What the Best College Teachers Do Quotes

“The moments of the class must belong to the student—not the students, but to the very undivided student. You don’t teach a class. You teach a student.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“The best teaching is often both an intellectual creation and a performing art.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Donald Saari uses a combination of stories and questions to challenge students to think critically about calculus. “When I finish this process,” he explained, “I want the students to feel like they have invented calculus and that only some accident of birth kept them from beating Newton to the punch.” In essence, he provokes them into inventing ways to find the area under the curve, breaking the process into the smallest concepts (not steps) and raising the questions that will Socratically pull them through the most difficult moments. Unlike so many in his discipline, he does not simply perform calculus in front of the students; rather, he raises the questions that will help them reason through the process, to see the nature of the questions and to think about how to answer them. “I want my students to construct their own understanding,” he explains, “so they can tell a story about how to solve the problem.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Sure, they became frustrated with students at times and occasionally displayed impatience, but because they were willing to face the failures of teaching and believed in their capacity to solve problems, they tried not to become defensive with their students or build a wall around themselves. Instead, they tried to take their students seriously as human beings and treated them the way they might treat any colleague, with fairness, compassion, and concern. That approach found reflection in what they taught, how they taught it, and how they evaluated students, but it also appeared in attempts to understand their students’ lives, cultures, and aspirations. It even emerged in their willingness to see their students outside of class.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“When I interviewed one of the mathematicians in the study, he asked me if I knew how to define a function. I confessed that my knowledge was a little rusty, and that the definition I remembered memorizing in college didn’t spring immediately to mind, something about variables being related to the values of other variables. “But can you explain the basic concept in your own words?” he persisted. I stammered and began looking for the nearest exit. At that point, he tossed a pen in my direction, which I instinctively reached out to catch. “How did you catch that?” he asked. “I opened my hand and then closed it around the pen at the right moment.” “But how did you know when to open your hand and when to close it?” he pressed. After a little struggling, and some additional questioning from the mathematician, I stumbled to the conclusion that I predicted where the pen would be by observing its flight. “That’s a function,” he exploded. “You took information about where it was at this point, this point, and this point, and predicted when it would arrive in your hand.” He then turned to the board and wrote a formula. “I could have explained it this way, and that’s the way it’s ordinarily done. But when we do it that way, students just memorize formulas or definitions and really don’t grasp what’s involved in the concept.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“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 are immutable. People can change, and those changes--not just the accumulation of information--represent true learning.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“In so many introductory science classes, the chemist [Dudley Herschbach] observed, students encounter what they see as "a frozen body of dogma" that must be memorized and regurgitated. Yet in the "real science you're not too worried about the right answer... Real science recognizes that you have an advantage over practically any other human enterprise because what you are after- call it truth or understanding- waits patiently for you while you screw up.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Those institutes can develop research-based teaching initiatives in which they work with colleagues across the university to tackle problems. They might focus on why certain groups of students (defined by whatever demography) do not achieve the kind of learning expected, or about how to help all students achieve a new level of development. The initiative would refine the questions; explore the existing literature; and fashion a hypothesis about what might work, a program to implement that hypothesis, and a systematic assessment of the result, ultimately contributing to a growing body of literature on university learning.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“You have to be confused,” Dudley Herschbach, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist from Harvard, confessed, “before you can reach a new level of understanding anything.” In many disciplines, especially”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Every student is unique and brings contributions that no one else can make.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas and not the ideas themselves.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Steele found, for example, that if he could convince women who took difficult mathematics examinations that everyone connected with the test assumed they would perform as well as men, that they did.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“Young children who constantly hear “person” praise (“you’re so smart to do this well”) as opposed to “task” praise (“you did that well”) are more likely to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than expandable with hard work.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“In short, we much struggle with the meaning of learning within our discipline and how best to cultivate and recognize it. For that task, we don't need routine experts who know all the right procedures but adaptive ones who can apply fundamental principles to all the situations and students they are likely to encounter, recognizing when invention is both possible and necessary and that there is no single 'best way' to teach.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

“To benefit from what the best teachers do, however, we must embrace a different model, one in which teaching occurs only when learning takes place. Most fundamentally, teaching in this conception is creating those conditions in which most--if not all--of our students will realize their potential to learn. That sounds like hard work, and it is a little scary because we don't have complete control over who we are, but it is highly rewarding and obtainable.”
― Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do