On Monday, May 7, 2018, The Hechinger Report featured a column on Deborah Ball’s AERA presidential address. In “20 judgments a teacher makes in 1 minute and 28 seconds,” Jill Barshay focuses on a small piece of video from an elementary classroom—just 88 seconds long—that Ball used in her address to demonstrate the many “discretionary spaces” teachers encounter every day and the ways that implicit biases and entrenched racism can affect teachers’ judgement and decisions in these spaces. Barshay summarizes the exchange between two students, Aniyah and Toni, in this way:
The actual classroom played out like a fairy tale. Loewenberg Ball publicly acknowledged the importance of Toni’s question. Aniyah explained her faulty reasoning a second time and it prompted a group discussion that clarified the interval confusion for most students. Toni was one of two students who went back up to the board to model how to locate a fraction on the number line and explain it. On the students’ exit tickets at the end of class, 25 out of 30 were able to answer correctly and explain their reasoning.
The column is available here. A video of Ball’s full AERA presidential address is available here