Book Reviews

Review by Carol DeVolder

Bain, the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, and some of his colleagues collected information from 63 teachers whom they identified as outstanding. Admittedly, the criteria for “outstanding” was qualitative, but after all, it was quality of teaching that the study was designed to assess. Moreover, the author chose participants from a variety of disciplines so that the implications are directed toward college teachers in general, not teachers of a certain subject or within a specific discipline. The questions asked of participants were posed and answered in a variety of ways: from structured interviews, small group analyses, observation, student and peer ratings, and quality of teaching materials (students’ products such as papers, presentations, and exams; learning objectives; examinations and evaluation methods, and so on). Bain notes that excellent ratings alone were not enough to get a participant into the study, but poor ratings could exclude a participant since poor ratings indicated a certain alienation of students that couldn’t possibly be conducive to learning. Each participant was assessed through multiple means.

The questions Bain asked addressed six general areas, indeed these questions serve as titles for six of the chapters in the book. The first chapter serves as a definition of and an introduction to the constructs. Chapter Two considers “What Do They [the best teachers] know about How We Learn?” Chapter Three answers the question “How Do They Prepare to Teach?” Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 are “What Do They Expect of Their Students?” “How Do They Conduct Class?” “How Do They Treat Their Students?” and “How Do They Evaluate Their Students and Themselves?” respectively. The final chapter is an epilogue, “What Can We Learn From Them?”

Bain’s book is jam-packed with examples and it’s especially noteworthy that these examples cut across disciplines.  Despite the fact that the study was designed to ask and answer the general questions above, it’s fair to say that there was one overriding theme. The take-home message was that we, as teachers, should engage in learning-based rather than performance-based teaching. This seems like a subtle distinction, but Bain provides plenty of evidence that this distinction is critical in becoming or being an outstanding teacher.  For example, are exams structured so that they assess performance, memorization, and test-taking ability or are they created to evaluate students’ abilities to understand, critique, and challenge the material? Are syllabi constructed so that they reflect concerns for  behaviors such as  turning in work on time, class participation, and attendance, or are they constructed to portray the type of learning expected if the student is to master the material? According to Bain, the best teachers focus not only on what the student should learn, but place equal weight on how to foster that learning rather than how to teach the material. Put another way, if I want to be a good teacher, I should focus on how to help my students wrestle with the material rather than how to effectively deliver the information. While this book doesn’t explicitly say how to achieve those goals, it does serve as a guide to point the reader in the right direction.