This book is excellent for all teachers, in grades K-12, not just college teachers. It gets at the essential elements of great teaching and teachers. I have given it to many of the teachers at my school.

If you are a seasoned educator looking to improve your classroom performance and get greater academic results from your students, this book is for you. If you are a new teacher who would like to get on the right track to teaching success - without having to endure the painful learning curve that most teachers go through, this book is for you.

The book's author, Ken Bain, set out with the objective of capturing the collective scholarship of some of the most outstanding teachers in the United States with surveys and interviews that helped him document what they do, and how they think in an effort to conceptualize their practices. He defines "outstanding" teachers as those teachers who have achieved remarkable success in helping their students think, act and feel.

The conclusion of the book is directed to people who teach, but will benefit students and their parents as well. "What The Best College Teachers Do" should be required reading for all teachers (young/old or new/seasoned) who not only want to get better, but to become outstanding in their field.

I have been in different schools in different countries with different languages as well and I am unable to say: "he/she was my best teacher". I think that many of them had different qualities and encouraging skills.

I had a teacher that when we entered into the classroom had as a norm that one student will bring a new joke every day. Of course it could not be a "malicious or disrespectful" one, but a joke that will make most people laugh. After that, the class was already engaged in a friendly atmosphere, as already everybody had agreed on something as a group: "laughing". This communication skill is healthy and activates our willingness to receive instruction after a hard working day, a busy study time, or a lack of sleeping, etc. After a ponderous time, a refreshing one is like a glass of cold water in the middle of the Saharan dessert.

On the other hand I always respect fairness on teachers and I try to apply that in my own career. If a student shows dedication and willingness to improve and work I will never deny that student of the possibility to have a good grade, let say it straight...to have an "A". A human being is the highest living structure over planet earth, influenced by so many things, busy in so many things, with so many different backgrounds and difficult private lifetime situations that could affect their ability to manage and cope with daily challenges. Saying this, I believe that when you see a human, a person that is willing to try, to make an effort, that ask for help and consideration, I think it is a worthy candidate to be considered among those who deserve an open door to progress. I have had more than two teachers with that fairness quality; they had influenced my life letting me see that all is not lost, that still we are decent candidates to live in a constantly improving society.

I have had teachers that also bring their own life and lifetime experiences to the instruction period, no matter which one the subject is. That skill of passing your own experiences from one generation to another, whatever it is, I believe is part of an educator as an integral instructor. I appreciate those teachers I had who gave me a light about what life could become ahead on my path.

In general, I think there are many skills that could be fruitful in managing a class and accomplishing our purpose as educators.

Alejandro R.G.

TEACHING LIFE: LETTERS FROM A LIFE IN LITERATURE (University of Iowa Press, just released) - impresses me as a worthy companion to this book. As Salwak says in the book's conclusion: "My joy that comes from this profession has sustained me through all kinds of challenges. As I say in the conclusion, it is a safe haven to which I can retreat and from which I emerge emboldened and clarified and confident - and very thankful. What a noble and important profession teaching is, and how fortunate all of us are to be able to contribute." Visit Amazon and see a fuller description of the book along with advance reviews.

Brief Summary: Ken Bain and his colleagues conducted a fifteen-year study of outstanding teachers from a variety of disciplines at two dozen institutions. The teachers they chose to study had all achieved remarkable success in helping their students make sustained, substantial and positive changes in the way they think, act and learn. The study looked at how good teachers prepare, what they expect from their students, how they conduct a class, how they treat their students, how they evaluate their students and themselves, and how they understand how students learn, and then play to those strengths.

There were several recurring practices and beliefs that seemed to be shared by the best teachers. They are looking to foster deep and lasting learning, rather than a kind of surface learning in which students remember something just long enough to pass the exam. They are learners themselves, constantly trying to improve their technique. They provide a safe environment which allows students to struggle and question new ideas. They plan their course backwards, beginning with the results they hope to achieve. They provide their students with clear and realistic goals. When their students have difficulty, they look for problems with their course rather than with their students. They make their classes as relevant as possible. Most importantly, good teachers seem to share the belief that teaching only occurs when learning takes place.

Sample Excerpt :Understanding that every student is an individual, the best teachers know that no single approach can work for all of them. As one teacher in the study said, "You don't teach a class. You teach a student." Bain further explains, "Simply put, the best teachers believe that learning involves both personal and intellectual development and that neither the ability to think nor the qualities of being a mature human being are immutable. People can change, and those changes - not just the accumulation of information - represent true learning. More than anything else this central set of beliefs distinguishes the most effective teachers from many of their colleagues."

Primary Strength: If a person was lucky, she might have five outstanding teachers in her lifetime who she would strive to emulate. Yet when I try to put my finger on the "what" and the "how" of what my outstanding teachers did, those qualities are elusive. But when I read this book, those great teachers of mine came to mind and I found myself thinking, "Yeah, they did that." Bain has taken on the herculean task of studying hundreds of successful teachers and then finding their common denominator, thus allowing each of us to study what the masters have in common and incorporating those skills into our own personal style.

Primary Weakness: Bain was vague about the "science" of his study. Some might like to know more about the source of his facts, how many teachers were studied where, and exactly how the studies were conducted.

Overall: Before I read this book, I knew that teaching was difficult. After reading this book, I realize that if you do it well, teaching is far more complicated than I ever imagined. It's like a juggling act with thoughts and minds, and you have to adapt your routine for every class. It confirms what I have always known: Not everyone can teach. It's not enough to know your subject cold, or to have the greatest lesson plan, or even to use the best techniques. You have to love the job. You have to respect your students and have faith that they want to learn, and they can learn. Because if you don't believe all of that, for even one day, they will know it. Your students will know it, and they will suffer.

This book was completely unhelpful. It is filled with inspiring anecdotes of "what the best college teachers do" that illustrate some inspiring and earth-shaking revelations such as "treat your students like human beings" and "don't lecture for 2 hours at a time." All of his advice is abstract with few practical applications, and the rest is common-sense knowledge. Do not buy this book.

Excellent; makes one realize much of what passes for learning in college classrooms is little more than memorization and even that fades quickly. It would be 5-star except it doesn't always explain How these college professors implement their concepts of better teaching.

I heard about this book at a small conference, checked it out of our university library, read one chapter and ordered a copy for myself. You'll easily come away with two or more ideas to better yourself -- a great book. I'm keeping this one in my personal library.

Interesting book; it gives useful insights in how to teach.
Low information density though, it could have been more focused.
Nevertheless, it's easy to read and informative in general.

This book had some good insight. The emphasis on creating a community conducive to learning, while not novel, is important. I think, or at least hope, that the author was well-intended. However, most of the ideas were jumbled, inconsistent and presented in a highly condescending manner. The most annoying approach was creating a straw man, followed by destroying the straw man, and concluding with some statement to the tune of "now thay we've shown ...." Of course all Bain has shown is that some idea that most thoughtful instructors never considered a possibility is actually ... not a possibility. Often he would, later in the text, argue that he's proven something about good or bad instructors. As an example, in Chapter 4, "Recall that we found [in chapter 2] many less successful instructors who think of memory as a storage unit and intelligence as the capacity to use the information in that tank." Realistically, I suspect that most instructors are a lilttle bit more thoughtful about what constitutes intelligence. I found his shallow dualistic view of education demeaning to the intelligence of instructors and students.

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?

The huge emphasis Bain puts on connecting course material to a student's personal concerns makes me wonder what would happen if a professor got up and talked about... the civil war ...computers ...botany. Can't teachers count on the inherent interest of anything?

The advice in the book frequently ignores real world teaching problems. Bain is very positive about take home exams, thinking it's silly to pass up their advantages because of worries about cheating. But these worries are serious.

He's very positive about the idea that every exam should be cumulative, with only the last one counting. A student should be able to miss an exam with impunity. They probably had some good reason. Hmm. In the best of all possible worlds, yes. My students wouldn't come to the exams that didn't count.

Be tolerant of late work, he says; there was probably a good reason. That's not my experience. Students need firm deadlines or some of them will never do any work.

It puzzles me that Bain's best teachers do things in their classrooms that really would be unworkable in mine. There's nothing in the book that addresses this disconnect.

As a former college professor who does some online teaching from time to time, I was fascinated by Bain's book. Bain identified a number of teachers who made a meaningful impact on student lives. He and his team followed up to ask, "What makes them so great?"

And he has answers. Anyone who's been teaching awhile will not be surprised. Ask questions. Get students involved. Don't just tell -- teach students how to learn. And so on.

But, as other reviewers have noted. Bain's "best" professors appear to dwell among the Olympians of higher education. We don't have a complete list of the "best," but we get references to Harvard and Vanderbilt.

In the real world, the vast majority of today's students enter large state institutions. They begin with large lecture classes. It *is* possible to personalize those classes to some extent but you certainly don't have room for discussion.

Additionally, most students juggle work, family and social pressures along with school. Many spend more time watching television than studying. A friend who won a major teaching award told me, "I don't make students do the reading. I know they won't."

Bain also ignores institutional pressures on faculty. When I taught online for a well-respected university, I was told, "You're expected to give at least a couple of C's and F's in every class."

OK, I said, then we should be fair: we need to let them know there's a forced curve, as Harvard does. No dice. And in this particular class, most students were majors who worked full-time. Their assignments were linked to their jobs. All were motivated to work hard. As Bain says, high grades can also reflect high learning -- but just try and prove it.

I've also been in environments where students were expected to get A's -- a B-plus was the closest to a failing grade. Students who genuinely wanted to learn were frustrated by whiny, do-nothing classmates who could hardly provide a stimulating classroom conducive to learning.

Most important Bain dismisses evaluations. but in reality, nearly every professor will live or die by student opinion. And great teaching does not always lead to top evaluations. I once heard a talk about an experimental astronomy class, where students engaged in participatory exercises throughout the term. They performed better on tests and appeared to learn far more thoroughly. Yet evaluations were lower than those of conventional classes. Unless the professor has some protection (and even tenured profs can get penalized for weak reports), you can bet he'll go back to the tried and true methods next time.

I had a similar experience myself, while teaching in a large state university. I would overhear students say, "I've never participated as much as I have in your class." One group of students even organized a little party for our class -- and they were commuters. We had a great community and students learned a lot. But the course evaluations had no place to describe these experiences. Students told me openly, "I base my evaluations on the grade I get."

If you're going to read this book, I'd also recommend Rebekah Nathan's Freshman Year. Nathan, the professor who went undercover to learn how students really live, identifies some reasons students continue to be demotivated. For example, Bain notes that an attitude of "Everyone is right" comes at a stage of learning development. But Nathan shows us orientation exercises where everyone shares an opinion -- no judgment, no synthesis, no analysis.

A professor can get lots of good ideas from reading Bain's book. Putting those ideas into practice -- well, that's another book.

What would be far more useful would be a serious study on learning. In Chapter 2, Bain cites studies showing that students don't change beliefs readily. I think he's right. A college sophomore who was studying psychology told me, "I don't like what we're learning. Depression isn't real. I was brought up to think about those who are worse off than I am -- and then I won't be depressed anymore."

Will this student's belief be changed by the "best" teaching? Does she belong in a university at all? These questions should haunt us as we study the real issues of higher education.

As a former college professor who does some online teaching from time to time, I was fascinated by Bain's book. Bain identified a number of teachers who made a meaningful impact on student lives. He and his team followed up to ask, "What makes them so great?"

And he has answers. Anyone who's been teaching awhile will not be surprised. Ask questions. Get students involved. Don't just tell -- teach students how to learn. And so on.

But, as other reviewers have noted. Bain's "best" professors appear to dwell among the Olympians of higher education. We don't have a complete list of the "best," but we get references to Harvard and Vanderbilt.

In the real world, the vast majority of today's students enter large state institutions. They begin with large lecture classes. It *is* possible to personalize those classes to some extent but you certainly don't have room for discussion.

Additionally, most students juggle work, family and social pressures along with school. Many spend more time watching television than studying. A friend who won a major teaching award told me, "I don't make students do the reading. I know they won't."

Bain also ignores institutional pressures on faculty. When I taught online for a well-respected university, I was told, "You're expected to give at least a couple of C's and F's in every class."

OK, I said, then we should be fair: we need to let them know there's a forced curve, as Harvard does. No dice. And in this particular class, most students were majors who worked full-time. Their assignments were linked to their jobs. All were motivated to work hard. As Bain says, high grades can also reflect high learning -- but just try and prove it.

I've also been in environments where students were expected to get A's -- a B-plus was the closest to a failing grade. Students who genuinely wanted to learn were frustrated by whiny, do-nothing classmates who could hardly provide a stimulating classroom conducive to learning.

Most important Bain dismisses evaluations. but in reality, nearly every professor will live or die by student opinion. And great teaching does not always lead to top evaluations. I once heard a talk about an experimental astronomy class, where students engaged in participatory exercises throughout the term. They performed better on tests and appeared to learn far more thoroughly. Yet evaluations were lower than those of conventional classes. Unless the professor has some protection (and even tenured profs can get penalized for weak reports), you can bet he'll go back to the tried and true methods next time.

I had a similar experience myself, while teaching in a large state university. I would overhear students say, "I've never participated as much as I have in your class." One group of students even organized a little party for our class -- and they were commuters. We had a great community and students learned a lot. But the course evaluations had no place to describe these experiences. Students told me openly, "I base my evaluations on the grade I get."

If you're going to read this book, I'd also recommend Rebekah Nathan's Freshman Year. Nathan, the professor who went undercover to learn how students really live, identifies some reasons students continue to be demotivated. For example, Bain notes that an attitude of "Everyone is right" comes at a stage of learning development. But Nathan shows us orientation exercises where everyone shares an opinion -- no judgment, no synthesis, no analysis.

A professor can get lots of good ideas from reading Bain's book. Putting those ideas into practice -- well, that's another book.

What would be far more useful would be a serious study on learning. In Chapter 2, Bain cites studies showing that students don't change beliefs readily. I think he's right. A college sophomore who was studying psychology told me, "I don't like what we're learning. Depression isn't real. I was brought up to think about those who are worse off than I am -- and then I won't be depressed anymore."

Will this student's belief be changed by the "best" teaching? Does she belong in a university at all? These questions should haunt us as we study the real issues of higher education.

Mr. Bain's book reviews his continuing study into what makes a good colledge teacher. However, after finishing the book, you are still left puzzling over the ultimate description of a good teacher. His research indicates that various excellent professors utlize differing techniques to both interest and enthrall their students, but there is little in the way of common threads that can be pointed to with certainty. The central message is that good teachers create an enthusiastic desire to learn, act more as helpmates than teachers, and manage to convey the feeling to their students that they can all not only succeed, but excel. Perhaps trying to define a good teacher is akin to defining good art--you either responed enthusiastically or you don't.

Although I like a great deal in this book, underneath it strikes me as basically a re-statement of the innovative teaching manifestos of the 1960s, right down to quoting Jerry Farber (whose book I still have).

Bain's is a book about student control, authenticity, caring, deep learning, involvement, meaning, collaboration, positive expectations, trust, take-home exams, students teaching one another, higher order thinking skills...

That's truly grand and wonderful, except to those of us who have lived and worked for a few decades with the limitations of some of those concepts. They magical concepts, but magic turns out not to be enough.

To make these attractive ideas sound even better, Bain sets up, throughout the book, a straw man who teaches "a frozen body of dogma," in terms like: traditional, conventional, habitual, memorizing, recognize the correct answer, details, orthodox (p. 114), surface learning, bulemic learning (!), counting off for late work, frozen artifacts, using "old yellowed notes in the teacher's mind" (158).

It is truly weird to see such a substantial book setting up a false opposite and ridiculing him/her/us. By contrast, Bain never considers what happens when well-meaning teachers take his concepts to excess. (And they/we certainly do.)

The book does not address certain concepts vital to teaching and learning, and I miss them -- such as willpower, setting priorities, managing time, developing and improving skills, practice and repetition, hard work, relentless effort, self-sacrifice, commitment to excellence, competition based on achievement, professionalism, responsibility, internalizing values, gaining content knowledge, self-discipline, ethics, and self-directed learning skills in the sense of Knowles.

Part of the reason seems to be acceptance by Bain and the teachers studied of the concept of Higher Order Thinking Skills, developed from Bloom's cognitive taxonomy. First of all, the HOTS idea devalues its foundation -- content knowledge through comprehension and recall. Second, the cognitive taxonomy rests invisibly upon the taxonomy of affective skills, less known, more important. That's about commitment, participation, and the disciplined internalization of values -- more or less "professionalism."

Four-fifths of the teachers studied for this book came from rather elite institutions ("research institutions"), and even though Bain claims these concepts work well anywhere, I'm not convinced.

With eager, accessible, willing students (think Northwestern, NYU, Harvard), an amazing variety of teaching approaches work well. But many of these concepts do not work easily or well with college students who are underprepared, undermotivated, and do not know how to succeed in the classroom. And may not want to.

Would an ordinary teacher put down this book and know how to teach better? That's not a sure thing. Will good teachers improve from it? I'd like to hear from you.

For a very different book, a "what do I cook for dinner" kind of book on teaching, take a look at Barbara Gross Davis' "Tools for Teaching," the kind of practical, how-to book that you need alongside Bain's invigorating, inspiring, glorious ideas. Davis gives you a list of things to do the first day of class, and it goes on from there.

I don't want to discourage you from reading Bain's book. It's worth reading.

This book encourages one to love their profession as well as to have alot of experiences...such as? travel the world, read alot of books, talk to many people, talk to many students-don't isolate yourself, watch a 1000 movies....if you do these things then you will be in the profession of teaching for a very long time... because the more you know the more you will feel within yourself that your goal to life is about making a difference, about filling in and molding those student minds....

What the Best College Teachers Do (Bain, 2004) is a good read for teachers interested in deepening their understanding of the art and craft of their profession. The book provides an in-depth definition, through field study research, of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Bain's research goes to the heart of what legislators and college accreditors call "assessment" by documenting what "teachers do that truly makes a difference in students' lives, and what any teacher can do to improve" (blurb by Richard Light on back cover). The best performers in any field are the ones most likely looking for ways to improve, but Bain's method does include examples of poor techniques for comparison.

Bain offers numerous examples of highly effective classroom assessment techniques. One idea he offers is the "small group analysis."

"Someone goes into the class while the instructor leaves the room. The consultant divides the students into small groups or pairs and asks each team to spend six or seven minutes discussing three questions: In what ways has the instruction/instructor helped you learn in this course? Can you suggest some changes in the instruction/course that would better help you to learn? If the course/instruction has helped you learn, what is the nature of that learning? Each team receives the questions on paper and is encouraged to take notes of their discussions. After six or seven minutes, the consultant brings the groups back together and gets feedback from some of them while inviting others to share any major additions to or disagreements with what they heard from their colleagues. The whole process takes less than twenty minutes and allows the consultant both to clarify (to ask those questions that we have all wanted to pursue when we read students' comments) and to verify (to find out if there are any divisions in the ranks)" (p. 159).

The book describes the results of scholarly and also intuitive modes of inquiry concerned with more effective teaching and learning for the teacher that wants to help create better learning. This book provides some research-based ideas about how college teachers can use experimentation, research, analysis, and reflection to deepen student learning.

The book is short (178 pages minus appendix etc.) with a conversational style that makes it a quick read in spite of the wealth of information.

I read about this book on a psychology teaching email list that I belong to and it seemed like it would be a great book. It turns out that the recommendations were correct. The author and his colleagues created a study where they followed college teachers form many disciplines and found what exactly made these people "the best college teachers." The author describes what they know about how students learn, how they prepare to teach, what they expect from their students, how they conduct class, how they treat their students, and how they evaluate their students and themselves. This isn't a "how to be a great teacher" book, but it gives many great suggestions for how to improve your teaching and your courses. I highly suggest this book to anyone who is interested in teaching and is interested in how to make their courses more student-centered.

Ken Bain's notable book is small in format but quite lofty in purpose: it sets out to define what education should be. It believes that teaching should lead to sustained, substantial and positive change in students, without harming them all too much. In other words, after taking a class a student should significantly change and should feel the lasting effects of this change for years to come. I was hard-pressed to remember the last class that did it for me.

While it is easy to agree with this thesis, achieving the desired result is hard. When I think about teaching, I often compare it to parenting. The analogy is not perfect, but it helps me translate some educational issues into the terms of my daily life. How do I teach my kid the beauty of reading (playing piano, rollerblading, you name it) so that the effect is lasting but that I do not push so hard that he hates the whole experience and, left to his own devices, never takes it up? I often find the "how" question difficult to answer.

The book lays down some answers to the "how" question for professional educators. Here, the best teachers focus on the students and what they learn, instead of focusing on the teachers and what they teach. No depth of insight introduced by the teacher really matters if it does not lead to a new perspective adopted by the student. Oftentimes the educator has to be just one or two steps ahead of the pupil. Be ten steps ahead or several steps behind - and your apprentice gets bored and you loose him, no matter how important the subject matter. One could conclude from the book that "covering" the material should not take precedence over engaging the student. I know that if I practiced that approach with my child I would probably ended up sharing fewer experiences with him, but each one would proved to be richer. The teachers who practice this employ a very much results-oriented approach, defining what students would be able to do with the knowledge they gain. At the end of the day (or the course), the key question is what difference it made for the students, in what way it made them change.

To be successful in helping diverse students advance to the next level of developing a worldview, the best teachers pay close attention to individual students' learning styles. Are they being passive receptors of information and think that teacher is always right? Are they just adept at giving the answers that teachers expect, without substantially altering their own views? Or are they "committed knowers": developing their own views and ready to defend them? According to Bain, education should not be an obstacle course, but a process guided by the teacher's vision for the student's development into a different individual. Many of these teachers share the belief that "people can change and those changes - not just accumulation of information - represent true learning". Best teachers help students shift their focus from making the grade to thinking about personal goals of development.

To advance towards this challenging goal, the best teachers adapt their teaching to different groups of learners. They present the material to match the students' learning styles (seminars for listeners, written assignments for readers and so on). On the other hand, they suggest enrichments for the learning methods to better suit the material being taught (such as helping students with reading techniques, which is valuable for all age groups, not just for kindergartners). Beyond knowing their material, the best teachers think about their own thinking and the history of thought within their disciplines. This helps them be aware of how different students may be approaching the material. Teaching will always be hard because it has to be individualized. The best teachers are good at creating an academic environment in which dissimilar students thrive.

To bring about sustained change, the best teachers appeal to students' sense of accomplishment. They use positive stimuli, often offering material through honors program rather than through remedial assignments. Social recognition and verbal praise go a long way as well. In addition, they engage students' sense of ownership of their own education. When students feel in charge of the decision to learn they learn better. And since students learn best when they answer their own questions, best teaching helps them formulate these questions. Only through rising up to owning their education can students grow into committed knowers.

The book does not introduce a comprehensive theory of education. Rather, it presents a fairly motley collection of findings from the multiyear study performed by Bain and his team. And still the book is remarkable for its unique perspective on education, the notes on best practices in the field and its belief in the higher purpose of education. I just took out one star for the language: it often feels a bit heavy-handed. One other minor criticism: the book would have benefited from more examples illustrating the author's statements.

This is a review of What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain.

Bain, the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at NYU, did a study of outstanding college-level teachers. For example, the students of calculus teacher Dan Saari of UC Irvine obtain a disproportionately large percentage of the A's on their school's college-wide calculus final. The medical students of cell biologist Jeanette Norden of Vanderbilt do far better than the national average on their board exams. In other cases, the success is in principle less clearly demonstrable. (How would one "prove" that a philosophy or English professor taught exceptionally well?) But Bain and his colleagues were particularly interested in professors whose students said changed the way they think, and sparked a lifelong interest in the subject.

Bain wanted to find out what such outstanding teachers had in common. The basic lesson he arrived at is easy to formulate (although challenging to implement). Mediocre and bad teachers typically subscribe to a "transmission model" of education, in which teaching is a matter of transmitting knowledge from the professor's brain to the students' brains. Outstanding teachers, in contrast, assume a "learning model" of education. The teacher who subscribes to a learning model is constantly searching to find what her students need to learn, constantly adjusts to meet those needs, and always responds to students' failures with efforts to teach better.

This might seem like an obvious point, but it is not. Speaking as someone who has been teaching for about twenty years, it is very easy to get into the mindset that says, "I put the knowledge out there. It's the students' job to pick it up." I have not myself fallen into that mindset (not most of the time, anyway), but many teachers do.

A further conclusion of the book is that the attitude of the professor is far more important than any other aspect of teaching. Pedagogic styles vary greatly among outstanding professors. Some lecture, others do not. (Interestingly, none lectures exclusively.) Some have outgoing personalities, some are shy. Some argue with their students, others are more collegial. (Significantly, no outstanding teachers humiliate their students or make them afraid to argue. It follows from this study that someone like "Professor Kingsfield" of the Paper Chase is the very worst kind of teacher.) Outstanding teachers have a style that goes beyond simple technique, but is not (for that reason) unlearnable. In particular, outstanding teachers are extremely knowledgeable about their subject, but at the same time they manifest humility (that they do not know everything themselves, and that their teaching can always improve), respect (for their students as humans, whom they never humiliate), faith (that their students can learn if given the right opportunity), and trust (that their students will make an honest effort, given the right environment).

The difficulties of achieving real learning are vividly illustrated by a study conducted by two physicists who tested students at the beginning of introductory physics courses on their understanding of the motion of physical bodies. Unsurprisingly, the students "entered the course with an elementary, intuitive theory about the physical world, what the physicists called 'a cross between Aristotelian and 14th-century impetus ideas'" (22). After the students had completed the course, they tested them again. Surprisingly, most students had exactly the same ideas about motion that they had entered the course with, including a number of students who got A's. Wait, it gets worse! The physicists conducted interviews with some of the students, and performed experiments in front of them demonstrating that their views were mistaken. "What they heard astonished them: many of the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion" (23). Part of what this illustrates is that professors need to develop an awareness of what mental models the students bring to the course and of how these models may interfere with learning. Then the teachers have to devise methods for encouraging the students to dismantle these models for themselves, and get better ones.

Of course, some students face additional challenges. In one experiment, two otherwise comparable groups of African-American students were given a portion of the Graduate Record Examination. One group was told that it tested their ability, while the other group was told that it was a "laboratory task that was used to study how certain problems are generally solved" (70). The former students performed significantly less well. Apparently, stereotyping produces performance anxiety that can adversely affect students. Even more stunning (I thought), in another study, three groups of Asian American women were given the same math test. Prior to the test, one group was given a questionnaire that included a question identifying their race, one group had a questionnaire that included a question identifying their gender, and the third group's questionnaire mentioned neither. The group with the racial question performed the best (responding apparently to the reverse stereotype that Asians are good at math), and the group with the gender question performed the worst (responding to the stereotype that women are worse at math).

What kind of learning are we trying to promote in our students? One group of psychologists has identified four levels of understanding that students can go through. (1) "Received knowers" are students who expect there to be definitive answers that they can regurgitate on tests or in papers, ideally word-for-word. Received knowers may eventually become aware of the fact that, in many areas, there are no simple right or wrong answers. They then typically graduate to being (2) "subjective knowers." Subjective knowers regard everything as simply a matter of opinion. If they get a low grade, their initial reaction is that it represents nothing but the professor's subjective (and annoyingly punitive) personal opinion. (3) "Procedural knowers" are the students who have learned to "play the game." They have learned that there are standards internal to intellectual disciplines, and they have learned to meet those standards. But for procedural knowers, it's still just a game. Like the students in the physics class who get an A but continue to think the same way about motion, procedural knowers never really internalize the standards. (4) Those who do internalize the standards of the discipline have achieved "commitment." But commitment is not just mindless acceptance of the standards. The student who is committed thinks deeply and critically about those standards. Within the level of commitment, the study distinguished between "separate knowers," who like to remain skeptical and critical, and "connected knowers," who try to understand other views sympathetically and synthetically. (Interestingly, more women than men seem to prefer being connected knowers. This implies that different techniques may be needed to guide male and female students to the fourth level, and that they may manifest having achieved this level in different ways.)

How can we achieve these goals? Empirical testing shows that extrinsic rewards for behavior that are seen as manipulative tend to decrease long-term interest in an activity, whereas intrinsic rewards (finding something interesting in itself) and positive verbal reinforcement stimulate and maintain interest. This applies to grading as a motivator as well. Students motivated by grades learn less effectively and have less long-term interest in the subject than those motivated either by the intrinsic interest of the topic or praise.

Students generally seem to respond best to being given high standards, along with assurances that they can meet them. Indeed, it turns out that students who are "at risk" in science courses actually do significantly better if they are invited into honors courses, rather than being put into remedial classes. This counterintuitive approach apparently works because it signals to students just that combination of high standards and confidence in the student's abilities.

In the chapter on how outstanding teacher conduct classes, Bain identifies the five elements of what he calls a "natural critical learning environment": (1) start with some question that students will find intriguing, (2) help the students to see why this question is important, (3) encourage the students to think actively and critically, rather than just listening and remembering, (4) guide the students to working out an answer, and (5) leave the student with further questions. Some of us have done this intuitively, but even so it is helpful to have the steps laid out explicitly. Although he stresses that good teaching is more than techniques, Bain also provides some helpful tips in this chapter. One should call on shy students the way one "might do so around the dinner table rather than the way they might cross-exam them in a courtroom" (131). When lecturing, use techniques like dramatic pauses, and change one's pace every ten or so minutes. Invite students rather than commanding them: for example, begin the semester asking for a show of hands of who is willing to show up, be on time and intellectually participate in every class.

Scattered throughout the book are a number of other interesting facts. Like many teachers, I have been very skeptical of whether student evaluations are anything other than a popularity contest. (This is not sour grapes: I have more than once received "perfect" ratings from an entire class of students.) However, it turns out that there is empirical evidence that two evaluation questions do correlate with independent measures of student learning: "Did the professor help you learn?" and "Did the professor stimulate your interest in the subject?" (13) On the other hand, a 1993 study showed that student evaluations of teachers based on video clips of a few seconds in length were substantially the same as those they would give after a semester. Bain charitably concludes that students have simply gotten very good at accurately determining who will or will not turn out to be a good teacher. Well, perhaps. But if my snap judgments of students at the beginning of the semester generally correlated with the final grades I assigned them, would you assume I was an insightful teacher, or a superficial and dogmatic one?

Although it occasionally succumbs to vague rhetoric, this book is overall a very useful guide to some of what we know about good college pedagogy.

Ken Bain currently directs the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, so he knows what he's talking about. His study of the best teachers and what they do took more than a decade to put together and resulted in several conclusions which are helpfully stated at the beginning of this book: the best teachers, not surprisingly, know their own fields extremely well and think long and hard about how to convey that knowledge. The best teachers don't just teach facts, they teach students how to think. The best teachers respect their students and assume everyone can learn, and they constantly assess and evaluate their own efforts as well as those of their students.

It was enjoyable for me to peruse this volume and compare my own teaching to the models described therein: to nod in agreement when the they matched what I did, to think about improving or modifying my approaches when they did not. After finishing it I can't say I slavishly agree with all of Bain's conclusions or admonitions--I still believe that in my field a certain level of basic technical mastery is essential for further achievement. (And there's nothing wrong that I can see with requiring students to meet deadlines.) However, Bain's work has motivated me to strive to improve how I impart that mastery, and caused me to re-examine "truths" that I thought were self-evident. It's my guess that such soul-searching is what this volume was meant to evoke.

I also suggest reading Patrick Allitt's "I'm the Teacher, You're the Student" for an interesting and rather different perspective on teaching in higher education.

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. The book unquestionably draws from a variety of important research articles, but in no way is this a dry read about pedagogical research. Ken Bain tells a good story in each chapter and uses both his experiential base and the literature to bolster his conclusions. What emerges is a practical, wise, and intelligent discussion of the best college teaching that is written in plain English. I read the book in two evenings quite easily. It is unusual to find such a well-written book containing a wealth of knowledge you can take back to the job.

This book is suitable for anyone teaching at the college level. Regardless of whether you are a graduate student preparing to teach for the first time, an experienced educator at the undergraduate level, or a top-flight researcher delivering graduate seminars, I have no doubt there is something we can all learn from each chapter.

Maybe as my final point I will share that I found the book so useful I purchased a copy for all new faculty arriving at my university this year. I can only hope my colleagues find the book as engaging as I do.