Since the 1990s, research and writing on the subject of college teaching has accelerated at a rapid pace. Every year passing seems to bring excellent publications worthy of a high ranking on any reading list for new faculty and their more seasoned colleagues. At the top of my list is Ken Bain’s, What the Best College Teacher’s Do (Harvard University Press, 2004). This is a wonderful book and, I think, a must read for new faculty. It also might surprise and motivate even the most experienced professors.
My purpose here is not to write a book review of What the Best College Teachers Do. I will say that Bain’s book is well-written, based on a good research scheme, and cuts right to the heart of matters, thus making it a delight for busy college faculty. But I’m more interested in a question that stuck with me reading the book. I kept asking myself, “Who were my best college teachers and what did they do?”
My best teachers – four in number -- shared much in common. All lived through some of the Great Depression era, understood the impact of world war, and matured as intellectuals during the cold war years. Each teacher had earned tenure and advanced rank, taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, published significant research, and achieved considerable reputation in their fields of study. I admired these teachers greatly and immediately considered them as models for what I aspired to be as a college professor—to be expert in my field of study, comfortable and successful in a wide range of teaching (from lecture hall to seminar room to advising), friendly and approachable, and last but not least, strive to be ethical.
Continuing the demographic, and typical of higher education some forty years ago, all my best teachers were men. (I can’t remember attending but a handful of courses in all eight years of study in the 1960s that featured a woman as professor.) Unfortunately, as well, none of my many college professors were African American, Asian, or from any other diverse cultural background. Talk about an incomplete education—especially for someone who wanted to be a U. S. historian. All this said, however, my best teachers sought to incorporate the widest and most recent perspectives into their teaching, so I gained a lifelong interest in African American history. Also, I acquired a nagging awareness that I wouldn’t be much of a college history professor without stretching the scope of my research, reading, and course development well beyond existing boundaries.
In line with Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do, my best teachers created a “natural critical environment” by placing big questions and theories before students at the very beginning of a course. So, for example, one of my professors kept posing the question of American uniqueness or “exceptionalism” – a familiar concept these days, but something that juiced up my interest back then and challenged what I had accepted without question as an undergraduate (particularly in the Kennedy years). Another of my professors asked students to look at the territorial, trade, and ideological expansionism of our nation as an American “empire” -- a term most students would have never applied to their nation in the early 1960s. Empires were for everybody else but the United States —right? Yet another of my professors spent considerable effort acquiring expertise in disciplines closely aligned to his teaching and research. His call for multidisciplinary perspectives opened up several paths of learning and perspective for my intellectual development.
Although most of the coursework I completed with my best teachers took place in large lectures, that setting didn’t preclude the development of higher order thinking. My teachers had the uncanny ability to provide opportunities for students to do much more than listen. Through the intricate structure of their lectures, course readings and assignments, and in-class and informal discussions, they guided students up and down a ladder of intellectual skills. As with the best college teachers in Bain’s study, mine helped me “think about information and ideas the way scholars in the discipline do” (See Ken Bain, “What Makes Great Teachers Great?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2004, B7-B9). I still remember how exciting this approach seemed to me, especially as I gained more skills and understandings with which to engage in such thinking.
Above all else, and possibly something to think about in addition to the characteristics and actions Bain attributes to those in his study, my best teachers constructed exciting and compelling frameworks for examining a topic. Each of these teachers had a carefully wrought design for viewing large chunks of the American past and intellectual culture – exactly what the best historians and thinkers should be expected to set before their students. These frameworks for studying, analyzing, and interpreting the past helped me come alive intellectually; they allowed me to recognize the importance of making connections, challenging accepted wisdom, looking at evidence from a variety of angles, and asking good questions. Of course, these frameworks could be so exciting and compelling (especially when worked out each week through masterful lectures and seminar discussions) a student might forget to think critically and be on the lookout for contradictory evidence and perspectives. My best teachers urged students to seek such evidence and perspectives, to constantly test and refine the framework.
Of course, at the beginning of my teaching career, I borrowed my professors’ wonderful interpretive designs and used them to some advantage in my teaching. I hoped what my best teachers had used so successfully would work for my students. In some cases I achieved good success, but I soon found I had not the exceptionable talent and genius of my best professors. I needed to develop a quite different classroom approach and persona to be successful with my students, who were working adults returning to college study—many without the background and advantages I had as an undergraduate. As a teacher, I needed to abandon the lecture style of my best professors and teach in a way best suited for adults working their way back into academic life and coming to class once a week for lengthy, three-hour sessions. My adult students brought with them a considerable amount of work and life experience, and only a few thought of making the study of history their main academic goal. Once I realized this fact and the reality that my students wanted (and needed) to engage in active learning, my teaching found a new rhythm and improved markedly. Best yet, I could employ the large frameworks and thinking approaches of my professors to good advantage within the compass of my new approaches to teaching. My best students experienced much of the same excitement and intellectual growth as I had with my best professors.
In the light of over forty-five years of teaching since I left the classrooms of my best college teachers, I particularly like what Bain writes in his book’s introduction:
. . . no one achieves great teaching with only vigorous vocal tones, a powerful microphone, good posture, strong eye contact, and honorable intentions. Great teachers are not just great speakers or discussion leaders; they are, more fundamentally, special kinds of scholars and thinkers, leading intellectual lives that focus on learning, both theirs and their students’. They focus on the nature and process of learning, rather than the performance of the instructor. (Bain, “What Makes Great Teachers Great?” B9).
Good advice. Something to which all can aspire.
_______ . _______
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