Moving Ahead: Opportunities and Priorities - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

Moving Ahead: Opportunities and Priorities

By NCTM President Diane J. Briars
NCTM Summing Up, May 6, 2014

As I begin my term as NCTM President, I’m struck by both the challenges currently facing the mathematics education community and the opportunities for systemic improvement in mathematics teaching and learning that addressing these challenges affords. One of our major challenges is, of course, addressing the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM)—facilitating large-scale, effective implementation; preparing for more rigorous, aligned assessments in spring 2015; and supporting the standards themselves.

Although preparing teachers and administrators across the country to implement CCSSM is an enormous challenge, it is also an unprecedented opportunity to widely disseminate features of high-quality mathematics programs that will effectively implement CCSSM and other college- and career-readiness standards. Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All, NCTM’s new signature publication released at the 2014 Annual Meeting, does just that. It presents six Guiding Principles for School Mathematics that are essential for high-quality mathematics programs, along with eight research-informed Mathematics Teaching Practices that help students develop the conceptual understanding, problem solving, reasoning, and procedural fluency called for by CCSSM and other high-quality standards. Principles to Actions builds on the Council’s previous standards publications and concisely summarizes the features of effective mathematics instruction from research and experience. At the same time, it provides specific descriptions and examples of what these features look like in practice, the conditions needed to support their implementation in all classrooms, and recommended actions for teachers, school-based and district leaders, and policymakers to put these practices in place. This new publication will drive the Council’s efforts to ensure equitable mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students.

I encourage all of you first to read Principles to Actions and then to act to improve mathematics teaching and learning in your setting. In this new publication, NCTM raises key questions for all stakeholders to consider:

For teachers:

To what extent are your instructional practices consistent with the Mathematical Teaching Practices?

Do your students have regular opportunities to engage in tasks that involve reasoning and problem solving?

How do you support your students when they struggle with a task?

To what extent do your assessments provide useful and timely information about students’ mathematical knowledge?

How are you and your students using the results to increase learning?

What supports do you need to fully implement the Mathematical Teaching Practices?

For school-based leaders:

To what extent are all your teachers implementing the Mathematical Teaching Practices?

What supports will they need to do so?

Do your school’s policies and practices promote or hinder teachers’ implementation of these practices?

For district or state leaders or policymakers:

To what extent are teachers implementing the Mathematical Teaching Practices?

Are school-based leaders prepared to support teachers in this implementation?

What supports do teachers and leaders need to do so?

Are your systems’ practices and policies—for example, curriculum, assessments, and professional learning experiences—consistent with the Guiding Principles?

Principles to Actions is a powerful tool for advocating for effective teaching practices and the supports needed to implement them, as well as a detailed guide for individual and collective study and reflection. I strongly encourage you to use it in both ways. In short, read it, share it, act on it. Additional information about Principles to Actions includes an Executive Summary, webcasts of the 2014 Annual Meeting Principles to Actions sessions, and a Reflection Guide.

The Council will continue its active support of, and advocacy for, the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. As stated in its August 2013 Position Statement, NCTM believes that CCSSM offers “a foundation for the development of more rigorous, focused, and coherent mathematics curricula, instruction, and assessments that promote conceptual understanding and reasoning as well as skill fluency.” In particular, the focus and coherence of the standards in grades K–8—addressing fewer different topics in each grade, with careful attention to the progression of topics across grades—ensure the instructional time needed to implement the research-informed Mathematics Teaching Practices described in Principles to Actions. These are not new practices but are ones that the Council has long supported, including engaging students in solving tasks that promote problem solving and reasoning, followed by productive discussions about their work. Also, the continuing emphasis on conceptual understanding, problem solving, and reasoning in the high school standards, along with explicit attention to mathematical modeling will better prepare students for post-secondary education and/or careers. NCTM’s reasoning and sense making initiative called for such emphases in high school mathematics as well. We will also continue to support the implementation of assessments that measure students’ proficiency in all aspects of CCSSM expectations, as well as research related to CCSSM and its implementation that will inform future refinements.

At NCTM we are undertaking two initiatives to enhance our service to members and, more broadly, to further our mission of providing professional learning in support of equitable mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students.

First, we are engaging in strategic planning related to all of our professional learning opportunities. Our goal is to examine the wide range of options available, including face-to-face meetings, conferences, and online courses, to develop a suite of offerings that will provide effective professional learning experiences for all members of the mathematics education community. The first step in this process has been to ask the question,

What is the optimal time of year to hold our flagship professional learning event, the Annual Meeting and Exposition, to maximize the number of teachers who would be able to attend and enable attendees to best use information they learn at the conference?

Our answer took into account input from a variety of stakeholders over the past 18 months: Hold the Annual Meeting in the fall beginning in 2020, with regional conferences and other professional learning opportunities then scheduled accordingly. This strategic planning effort will continue over the next few months.

Second, to increase service to members and the community, the Council will launch a new website this fall. The new website will feature enhanced content and improved site navigation, along with other new features, and the site will be fully accessible on mobile devices.

Supporting high-quality early childhood education and strengthening the pathways from high school to college mathematics are two additional priorities for my work over the next two years. These topics are particularly important and timely, owing to recent research and developments in these areas.

The foundation for the early childhood priority is the NCTM Mathematics in Early Childhood Learning Position Statement, approved by the Board in October 2013, which calls for young children in every setting to have the opportunity to experience mathematics through effective, research-based curricula and teaching practices. Every child needs access to high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten programs to develop understanding of early mathematics concepts.

A number of recent reports, including Mathematics in 2025 (2013) and What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Career Ready? (2013), released by the National Research Council and the National Center on Education and Economy, respectively, highlight the increasing importance of statistics, modeling, and discrete mathematics in today’s society, and the need to update our current curriculum pathways from high school to post-secondary education to prepare students mathematically for their futures. Consequently, this is the ideal time for NCTM to collaborate with other members of the Conference Board for the Mathematical Sciences, including the Mathematics Association of America, the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges, as well as mathematics education organizations such as the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics, and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics to examine new alternatives.

I’ll be writing more about each of these priority areas in future columns.

I am extremely honored to have the opportunity to serve as NCTM President and am very much looking forward to working with and for all of you over the next two years. NCTM is your organization. Please get involved and help NCTM become an even stronger support for you as a mathematics teacher, leader, teacher educator, or researcher.