Linking the NCTM Standards to School-to-Work Reform

V. Hernández-Gantes, L. A. Nieri

Study findings suggested that linking the NCTM Standards to emerging career-oriented curriculum is not a simple process requiring pedagogical changes only. It is a far-reaching enterprise challenging educational leaders to engage in serious comprehensive restructuring involving curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Organizational and management changes are also necessary to support more active collaborative efforts and shift from traditional ways of thinking about educational systems. Consistent with research on organizational restructuring, the following findings highlight a framework for linking the NCTM Standards to curriculum featuring mathematics in realistic contexts.

Managing Change

• Assessing institutional and student performance is essential in order to make informed decisions about improvements and their relation to shifting students' learning from traditional tracking systems.

• Leadership styles that promote more democratic participation in decisionmaking appear to be more successful in facilitating shared understanding of needs, purpose, and working toward changes to improve the quality of learning for all students.

• Another basic requirement for successful implementation at early stages is setting a clear definition of achievement expectations for students and roles of instructors, administrators, and other internal and external supports.

Moving Toward Authentic Instructional Practices

• Instructors must commit to implementing changes in pedagogy that match high expectations for student achievement. For this purpose, integration formats and collaboration arrangements have to satisfy local needs. Models and guidelines outlined in related literature provide an excellent frame of reference for successful integration.

• Career contexts provide great opportunities for the development of nonroutine problems featuring significant mathematical concepts. Through these problem scenarios, core SCANS and NCTM Standards skills (e.g., problem solving, communication of ideas, and knowledge applications) can be effectively emphasized.

• To guide decisions on the development of authentic, integrated, NCTM Standards-based instruction, a shared understanding of criteria for high authenticity is required to match high expectations for achievement and career goals for all students. The NCTM Standards vision along with relevant ideas supporting emerging vocationalism should be taken as a flexible guide, not as a step-by-step framework.

Building Institutional and Community Support

• Creating an institutional climate is critical for establishing the organizational capacity that will sustain integrated work. The goal should be to foster a sense of community where avenues for democratic input in decisionmaking are understood and used.

• Early promotion of interdisciplinary collaboration in decisionmaking through working groups, councils, and other forms of participatory management are suggested to foster shared understandings, empower participants, and facilitate work toward common goals.

• Instructors should be encouraged to take responsibility for designing their own professional development plans grounded in individual and program needs to acquire specific preparation for implementation of suggested improvements in curriculum, teaching, and assessment.

• Channels for continuous dialogue and discussion of important institutional issues affecting all stakeholders are also helpful in creating a sense of professional community. It is important to shift from bureaucratic, compartmentalized systems precluding multiple manifestations of collaborations and open exchanges of opinions.

Fostering Interdisciplinary Teacher Collaboration

• Interdisciplinary collaboration helps break down the walls between instructors. Fostering teamwork and exchanges between mathematics and vocational instructors is helpful for dispelling stereotypes and building an appreciation for each other's contributions to the educational enterprise.

• Bringing mathematics instructors closer to vocational work provides likely and valuable exposure to external supports (e.g., business and industry) that may be taken for granted by vocational instructors. This exposure can contribute to a greater understanding of the complexity of supports needed for establishing career curricula and to an opportunity to identify significant mathematics applications.

• Awareness of issues, government regulations, and requirements of mathematics/ vocational reforms perspectives is a desirable condition for establishing a holistic understanding of common undertakings and to shift from turf protection that is prominent in traditional settings.

Survey information suggested that the extent and nature of efforts linking the NCTM Standards and school-to-work reform are weak and slowly evolving. This process appears to be very complex, requiring deep changes and radical shifts from traditional practices supporting education systems. However, drawing from the experience of case study sites, we were able to identify a promising framework for development of effective integrated efforts featuring mathematics in occupational contexts. This framework is supported by related research on the restructuring of educational organizations and can be useful for practitioners, administrators, and policymakers.