Effective Mathematics Teaching Practice 7: Support Productive Struggle in Learning Mathematics

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Productive struggle is as much a goal of NCTM’s Effective Mathematics Teaching Practices as it is a practice itself. Struggle in mathematics is easy to find, but what makes it productive is that feeling of making sense of things, of seeing relationships between quantities or shapes, and making progress towards a strategy that may yield a viable solution, and, more importantly, a better understanding of the underlying mathematics. Letting students find this place of productive struggle, and to stay there for a while, often takes more patience and restraint than teachers are accustomed to having. This is why the other Effective Teaching Practices are so important—teachers are unlikely to position students for engaging in productive struggle unless they’re focused on the right goals, they’ve chosen the right tasks, they facilitate meaningful discourse, they ask purposeful questions, they encourage a range of representations, and they strategically make use of evidence of student thinking. When the teacher establishes the right conditions for student learning, it becomes far more likely that students will persist rather than give up, take risks without fear, and persevere when the work becomes challenging.

One of the ways NCTM (2014, p. 52) summarizes the practice of support productive struggle in learning mathematics is by describing a set of actions expected of teachers and students that indicate engagement in this teaching practice.