The Center for Teaching Excellence hosted a weekend workshop on October 20, 2007, featuring Ken Bain, PhD Dr. Bain is an internationally renowned educator, author, and historian. He is in high demand to keynote conferences and provides lectures and workshops on the topic of effective college teaching. We were indeed lucky to have him visit IUP.
Among his numerous publications, he recently completed a fifteen-year national research project which culminated in his influential and popular book What the Best College Teachers Do. His study included nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of universities and academic fields.
Approximately 150 people attended this workshop. Dr. Bain walked everyone through a series of questions regarding our goals and pedagogy, drawing our attention to what we know about learning, about structuring and sequencing assignments, and presenting information. After studying hundreds of professors in all fields and with all class sizes (he mentioned one with seven hundred students in his lecture hall!), Dr. Bain put together the data.