Ken Bain (1942–2025)

More than a decade ago, I encountered Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do as a university administrator, and it quickly became one of the most practically useful books I’d read on pedagogy. I found it immediately translatable into faculty development workshops and instructional design. I read it, distilled it, and passed it on to my colleagues. It shaped the way we talked about good teaching.

Fifteen years later, I discovered What the Best College Students Do. But this book show more isn’t a sequel in structure or tone. It does something different.

Rather than offering a field guide for students, Bain presents a series of narratives and reflections that describe the mindset of successful learners. It's a rich book, but not one that yields easy implementation.

As an educator, I found the core ideas sound, but their delivery demands patience. It’s less of a manual than the first volume. Still useful, but not immediately actionable.

So, to save you time for this review, you can read my spoilers below. I've provided key points which reflect Bain's core themes, and then tips for students to become good deep learners.

Key Points

The best students:

• Pursue understanding rather than coverage
  They aim to grasp underlying concepts, structures, and relationships. Information matters only insofar as it contributes to understanding something larger.


• Operate from curiosity rather than compliance
  Their engagement is driven by interest and meaning, not merely by grades, credentials, or approval.


• Treat intelligence as developmental
  Ability is not a fixed trait but something shaped through effort, revision, and sustained engagement. Difficulty is expected, not diagnostic.


• Integrate knowledge across boundaries
  They connect ideas across courses and disciplines, seeing learning as cumulative and relational rather than siloed.


• Use failure as information
  Mistakes are not indictments but data. They analyze missteps to refine their thinking and strategies.


• Frame learning around questions
  They approach coursework as inquiry—seeking problems to explore rather than tasks to complete.


• Monitor and adapt their own learning
  They think explicitly about how they learn, adjusting approaches when strategies prove ineffective.


• Engage actively rather than passively
  They test ideas, retrieve knowledge, discuss concepts, and apply learning rather than relying on rereading or review alone.


• Anchor learning in personal meaning
  They learn most deeply when they can connect material to questions, values, or concerns that matter to them.


• Define success as growth, not performance
  Achievement emerges as a byproduct of sustained engagement and understanding, not as the primary objective.

Lessons for Students

To get the most from a course:

• Identify the animating question of each course
  Ask what problem the discipline is trying to solve or what questions still animate it. Let that inquiry guide your attention.


• Read to understand arguments, not just absorb content
  Focus on claims, reasoning, and evidence. Ask what the author is trying to persuade you to believe—and why.


• Practice recalling ideas rather than rereading them
  Test what you know without notes. Use the struggle to reveal gaps and misconceptions.


• Distribute learning over time
  Study in shorter, repeated sessions. Revisit ideas after forgetting has begun.


• Use confusion diagnostically
  Treat moments of not understanding as signals pointing to where learning is needed most.


• Externalize your thinking
  Talk through ideas, write informally, or teach concepts aloud. Clarity often follows articulation.


• Reflect systematically on feedback and outcomes
  After assignments, examine what worked, what didn’t, and how you would revise your approach.


• Separate evaluation from identity
  Grades provide information about performance, not measures of intelligence or worth.


• Keep track of questions, not just answers
  Maintain a record of unresolved problems, emerging connections, and evolving understanding.


• Aim for intellectual change, not efficiency
  Periodically ask whether a course is altering how you think. That, not speed or polish, is the measure of deep learning.

Bottom Line

Bain isn’t a how-to manual. It’s a reflection on what deep, personal, transformative learning looks like. For faculty and advisors, What the Best College Students Do is well worth reading. But for students hoping for direct instruction, or for instructors seeking easily exportable classroom techniques, this book will frustrate you.

In short: worthwhile if you’re invested in pedagogy. Skip it as a student reading assignment. show less

I suspect that most instructors who will read this book already possess much of the wisdom contained in its pages—and that’s fine. Who doesn’t benefit from positive affirmation of good habits and effective practice? But this volume doesn’t pretend to be a “how-to” manual or the academic equivalent of “Teaching for Dummies.” Instead of providing concrete advice or recipes for good teaching, Bain distills the wisdom and methodology of the most highly effective college show more instructors into a clear and focused analysis of approaches to teaching that yield the best results.

To no one’s surprise, it turns out that an instructor’s beliefs about teaching, learning, and students’ potential have a profound impact on that instructor’s effectiveness. Bain first establishes what he means by outstanding teaching (“helping students learn in ways that made a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how those students think, act, and feel”). It’s important to note the three dimensions of learning alluded to here—thought, behavior, and affect. All aspects are essential for meaningful teaching and learning.

Bain then discusses, in lucid and enlightening detail, how the best instructors prepare, what they expect of their students, how they teach, how they interact with students, and how they assess their students and themselves. Both beginning teachers and veterans will benefit from his analysis. And those readers who are not teachers will come away with an appreciation for the complexity of the profession, which is part art, part craft, and part science.

Highly recommended. show less

I've been a college professor for 7 years. I spent 5 years in a Ph.D. program learning about motivation and leadership and teams - the topics I teach and do research on. But very little of that time was spent on how to teach. I've learned a lot along the way through talking to colleagues and through trial and error. I also try to read books on the science of teaching as well, and I found [What the Best College Teachers Do] to be one of the best books that I've read on this topic.

Based on show more his research on excellent teachers, Ken Bain discusses both the overarching philosophy of excellent teachers as well as a number of specific practices that these teachers use. He emphasizes that knowledge is constructed when students have to struggle with challenges that their existing ways of thinking do not help them address. He encourages professors to structure their courses around big questions that will both guide class activities and motivate students to learn. He challenges the idea that professors transmit knowledge, but suggests instead that professors create an environment in which students can learn effectively.

I found this book useful in both clarifying some of my existing ideas about structuring college courses and providing me with some new ideas as well. This book might also be interesting for parents of prospective college students because finding these excellent teachers can help inspire a passion for a topic or a passion for learning itself. show less

I can't say I was exactly expecting this book to change my life, but I'm amazed at how underwhelming it is. The author states that the contents to the book are universal, but I'd like to see how some of the exceptional professors profiled in the book would handle working at an open-enrollment community college. I don't disagree with anything in the book, but sometimes I can't even get my students to show up to class.