CHAPTER 34: Building a Professional Memory: Articulating Knowledge About Teaching Mathematics

In many ways, teaching is a profession without a memory. Unlike architecture and engineering, few detailed records are kept of what teachers do and how they do it. Architects and engineers leave behind drawings, specifications, models, contracts, and buildings. Such artifacts provide a record of the problems faced, solutions tried, and products produced. Teachers, however, leave few descriptions that record their experiences introducing a new topic or their struggles with particularly challenging curriculum. Many records that are left do little to capture the complexity of teachers’ pedagogy.

An integral part of the education of doctors, lawyers, and business people is the study of “cases” that record their profession’s history. At present, there is no comparable body of literature to which beginning and practising teachers can turn to discover the wisdom of their predecessors. The development of a case literature of mathematics teaching should be a professional priority.