by Glenda Lappan, NCTM President 1998-2000
NCTM News Bulletin, April 2000
What Now?
I am pleased that my term as president of this outstanding organization ends as our important Principles and Standards for School Mathematics is published. I am looking forward to working with this print document and the E-Standards over the next few years. It gives us an invaluable opportunity to reinvigorate our efforts to make a difference for all children in the United States and Canada. Principles and Standards will help by supporting us in becoming more professional in the standards we hold for ourselves. After all, as we set higher standards for our students, we must set higher standards for ourselves.
Principles and Standards is full of ideas. They are not political statements. Principles and Standards, along with its predecessors, is intended to move us decisively toward higher achievement for all students. It has been developed in a scrupulously open process. This updated Standards document is a tool for organizing much of what we know, theoretically and practically, about learning, intellectual development, and the development of mathematical ideas, as well as analyzing the role of mathematical knowledge and skill in the future lives of students.
These Standards are visionary. They are a statement of where we want to be. None of us will agree with every word in Principles and Standards, but we don't have to. Reasonable people can differ on the details, especially on details of implementation. The real question is how we can build on these ideas to establish a high-quality mathematics education program for each of our students.
The document and its vision hold something for all of us. If you are a teacher, Principles and Standards offers you, for the grade band in which you teach, an illustrated conversation about the important mathematical concepts, procedures, and ways of thinking that students must acquire. It also offers you a picture of how these concepts, procedures, and ways of thinking develop from prekindergarten through grade 12. This curricular vision of how ideas grow and develop over time is invaluable if we are to make the mathematical journey of our students through school seamless, challenging, and connected.
If you are a professional who educates and supports teachers, Principles and Standardsoffers you professional development material around which to organize teachers in a serious study of mathematical content, teaching, assessing, and student learning. The E-Standards help you provide a safe place for teachers to experiment with new technologies and their role in learning. The search engine allows you to look at related occurrences of particular topics. The companion Illuminations Web site, which is in its infancy but growing, offers examples that are rich in complexity and capable of helping us recognize what teaching for understanding really involves. By April 2001, we will have the first of additional, more grade-specific publications to help you develop mathematics programs to put these Standards into practice.
If you are a principal, Principles and Standards offers you a way to make your school's efforts to improve mathematics teaching and learning more focused and coherent. Ongoing professional development for teachers over their entire career is an established part of school culture, but it is seldom driven by a long-term vision for improving teaching and learning. Professional development needs to be purposeful and connected to the curriculum that teachers are responsible for teaching. Principles and Standards can help you work with your teachers over time to create a better way to use the precious time and resources you have to improve students' performance in mathematics.
If you are a superintendent or school board member, Principles and Standards can help you to understand the big-picture vision of a high-quality mathematics program for prekindergarten through grade 12. The many examples given in Principles and Standardshelp show the connection among the content and processes described in the document. For example, whereas the mathematical context of an example may be geometry, students may, in pursuit of a solution to the problems posed, be using other strands of content, such as algebra, or may be using such processes as reasoning, connecting, and communicating.Principles and Standards also details a set of principles on equity, curriculum, learning, teaching, assessment, and technology that can be used to improve your schools' programs.
If you are a parent, Principles and Standards gives you information with which you can advocate for high-quality mathematics programs for all students. This is not a document that views mathematics as a sorting mechanism. Out of approximately four million children who entered first grade in the United States in 1978, only 500 graduated with a Ph.D. in mathematics 20 years later. Clearly the curriculum cannot be aimed solely at producing mathematicians, although it must be challenging in order to continue to nurture them. Our programs must meet the general population's growing need for quantitative literacy and other skills. Principles and Standards can help you understand what this means.
And for all of us, Principles and Standards can be what it is intended to be--a rallying point for inspiration, ideas, and guidance in our ongoing attempts to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics for future generations of our children. Our hope is that Principles and Standards stimulates many conversations and suggests directions for work that will give students rich mathematical experiences for the decades to come.
For more information, see the Web at www.nctm.org/standards or illuminations.nctm.org.