Teaching and Learning in the SUNY Hudson Valley Educational Consortium: Pre 3

Reading Bain, What The Best College Teachers Do
Pages 135-145.

The questions below are meant to stimulate your engagement with the reading sections. Be prepared to bolster your answers with specific pages and quotes from the material.

1. On pages 136 and 137 Bain notes that personality played little or no role in successful teaching. His research did find however “ an elaborate pattern of beliefs, attitudes, conceptions, and perceptions behind the way outstanding teachers treated the people who took their classes.” What, from your reading, stood out to you as some of the most important of these?

2. How does Bain contrast the fictional “Professor Wolf” with the way that the best teachers related to their students?

3. What did Bain’s research suggest about the attitude that the best teachers had regarding ‘alleged student deficiency.’

4. Was the issue of trust in students desire to learn related to the nature of the institutions at which professors taught?

Here are questions to explore from The Courage To Teach: Exploring The Inner Landscape Of A Teacher's Life by Parker Palmer.

1. What do you think Parker Palmer means by “We Teach Who We Are”, and how do you think that concept relates to the reading from Bain?

2. In a related question, what does he mean by “Teaching Beyond Technique”?

3. What does he mean when he talks about ‘heart’? And why does he suggest that teachers sometimes lose heart?

For an example of what these two readings discuss you might wish to take a look at the first 30 minutes of the video below:

1 comment:

Peter MartinApril 13, 2016 at 4:07 AM
We teach who we are is another way of saying we teach what we love, or at least it should be. By allowing students to construct their own understanding of content we allow them to construct their own personalities with the material. Teachers are no longer disseminating information for students to digest but rather they are fostering an appreciation and willingness to make the material their own. When we teach beyond technique we move past the perfunctory steps of passing on information. We stretch ideas and concepts and work towards building greater personal meaning with our students. Teachers do lose heart sometimes. This happens for a number of reasons. It isn't that the teacher falls out of love with their subject or loses a willingness to teach. It happens for a number of reasons including a lack of support, inspiration, and set of appropriate challenges.