How to create a mathematics curriculum truly worth learning.

The purpose of ISDDE is to assist the profession to raise the quality of design of educational processes and materials, and a main goal is to increase our impact on educational practice. Implicit in these aspirations is a belief that better designed educational resources and processes will have more impact on educational practice and hence lead to widespread improvement in educational outcomes. In this talk, I will reflect on four decades of work aiming to promote higher thinking goals in school mathematics, especially the capacity to solve real world and intra-mathematical problems that are not routine, and to show mathematics as a creative endeavour that can make an important contribution to people’s lives. I will illustrate with many examples of changes in the design of curriculum materials, experiences with the design of local and state assessment, and observations on the impact of the changing nature of teaching, from the point of view of a teacher educator, curriculum writer and a mathematics education researcher. Two general conclusions are that the central concerns of today are continuous with those of decades ago but they present differently, and that now we have valuable hard-won knowledge that we do not see, because in fact we ‘see’ with it. The goal of teaching higher order thinking in mathematics to everyone remains elusive but it is still the best direction.