What the Best College Students Do

Ken Bain

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674070387
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Istruzione superiore

The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college—and every other educational enterprise, too.The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book—college graduates who went on to change the world we live in—aimed higher than straight A's. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives.Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a "meta-cognitive" understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn't achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.

1

THE ROOTS OF SUCCESS

Sherry Kafka came from a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks. Her little community in the backwoods of that largely rural state had none of the artistic trappings that would later define her life and make her one of the most celebrated designers and planners in the country. In fact, she later reported, her town didn’t even have a movie theater. Once a week, “a gentleman” would come to town with a tent, set it up in the square, and show a movie “if he didn’t get drunk that week.”

Her family didn’t have much money, and they moved around a lot trying to make ends meet. She went to sixteen schools in twelve years, and midway through her senior year she transferred from a fairly large school in Hot Springs to a tiny hamlet that had only six graduating students. “I think only five of us actually made it,” she later reported. “I even went to schools that don’t exist anymore because they were so small and could barely scrape together enough teachers.” Yet all that moving didn’t daunt her. “It made me forge my own methods of using what the schools offered me,” she concluded. “I figured out very early that all schools are cultures, and my job was to go into that school and understand how that culture works.”

No one in her family had ever gone to college right out of high school, although her father did attend a Baptist seminary later on. They seldom read anything but the Bible, and except for the Holy Word, they had no books in the houses where she grew up—only stories. When she was four and five, her great-grandfather would tell her stories he had heard from his parents, or ones he had just made up along the way. After spinning a yarn that would fascinate the little girl, he would point at her and say, “Now you tell me a story.” And so she would begin. The old man would ask her questions about the characters and animals wandering through her tales, forcing her to invent more details about them. When Sherry was in the eighth grade, a few years after her great-grandfather passed away, she decided she was a “person of the story” and that she wanted to be a writer. To become a writer, she realized that she needed to learn more, and that meant eventually going to college.

Because her family was poor, she knew it wouldn’t be easy, and thus she began to fish around for some means to pay for her higher education. In her senior year of high school, she entered and won a national writing contest that promised to pay all expenses for her first year in college. When she asked her parents where she could go to school on the scholarship, they told her she could go to a university in Texas because they knew a dorm director there who could keep an eye on her if she got sick.

That fall she arrived on campus, full of excitement about her new adventure in this faraway city, and was presented with a list of mandatory courses. Before she left home, however, she had promised herself that every semester, she would take at least one course “just for me,” something she would enjoy. When she looked at the list of requirements, she spotted a happy coincidence, a course that looked interesting but also fulfilled a fine arts requirement.

It was a course in the Drama Department called “Integration of Abilities.” The title itself spoke to a childhood memory. When she was a little girl, her father had told her that the most successful people, “the most interesting” people, the people “who got the most out of life,” were the “people who were the best integrated.” He had told her that she should make a connection between every course she took and find ways that they overlapped. “When I studied,” she concluded, “I should think about what happened in biology and how that applied to English, or music.”

She decided to enroll. It would change her life.

Her class met in a strange theater with stages on four sides and chairs that you could spin around to face any direction. As she sat in one of those high-backed chairs the first day, a man with dark, wavy hair came into the room and sat on the edge of one of the stages. He began speaking about creativity and people. “This is a class in discovering your own creative ability,” he told the students, “and all you will have to help you with your discovery is yourself and getting acquainted with the way you work.”¹

Sherry later reported that she’d never encountered anything quite like this strange man who sat on the edge of the stage in his suit and tie. “We’re going to give you some problems,” he said, “and some of them are pretty crazy, but they all work.” As Sherry twisted a bit in her revolving chair, he continued. “What you bring to this class is yourself and your desire to participate, and what you do in here depends finally upon that.”

Over that first meeting and in the days to come, her professor, Paul Baker, invited Sherry and the other students to participate in a new kind of learning. “To some,” he said, “growth is almost all” just improving your memory. To others, “it lies in learning how gadgets work—how to put motors together, how to attach pipes, mix formulas, solve problems.” The purpose of that type of growth, he said, “is never to develop a new method but to become extremely adept at the old ones.” To a third group, growth means you develop “cults” and “systems” in which you can estimate “how far below your own standards other people have fallen.” You “join, dictate, slap backs, smoke cigars in backrooms, belong to important committees, become a pseudo artist, musician, actor, prophet, preacher, politician. You drop names and surround yourself with position.”

To only a few, Baker concluded, “growth is the discovery of the dynamic power of the mind.” It is discovering yourself, and who you are, and how you can use yourself. That’s all you have. Baker emphasized that in all of human history, no one has ever had your set of body chemistries and life experiences. No one has ever had a brain exactly like yours. You are one of a kind. You can look at problems from an angle no one else can see. But you must find out who you are and how you work if you expect to unleash the powers of your own mind.

As Sherry Kafka sat in that revolving chair, now listening intently, her professor invited her into that highest level of growth. “Everybody is unique,” he kept saying, and you have much to contribute to the world. “Each of you has your own philosophy, your own viewpoint, your own physical tensions and background,” he emphasized. “You come from a certain soil, a certain family with or without religious background. You were born in a certain house to a certain family at a certain time. Nobody else in the world has done so.” You can, Baker argued, create in ways that no one else can.

This is a book about creative people and how they became that way. These creative people went to college and emerged from that experience as dynamic and innovative men and women who changed the world in which they lived. How did their college experiences, particularly their interactions with professors, change their patterns of thinking? Although current and future college students may find this question most compelling, teachers or parents will also find solutions here for fostering creative development and deep learning.

Who We Studied and Why

I begin with the story of Sherry Kafka because her experience in that course with Paul Baker reflects many of the major concepts and approaches we will encounter repeatedly, and because that course transformed the lives of hundreds of people who became scientists, musicians, physicians, carpenters, historians, painters, hairdressers, philanthropists, editors, political leaders, teachers, philosophers, writers, designers, engineers, and a raft of other creative folks. What those “best students” did was take a phenomenal class, often far afield from their major area of study, and use their experiences in that course to change their lives.

They pursued the development of the dynamic power of the mind, and that end—not academic honors or simply surviving college—became their primary goal. In Baker’s course, they learned a new language of creativity that centered on what you do with space, time, motion, sound, and silhouette. Sherry and her classmates came to understand themselves better and out of those insights to appreciate the unique qualities and experience that they could bring to any project. In turn, the more they understood about themselves, the greater confidence they had, and the more they appreciated the special qualities and achievements of everyone else. They became students of other people’s histories—in the sciences, humanities, and arts. Most important, they found a way to motivate themselves to work.

I should say right now that this is not about people who made the highest grades in college. Most books and articles on being the “best student” concentrate only on making the grade. But my fellow interviewer, Marsha Bain, and I were after bigger game. We wanted to know how people did after they left school, and we selected people to follow only if they obviously learned deeply and subsequently became those highly productive individuals who continued to grow and create. We wanted to find interesting people who are aware of the world, difficult to fool, curious, compassionate, critical thinkers, creative, and happy. We sought men and women who enjoyed a challenge, whether in learning a new language or solving a problem, people who recognized when old ways would not work, who were comfortable with the strange and challenging, who had fun finding new solutions, and who were at ease with themselves.

We wanted to know how they got to be that way. How did they find their passion? How did they make the most of their education? How can we learn from them? In some cases, these highly confident, creative problem solvers learned despite college; in others, they flourished through their wonderful experiences there. Some of them have always been successful. Others spent most of their high school years barely scraping by before finally breaking out of the pack in college, or even later.

We looked for people who have distinguished themselves with great discoveries or new ways of thinking, who make good decisions and have the self-confidence to explore, to invent, to question. A physician who established a path-breaking practice, a teacher who made a huge difference in students’ lives, a comedian who changed the way people laugh, a writer who captivated readers, a musician who redefined music, an innovative bricklayer or dress designer—all these are examples of people who adapt easily to new situations and can solve problems they have never encountered before.

Did they make tons of money? In some cases, yes, but that wasn’t part of our criteria. If any of the people we interviewed had accumulated considerable wealth, we were interested in what they did with it, how creative they became. In other cases where the financial reward had accumulated slowly, we wanted to know how they spent their lives, and what they produced.

Did they also make good grades in college? For the most part, yes, but so did lots of other people who didn’t really benefit from their education in the same way. High marks, by themselves, don’t tell us much. Consider for a moment the history of grades. They haven’t always been a part of formal schooling. About two hundred years ago, society began asking educators to tell them how much students had learned. Somebody somewhere—probably at Oxford or Cambridge in the late 1700s—came up with the system of giving the best learners A’s, the next best B’s, and so forth. It was just a system of shorthand that was supposed to describe how well people think. Through most of the 1800s, schools in England and the United States used only two grades. You either got credit for taking a certain course or you didn’t. But by the late 1800s, schools had adopted a range of grades from A to F, from one to ten, or some other scale. In the twentieth century they added pluses and minuses.

What did all those letters and symbols tell you? Quite often, not much. As Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who directs the Hayden Planetarium, put it, “As an adult, no one ever asks you what your grades were. Grades become irrelevant.” And with good reason. It’s pretty difficult to get inside someone’s head and discover what they understand, let alone anticipate what they will be able to do with that understanding. As a result, grades have often been lousy predictors of future success or failure. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, received a C in public speaking.²

A few years ago, two physicists at an American university conducted an experiment that shows how meaningless grades and test scores can become.³ They wanted to know whether an introductory physics class in college changes the way students understand how motion works. To find out, they devised a test called the Force Concept Inventory. That examination measured how students understand motion, but it was not the kind of exam normally used to grade students in physics, and for all sorts of reasons I won’t discuss here, it really can’t be used for that purpose on a regular basis.

They gave that quiz to 600 people entering an introductory physics course. Most of them did poorly on it because they didn’t understand motion. Without going into a lot of details, let’s just say they could never put a satellite in orbit based on how they thought motion worked. But that’s before they took the course. The students then took the class, and some received A’s, others B’s, some C’s, a few D’s, and several flunked.

Several months after the course ended, the students retook the same test. A few demonstrated that they had gained a better understanding of motion. Most students, however, clung to their old ideas. More important, the students’ grades in the course did not predict which ones really understood Newtonian concepts of motion. The A students and the C students were just as likely—or unlikely—to have changed their understanding. Thus, some of those A students got no more out of the course than the students who flunked. The top students were simply better at memorizing formulas, plugging the right number into the equation, and calculating the correct answer on the exam, but that performance reflected nothing about how well they really understood how motion works. That doesn’t mean that low grades produced better results. It just means that grades often tell us little about a student’s learning.

Recently, I had lunch with a prominent chemical engineer who told me about a subject he had actually taken twice, once as an undergraduate and again in graduate school. “To this day,” he said, “I don’t understand that material, but I made A’s in both of those classes. I learned to study in the right way and pass the examinations with flying colors, but I never really learned anything.” He had learned deeply from other courses and had become quite successful in his field. But imagine for a moment that his experience in that one subject had been more typical, that he had gone through school playing the strategic grade game in all of his courses. He could have made high grades without really learning anything.

Maybe you don’t care about chemical engineering, physics, or putting satellites in orbit. That’s not the point. No matter what ambitions you may have, good grades don’t necessarily tell us what you know or what you will be able to do with that understanding. Later in the book, we’ll explore how someone could get an A and still not understand motion, but for now, just bear in mind that good grades don’t necessarily mean you really comprehend anything. In school, we are often asked to memorize lots of stuff that has no influence on our subsequent lives.

Imagine for a moment a different world, a place in which students find deep meaning in everything they learn. In that universe, learning changes who people are and how they view the world. It makes them into better problem solvers, more creative and compassionate individuals, more responsible and self-confident people. Students are able to think about the implications and applications of what they learn. Not afraid to make mistakes and full of questions and ideas, the citizens of this place easily and happily explore new areas with ease while possessing a deep humility about how complex their world can be. Learning remains an adventure. Someone may forget a few facts but still know how to find them when needed.

Such a world does exist for some people. But everyone faces increasing pressures in college and life to learn only for the test or for someone else. Straight A’s in high school or college are great, but—and this is a big qualification—they say little about who you are, what you are likely to do in life, how creative you are likely to be, or about how much you understand. Of course, even if you didn’t get good grades, we still don’t know much about you.

We have seen five types of students in college:

1. Those who receive good grades but become no more productive than their friends who receive C’s and D’s;

2. Those who receive good grades and who become deep learners, adaptive experts, great problem solvers, and highly creative and compassionate individuals;

3. Those who receive mediocre grades but someday achieve phenomenal success because they did learn deeply, despite their transcripts;

4. Those who receive poor marks, give up, and live a life that is largely dependent on others;

5. Those who receive poor grades but tell themselves (without much evidence) that someday they will shine.

Sure, high marks have their rewards. An excellent academic record can serve anyone well in our society. Later in this book, I’ll spend some time helping anyone learn how to achieve an A, but if we had to choose between good grades or deep learning, I’d pick the latter every time.

Fundamentally, we want to promote deep, passionate, joyous, and creative learning. Grades are important, but anyone who concentrates just on making straight A’s will probably not become a deep learner. Anyone who concentrates on deep learning, however, can make high marks. We will show you how that can be done.

We have two major sources for our advice. First, we pored over the research and theoretical literature on good students. Thirty to forty years of research have told us a great deal. We paid attention to some of those studies but not all of them. Some of that literature measures good students by their grade point average, and as we’ve already seen, that doesn’t tell us much. Another group of researchers, however, has looked primarily at students who became deep learners. You will see their studies and ideas reflected here.

Second, we interviewed several dozen people who have become highly successful and creative people, good problem solvers, and compassionate individuals: physicians, lawyers, business and political leaders, computer scientists and artists, musicians, mothers, fathers, neighbors, Nobel Laureates, MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipients, Emmy winners, and a few current college students. We share some of their stories: some funny, some sad, but all inspiring.

Integrating Your Abilities and Finding Your Passion

“This is a class,” Paul Baker kept saying, “that assumes you are interested in the work of the mind.” Sherry hardly noticed the guy sitting next to her—a future pro football player—as they both listened intently. Creativity can come in any area, Baker explained, not just the arts. “It could be a sermon, a scientific formula, or a book, but it could also be something you build, a well-planned street system, a beautiful meal, or a well-run...