Q&A with Deborah Loewenberg Ball, William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, director of TeachingWorks, president of AERA, and NPR-described "rock star" in the field of teacher education.
You've noted that society has "perpetuated a myth that being a good teacher is about loving kids and working incredibly hard day and night." What are we missing?
Teaching is incredibly complex work. Teachers spend every day making hundreds of decisions—whom to call on, what example to use, how to elicit a student's thinking, when to close a productive discussion, how to interpret written work, which assessment tool to use. These decisions have to be made in the moment, while also monitoring the entire class for understanding, behavior, and engagement. This requires good judgment and a capacity to relate to a wide range of young people; understand culture, context, and community; and manage a classroom. Moreover, with every decision, a teacher either intervenes on patterns of inequity that persist in schools, or by not intervening, reproduces these patterns that marginalize some students and privilege others. Of course, because so much of this happens inside the teaching of content, teachers also need detailed knowledge of the domain being taught and a repertoire of practices for making it learnable. It's simply not enough to be a hard worker who loves children—just as it's not enough for a midwife just to love babies or a pilot just to love airplanes.
TeachingWorks identifies a set of high-leverage instructional practices for beginning and early career teachers. What makes them "high-leverage"?
High-leverage practices are the basic fundamentals of teaching. Used across all subject areas, grade levels, and contexts, these practices are critical to helping students learn important content and are central to supporting students' social and emotional development. They are "high-leverage" because they are crucial to student learning—when they are done sensitively and skillfully, they advance students' development, but when they are not done with care or skill, students are harmed. A core example is leading a group discussion. This practice, which builds collective knowledge and capability in relation to specific instructional goals and allows students to practice listening, speaking, and interpreting, is so essential to teaching that it's impossible to imagine a classroom without it. Students learn from their peers and have opportunities to learn to disagree and have their contributions valued. However, a discussion led by someone without the necessary skills can lead to students feeling embarrassed, being marginalized, or mislearning critical ideas.
Why doesn't on-the-job training work for teachers?
The stakes are simply too high to learn this complex profession through hard knocks and trial and error. The fact that many teachers do eventually figure out how to teach this way does not mean that it is a good or reliable approach to producing skillful teaching at scale. In fact, each misstep, each lost day, each incorrect lesson, can have long-term devastating effects on young people.
Teaching, you assert, can be a "lever for social change and for racial and class justice." Can you elaborate?
We need to change the discourse about teaching and public education. For too long, our schools and the teachers in them have been disparaged and blamed for a host of ills facing our country. However, the truth is that education is fundamentally about our futures as a nation and a world. Teachers educate the next generation who can fight for human rights, build institutions, make laws, create knowledge and art, and imagine and make possible a just world. When recruiting tomorrow's teachers, we must make it clear that their chosen profession has revolutionary potential—that teachers can challenge power and privilege and consistently open the histories of our past so that we can achieve our shared ideals of justice and freedom. When teachers disrupt the narrative of who and what is valued, they can intervene on patterns of marginalization, changing our society by helping the young people whose lives they touch thrive.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
