Breathing Classroom Life into the Eight NCTM Teaching Practices
By Steve Leinwand
November 2, 2016
My San Antonio Annual Conference session is titled Breathing Classroom Life into the Eight NCTM Teaching Practices. I’m passionate about this topic because I strongly believe that one of our greatest challenges as a profession is the consistent conversion of the words for which we advocate into tangible
pedagogical actions that make a substantive impact on student learning.
As the Chair of the NCTM Principles to Actions writing team, it amazes me that two and a half years after the release of this document these eight teaching practices remain essentially unchallenged. I have seen no suggestions for an additional, missing practice or two and I have heard no commentary that any
one of the eight is the wrong size or overlaps another. This is a tribute to an iterative development process – you can find all 21 previous drafts on my computer – and a comprehensive review process. It is also testament to widespread agreement on what we know about good teaching and about what a range
of research findings confirms. That is, we know that we can summarize high quality instruction as teaching that reflects goals, tasks, representations, discourse, questioning, fluency, struggle and evidence. When coaching and teaching training address these practices, when teacher
evaluation focuses on these practices, and when our professional interactions incorporate discussion of these practices we build a shared culture that strives for a describable excellence.
But like all words and lists and menus, our job, at all levels and in all roles, is to put flesh on these words and help the entire profession envision what they mean in practice. Since the dawn of the Common Core era, I have worked to put flesh and understanding on the first four Standards for
Mathematical Practice. This work is now supported and enhanced by blending and linking these critical first four Common Core practices for students with the eight NCTM Teaching Practices for teachers. Just like it takes time and attention to gradually implement effectively the former,
it will take time and attention to implement effectively the latter. But we know with great certainty that our students are the winners when, as a profession, we adopt practices that establish mathematics goals to focus learning, implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving, use
and connect mathematical representations, facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse, pose purposeful questions, build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding, support productive struggle in learning mathematics, and elicit and use evidence of student thinking. So let's commit to breathing
classroom life into each of these teaching practices by helping our colleagues envision each one.
Be sure not to miss Steve's session at the 2017 NCTM Annual Meeting in San Antonio:
Breathing Classroom Life into the Eight NCTM Teaching Practices
We can summarize the eight Principles to Actions Mathematics Teaching Practices as goals, tasks, representations, discourse, questioning, fluency, struggle and evidence. This fast-paced, example-laden presentation will provide examples by which we’ll model and discuss each of these critical research-affirmed practices.