Most high school graduates in the United States have experienced around 1,500 hours of mathematics instruction. This experience creates powerful expectations for mathematics teaching and learning among the general public that does not exist for other professions. Consider physicians. None of us spent our formative years observing a physician at work for 1 hour a day, for 180 days per year, for 13 straight years. So we do not have the same expectations for how a physician does her job as we do for a teacher of mathematics. Consequently, most of us have a tendency to trust the professional expertise of the physician who is treating us. In fact, we expect our physician to be up-to-date with respect to current, research-based, and effective treatment protocols.
And yet, because mathematics teaching and learning is a cultural activity, there is a greater tendency to resist change in the mathematics classroom. Sometimes when educators, schools, or districts attempt to implement research-informed instructional practices or policies, they face resistance from colleagues, administrators, or parents who dispute those changes because they don’t conform to their beliefs and cultural expectations for mathematics teaching and learning. This resistance is natural and to be expected, but it impedes our ability to improve our teaching and our students’ learning.
The result is that we continue to practice detrimental aspects of mathematics instruction that have been around for centuries in too many classrooms, even though the urgency that each and every student reach higher levels of proficiency in mathematics, our knowledge of what constitutes effective teaching and learning, and the students themselves have all dramatically changed. Most of us would not want our physician to treat us the way physicians treated patients decades or centuries ago. The same should be the case with respect to our, and the general public’s, expectations for mathematics teaching and learning. So what can we do?
Matt Larson (NCTM President) “Why is Change So Hard?“