#GMDWrites

NCTM Principles and Standards From an International Perspective: How Does the Curriculum Bring Educators Together on a Common Discourse?

Written by Yeliz Günal Aggül

Curriculum has a very central role in teachers’ lives. Mostly, curriculum is identified with, characterized, and concretized through resources, called “curricular guidelines” in the literature (Pepin & Gueudet, 2014). Their titles might change from country to country. To give examples from two countries where I conduct my research, I can mention NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000) or Common Core State Standards for School Mathematics in the USA and the Teaching Program in Turkey. Regardless of the country in which it is designed and implemented, these resources provide a framework and a national agenda for which learning outcomes will be taught and when. Beyond this central role, curriculum has another, mostly taken for granted, function that has to do with teachers’ solving their problems of practice and improving their teaching. A successfully designed curriculum provides a common discourse that functions as an anchor and orientation that supports teachers in shaping their teaching, finding a path to pursue their professional development, collaborating with their colleagues, and partnering with educational researchers in this process. Ball and Cohen (1999) clearly explain the importance of a common discourse among educators in advancing education:

• In the education of professionals, discourse serves additional purposes, which are related to building and sustaining a community of practitioners who collectively seek human and social improvement. The discourse of teacher education should also help to build collegiality within the profession and create a set of relations rooted in shared intentions and challenges. Such discourse should focus on deliberation about and development of standards for practice and on the improvement of teaching and learning (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 11).

1. Although traditional cultural codes of teaching in the US, as mentioned in Stigler and Hiebert (1999), do not cohere with the teaching philosophy that NCTM promotes, the Standards document produces a counter discourse and takes a clear, determined reformist position.
2. NCTM, as a civil organization, provides an effective compilation of research findings on mathematics teaching and learning in this document in an accessible language for those who are not researchers. Being an independent organization of mathematics educators, it functions independently from state bureaucracy, which protects it from political shifts in the country. It also displays a common attitude among mathematics educators who take science and the universal humanitarian goals of education as their points of departure.
3. NCTM has a clear position regarding the pedagogical principles it follows, of which the first one is “equity”, described as “excellence in mathematics education requires equity—high expectations and strong support for all students” (p. 12).
4. It provides a clear outline of how objectives are related from kindergarten to 12th grade, helping teachers have a birds-eye view of the mathematics taught, what their students learn in lower and later grades, and the connections among mathematical ideas. In this way, teachers can make sense of the curriculum, and as a result, they become active agents in implementing and improving this common discourse in practice.

This is not an exhaustive list of the important features of NCTM’s Principles and Standards. My goal here is to provide an international perspective that highlights the significance of these aspects, which are considered ordinary in the daily lives of educators in the United States, and above all, to emphasize how NCTM’s Principles and Standards provide a robust framework for not only mathematics educators in the USA but also as a civil organization that has a universal value that helps to develop a common discourse while improving mathematics classrooms all across the world. Since they did this analysis, our community has appreciated the NCTM’s guide and worked to get a deeper understanding of the vision provided in it. We held long discussions on whether this resource responded to community teachers’ own questions and concerns that they have as practitioners in Turkey.

Designing a curriculum that provides a coherent and robust discourse alone cannot serve as a magical solution to the challenges in education. It is crucial to have effective methods of conveying the intentions of curriculum designers in order to achieve the desired goals. Expecting teachers to simply rely on programs by ignoring their agency should not be the way to disseminate the discourse that curriculum designers wish to share. While a robust, scientifically-based curriculum serves as a starting point for change, implementing systemic changes should also involve teacher learning systems that encourage teachers to actively participate in knowledge building and cultural transformation processes. All stakeholders need to collaborate in developing creative ways of designing participatory professional learning environments, enabling a shared discourse to evolve as teachers engage with curriculum resources and as research meets practice. Only this approach empowers teachers to exercise agency, adapt the curriculum flexibly to meet the specific needs of their students, and take control of their own continuous professional learning.

References

Ball, D. L. & Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In G. Sykes and L. Darling-Hammond (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp. 3-32). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

NCTM (2000). Principles and standards for school mathematics. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Reston.

Pepin, B. & Gueudet, G. (2014). Curriculum resources and textbooks in mathematics education. In S. Lerman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of mathematics education (pp. 132-135). Springer.

Stigler, J. W., & Hiebert, J. (1999). The teaching gap: Best ideas from the world’s teachers for improving education in the classroom. New York: The Free Press.

Van de Walle, J. A., Karp, K. S., & Bay-Williams, J. M. (2020). Elementary and middle school mathematics: Teaching developmentally. Pearson.

GMD and the Blurring of Boundaries
I can’t believe it’s been around five years since I wrote my first GMD post. It all started when Nate Goza reached out to me, via Grace Chen, about writing for the newsletter. Back then, my role was to summarize whatever was going in the world of math ed, particularly from the standpoint of those on math ed twitter through hashtags like #MTBoS. It was one of my first opportunities to be part of a larger professional community outside of my immediate circle. It also marked the beginning of understanding myself as something I’ll tentatively call a “teacher-scholar”.

The term teacher-scholar might be a loaded term. I use it cautiously because it can connote a teacher who is necessarily part of the formal academy. This is not how I want to use the term. To me, a teacher-scholar might be someone who teaches while also staying interested in professional growth, understanding the sociopolitical aspects of schooling and/or maybe keeping up with academic research. I like to think that many, if not most, teachers can be said to be teacher-scholars. Before becoming a teacher, I was a member of a different professional community: the law. I never vibed with that community, probably because I found myself on the business side of things. After leaving the law, I found myself in a world that felt more like home. Maybe this was because of the scholarly orientation of the job. By becoming a teacher, I could become someone committed to a life of curiosity and creativity. In law, I could become immersed in critical race theory or feminist legal theory. But at the end of the day, I had to go back to the office and give advice to corporate clients based on the same set of statutes and case law. In the classroom, ideas like culturally responsive-sustaining education were not just interesting in their own right; they became necessary for thinking about my role as a teacher, how I interacted with my students, and how I planned for instruction on a daily basis.

This is where the GMD and larger math edutwitter space come in. I learned about ideas like culturally responsive/relevant/sustaining education in these spaces during my first few years of teaching. The ideas of culturally responsive/relevant/sustaining education come from the writings of incredible people like Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Django Paris, and Samy Alim. But access to these ideas requires an awareness that they exist, and then in many cases it requires digital access to journal articles through a university account (email me for article requests!). The GMD newsletters, webinars, and twitter chats were there for anyone to access. Granted, math edutwitter is an imperfect space and access to the resources it offers is not universal — it is at the end of the day a mostly young-ish crowd, tech savvy, and likely predominantly white, with many “sub-communities” who have thrived in the face of these realities. Nevertheless, the GMD was an incredible place—for me, and hopefully for others—to start to nurture a scholarly approach to teaching that did not require a formal affiliation with the academy.

As it turns out, I ended up pursuing a doctorate in education. 😅. In hindsight, the GMD and math edutwitter bears a not insignificant responsibility for that decision. Being on the inside, so to speak, has allowed me to see in even clearer terms how the academy can be separated from the everyday work of teachers. For structural reasons tied to culture and capitalism, the output and currency of most academic research comes in the form of journal articles. Many of these articles can only be accessed by other academics through subscription access or the purchase of books that are sometimes $100+. Yes, you can and should reach out to authors to ask if they would be willing to send you a PDF copy of their work. But not everyone will, or even can, overcome that interactional friction. Hence, what results is the first and very real wall of separation between the academy and the rest of the world. Elsevier and others, I’m looking at you!

Paywalls are just one aspect of this separation. The language of many journal articles can be obtuse and overly reliant on knowledge of theories and concepts found in other journal articles. To understand X article, you need to read A, B, C theory just to understand what is going on [is academia the original MCU?!]. For better or worse, this might be a symptom of the advice that I received about journal article writing: when submitting an article for publication, make sure it is part of a broader academic conversation. Cite the relevant literature. Keep it under 9,000 words. The result is a potentially wonderful piece of work with terribly dense language that seems to enter an existing conversation mid-stream. The format is often standardized in a way that makes it easier for other academics to read but can be an obstacle for everyone else. Every article seems to conclude with super interesting “more research is required” questions that you may never see or, more likely, may never hear about until three years after those ideas are first introduced at a conference with a $350 registration fee, not excluding hotels, airfare, and food. Oh, and all the articles are only available in English.

The GMD blurred a lot of boundaries. It was a healthy mix of K-12 teachers and university academics, with a leaning toward academics near the end, perhaps as some of us switched over to graduate school. The conversations that folks were having through the newsletter and the webinars were beyond what I was exposed to at my school’s PD sessions. They were deep topics covered at a level of depth that I did not necessarily “grow out of” once I went to graduate school. Ideas like open middle problems, critical data consumption, coded language, and humanizing mathematics have stuck and will continue to stick with me. Even the latest GMD newsletter article–with discussions of concepts like data feminism and black feminist mathematics pedagogies–continues to blow me away. These ideas are being shared in a freely available platform by a team of volunteers. Should people be compensated for their labor? Absolutely. But to the extent that the GMD came together because of folks who were so passionate about their ideas that they wanted to share it in this venue, then what the GMD achieved is absolutely incredible.

🔥🔥🔥

The GMD was a special place to nurture a spirit of teaching-scholarship. It blurred boundaries between the everyday work of teaching and the too often unscalable walls of the ivory tower. I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunities I had to experiment and share ideas. So to anyone reading this, I just wanted to say thanks for everything.
@melvinmperalta