Deborah Loewenberg Ball
American mathematician and educational researcher
Deborah Loewenberg Ball is an educational researcher noted for her work in mathematics instruction and the mathematical preparation of teachers. From 2017 to 2018 she served as president of the American Educational Research Association. She served as dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2016, and she currently works as William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of education. Ball directs TeachingWorks, a major project at the University of Michigan to redesign the way that teachers are prepared for practice, and to build materials and tools that will serve the field of teacher education broadly. In a sometimes divisive field,
Ball has a reputation of being respected by both mathematicians and educators. She is also an extremely well-respected mentor to junior faculty members and graduate students.
Education
As an undergraduate at Michigan State University, Ball majored in French and then taught elementary school for seventeen years in East Lansing, Michigan. Ball only started serious study of mathematics when she saw her students struggling in math. In 1988 she received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University from the department of teacher education. Her thesis was titled Knowledge and reasoning in Mathematical Pedagogy: Examining What Prospective Teachers Bring to teacher education.
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This entry incorporates text from “Deborah Loewenberg Ball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.