"Fundamentally, they were learners..."

On page 20 of What the Best College Teachers Do, in summing up the qualites of outstanding teachers, Ken Bain writes, "Fundamentally, they were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students' development..." 

My quest is to understand learning. We never arrive. To me that's part of the joy of learning. There's always something more, something new, something deeper. And one of the things we constantly need to learn about is our students. In many ways they keep changing; in many ways they stay the same, but without an understanding of "where they're at", we will never be able to foster learning in them.

As I read this book, I keep seeing the connections to the book some of us read last semester, The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull. A neurobiologist and director of a university teaching center, Zull sits in a wonderful spot to put together the things we have learned about learning from the "outside" with the chemistry and physiology of the brain on the "inside". Two things have absolutely stuck with me from that book. One is that to learn anything, it must be connected, physically, to something we already know. The other is that we really don't learn much of anything (not as "deep learning') if we don't want to, so the ability to motivate students and make learning important and meaningful for them is absolutely necessary. We can't do either of these things well if we don't know anything about our students.