The quality of public school teachers is, improbably, in the news these days, as activists push to overturn decades-old teacher tenure and retention laws in California and New York. Journalist Elizabeth Green has spent years looking at what makes a great teacher — and whether the teachers we remember most fondly were born great or simply learned key skills. Her new book, Building a Better Teacher (W.W. Norton & Co., $27.95) is out this week. USA TODAY's Greg Toppo spoke recently with Green, who co-founded the Web-based non-profit education news site Chalkbeat. Their conversation has been edited for clarity:

Q: You've been reporting on education for eight years now. How did you get interested in this topic?

A: I was reading all of this research that was saying that the teacher was the most important factor, more than any other factor, in school. But there was this mystery about it. And when I finally figured out what does make a great teacher, it was really different than what I had assumed. We assume that teaching is a natural-born skill, but it's really something that even the most gifted of us have to learn.

Q: Most of the proposed solutions to our teacher-quality crisis revolve around either making teachers more "accountable" through high-stakes tests, or allowing them to be more "autonomous," giving them more freedom to teach as they'd like. You say that both of those approaches are problematic. Why?

A: What I realized is that neither of these descriptions can act as prescriptions for change, because both treat teaching as a natural-born talent. What we really need to do is give teachers time to study the craft of teaching, give them teachers to help them learn it and materials that guide them. With good, solid preparation, it makes sense to also evaluate teachers to make sure their students are learning and to give them some creative freedom to figure out their own style. But without it, accountability and autonomy both add up to the same bad formula we've always used — leaving teachers completely on their own to figure out something no one is born knowing how to do.

Q: One of the key figures in the book is University of Michigan Education School Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball,who revolutionizes your thinking about teaching by asking you to do some math in your head. Tell me about meeting her, and what you learned.

A: When I met Deborah Ball, she gave me a math problem: 49 times 5. I said, 'I've got this: 245.' Deborah said, 'Now tell me why a child would think that 49 times 5 equals 405.' I had no idea. But she explained that the student had simply switched a step in the traditional multiplication algorithm, correctly carrying the 4 in 9 x 5 = 45, but then incorrectly adding it to 4 before multiplying by 5, instead of adding it to 4 x 5 (8 x 5 = 40). Teachers need to know this kind of minute detail in order to teach. They need to be able to reverse-engineer students' mistakes. Yet it takes a special kind of knowledge to do that reverse-engineering. Even professional mathematicians can't do it without training. Just knowing a subject is not enough to teach it.

Q: You also write about the work of Doug Lemov,a former principal who found himself studying videotapes of teachers and intricately coding each motion, as a sports coach might do for players after a big game. Talk about Lemov's "taxonomy" of good teaching and why it's important.

A: What Doug Lemov found is that what we think is the natural charisma of the "it" teacher who can command attention just by walking into a room is actually technique. And the techniques go against all our instincts about how to interact with other people. When you say "Shh," it's the natural adult response to chattering kids. But it actually draws unnecessary attention to misbehavior — and it doesn't tell the kids what to do. Are you asking the kids not to talk, or to talk more quietly? The better response is to tell them exactly what they should be doing instead.

Q: In Japan, you say, ideas about teaching "spread like a virus" and result not only in great instruction but superior teaching materials. Talk about what happens there, and how it's different from what happens here.

A: In the USA, we talk a lot about "best practices." We want to take the best way and mandate that everyone else do that, too. In Japan, by contrast, the assumption is that everyone has to learn how to teach, and even the very best teachers have room to improve. To do that, the Japanese hold "public lessons" by great teachers that can attract as many as 1,000 people to watch. But the point isn't just to watch a model for everyone else to replicate. It's also to experiment. They even have a teaching version of the television show Iron Chef, where two teachers will teach the same topic on one stage, but in two different ways. Each lesson becomes a hypothesis to see what's working well. And then the best ideas get enshrined in the country's national "course of study" and in textbooks, both of which are written by the best teachers.

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