New Mission: Teaching Teachers to Teach

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It's a cold and gloomy Friday morning near the end of the semester, but the students in one Smith College mathematics class sit spellbound.

They're deep into a calculus equation meant to figure out the speed with which a vat of grape juice ferments into wine.

"Here the problems are complex, they're messy, but they're interesting," said teacher Jim Callahan, part of a group devising new ways to teach calculus.

Smith and four other colleges in western Massachusetts have begun a three-year, $300,000 campaign that tackles something higher education is often accused of overlooking: teaching teachers to teach.

The others are the University of …