Giving Compass' Take:

• Deborah Loewenberg Ball maps out the quick, frequent choices that teachers make in their classroom and how they impact student development and learning through the lens of racism and sexism. 

• How can teachers evaluate their own decisions to learn how to better serve students? Can philanthropy provide opportunities for teachers to develop their decisionmaking skills? 

• Learn how to help teachers who are struggling to get by.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball, an expert in elementary school math instruction and professor of education at the University of Michigan, still teaches in the classroom, in part for research purposes.

In a one-minute 28-second period that was filmed in her classroom, Loewenberg Ball counted 20 separate micro moments when she had to decide how to react. She calls them “discretionary spaces,” and in a lecture at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in April 2018, Loewenberg Ball put a scientist’s microscope on discretionary space #19 to give us all a lesson in how racism and sexism unintentionally creep into the classroom.

Moment #19 begins with one of her students standing where a teacher usually does, at the front of the classroom with a dry-erase marker at the board. Aniyah, round-faced and earnest, perhaps diffident, starts to explain how she solved a problem about fractions. “I put one-seventh -.”

Her classmate Toni interrupts, “Did she say one-seventh?” Toni’s voice climbs upwards as if to emphasize her disbelief.

What would you do in that moment?

Three options teachers commonly choose in the classroom are these, according to Loewenberg Ball:

  1. “Toni, when you’re ready to participate appropriately by not playing with your hair and laughing and have a question to ask, I will come back to you.”
  2. “You need to be a better listener, Toni. Aniyah already explained why she picked one-seventh. Who else has a real question for Aniyah?”
  3. Or the ubiquitous, “What do others think?”

Read the full article about teacher micro-moment decisions by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.