Welcome!

Welcome to the Teaching Learning course and our site.

This site will be the gathering place for a Teaching and Learning course for faculty teaching in the community colleges of the Hudson Valley Consortium of SUNY, taught by William Sheldon and assisted by Hope Windle.

This series kicks off an on-going conversation about teaching between professors at these various institutions and is shared by the collection of Teaching and Learning Centers at SUNY Orange and SUNY Rockland, as well as the Instructional Design communities at SUNY Ulster and Sullivan as well as the Distance Learning Offices within these schools.

We are refering to the book by Ken Bain, "What the Best College Teachers Do". There are many websites that summarize the book but here is a link to a site that shares an excerpt.

Ken Bain. What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 207 pp. Cloth: $21.95. ISBN 0-674-01325-5.

Bain notes that "the best college and university teachers create what we might call a natural critical learning environment in which they embed the skills and information they teach in assignments (questions and tasks)—authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenging students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental modes of reality" (p. 47). This statement is the essence or core of what the best college teachers actually do in their role. The book concludes with thoughts about how the best teachers evaluate the students and themselves, a summary of what we can learn from the best teachers, and a review of the research methodology for this...