The Curriculum You Choose Matters
Textbooks and their supporting materials are the primary tools instructors use to shape a course and the primary resource for students. However, many textbooks fail to support strong connections across topics and are not based on current knowledge about how students actually come to learn foundational mathematical ideas. This seriously undermines students’ access to potentially rich mathematical experiences and hampers instructors’ efforts to shift their instruction to support stronger conceptual learning. Put simply, curriculum matters for student learning! Curriculum influences…
- the internal coherence among course topics.
- the potential quality of students’ mathematical experiences.
- the balance of opportunities for students to engage in repeated reasoning related to ideas that are critical to their success in other math courses and in related fields.
- students’ beliefs and attitudes about mathematics and their confidence in persevering in the face of challenges.
Curriculum also has the potential to impact a teacher’s Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) and their skills as an instructor. A strong conceptual curriculum…
- creates occasions for teachers to advance their personal mathematical understandings.
- creates opportunities for students to think about mathematical ideas independently from the instructor.
- creates occasions in which the teacher must consider alternative expressions of students’ reasoning.
- improves instructor’s enjoyment of teaching.
