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State of the Art: Mathematics - July 1993

image omitted Lasting change takes broad support.

It costs state legislators and bureaucrats relatively little to fashion a new instructional policy that calls for novel sorts of classroom work. These officials can easily ignore the pedagogical past, for they do not work in classrooms, and they bear little direct responsibility for what is done in localities--even if it is done partly at their insistence. However, teachers and students cannot ignore the pedagogical past, because it is their past. If instructional changes are to be made, they must make them. And changing one's teaching is not like changing one's socks. Teachers construct their practices gradually, out of their experience as students, their professional education, and their previous encounters with policies designed to change their practice. Teaching is less a set of garments that can be changed at will than a way of knowing, of seeing, and of being. 
                                       (Cohen and Ball 1990, p. 163)
Broad support from the educational community is needed to advance the reform effort and transform it to state of the art. Teachers willing to risk making the recommended shifts in classroom practices are at the forefront of the reform in teaching and learning mathematics. Yet systematic change cannot occur unless the members of the learning team--students, parents, school administrators, and policymakers--are also key participants in the process. Past reform efforts have died out because the whole learning team was not involved. The rationale for changing mathematics teaching and learning and plans for implementing the changes should be disseminated to all of these groups. The learning team needs to be involved in the construction of the new school mathematics environment.

Although research on the current reform movement in mathematics is ongoing and as yet incomplete, several components of the reform's success have emerged. It is evident that teachers cannot accomplish it alone. A coordinated school-based reform effort guided by world class standards in mathematics is necessary to transform the mathematics curriculum, teaching methods, and student assessment. The reform's success will also depend on the availability of greater opportunities for all students to learn mathematics and to use new technology. In addition, since the reform movement asks much of teachers, extensive and continuous staff development is needed. This includes courses in content to develop new and deeper knowledge of mathematics, in skills for facilitating learning, in new assessment methods, in implementing cooperative learning, and in working with diverse student populations.

In the end, the appropriate organizational structures must be in place to support the professional cooperation, planning, and school governance that in turn promote risk taking and reform and lead to a new state of the art in mathematics.
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[Curricular and pedagogical change in mathematics cannot occur without accompanying change in student assessment.] [Table of Contents] [References]

This page was last updated January 4, 2002 (jca)