Building Thinking Classrooms 2025 Annual Conference

How do the ideas in Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman overlap and complement those of BTC Chapter 14, “How We Grade in a Thinking Classroom”?  Learn how accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational grading practices shift us from a normative, point-gathering paradigm to a data-gathering paradigm and establish a stronger connection between learning and grades.  Examine a 7th-grade teacher’s implementation journey, even while using required curricular resources.  End with a reflection and concrete plan for how Feldman’s ideas can deepen the impact of Liljedahl’s guidance for grading in your own thinking classroom.  This session is for those interested in new grading practices as well as those seeking steps to get started.  

Are you feeling overwhelmed with all the possibilities for assessments after reading the Assessment Practices in BTC? Are you looking for inspiration or a place to start with your assessment practices in your classroom or as a department? Come hear from two teachers on how their department created essential standards to help focus instruction, how we are assessing student work, and creating a more equitable grading system to give better access to higher math classes for all students. A merging of BTC assessment with Standards Based Grading.

Three years into implementing BTC in my classroom and honing the first 12 practices finally led to successful integration of navigation tools.  Come hear one teacher's story on how we got students engaging early, often, and ongoing with tools that are designed to help students track their learning progress, identify areas for practice, and understand expectations clearly. We’ll discuss the challenges of creating meaningful navigation tools, integrating them effectively into high school math courses, and why I waited until my third year implementing BTC to try them.

As teachers, so much of what drives our assessment practices revolves around numbers. But do these numbers really tell us what we think they do? In this session, we will unpack our grading and reporting practices, interrogate their purpose and validity, and explore whether they truly serve all of our students. Together, we’ll challenge some of the assumptions we hold about numbers in our grade books and consider what might lie beyond them.

Have you every struggled with how to provide intervention support within your math classroom that both supports the unfinished learning from our students AND teacher efficiency? In this session, I will focus on my journey in using the BTC grading navigation tool to help support student learning and my own organization in providing Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention within a multi-language learner level, 8th grade math classroom.

This session explores how integrating Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) can transform classrooms into inclusive, collaborative communities. By redesigning rubrics to foster accountability in group learning and utilizing strategies like community circles to build trust and openness, educators can create spaces where self-awareness and empathy drive both academic achievement and personal growth. Together, we’ll explore practical approaches to building trust and connection while addressing challenges such as disengagement, behavioral issues, and resistance to collaboration. Participants will leave with effective strategies for designing rubrics that support accountability and SEL, creating thriving, inclusive learning environments.

Join Maegan Giroux, as she walks through how she and her grade 6/7 students' assessed a full unit, from start to finish. Maegan will share student work and comments on the assessment approach including the various ways the class chose to embed conversations, observations, and technology into the assessment. This session will include time for Q&A and open discussion around the unit was planned and assessed.