On March 28, 2024, Deborah Loewenberg Ball delivered the Distinguished Educator Keynote Address at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Teacher Educators. Her talk was titled “What is the Matter (with)(of) the Methods Course?” and examined the critical role that the methods course is positioned to play in teacher preparation programs. She used a case to explore what that looks like and requires.

ATE was founded in 1920 and is the only national, individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education for both school- and campus-based teacher educators. The theme for their 2024 meeting was “A Professional Educator’s Kuleana: Preparing for the Future Through Accountability, Diversity, Advocacy, and Celebration.”

View slides from Loewenberg Ball’s talk here.

The March 2024 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society features a profile of Deborah Loewenberg Ball’s life and career. Written by Hyman Bass, Loewenberg Ball’s long-time colleague and collaborator, the profile is one in a series celebrating the work and careers of several accomplished women in mathematics. It features details about Loewenberg Ball’s family, education, elementary teaching career, scholarly pursuits, and key contributions, including her development of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT), her seminal insights about teaching and teacher education (e.g., high-leverage practices and discretionary spaces), and her design and leadership of the Elementary Mathematics Laboratory (EML).

In his piece, Bass summarizes Loewenberg Ball’s orientation toward the transformative power of teaching:

Teaching (and learning) for Deborah is a calling, a life practice, her way to interact with the world, to nurture and empower people of all ages, stations, and identities, and to disrupt institutions and practices that oppress them. She assumes that all children bring substantial knowledge and skills, and so considers it a core task of the teacher to elicit that and use it as a foundation for what new material the children are ready to learn. 

As a mathematician himself, Bass also reflects on the ways others in his field have responded to Loewenberg Ball’s work on the teaching and learning of elementary mathematics:

Something mathematicians most appreciate about Deborah is her respect for the integrity of the disciplinary knowledge in whatever domain she teaches, mathematics in particular. Although she has followed a different path in and around mathematics, she reflects a mathematical sensibility and depth of mathematical understanding of all that she teaches, as well as an artistry in pedagogical design that elicits critical thinking and a deep engagement with learning. And she does this with children historically and pervasively marginalized and oppressed in our society.

Read the profile here.

In a February 16, 2024, opinion piece published in Education Week, Deborah Loewenberg Ball reflects on the ongoing crisis narrative about learning loss—and public education in general—that is prominent in today’s education discourse. Responding to the many articles and conversations about declining test scores and pandemic-related deficits in the wake of the release of the 2022 NAEP results, she writes: 

It should worry us that, as a nation, the United States seems to be invested in tearing down the enormous possibility and promise of public education. In retelling that our children’s opportunities have been irredeemably destroyed, we impair the possibility of collective inspiration for how to move forward. Instead of seeing and building on children’s cultural and intellectual capacities, we are stuck in a swamp of behindness that creates an urgency of “catching up.” This swamp spawns policy initiatives that seek to control and punish rather than contribute to and develop.

Loewenberg Ball goes on to assert, “Good teaching is fundamental to a national project of public education that would prioritize students’ flourishing. But instead of recognizing and making possible the work of teaching, we disdain the profession by withholding respect, necessary resources, and appropriate compensation.” She closes her piece by offering up three strategies that could begin to address the problems facing education in the U.S. today—problems that are “undeniably complex, inextricably interconnected, and rooted in shameful histories.”

Read the Ed Week piece here.

As part of their Conversations on Intellectual Humility podcast series, JStor paired psychologist Shauna Bowes with Deborah Loewenberg Ball for a conversation about intellectual humility and public schooling. The wide-ranging conversation examines: 

• How elementary mathematics classrooms can serve as sites for practicing intellectual humility (including a discussion of an example from Loewenberg Ball’s own teaching)

• How teachers can model intellectual humility

• The role of listening in intellectual humility

• How intellectual humility might be defined and/or constrained by gender and cultural identities

• The role that intellectual humility could play in our current divided society

As Loewenberg Ball points out, listening is key to this work:

If you really listen to children, you see that they’re developing a ton of ideas and explanations for all kinds of things, but often nobody’s listening to them or even asking what they think. And the experience they get of listening in school is mostly like, um, I would call it like a, a cultural, a cultural view of what listening is supposed to look like. It’s pretty middle-class and white . . . In fact, in school, I would say typically most children learn the time to listen is when the teacher’s speaking, not when your classmates are speaking, and it takes some real work for them to learn, like, in this classroom what’s going to matter is hearing what your classmates think because they have ideas. That’s where you’re going to learn a lot.

She goes on to discuss the crucial role that teachers play in either disrupting or reinforcing dominant patterns of discourse as part of the work on intellectual humility:

So, for the education part of this, part of what teachers can do is create spaces where there are different kinds of norms and people are actually playing roles and like kids are learning about each other and about other identities in school. And if we’re inattentive to that, those same identities and same kinds of positions and roles get reinforced. But schooling is also a place where you can disrupt those. And so that’s another big responsibility, is the collective space that schooling represents that is different than individual people.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

Check out the entire series here.

On January 4, 2024, Education Week released the 2024 Rick Hess Straight Up Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Deborah Loewenberg Ball was again included on the list of 200 university-based scholars in the U.S. who are doing the most to influence educational policy and practice.

The list is intended to reflect both a scholar's larger body of work and their impact on the public discourse last year. The purpose of the list is to recognize scholarship that impacts the real world and encourage universities to invest in this meaningful work.

More information about the rankings and the full list of included scholars are available here.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball has been elected to the Council of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This 19-member body comprises fellows of the Academy who, according to the Academy’s bylaws, advise the Board primarily on the academic work of the Academy, including studies and projects, publications, archives, and other programmatic matters. The Council:

• Provides oversight of the scholarly and policy research activities of the Academy and its publications;

• Presents to the Board any proposed policies and strategies related to the academic studies, commissions, publications, and other programmatic initiatives of the Academy;

• Reviews and recommends to the Board for their approval all academic studies and commissions undertaken in the name of the Academy;

• Provides advice regarding the Academy’s publications, including Dædalus and such other reports and bulletins; and

• Approves topics for issues of Dædalus.

Loewenberg Ball was elected a fellow of the Academy in 2014 and serves on its Education Program Committee. She is currently a member of the Academy’s Higher Education Forum and was earlier a member of the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, taking part in the public launch in 2017 of its publication, The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America in Washington, D.C.

In a May 23, 2023, New York Times letter to the editor, Deborah Loewenberg Ball responds to the claims about Covid-related learning losses advanced in the May 11 opinion piece, “Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School.” She argues, “Being ‘behind’ is the product of the unquestioning acceptance of ‘grade level’ as a standard for students’ progress. This leads to agitated moves to help students ‘catch up’ and assumptions that, because they didn’t learn to add fractions last year, they never will.” Instead, Loewenberg Ball urges a focus on supporting teachers in their crucial work: “To address the needs of our young people and ensure their academic progress and social development, we must support the work that teachers are doing and provide necessary resources and opportunities for professional learning.”

Read the letter here.

In the May 8, 2023, Proof Points column in The Hechinger Report, Deborah Loewenberg Ball reflects on the nascent “science of math” movement. According to the column, the science of math movement, led by special education researchers, “revives an old fight between advocates of teacher-led instruction of step-by-step procedures against those who favor student discovery and a conceptual understanding of math. It also raises new questions about what makes for good evidence in math education and pits well-designed quantitative studies of achievement gains against qualitative studies of people’s attitudes about math and why more women and people of color don’t enter STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.”

Loewenberg Ball, seeing the parallels between this new movement and the math wars she observed in her field for decades, cautioned against using the science of math approach to overhaul mathematics teaching: “She said that in order to come up with the most effective approach for teaching math, we need to agree on the goals of math instruction. Do we want kids to be able to compute accurately? Yes, but not everyone agrees that this should be the main goal of mathematics education. ‘The public needs to understand that the goals of math education are contested,’ she said. Merely invoking the word ‘science’ doesn’t resolve that debate, Ball said.”

Read the column here.