Ann L. Brown, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who did pioneering work in cognitive psychology, died June 4 at the age of 56.
Ms. Brown, who was born in Portsmouth, England, did not learn to read until age 13, but she went on to graduate with honors from the University of London.
In the United States during the 1970s, Ms. Brown, working with Annemarie Palincsar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, devised a successful method for improving children’s reading comprehension that is known as reciprocal teaching.
More recently, Ms. Brown and her husband, psychologist Joseph C. Campione, had parlayed some of the same techniques into a program called Fostering Communities of Learners. Through that program, they sought to transform elementary school classrooms into research communities in which children were encouraged to follow their own questions and to share their findings. The researchers were in the midst of compiling results from early evaluations of the program when Ms. Brown developed an undisclosed fatal illness.
Ms. Brown was a past president of the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education.
--Debra Viadero
Edward C. Pomeroy, a leader in teacher education and the first executive director of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, died June 16 after a short illness. He was 82.
After becoming the group’s executive director in 1970, Mr. Pomeroy led the Washington-based organization while it broke away from the National Education Association. The AACTE now represents 750 colleges and institutions nationwide.
During his career, Mr. Pomeroy helped establish the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the International Council on Education for Teaching. He also served as an advisory commissioner of the Education Commission of the States.
--Michelle Galley
