Authors: Ken Bain
ISBN-13: 9780674013254, ISBN-10: 0674013255
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Date Published: April 2004
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Ken Bain is Vice Provost for Instruction, Professor of History, and Director of the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair State University.
What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators.
The short answer isit's not what teachers do, it's what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and outbut they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.
In stories both humorous and touching, Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students' discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.
Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do has generated considerable buzz, and rightly so. Based on a careful study of 60 outstanding teachers from a variety of disciplines and institutions, it distills valuable lessons that warrant the consideration of anyone who wishes to be more effective in drawing students into the life of the mind...[Readers] will find its various discussions to be uncommonly well grounded and uncommonly inspiring.
1 | Introduction: Defining the Best | 1 |
2 | What Do They Know about How We Learn? | 22 |
3 | How Do they Prepare to Teach? | 48 |
4 | What Do They Expect of Their Students? | 68 |
5 | How Do They Conduct Class? | 98 |
6 | How Do They Treat Their Students? | 135 |
7 | How Do They Evaluate Their Students and Themselves? | 150 |
Epilogue: What Can We Learn From Them? | 173 | |
App | How the Study Was Conducted | 181 |
Notes | 191 | |
Acknowledgments | 201 | |
Index | 203 |