For nearly three decades, there have been two competing schools of thought about the best way to teach in a college classroom. In the traditional method, the teacher lectures and the students take notes. The more permissive alternative has a teacher trying to be the students’ friend, and having lessons that are more like conversations and less like lessons.
Both are flawed approaches which don’t ensure that students learn anything. A more traditional professor can certainly compel students to obey, and to regurgitate crammed knowledge on tests. But he can’t force students to learn, and crammed knowledge is swiftly forgotten once exams are over. The notion of the professor as a “huggy-bear” sort of friend isn’t constructive, either, since students who don’t have to work to get a grade won’t put in the effort required to learn.
Two new books address the question of how to motivate students to learn. In Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale University Press, $29.95, 277 pages), Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, comes up with ways that his fellow English teachers can do a better job in the classroom.
In What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press, $21.95, 190 pages), Ken Bain, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, offers a great many interesting suggestions for how teachers can improve their classroom skills.
Mr. Graff begins his book with analysis of the culture wars of the 1990s. He notes silliness on the side of the multiculturalists: For example, such novels as Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” are now required reading in many college English classes — ensuring that the condensed Cliffs Notes summaries are bestsellers.
But Mr. Graff swiftly moves from cultural analysis to practical advice about what college professors should teach. He argues that his fellow English teachers should teach students how to argue, and how to examine different texts using the critical tools that scholars use. Much of this book consists of arguments about why teachers should train students to debate ideas.
But Mr. Graff’s analysis is too restrictive. He assumes that the methods of the English teacher are the only ones worth examining. It’s possible that a better model for teachers is the historian, who weighs and judges factual evidence. And Mr. Graff has nothing to say about how science teachers ought to do their jobs. Because of this restricted scope, “Clueless in Academe” has very little practical advice.
Ken Bain, in contrast, does a much better job in analyzing successful teaching. He begins with this premise: Most college graduates had one or two great teachers, who successfully persuaded them that Plato or medieval English history was worth close scrutiny.
For instance, generations of students at Baylor University made sure to take courses with historian Ralph Lynn; his classes, said Texas’ former Governor Ann Richards decades after she took them, were “magical tours into the great minds and movements of history.”
What makes the Ralph Lynns of the academic world so memorable? To find out, Mr. Bain and his colleagues, after many years of research, identified about 100 exceptional teachers. They attended lectures, talked to students, and interviewed professors. Mr. Bain’s goal was to produce what management professors call “best practices” — the ideas that other teachers can use to perform better in the classroom.
Mr. Bain found that the best teachers are passionate about what they do. One professor said that she thought her courses were like a “great feast,” in which she invited students to participate. Bad teachers order students to do what they command, and constantly carp and complain that students will never grasp the subtleties of their discipline. Good teachers convey some of the doubts and the pleasures their discipline provides, without being weepy or whiny.
“We found no patterns in instructors’ sartorial habits,” Mr. Bain writes, “or in what professors and students called each other. In some classrooms first names were common; in others, only titles and surnames prevailed.”
But Mr. Bain found that outstanding teachers realized that teaching is a performance art, requiring some of the skills actors use to command a stage. Great teachers do far more than stand at a lectern and read old notes.
“Clueless in Academe” is a pendant to culture wars that, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, now seem like a closed chapter in academic history. Mr. Graff offers little to anyone outside an English department. In contrast, “What the Best College Teachers Do” is a tightly-reasoned, innovative look at a neglected subject. Any college teacher who wishes to hone his skills should study Mr. Bain’s compact book closely.
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Readers interested in improving our schools ought to study education history closely. David Tyack, now an emeritus professor at Stanford, has previously written two of the best books on the history of American public schools: “The One Best Way” (1974) and “Managers of Virtue” (with Elizabeth Hansot, 1982). These provide the best explanation as to why and how American public schools of 100 years ago were transformed by progressives, from relatively decentralized institutions receptive to parental concerns into hierarchical, red-tape-ridden bureaucracies.
Mr. Tyack’s latest book, Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society (Harvard University Press, $22.95, 185 pages), is far poorer than his great histories of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite having held four workshops devoted to the book and seeking advice from 37 historians of education, Mr. Tyack does not offer anything new. His findings about the limits of Americanization, school choice, and school decentralization largely repeat those of earlier studies. Moreover, he has not kept pace with current research; by my estimate 90 percent of his citations about school choice, for example, are over a decade old.
Mr. Tyack is a great historian, and his earlier books are important. “Seeking Common Ground” is a minor coda to a distinguished career.
Martin Morse Wooster is the author of “Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds.”
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