Algebra for Secondary Teachers: Engaging Students to Develop Symbolic Meaning

As with all fields of study, most professions are governed by a set of standards. In health professions, each profession such as the American Medical Association or the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists create standards for acceptable practice in their profession. It should come as no surprise that mathematics teachers do the same. In fact, those who teach mathematics at all levels are members of organizations that create standards for the teaching and learning of mathematics. At the college and univeristy level, organizations such as the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS) take on this task. At the PK-12 level, this task of developing standards falls both on professional organizations, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and each state since the oversight of education in the US is left to the individual States.

Since the individual states have the ability to develop their own standards, you can imagine how different these standards could look. With such potentially different standards from state-to-state, eventually, it began to cause challenges as families (and their students) needed to move to different states. A child could end up moving from a state where they were well on track with that state’s curriculum only to find themselves woefully behind the expectations in another state. For mathematics, it wasn’t until 1989 that NCTM created the first set of guidelines (or Standards) to help all states deal with this problem.

In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics published its Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 1989) followed in 1991 by the Professional Teaching Standards and the Assessment Standards in 1995. While these standards were research-based, the text of the standards did not adequately show the connections to the research that some critics would like and so in 2000, a new and more comprehensive version was developed called the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (PSSM) (NCTM, 2000).

While the PSSM developed by NCTM gave guidance to states for what content and pedagogical techniques should be used at various grade levels, it still is technically the pervue of the individual states to decide the content and methods for teaching various subject areas. NCTM did not have any power to enforce the teaching of mathematics in accordance with the PSSM. Therefore, there needed to be some agreement among states in order to deal with consistency across the nation with respect to what mathematics is taught, at what grade level it is to be taught, and how it is to be taught.

In order to give some method of enforcement to the vision of the NCTM’s PSSM, The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers developed the Common Core State Standards (2010) CCSS Website

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thecorestandards.org

. This project developed standards for both Mathematics and English. The given website gives current state acceptance of these standards. The CCSS specific for Mathematics can be found in pdf form at Common Core State Standards for Mathematics

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corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Math_Standards1.pdf/

. It is up to the states to decide if they wish to participate in the use of the CCSS. For example, Michigan was an early adopter of the CCSS, while Texas chose not to participate. As of this writing, 41 of the 50 states have chosen to adopt the CCSS as their official state standards. A map of the current status can be found at Current Status of CCSS

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www.thecorestandards.org/standards-in-your-state/

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