The Essential Bain: Teachers
Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004).
Big Picture: There is no single ‘best way’ to teach.
Outstanding Teachers:

Achieved remarkable success in helping their students learn in ways that made a
sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how those students think, act and feel
 Actual classroom performance didn’t matter so long as do no harm
 Indications from the students that the teacher had ‘reached them’ intellectually and
educationally, and had left them wanting more
 Broke traditional definitions of courses
 Indications of deep learning – students spoke less of learning the material, more of
developing an understanding, making something their own,
1. What Do the Best Teachers Know and Understand?




Outstanding teachers know their subjects extremely well.
They can do intellectually, physically, or emotionally what they expect of their students.
They use their knowledge to develop techniques for grasping fundamental principles
and organizing concepts that others can use to begin building their own understanding
and abilities.
They know how to simplify and clarify complex subjects, to cut to the heart of the
matter with provocative insights, and they can think about their won thinking in the
discipline METACOGNITION, analyzing its nature and evaluating its quality.
2. How do they prepare to teach?


The best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help and
encourage students to learn. Centered around four fundamental inquires:
1. What should my students be able to do intellectually, physically, or emotionally as a
result of their learning?
2. How can I best help and encourage them to develop those abilities and the habits of
heart and mind to use them?
3. How can my students and I best understand the nature, quality, and progress of
their learning?
4. How can I evaluate my efforts to foster that learning?
Highly effective teachers often talk about what they want students to ‘do’ intellectually
rather than about what they should ‘learn’
3. What do they expect of their students?









They favor objectives that embody the kind of thinking and acting expected for life.
They look for and appreciate the individual value of each student and the abilities that
any person brought to the table.
They set high standards and conveyed a strong trust in their students’ abilities to meet
them
They promoted intellectual excitement and curiosity rather than worry and doubt over
‘making the grade.’
Their critiques didn’t intend to judge anyone’s soul or worth as a human being.
They believe that learning involves both personal and intellectual development and that
neither the ability to think nor the qualities of being a mature human are immutable.
People can change, and those changes – not just the accumulation of information –
represents true learning.
They stress the need for students to grapple with important concepts and ideas, and to
see them from a variety of perspectives, and to build their own understanding of the
material.
They ask themselves what they hope students can do intellectually, physically, or
emotionally by the end of the course and why those abilities are important.
They also have an appreciation that excessive anxiety and tension can hinder thinking.
4. What do they do when they teach?





They try to create a ‘natural critical learning environment’ in which people learn by
confronting intriguing, beautiful, or important problems, authentic tasks that will
challenge them to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine their
mental modes of reality.
The method matters far less than do the challenge and permission for students to tackle
authentic and intriguing questions and tasks, to make decisions, to defend their choices,
to come up short, to receive feedback on their efforts, and to try again.
Lectures from highly effective teachers begin with a question (sometimes embedded in
a story), continue with some attempt to help students understand the significance of
the question (connecting it to larger questions, raising it in provocative ways, noting its
implications), stimulate students to engage the question critically, make an argument
about how to answer the question (complete with evidence, reasoning and conclusion)
and end with questions, such as ‘What major conclusions did you draw?’ ‘What
questions remain in your mind?’
They do not think in terms of teaching their discipline; they think about teaching
students to understand, apply, analyze, synthesize and evaluate evidence and
conclusions.
Teachers help students build an understanding of concepts rather than simply perform
their discipline in front of them.
5. How do they treat students?







They tend to reflect a strong trust in students and treat students with what can only be
called simple decency.
They displayed not power but an investment in the students
They shared with students their secrets about learning, how they remembered
something, or the analogies they made in their mind as they built their own
understanding.
They expressed a sense of awe and curiosity about life and a sense of humility about
themselves and their own learning
They understood how much they didn’t know
They saw themselves as students of life, fellow traveler and generally felt a bond
between themselves and their students in humankind’s struggles to know anything.
They did see problems if they failed to reach a student, but they tried to keep any lack of
success from affecting their confidence that they could fix the problem with more effort.
6. How do they check their progress and evaluate their efforts?







They have some systematic program to assess their own efforts to make appropriate
changes.
They are not immune to frustrations, lapses in judgment, worry, or failure.
They have a strong sense of commitment to the academic community and not just
personal success in the classroom; they view themselves as contributors to a learning
environment, a fellowship of scholars.
They tended to maintain vigorous exchanges with colleagues.
Fundamentally, they were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to
foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had
already achieved.
What [students] understand and can do intellectually by the end of the course matters
more than anything else
Fundamental evaluation question: Does the teaching help and encourage students to
learn in ways that make a sustained, substantial and positive difference in the way they
think, act, or feel – without doing them any major harm?
Essentially… “If we expect to learn from the practices and thinking of highly effective teachers,
we must do more than become routine experts, applying and perfecting some inherited pattern
– even if it comes from the best. We must use their approaches to help build our own
understanding of powerful learning environments and the adaptive spirit and expertise to toss
aside inhibiting conventions in search of better solutions.”