How do good teachers prepare to teach? This is the second question asked by Ken Bain in his excellent new book on teaching: What the Best College Teachers Do
The traditional model focuses on what the teacher does and not what the student learns. The latter asks what students can "do intellectually." Do you "teach" your own kids "what" they need to know or do you think of what you want them to be able to do and so teach them how to do that? Big question for parents; big question for pastors; big question for teachers.
Bain finds 13 features and I want to give some of them today and more Wednesday:
1. Good teachers plan backwards: from what they want students to be able to do. How do we encourage students to answer big questions and develop skills to do that?
2. What reasoning abilities do students need to answer this in this course?
3. What mental models do our students bring to the table and how can we help them in our challenge to those mental models?
4. What information is needed and what is the best way to gain that information?
5. How can we help students who will struggle with the questions of the course and with the methods needed to answer those questions?
6. How do we help students comprehend various views of the subject and grapple with the issues? Good teachers bring these conflicts into the class.
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In agreement with a couple of the above comments, two words come to mind in description of a good teacher, interaction and dependence. My experience both as a student and an educator confirms the importance and effectiveness of planning with the desired results in mind and teaching so as to equip student not only to have information but to know how to do certain skills. The addition I would suggest (and maybe Bain addresses this elsewhere in his book) is that those skills we desire to teach should lead students toward interaction with other students and toward and understanding of how and when they should rely upon others (put themselves in a place of dependence) in the educational process. While independent thinking has merit to a degree, the greater benefit comes when we can cultivate interdependent thinkers who know how to engage others in the educational process and know how to depend on others in the meantime.
I have a friend who taught a few college courses. I'll ask him. Actually, I have another good friend who's taught as well. They're both in Texas.
This is rich pedagogy and I'm looking forward to the next installment. I remember college professors who were some of the most captivating people I'd ever heard. They were captivating for a number of reasons but most often because of a singleness of purpose and the introduction and well navigated experience on conflict.
To get me to think on my feet, one OT prof made me write a heresy paper on Pelagius and then defend his views as if in the first person. Only I had to defend the paper standing atop a boulder just outside the cafeteria while all the Bible professors went to lunch. In one such address, I told them that the book of Romans wasn't inspired.
Teaching as a Subversive Acivity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner is a very good book in the same fashion.
Scot,
These questions are great. I am getting a lot out of this series. I began reading the book yesterday.
Teaching is the bridge to an end, that is, the teacher is the bridge. If we sre talking of what makes a "good teacher" then we are talking what constitutes him/her as a "good bridge".
'Good teaching' by a 'good teacher' will always carry the weight to the end of being taught well so that others might get the same intimacy for the subject being thaught.
A 'good teacher' exemplifies the end of the bridge by his/her intimacy with the subject as the reward for the spark which started them on their journey to cross the bridge.
All subjects are there for intimacy, to be known about. Intimacy is in every subject to be experienced because of and by the bridge.
May we, by the present Life of the risen Christ Jesus in us, accept His intimacy as well as His teaching.
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