What the Best College Teachers Do (review)

There are many books about college teaching available today that illustrate various classroom techniques and offer advice on effective methods. However, few of these books report the results of serious scholarship on this important topic and relate how research findings on best practices in teaching can help other faculty and administrators learn how to improve or facilitate the enhancement of our primary craft.

As I began to read this book, I immediately thought of certain teachers who had influenced me greatly in college. In fact, I have often wondered how, as a college administrator, I could facilitate faculty development in this area, and how as a faculty member I could even come close to influencing my students' collegiate learning experience in this way. Ken Bain's new book, What the Best College Teachers Do, seeks to unravel this mystery with a thorough and interesting examination of best practices in college teaching today.

With many years of experience as a historian and professor of history, and as founding director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, Bain applies his discipline's scholarly research techniques and his practical administrative experience to examine the excellent teaching of 63 college faculty members at two dozen institutions of higher education. These faculty members are from a variety of academic fields at different types of institutions, ranging from highly selective to open admissions.

The subjects were identified as excellent teachers through a mixture of means, such as awards received, student results on standardized and professional exams, and/or their outstanding reputations. To obtain information about these teachers for analysis, Bain used several methods of research inquiry, like those of the narrative historian or investigative journalist: formal and informal interviews, public presentations, written discussions of their ideas about teaching, examination of syllabi, assignment sheets, grading policies, lecture notes, and observations, as well as comments by students and colleagues.

Early in the book, Bain seeks to first define the best teaching practices and capture the collective scholarship of some of the best teachers identified in the United States. He defines excellent teachers as those who achieved extraordinary success in helping their students to learn and retain their knowledge, and who greatly impacted their students' lives. Interestingly, and perhaps most importantly, this book seeks to truly understand what teachers do well and what the readers can learn to inspire systematic and reflective appraisals of their own teaching.

Bain goes beyond mere observational reporting by also discussing advanced learning theories and what the best professors know about how students learn. The book contains some review of the literature in this field but focuses mainly on the primary research that he and his assistants conducted for this study. The literature cited does support Bain's findings, for example, that many outstanding teachers make high demands on students yet offer many ways to review and improve their work during the term by learning from their mistakes. Bain notes that "the best college and university teachers create what we might call a natural critical learning environment in which they embed the skills and information they teach in assignments (questions and tasks)—authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenging students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental modes of reality" (p. 47). This statement is the essence or core of what the best college teachers actually do in their role.

After defining excellent teaching and students' learning process, Bain then examines how the best teachers prepare for their courses, how they conduct classes, and seven fairly common principles that emerged from the practices of the best teachers. These seven principles are very general, full of common sense, somewhat obvious, and not really new; yet they are very important for teachers to actually plan for and implement in their teaching strategies.

The book concludes with thoughts about how the best teachers evaluate the students and themselves, a summary of what we can learn from the best teachers, and a review of the...