Ken Bain, author of the best-selling book "What the Best College Teachers Do," spoke to an audience composed mostly of professors in Filene Auditorium Thursday. Dartmouth's Center for the Advancement of Learning hosted the event.
The book is based on Bain's 15-year study involving dozens of professors in various fields to find what makes a great professor and how professors can leave a lasting impact their students. Bain said that the impact excellent teachers made on his intellectual development inspired him to conduct the fifteen-year study.
Bain began by encouraging audience members to reflect on their educational upbringings.
"I want to capture the scholarship of teaching and learning," Bain said. "We wanted to find people who had enormous success in helping and encouraging their students to achieve remarkable learning."
Bain discussed the central qualities of effective teaching, beginning with a teacher's understanding of how students learn.
"[Great teachers] are good learners of learning," Bain said.
According to Bain, another quality central to effective teaching is challenging the academic routine of a student.
"Most fundamentally, you have to put the learner in a situation in which their existing mental model will not work," Bain said. "The learner actually has to care that their existing paradigm does not work. They have to care deeply enough to stop, grapple and construct a new reality."
Great professors, Bain said, believe their students want to learn.
"What [professors in the study] attempted to do was to appeal to basic human curiosity," Bain said. "Most of them believed strongly that their students were fundamentally curious creatures."
Bain said that challenging students is the final key component to great teaching.
"Ask interesting questions," he said. "Frame a question in a way that would be fascinating to the students."
Bain's book has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Catalan. It won the 2004 Virginia and Warren Stone Prize awarded by the Harvard University Press for an "Outstanding Book on Education and Society."
Bain is also the founding director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University and the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University. He is currently the Vice Provost for Instruction and teaches History a Montclair State University.
