What Do the Best Teachers Do?

Kenneth R. Bain, Director of the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence Northwestern University

What do the best teachers do to captivate and motivate students, to help them reach unusually high levels of accomplishment? For the past dozen years, Ken Bain and his colleagues have looked at the practices of such teachers in colleges, universities, and medical schools. Most of these highly successful teachers teach with attitudes and practices that reflect the insights of the literature on human learning and motivation.

This highly interactive workshop will give participants an opportunity to explore those insights systematically and to consider their implications for the ways they structure and conduct their courses. Participants should emerge with an increased understanding of human learning and motivation, an awareness of the practices of teachers who have had great success in fostering advanced reasoning abilities in their students, and a greater ability to incorporate relevant ideas into their own practices.

Ken Bain concentrates his research and writing on the development of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The author of a 1985 guide to the teaching of history, he is currently completing his third book on U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East, The Last Journey Home: Franklin Roosevelt and the Middle East, and writing about his 12-year study of outstanding college and university teachers. He has won four major teaching awards.

Here are sample comments from past participants in the workshop with Mr. Bain:

"A highly provocative examination of what it means to learn and how we can best help our students learn."

"As they said in the workshop, anyone who expects just a bag of tricks will be disappointed, but anyone who is willing to think deeply about teaching and learning issues will find this workshop extremely useful. I highly recommend it."