What the Best College Teachers Do

“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 own thinking in the discipline, analyzing its nature and evaluating its quality. That capacity to think metacognitively drives much of what we observed in the best teaching.”

Bain’s subjects inspired deep learning in their students through their own ability to reflect on significant research questions. In sharing their thinking, they proved challenges are normal and thus part of the learning process.

“While others might be satisfied if students perform well on the examinations, the best teachers assume that learning has little meaning unless it produces a sustained and substantial influence on the way people think, act, and feel.”

Bain’s subjects did not focus on exam results, even when their students performed well. Instead, they focus on inspiring deep learning that will persist after students leave the classroom.

“They all had to learn how to foster learning, and they must constantly remind themselves of what can go wrong, always reaching for new ways to understand what it means to learn and how to best foster that achievement. Even the best teachers have bad days, as they scramble to reach students.”

Effective educators are not born but made through consistent assessment of their own teaching. They reflect and improve rather than blame students when lessons fail to take.

“Most of all, I hope readers will take away from this book the conviction that good teaching can be learned.”

Effective teaching is cultivated, like any other knowledge. Many college and university instructors have limited instruction, if any, on the science of teaching and learning during their own education. Therefore, through experience and exchange of ideas with other experts, one can learn to be a better educator.

“We discovered that they know their disciplines well and are active and accomplished scholars, artists, or scientists—even if they do not always have long publication records. But that necessary knowledge alone can’t account for their teaching success. If it did, then any expert in the field would become an outstanding educator, but that clearly doesn’t happen. Nor is it the case that experts just need more time to become better teachers.”

Effective researchers do not necessarily make effective teachers. Bain’s subjects were knowledgeable in their fields of study, but also spent a great deal of time studying teaching and their students.

“Because they believe that students must use their existing mental models to interpret what they encounter, they think about what they do as stimulating construction, not ‘transmitting knowledge.’”

Students often enter courses with preexisting conceptions about related topics, even when they know little about them. Therefore, instructors must collaborate with students to deconstruct these “mental models” rather than present content.

“Rather than telling students they are wrong and then providing the ‘correct’ answers, they often ask question to help students see their own mistakes.”

Bain’s subjects avoided the traditional model of education that emphasizes memorization of “correct” information to reproduce on exams. Instead, they acted as guides who helped students understand where they went wrong so they could think critically about their own learning.

“If students only study because they want to get a good grade or be the best in the class, they do not achieve as much as when they learn because they are interested.”

The simple transfer of knowledge is ineffective for long-term understanding. Students do not retain or pursue intellectual growth when they are fed information that fails to spark interest. They instead require learning objectives and personal questions to answer.

“Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful learning environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia.”

Teaching requires more than disciplinary knowledge: Bain advises that college and university teachers approach their pedagogy like scholarship. This approach necessitates consistent evaluation of one’s classroom and methods of student engagement. Instructors must adjust courses as they study their students to meet their learning needs.

“Some professors discuss knowledge as if it is something they ‘deliver’ or ‘transfer’ to students, almost as if they open heads and pour it in. Not surprisingly, they focus on building the explanation that makes the most sense to them rather than on one that will help and encourage students to construct their own explanations, to reason, to draw conclusions, to act.”

Bain continually confronts traditional teaching whereby faculty lecture with little student interaction. He does not advocate the elimination of lecturing, but rather encourages a student-centered approach to it. For example, one subject compared her class to a carefully prepared meal and the classroom experience to a friendly conversation around the dining table. Bain claims this attitude is key to long-term impact. Students should not simply receive knowledge to regurgitate on exams: They must actively engage in and examine their learning process.

“Traditional grading […] simply represents an invention, a way of looking at someone else’s thoughts and work and categorizing those intellectual products into broad classification […] a device that, in truth, conveys little insights into the qualities and deficiencies of what students are doing.”

Grades alone do not determine student learning, but when coupled with student-centered pedagogical practices, can provide insight. Instructors must build a positive classroom and relations with students, so students feel safe sharing ideas. Assessment and constructive feedback beyond exams are necessary to determine student learning.

“Students will be buoyed by positive expectations that are genuine, challenging yet realistic, and that take their work seriously.”

Students often fear being “rated” via grades. Alternatively, safe learning environments where instructors establish trust minimize this fear and encourage dedication to coursework.

“I cannot stress enough the simple yet powerful notion that the key to understanding the best teaching cannot be found in particular practices or rules but in the attitudes of the teachers, in their faith in their students’ abilities to achieve, in their willingness to take their students seriously and let them assume control of their own education, and in their commitment to let all policies and practices flow from central learning objectives and from a mutual respect and agreement between students and teachers.”

Teachers cannot look to activities or practices alone to foster a natural critical learning environment. Instead, this environment is the product of an instructor’s active approach to teaching: Faculty should plan courses with clear objectives, establish trust, and allow students to take ownership of their education through active learning (i.e., engaging issues and questions).

“If you believe, as our subjects tended to do, that people construct models of reality rather than simply store or ‘absorb’ knowledge, you are more likely to ask how that construction takes place and how it might be improved.”

Bain encourages teachers to consider the mental models that students bring to classes when they plan and execute teaching. Simply transmitting knowledge to students fails to challenge these mental models. Students may perform well on exams, but their long-term understanding changes little. Instructors must allow students to struggle and even fail to grasp ideas, and support them—intellectually and emotionally—as they develop new understanding.

“Rather than trying to teach the ‘facts’ to students devoid of any reasoning […] they integrated explanations with questions and problems.”

Effective faculty do not approach teaching as if conveying facts. Instead, they present concepts and theories worthy of interrogation to encourage student curiosity and critical thinking.

“The best teachers we encountered expect ‘more’ from their students. Yet the nature of that ‘more’ must be distinguished from expectations that may be ‘high’ but meaningless, from goals that are simply tied to the course rather than to the kind of thinking and acting expected of critical thinkers. That ‘more’ is, in the hands of teachers who captivate and motivate students to help them reach unusually high levels of accomplishment, grounded in the highest intellectual, artistic, or moral standard, and in the personal goals of the students.”

An effective educator is not one who insists on a heavy workload for its own sake. Rather, they expect students to interrogate their mental models, and develop higher levels of understanding and creation that persist after a course concludes.

“Because the best teachers plan their courses backward, deciding what students should be able to do by the end of the semester, they map a series of intellectual developments through their course, with the goal of encouraging students to learn on their own, engaging them in deep thinking.”

Backward design is key to effective teaching. This method begins with learning goals, allowing faculty to structure their courses around issues and questions that encourage deep learning. Only after deciding a course’s goals should faculty decide related content.

“The very best teachers offered a balance of the systematic and the messy.”

The best teachers use an eclectic blend of instructional methods. Some of these methods are traditional, like lecturing, while others utilize technology, etc. This approach reaches more students and keeps them engaged.

“They know how to make silence loud.”

Effective teachers are effective communicators, not only in verbal explanations but deliberate body language and pace. They do not fear pauses but instead use silence for emphasis and potential reflection.

“Their attention to the details of performance stems from a concern for the learners, and their focus is on the nature of the processes of learning rather than on the performance of the instructor.”

The best teachers do not view themselves as infallible “performers” for students. They actively consider others’ perspectives and needs in their course planning. For example, they consider how their body language and tone impact students.

“[We] encountered less effective teachers everywhere who were convinced that the gods of academia had stuffed their classes with nothing but lazy anti-intellectuals.”

Ineffective educators make (often negative) assumptions about students’ motives and capabilities. By contrast, effective educators believe their students capable of achieving learning objectives and treat them as collaborators in the learning process—with respective differences in mind.

“They talked frequently about a journey they took with their students in search of better understanding, or told us stories about insights that students had developed that influenced their own comprehension. While many of their colleagues might disdain the struggles of their students […] the best teachers generally felt a bond between themselves and their students in humankind’s struggles to know anything.”

Bain’s subjects did not treat their students as adversaries, but collaborators in intellectual endeavors. They learned from their students, since they approached their own teaching as a form of scholarship and established mutual trust.

“Like so many teachers, I failed to understand that testing and grading are not incidental acts that come at the end of teaching and that powerful aspects of education that have an enormous influence on the entire enterprise of helping and encouraging students to learn. Without adequate assessment, neither teachers nor students can comprehend progress the learners are making, and instructors can little understand whether their efforts are best suited to their students and objectives.”

Bain advocates for assessment, formal and informal, throughout a course. This method gives instructors and students a snapshot of progress over an extended period of time. This approach contrasts with the traditional practice of giving exams, which do not adequately measure student understanding.