NPR – Sarah Hulett
“Deborah Ball realized years ago she had a problem. It was around 1980. She’d been working as an elementary school teacher in East Lansing, Michigan for about five years. But she felt like she just wasn’t getting any better at it. “I felt like I was really thoughtful,” she says. “I tried to make stuff make sense to them. I used examples and tried to connect them to their lives, but they would forget things as fast as I taught them. On Friday they could do it, on Monday they would have forgotten.” Ball is now the dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and kind of a rock star in the field of teacher education. She’s spent the past three and a half decades thinking about what good teaching looks like. And every summer, she puts her own practice on display, teaching math to fifth-graders in front of an audience of educators. It’s part of a program called Teaching Works she started, in part, to help teachers figure out how to get students to not just give right answers, but really understand math.”(more)