Implementing The “Professional Standards For Teaching Mathematics”: What's All This Talk about “Discourse”?

Abstract

Despite its title, the Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (NCTM 1991) should not be read as a set of prescriptions about how to teach. The document will not deliver on such expectations, not because it fails but because no document can prescribe good teaching. No set of standards can be expected to stipulate what teachers should do. The potential of the Professional Teaching Standards rests instead in its use as a set of tools with which to construct productive conversations about teaching. It should be viewed as a resource with which to build teaching rather than as a measuring stick by which to judge teaching. With new ideas about things to pay attention to in our classrooms, to ask ourselves, to wonder about, we would have increased power to analyze and improve our teaching — alone and as members of a wider community of educators. In this article I explore possible outcomes of using the Professional Teaching Standards in such ways.