Teacher College Education

What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. The short answer is--it's not what teachers do, it's what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out--but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn. In stories both humorous and touching, Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students' discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. "What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.

Today George Peabody College is a part of Vanderbilt University, as it has been since its merger in 1979. Its prior history was rich and complex. In this book, Paul Conkin, author of the award-winning history of Vanderbilt, Gone with the Ivy, tells the story of Peabody's many lives, of its successes and failures, and of its many colorful leaders and professors. It all began as a small frontier academy in 1785. The institution that would become Peabody experienced its first reinvention two decades later as it became Cumberland College, and then, in 1826, the University of Nashville. The University maintained an elite undergraduate college until 1850, and, despite the success of its medical school and a military institute, it failed in three subsequent efforts to restart its undergraduate program. In 1875 the University offered its campus and degree-granting authority to the first normal school in the state of Tennessee, a school funded by the Peabody Education Fund. The Peabody Normal College was the best in the South, and, as such, exerted an enormous influence on education in the region. A new era began in 1909. The trustees of the Peabody Fund, at its liquidation, provided an eventual $1.5 million to establish a graduate-level George Peabody College for Teachers. It opened for classes in 1914, on its present campus, where it quickly became the premier teachers' college in the South. As was the case with many private, independent institutions, Peabody faced intermittent financial struggles, which finally ended with its union with Vanderbilt. Today Peabody is, by almost any criteria, one of the five or six strongest colleges of education in the United States.