Building Thinking Classrooms 2025 Annual Conference

“Students are spending so much of their class time learning in groups that individual tests may be beginning to feel disingenuous” (Liljedahl, 2021 p.253). Join us for an in-depth exploration of team assessment strategies and what they mean for your teaching practice and your students. Gain a new outlook and walk away with strategies you can use in your classroom to make team assessments work for your students.

How can we focus on the verbing of mathematics during the Launch, Body and Closing of a math lesson? Lets look at how we can craft hands-on experiences with the use of linear, set and area models within the building thinking classroom framework. We will chat about how we can center on change and motion while we play with structure and then name it in a Thinking Classroom.

In this session I will both highlight and demonstrate the teaching methodology I call "Histematics" which is essentially the use of history to teach mathematics and the use of mathematics to teach history. This is an attempt to decompartmentalize academic disciplines and increase intrinsic student engagement with mathematics by adding cultural relevancy as well as a more interesting storytelling aspect to math instruction. Black History exemplars and events will be used to teach math topics.

Have you been wondering how to implement BTC with your diverse population? What about students way below grade level? Multilingual students? Those with disabilities? What about shy or reluctant learners? How do you handle grouping students who were in a fight last week? You name it, we’ve seen it. Come to this session to get practical strategies on addressing some of the most common issues that arise when beginning to implement BTC.

We’re a team of 1st-5th grade teachers from a Title 1, high ML school in Sumner, WA, who attended the BTC conference in Arizona last June. Alongside our admin, we set out to bring BTC’s transformative practices back to our school. Over the past year, we’ve faced challenges, gained powerful insights, and developed effective strategies for implementing BTC in classrooms and building schoolwide buy-in. We’ve empowered non-English speaking and also disengaged students to become engaged participants and critical thinkers in math, while fostering a culture of ownership in learning. We’ve reached paras, specialists, district admin, and even our school board. Join us to learn how you can ignite this transformation in your classroom and school!