Ken Bain Biography

Teaching Effectively:  What the Best Teachers Do

Ken Bain  (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1976) is a Professor of History and the Vice Provost for Instruction and Director of the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.  He has been the founding director of four major teaching and learning centers:  the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, and the Research Academy for University Learning (formerly the Teaching and Learning Resource Center) at Montclair State University. 

At the University of Texas--Pan American he also served as founding director of the History Teaching Center, a pioneering program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities to promote greater collaboration between history teachers on the secondary level and university and college research historians.  From 1984 to 1986, he served as director of the National History Teaching Center, which had a similar mission on the national level.

He has long taken an interest in teaching and learning issues and in recent years has contributed to the scholarship in that area. Internationally recognized for his insights into teaching and learning and for a fifteen-year study of what the best educators do, he has been invited to present  workshops or lectures at over two hundred universities and events in recent years--in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. His learning research has concentrated on a wide range of issues, including deep and sustained learning and the creation of natural critical learning environments.

His recently-published book, What the Best College Teachers Do  (Harvard University Press, 2004) won the 2004 Virginia and Warren Stone Prize for an outstanding book on education and society, and has been one of the top selling books on higher education. It has been translated into six languages.