From “Improving Mathematics Teaching” by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert
The Cultural Nature of Teaching
We concluded from our first study that teaching is a cultural activity: learned implicitly, hard to see from within the culture, and hard to change. We were struck by the homogeneity of teaching methods observed within each country and by the striking differences in methods we observed across Germany, Japan, and the United States. Even in the United States, a country with great diversity in language, ethnicity, and economic conditions and an education system controlled by local governing boards, the nationwide variation in 8th grade mathematics teaching was much smaller than we had expected.
