“The questions are the key.”
—Ken Bain
 e is obsessed with asking provocative questions. Even while being interviewed, Professor Ken Bain sometimes responds to questions with more questions. Currently vice provost for instruction at Montclair State University, Bain is also director of the university’s Teaching and Learning Resource Center. He is known internationally for his 15 years of research on the best ways to teach and learn. The result? Bain has founded centers dedicated to research on teaching at four institutions: Montclair State University, New York University, Northwestern University, and Vanderbilt University. He has also received awards for his work from the Harry S. Truman Library, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the International Studies Association. His book, What the Best College Teachers Do, won the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize awarded annually by Harvard University Press for an outstanding book on education and society. He has been invited to speak at nearly 200 universities and institutions throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Most recently, Professor Bain was invited to be the keynote speaker at a workshop on interactive learning organized by the Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU and LASPAU for the Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana (UNITEC) as a part of the Séneca Program for Academic Excellence.
 Professor Bain agreed to have a conversation with the Informativo about some of his findings in the field of interactive teaching and learning.
What common elements or characteristics have you found among the best teachers during your 15 years of study? What makes great teachers great?
I found that the best teachers have a central ability to ask key and provocative questions. They define their teaching in terms of those questions. I also found that good teachers understand the learning process. They recognize that humans construct their sense of reality and use those constructions to understand new situations. Good teachers use that understanding to build powerful learning environments.
What motivated you to study teaching and learning processes?
As a history teacher, I basically wanted to become a better teacher. I wanted to systematically evaluate what good teaching does. I realized that I had particularly benefited from good teaching. During my studies, I identified my good teachers because I was highly motivated to learn while taking their classes. With bad teachers, I basically didn’t learn anything at all. My personal experience demonstrated to me that good teachers can certainly make a big difference.
You have pointed out the importance of creating critical or powerful learning environments? How do you define them?
A powerful learning environment is precisely the one that highly stimulates students to learn. In the case of my teaching of history, I always try to ask questions that students find interesting and relevant—not just give them a string of facts. One of the questions that I have asked is: Why do human beings go to war? That question has made my students think and reflect. Just asking them to memorize facts or books doesn’t provide a stimulating environment. A Harvard professor who is considered excellent by his students told me once that he starts his course by asking the students: What is justice? This question has generated very interesting debates.
I have read that you also use role playing to teach. What are the advantages of this teaching method? What other methods do you use?
Assuming an active role, students put themselves inside a historical moment and its complexities. Then the students not only act but reflect. Sometimes I also use case studies. Sometimes I ask broad questions such as: What are the forces in history that shape our civilizations? The variety of responses and the engagement of the students are what provide an interesting learning environment. The goal is to get the students fascinated with the issues. Every human being has a natural curiosity. We need to recapture the child-like curiosity that lies in all of us, the fascination with the unknown. A good teacher appeals to that curiosity, to the student’s ability to explore his or her own curiosity.
According to your detailed observations, what other strategies are being used by good teachers to stimulate students to learn deeply in an interactive way?
When I observed classes from teachers at different institutions in different cities, I confirmed that the students learn more deeply when they try to solve problems they find intriguing, important, or beautiful—also when the teachers allow them to try, fail, receive feedback, and then try again and again before anyone makes a judgment on their work. Students also tend to learn more when they work collaboratively with other classmates who have similar problems. I constantly ask my students to challenge their paradigms. It is also important for the students to know that they can get the support they might need not only at the intellectual level but at the emotional and physical levels, if necessary.
What is the best way to evaluate the quality of a teacher?
A good way to evaluate a teacher is to look at the influence of his or her classes on the students. Do the sessions deeply provoke students intellectually? Do the questions asked by the teacher really encourage them to think? Students should also trust that their work will be considered fairly and that it will be relevant. Teachers should encourage the students to believe that by working hard their abilities will improve, that they indeed can learn. It is very important that the students feel in control of their own learning.
Your research refers to Natural Learning and Active Learning. What is the difference between these concepts?
Active Learning recognizes that it is best to have people actively involved in their own learning. Natural Learning recognizes something important about the nature of that action. The action is most effective if the learner decides to do it because the student thinks it will help him or her satisfy a need to know, help solve a problem that he or she regards as important, intriguing, or beautiful—not just because someone told the student to go talk with a neighbor.
Your center suggests making the syllabus into an artistic feast. Educational institutions, though, generally provide very specific guidelines for teachers to design syllabi. They frequently point out the importance of including specific assignments and requirements. How does one reconcile these two views?
The typical syllabus unfortunately emphasizes “assignments” and “requirements.” But working under such a syllabus, even good students just learn to follow orders and do what is necessary to make the grade, avoiding a more profound learning process. They become strategic learners. At Montclair, we have found that teachers can begin to reconstruct the environment in which their students learn with a syllabus that makes promises rather than demands and invites students to a provocative intellectual feast.
What tips would you provide to teachers who would like to improve the quality of their syllabi?
The syllabus mainly has to be flexible, able to adjust questions and challenges to the student. A promising syllabus basically has three elements. First, the promise: This is what you will be able to do after finishing this course. The promise refers to the overall course goals. Second, a motivating invitation to do the work that will guide them to achieve the promise—beyond listing assignments. It is important that students assume responsibility for their own active learning and reflect about what they can do in that regard. They must obviously be willing to read. Students could also pursue topics of special interest to them and write papers about these topics, helping them refine their thinking.
What about the grading?
That’s the third element. The conversation about how students and teachers can understand the learning progress could start by writing a short statement on what an “A” thinker should be able to intellectually do as a result of taking a class. And then the same for the “B” thinker, and the “C” thinker, etc. Then the teachers could ask the students to do the same and then have a discussion about their views.
At the end of the semester, the students should be able to evaluate their own work. The self-assessment could begin by stating the grade which the student believes that he or she has the evidence to support, using excerpts of his or her own work. The students should ideally get used to assessing their own strengths and weaknesses. Based upon the quality of the self-assessment, the teacher could change the grade.
How does one transform the lecture from being a passive way of teaching, as it sometimes is, to a more interactive, dynamic, and effective teaching process?
Five elements characterize good lecturers: 1) A good lecturer asks a provocative question or presents a challenging or intriguing problem. Because students like stories, good lecturers often tell stories to raise a question or problem. 2) Good lecturers provoke students to adopt the question or problem as their own. 3) A good lecturer is able to engage students in thinking critically: applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating the question or problem. 4) Good lecturers don’t ask the students to just memorize. 5) At the end of the presentation, good lecturers formulate a new question or problem.
What is the main difference that you found between good lecturers and bad lecturers?
When we asked highly effective lecturers what they intended when they lectured, they said they wanted to help their students understand, provoke them to think differently. When we asked not-so-successful lecturers, they often said they wanted to cover the material.
Do you think that it is important for lecturers to prepare a performance, as some say?
Good lecturers generally fill the room with their presence, look into students’ eyes, and engage them in the conversation. They don’t hide behind a podium. They also read the reactions of the audience and periodically change pace if necessary. They make sure that everyone can hear them and see the respective illustrations. They also repeat key points and allow time for students to answer and think about the material presented. Showing a sense of humor generally helps to get the attention of the audience. Some good lecturers ask questions and suggest that the students work on them individually or in small groups and then report back. Good lecturers should also be good at listening and responding, and they should also let students respond to one another.
What technology, if any, can help create a learning environment?
Technology is not absolutely necessary. But if you have access to it, you can use it as a tool. You can use whatever works: blogs, email communities, instant messaging. Technologies help to visualize, to represent aspects of the world. Technologies help to present graphs, maps, etc. But technology is not absolutely necessary to create a learning environment.
What books would you recommend to every teacher in order to understand more about human learning?
First, modestly I recommend my own book. I also strongly recommend How People Learn by John Brandsford, and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
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Interviewer María Cristina Caballero, a Colombian journalist, is a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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