Quotes from Ken Bain

The moments of the class must belong to the student—not the students, but to the very undivided student. You don't teach a class. You teach a student.

The best teaching is often both an intellectual creation and a performing art.

Simply put, the best teachers believe that learning involves both personal and intellectual development and that neither the ability to think nor the qualities of being a mature human are immutable. People can change, and those changes--not just the accumulation of information--represent true learning.

In so many introductory science classes, the chemist [Dudley Herschbach] observed, students encounter what they see as "a frozen body of dogma" that must be memorized and regurgitated. Yet in the "real science you're not too worried about the right answer... Real science recognizes that you have an advantage over practically any other human enterprise because what you are after- call it truth or understanding- waits patiently for you while you screw up.

You don't learn from experience; you learn from reflecting on experience.

Every student is unique and brings contributions that no one else can make.

We all seek stability," he quoted Langer as saying. "We want to hold things still, thinking that if we do, we can control them. But since everything is always changing, that doesn't work. Actually, it causes you to lose control." Yet if you understand reading as a mindful person, "uncertainty creates freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves," Rilke advised

Young children who constantly hear "person" praise ("you're so smart to do this well") as opposed to "task" praise ("you did that well") are more likely to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than expandable with hard work.

Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas and not the ideas themselves.

You have to be confused," Dudley Herschbach, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist from Harvard, confessed, "before you can reach a new level of understanding anything." In many disciplines, especially

Steele found, for example, that if he could convince women who took difficult mathematics examinations that everyone connected with the test assumed they would perform as well as men, that they did.

To benefit from what the best teachers do, however, we must embrace a different model, one in which teaching occurs only when learning takes place. Most fundamentally, teaching in this conception is creating those conditions in which most--if not all--of our students will realize their potential to learn. That sounds like hard work, and it is a little scary because we don't have complete control over who we are, but it is highly rewarding and obtainable.

In short, we much struggle with the meaning of learning within our discipline and how best to cultivate and recognize it. For that task, we don't need routine experts who know all the right procedures but adaptive ones who can apply fundamental principles to all the situations and students they are likely to encounter, recognizing when invention is both possible and necessary and that there is no single 'best way' to teach.