Is it possible for someone you’ve never met to be a mentor?

I don’t know how else to describe Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, a book that transformed not just my teaching, but my entire life.

Ken Bain passed away on Oct. 10. I first learned this news on LinkedIn from Jim Lang, who did know and was directly mentored by Ken Bain and, like the several dozen folks who offered comments on his passing—and also me—whose life and work were profoundly affected by Ken Bain’s work.

(I also recommend checking out this episode of Bonni Stachowiak’s Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, which remembers Ken Bain and provides links to his multiple appearances on the show.)

I read an advance copy of What The Best College Teachers Do sometime in early 2004 in a period where I was starting to question the folklore of teaching I had absorbed as a student and graduate assistant, and it immediately changed how I thought about my own work, kicking off a process of consideration and experimentation around teaching writing that continues to this day.

What the Best College Teachers Do reflects more than a decade of study and is entirely based in observations of teaching, teaching materials, student responses and reflections, interviews and other sources, filtered through various lenses (history, literary analysis, sociology, ethnography, investigative journalism) to draw both big conclusions about not just what teachers do, but how they think, how they relate to students, how they view their work and how they evolve their approaches.

The method is relentlessly qualitative rather than quantitative, and it can be straightforwardly adapted to one’s own work.

At least that’s how I used the book. Looking through some of the text for the first time in years, I can see significant strands of What the Best College Teachers Do DNA in my writing about the writer’s practice. The lens of “doing” as the central feature of any work has been part of my personal framework for so long that I almost lost its origin, but there it is.

One of my very first posts at Inside Higher Ed, back before I even had my own section and was merely guesting at Oronte Churm’s joint, was on What the Best College Teachers Do.

The book is more than 20 years old, but its framing questions are evergreen and even more relevant in this AI age. The book asks and answers the following questions:

1. What do the best teachers know and understand?
2. How do they prepare to teach?
3. What do they expect of their students?
4. What do they do when they teach?
5. How do they treat students?
6. How do they check their progress and evaluate their efforts?

The book helpfully encapsulates the study’s findings under these categories, and as bullet points of good teaching practice they are spot-on. But I am also here to testify that they are not a substitute for the full experience of reading What the Best College Teachers Do, because the act of reading the specific illustrations and examples that gave rise to these findings allows for the individual to reflect on their own practices relative to others.

The first thing I did after reading and absorbing What the Best College Teachers Do was change my attendance policy to no longer punish students based on a maximum number of absences. I’d engaged in this practice because it had been handed down as conventional wisdom: If you don’t police student attendance, they won’t show up. Bain’s best teachers challenged this conventional wisdom.

The positive effects were immediate. I stepped up my game in terms of making sure class was viewed by students as productive and necessary. My mood improved, as I no longer stewed over students who were pushing their luck in terms of absences, daring me to dock their overall semester grade.

Attendance went up! I asked students about this, and they said that when a class says you “get four absences” they were treating that as a kind of permission (or even encouragement) to go ahead and miss four classes. Student agency and self-responsibility increased. If they missed a class, they knew what they had to do, and it didn’t involve me.

The experiments continued, leading ultimately to the writer’s practice and my embrace of alternative assessment, developments that made me a much more effective instructor and now, improbably, someone invited to colleges and universities to share his expertise on these subjects.

It would not have happened without the work and mentorship of Ken Bain, mentorship I experienced entirely through reading his book.

I worry that mentorship is going to be further eroded by AI, particularly if entry-level jobs with their apprenticeship tasks are now completed through automation, rather than by working with other, more experienced humans. The enthusiasm for letting large language models compress texts into summaries rather than reading the full work of another unique intelligence is also a threat.

My conviction that our way forward through the challenge of AI is rooted in deeply examining the experiences of learning and fostering those experiences for students only grows stronger by the day. What the Best College Teachers Do is experiences all the way down, a book of observations conveyed in such a way that allows us to make use of them, literally, in what we do.

A great man. A great mentor. Ken Bain’s work will live on through the many pedagogues he’s inspired.