What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain

Author:Ken Bain [Bain, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

2. Get Their Attention and Keep It

Whereas the ideas of natural critical learning serve as a robust organizing rationale around which the best teaching takes place, some more specific principles guide the actions of the people we studied. They consciously try to get students’ attention with some provocative act, question, or statement. “The human mind must first focus on the problem of how to understand, apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate something,” one of the professors told us in an argument we heard frequently, “and a teacher can help stimulate that focus.” Teaching is “above all,” Michael Sandel, a Harvard political theorist, argued, “about commanding attention and holding it.” That means not just generally motivating students’ interest in the subject but capturing and keeping their attention for each class. “Our task,” Sandel contended, “is not unlike that of a commercial for a soft drink or any other product.” The only difference, he went on to argue, is what professors might do with that attention once they catch it. “For the most part,” he said, “we want to hold the attention of students for the sake of changing the things they are likely to pay attention to most of the time. We want to grasp students and direct their attention some place else.”

Teachers succeed in grabbing students’ attention by beginning a lecture with a provocative question or problem that raises issues in ways that students had never thought about before, or by using stimulating case studies or goal-based scenarios.

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