(originally published in 1994)

At the University of California at Berkeley, the Distinguished Teaching Award was instituted in 1959 to recognize and reward excellence in teaching. Since the inception of the award, over 150 faculty in forty-eight departments have been honored. All faculty still on campus who received the award were asked to participate in the creation of this book, and an enthusiastic 83 agreed to do so. As part of the nomination process for the Distinguished Teaching Award, faculty are asked to write a statement about their teaching, and this book contains excerpts from those statements. In some cases, faculty decided to write new statements expressly for this book.

Recipients of the award are nominated by their departments, and the process is arduous enough that a department must be truly convinced of the excellence of the nominee. The required dossier must provide a thorough examination of the nominee's teaching: letters of support from colleagues here and at other institutions, from current and former students, and from the department chair; a summary of student evaluations for all courses taught in the last eight semesters; raw data from student evaluations in at least two courses; course materials, including syllabuses, exams, and samples of student work; and finally, the statement of teaching philosophy.

The recipients of the award are chosen by the Committee on Teaching of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate, composed of five faculty members and two students. In a typical year, fifteen to twenty faculty members are nominated, and four or five receive the award, which is presented each spring at a public ceremony. The members of the Committee on Teaching over the years have always agreed that making the selection is perhaps one of the most difficult—and rewarding—tasks on campus.

The statements in this book are "essays" in the sense Montaigne intended: attempts—in this case, attempts by teachers recognized for their outstanding teaching to describe the values, beliefs, and practices that have contributed to their success as teachers. Some take a more philosophical approach to discussing the pleasures and challenges of teaching, while others offer a pragmatic assessment of the daily activities that constitute effective teaching. These essays are not necessarily summations of the wisdom accrued during long careers (although some are indeed just that), but rather snapshots of academic careers near the beginning, in the middle, or near the end. The faculty represented here also give us a snapshot of the last forty years of university teaching. One contributor began teaching at Berkeley in 1931 and two began in 1988. Together, they capture the spirit, dedication, and range of teaching at a research university.

The faculty—historians, scientists, literary critics, artists, engineers, writers, legal scholars—who have contributed to this book come from all academic ranks (lecturer, supervisor, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, and professor emeritus) and thirty-six different departments. Among the recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award are Pulitzer Prize winners, members of the National Academy of Science and National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipients of the National Book Award, Presidential Young Investigators, and the Chancellor of the Berkeley campus, among others—awards and recognition that attest to their contributions to their fields.

The eighty-three statements are grouped into five categories: humanities, physical sciences and engineering, biological and environmental sciences, professional education, and social sciences. Within each category, statements are organized alphabetically by department, and within each department alphabetically by author. The index in the back lists all the contributors, for ready reference. In addition, a very brief biography of each contributor is included.

The careful reader will notice some conflicting views—for example, one contributor proclaims, "Teaching is a wonder and a mystery" while another firmly states, "There is no great secret to good teaching"—but such instances are rare in this book. In fact, although these essays were prepared independently over a number of years, there are striking similarities about what good teachers say about teaching. On at least ten propositions, the contributors are in near or total agreement:

1. The teacher's main task is to guide students through the learning process, not to dispense information:

"Teaching is not about imparting information. Teaching is about giving students room to learn how to think for themselves." (Law)

". . . teaching is less a matter of professing than it is finding means for students to discover their own virtuousness." (Architecture)

". . . I am on hand not to argue positions or provide entertainment but to facilitate an encounter between texts and minds." (English)

2. The goal of teaching is to help students read, speak, write, and think critically—and to expect students to do these things:

". . . I see it as one of my prime duties as a scholar-teacher to stretch [students'] abilities, open their eyes, and require of them as much as I think they can produce." (Classics)

"The amount of information imparted in the classroom is less important than the dialogue we begin with our students, that collective intellectual enterprise in which we seek to foster critical thinking and experimentation with new ideas, in which we engage our students in that elusive pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead." (History)

3. Learning is a "messy" process, and the search for truth and knowledge is open-ended:

"The very impossibility of ever arriving at an account of a tradition or of ways of looking for once and for all, the contingency of it all and yet the persistence of our attempts to do so is at the center of all my teaching." (Art History)

"In dealing with any really hard problem, most scholars will probably admit they do not know of a single right solution . . . Students should not be given the impression that they have arrived nowhere simply because no single right solution has been found." (Law)

"Just as in real life, my problems may have several answers. This irritates everyone; students want precise, tidy problems. But my job is to teach them how to take messy, vague questions and transform them into a precise model which can then be attacked." (Mathematics)

4. Good teachers love their subject matter:

"Here is my advice. Don't teach if you don't like the subject matter. If you love it, don't hide it. Wear your zeal on your sleeve, shout it, show it, sing it. The rest will take care of itself." (Economics)

"A short philosophy of teaching might be, 'Love your subject and convey that love; all else is secondary.'" (Physics)

". . . we have a unique power to make our classes come alive with the excitement of discovery and the love of creative learning that drive our own lives." (Chemistry)

5. Good research and good teaching go hand in hand. Students' engagement with the subject is enhanced by knowing about the teacher's own research, and the interaction with students often provides new insights into the research:

"My experience as a professor and as Chancellor contradicts the popular misconception that teaching and research conflict with one another. Exciting classes stimulate scholarship, and active research enriches teaching." (Mechanical Engineering)

"Presenting recent research in classes adds a sense that we are all still learning, not just reviewing knowledge, and student response has been enthusiastic." (Integrative Biology)

"The integration of research and teaching has been for me a two-way process. Not only have I involved students in my research and related my research to my teaching; I have also participated in and learned much from student research projects. Most of my work related to student research has been at the undergraduate level. I think undergraduate students are capable of doing original research and have encouraged them to participate in the advancement of knowledge." (Ethnic Studies)

6. The best teachers genuinely respect students and their intellectual capabilities:

"I insist upon taking students seriously—seriously enough to argue with them, seriously enough to snap their heads off if they cannot show me logical bases for their assertions, and seriously enough to retreat in open confusion when they disagree with me and show me I have in fact misunderstood the materials I have presented." (English)

"Few things can compete with the teaching of eager, talented, well-prepared and demanding students that crave, in fact, demand, precision and excellence . . . How lucky I really am." (Mechanical Engineering)

7. Good teachers are rarely satisfied with their teaching. They constantly evaluate and modify what they do:

"There is no room for complacency in teaching, and that's one of the things I love about it." (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management)

"At any given moment I may feel that I am not doing a good job in my courses, and feel my preparations are inadequate, or that I am giving students short shrift. I realize I have thought this about my teaching during every term of every year since I started to teach." (English)

8. Good teachers usually had good teachers, and they see themselves as passing on their own teachers' gifts to a new generation of students:

"As I watched my teacher think out loud, inviting us to think with him about the material, I suddenly got the point. Instead of trying to fit some new material into my scholarly bag of knowledge, or attempting to come up with a response, I allowed my teacher's passion, his sense of wonder, to inhabit me. That kind of experience is what I try to offer students in my teaching." (Economics)

"For many of us, it was the special things that happened with teachers that shaped our paths to success. My aim is to offer the best that I was served." (Psychology)

9. Good teachers treasure the small moments of discovery in the classroom and the more enduring effect they have on students' lives:

"But the true rewards, the point of it all, are those moments of insight when a student suddenly brightens with radiant excitement and says, 'Oh, now I get it!' and does 'get' something to which access had been blocked. A small miracle." (Political Science)

"Teachers live for moments . . . when realization glows like a cartoon lightbulb over a student's head."
(Public Policy)

"I have watched students learn things I never knew while I was supposedly teaching them, and do things that may well be beyond my capabilities while I was supposedly directing their research. And I have watched them continue that performance for years after leaving Berkeley. There is an enormous satisfaction in that." (Materials Science and Mineral Engineering)

10. Good teachers do not see teaching as separate from other activities; rather, they see their lives as remarkably integrated:

"The activity of teaching seems to me particularly blessed, for it allows me to spend my time with what I love and gives a oneness to my life that students value—in the literal sense, appreciate. One might say that my business is my hobby—or that I have no hobbies. I am always working—or never working. Whatever the formulation, the result is a wholeness to one's intellectual, even one's physical life." (Music)

"Very few teachers can match their professional work and their classwork as near-perfectly as this. One of the great advantages of Berkeley, I believe, is that so many faculty members are able to lead intellectual lives as unified as mine." (Journalism)

Among the number of suggestions we received while preparing this book, several stood out. The introduction, one faculty member said, should take the high ground, make a case for excellence in teaching. Another suggested that we convey what it really means to be a teacher. Still another suggested we refer to the great thinkers throughout time and their attitudes on teaching. However, the statements compiled here do all of that and more.

Finally, one contributor to this book probably spoke for many or all of them in a note attached to his statement:

"Our teaching has been 'distinguished' only because of the high quality of the students with whom we have had the opportunity to interact."

Another contributor caught the same note and offered a sentence from Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778):

"A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars."