What the Best College Teachers Do [Hardcover] Author: Ken Bain | Language: English | ISBN:
0674013255 | Format: PDF, EPUB
What the Best College Teachers Do Epub FreeYou can download What the Best College Teachers Do [Hardcover] Epub Free for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
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 is--it'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 out--but 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.
Books with free ebook downloads available What the Best College Teachers Do [Hardcover] Epub Free
- Hardcover: 207 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (May 30, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674013255
- ISBN-13: 978-0674013254
- Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Ken Bain has written precisely the sort of book I wish someone had shared with me during my graduate school days. Like many of my colleagues, I was left to my own devices inside the college classroom. My solution was to emulate those professors I respected as a student. Other than a few days of preparation in 1990, I never had any sort of systematic training about good classroom performance or how students learn.
Ken Bain, Director for the Center of Teaching Excellence at New York University, has provided a valuable resource for all of us in a similar situation. Perhaps the most striking feature of Bain's book is that it is not a how-to approach. If you are looking for a host of specific techniques to apply, then other teaching resources will better suit your needs. Instead, Bain's book looks at the best college teaching from a more bird's eye view to identify the essential characteristics of our best teachers. Some of the key themes include:
- How the best teachers connect content knowledge with real-world practice so that students exhibit learning (change).
- How the best teachers exhibit some combination of 13 goals or targets for preparing to teach.
- What the best teachers expect of their students.
- How the best teachers draw from seven unifying principles to deliver a course.
- The types of invitations that the best teachers extend to their students when attempting to draw them into a learning community.
- How we can learn more about our teaching, and improve, by pursuing a robost course evaluation system.
These are the key themes. Each is developed with a variety of examples that the author has gathered over the years while working at Vandebilt, Northwestern, and now NYU.
If I had to summarize this book in two words, they would be "only connect" (E.M. Forster). Bain advises college teachers to orient their teaching to the students in the room. We--and I say we because I am one--need to know what presuppositions students bring to the class; we need to keep students' attention by connecting the new to the familiar; we need to turn students into learners and thinkers, instead of cramming facts into their heads. Etc. etc.
All this sound like common sense, but in fact it goes against the standard orientation of college teachers. The usual thing is to think first about the subject of the course, about which the teacher is presumably an expert. The subject, and the teacher's deep knowledge of it, steers lectures and exams. The problem is that this can put students to sleep and leave them with an acquaintance with the subject that fades soon after the final exam.
I'm glad I bought this book, I recommend it, and I think it's going to make my own teaching better. All that being said, here are some more negative reactions. What if everything Bain says is actually true? What would that say about the American college student? His advice makes the student sound like a fragile creature who's got to be seduced into an interest in anything outside of himself.
For example, Bain says professors shouldn't use the word "requirements" on the syllabus. They should promise students specific valuable things, but never demand. In fact, he seems to say that the exact way grades are computed shouldn't be stated. What would happen if there were clear and straightforward demands? Would students crumble?
Book Preview
What the Best College Teachers Do Download
Please Wait...