What the Best College Teachers Do
by Ken Bain · first published 2004
5mentions
3recommended by
4HN commenters
2010–2020first – last mentioned
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What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study, 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
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…effectiveness. - Important when measuring success: Were you prepared? Did you achieve your objective in five minutes (or whatever other time)? Not mentioned in the article: A great book on this topic is "What the Best College Teachers Do" by Ken Bain. Ken does his own research into what makes a great teacher and has some fascinating findings. The huge effort that highly successful teachers put into their students is just incredible, though…
on “What Makes a Great Teacher?” ↗Check out What the Best College Teachers Do and What The Best College Students Do by Ken Bain.
on “Ask HN: Learning How to Teach” ↗…kid "you are smart", this makes it sound like it's something they are, not something they do; i.e. something they have no control over.) I think if you read any decent book on pedagogy (my favorite is "What the Best College Teachers Do", by Ken Bain) you'll see that there is a huge amount of research on how kids learn and how they are motivated to learn. That most of this research seems mainly ignored in the real world is unfortunate.
on “How to Think” ↗…understanding whatsoever. Or, students can show understanding but have underlying mental models untouched (making them even more confused than previously). Both of these cases are failures. The book "What the Best College Teachers Do" has amazing insights on how involved, dedicated, knowledgeable, and wise very successful and effective teachers are. The amount of thought and effort they put into their courses is staggering, so I'm…
on “Are teachers underpaid? It depends.” ↗I was just reading about extrinsic motivators today in the book, What the Best College Teachers Do. The research cited there dates back to the 1970s and the work of Edward L. Deci. Apparently what he and his colleagues found is that most extrinsic motivators (money, prizes, grades) actually do work…
on “Should Kids Be Paid to Do Well in School?” ↗