What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain (Harvard University Press, 2004)

Based on interviews and other information gathering such as observations, colleague/student comments, and course materials from 63 "excellent" college teachers in the USA, Ken Bain presents his conclusions on how the best college teachers create exceptional learning in their college courses that stimulates and challenges their students.

"Exceptional learning" (p.189) is defined in two dimensions: intellectual development and personal development. Intellectual development includes acquiring subject knowledge, learning how to learn independently, reasoning from evidence, employing abstract concepts, engaging in conversations/communication in speaking and writing about that field, asking sophisticated questions, and developing the habits of mind to continue to employ those abilities. Personal development includes 1) understanding one's self (history, emotions, dispositions, abilities, limitations prejudices, assumptions, passions, 2) understanding what it means to be human, 3) developing a sense of responsibility to one's self and others, including moral development and the ability to exercise compassion and understand and use one's emotions.

I think that list above covers what I aim for. I hadn't thought about the "personal development" side of exceptional learning very deeply before, but feel that I aim to help my students with their personal development through the liberal arts academic English courses I teach, especially when I am able to include a sufficient amount of personal choice and reflective writing in the learning curriculum so that students can explore their interests and create meaningful learning experiences for themselves.

The book can serve as a good introduction to what good college learning should be, and has much value there, especially for college professors who may have never studied recent learning theory and methods and are stuck in traditional lecture and test-giving models of college courses that fail to stimulate intellectual engagement.Unfortunately, for teachers who are already conducting teaching according to the "learning-centered" principles that the book introduces, it lacks well-developed specific examples of good practices, and primary goes on and on about abstract descriptions of what good teachers seem to do, supported only by a few rather vague quotes. When some interesting practice was mentioned, I kept wishing for more details, or at least a reference to some documentation that could shed more light on how to carry it out.

Some interesting practices that I want to explore (more) in my teaching are:

1.Writing a syllabus as an inspiring list of invitations to a learning environment and promises for discovery and personal development based on adherence to community guidelines, rather than requirements with penalties. What abilities can you learn/develop in this course? Why are those abilities important? (Who gives a damn?) How can we work together to make that happen? How will we assess whether you are being able to develop those abilities? How will we assess whether the course is optimally helping you develop those abilities?

2. Write a book like this on "What the best college English teachers in Japan do?" employing research methods similar to his. Has this already been done? Who might be interested in working with me on this?

3. Students must learn to judge their own quality of work. Best grading is to some extent based on a final reflective essay that explains what they learned or developed and how they want to improve further.

4. Create an archive of student research results that other students can see (Richardson case, 1999 Texas University). ICU really, really needs this. Students each year are doing very inspiring work, but their work is rarely ever made available to peers or the world. We need a system for publishing student work--some kind of balance between requiring all students to publish and only publishing student work that is exceptional--publishing work that student/teacher/peers have worked together to polish and engage readers should be a standard practice for this learning community, especially in the end of the first year + second year of ELP, as it should be in the major courses as well. And how about senior theses? Are those available easily online, and why not?

5. Expect personal development from students - mention this explicitly as a learning objective - compassion, find new passions, responsibility, understanding oneself, human society, and one's community.

6. Ask an inpartial third party consultant (Director? Staff member? Another student?) to come into the class around mid-term (and also at the end, possibly) to ask students their honest views of the learning in the course and any suggestions or expectations.

7. Building a convincing teaching portfolio each term - Class materials, observations, student reflections/evaluations, quality of student work. I guess my blog can act as this, but what would help organize the process more effectively?

Nice ideas to explore and experiment with in the new term. Good stuff.

NYT: Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/education/04teacher.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a23&pagewanted=all

It sounds like Bill Gates is putting a lot of money behind an effort to determine why some teachers are more effective than others, and how all teachers can become more effective in their teaching.

The most interesting part of the research project he is funding is the use of digital video of classrooms. The project plans to take 24,000 hours of videos, or something like that, to analyze effectiveness of teaching. Experts will watch the videos and a system for evaluating teachers' effectiveness will be created.

As the article mentions, the main difficulties will be: Are video analyzes as good as a human observation of a classroom? Also, is the privacy of the teacher violated when a video is distributed to "experts"? Who will be responsible for managing these videos?

The project is promising, but needs to proceed very cautiously.

Building Better Teachers (New York Times 3/7/'10)

Very interesting article on "What makes a good teacher?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=all

Are good teachers just magically "good?" or does well-designed teacher training make a significant difference?

An educational consultant named Lemov did a video-recording project of several hundred "good" classroom teachers to find out why they are good, and he seems to think one of the most important elements is classroom management techniques. In other words, a good teacher (or primary and secondary schools) needs to know how to get the attention of the students and hold their attention to the task at hand. Apparently that makes a big difference in whether a teacher can help the students excel in standardized tests compared to their peers.

Lemov's taxonomy of teaching techniques is going to come out as a book: “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College" Seems interesting, especially if it comes with videos.

Check out the video section:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/07/magazine/20100307-teacher-videos.html#/readingaloud

This will include techniques such as:

No. 43: Positive Framing, by which teachers correct misbehavior not by chiding students for what they’re doing wrong but by offering what Lemov calls “a vision of a positive outcome.” Zimmerli’s thank-yous and just-like-you’re-doings were a perfect execution of one of Positive Framing’s sub-categories, Build Momentum/Narrate the Positive.

No. 45: Warm/Strict, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”

No.??: What to Do. The clip opens at the start of class, which Zimmerli was teaching for the first time, with children — fifth graders, all of them black, mostly boys — looking everywhere but at the board. One is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.”

Another interesting idea was MKT, by a Professor Ball of...Michigan? Math Knowledge for Teachers. In other words, only having deep content knowledge of math or only having classroom management magic does not make a good teacher. What makes the difference is the ability to know what "only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

For teacher training of teachers for EFL like I do, I think there definitely is a need for E.A.K.T - English acquisition knowledge for teachers. I also think having a good basic training program in classroom management makes a big difference, especially if it is done on-the-job with the mentorship of a more experienced master teacher. I had very good mentors in my MA program for teachers of ESL, and working with them during my TA-ship teaching hours made a big difference in my confidence for classroom management and planning when I started teaching. I still had a lot to learn about managing a classroom during my first few years on the job, but I had a pretty good image of what I wanted based on observing expertly managed classes taught by my mentors.

Hopefully the video project that Lemov did and other video-based projects will become available to teachers to learn from!

And I should consider doing my video project -- recording my own classes to identify what went well and what didn't as well as the classes of my colleagues. I want to be able to confidently do teacher training the future and having a record of how my own teaching evolved would be invaluable. Hmm...if I could work together with some people on this, that would be even better.