Building Thinking Classrooms 2025 Annual Conference

Grades shape student's perception of their abilities & future prospects, yet outdated practices, proven inaccurate by decades of research, continue to distort students' self-identities and undermine their potential for success.  In this session, participants will critically examine the reliability & effectiveness of traditional grading through research-backed discussions, reflective activities, & case studies. Building on insights from Building Thinking Classrooms, participants will explore practical, data-driven grading strategies, hear inspiring stories from educators who have successfully transformed their practices, & gain resources and support for shifting toward grading practices that foster student growth & accurate self-reflection.

Join us as we participate in a task and then work on our own together to reflect on how to help students know where they are instead of who they are.  We will think about assessment throughout the launch, body and focus on research-based improvements on assessment during the closing part of the lesson as well as navigating the paradigm shift of letting go of early not knowing when reporting out based on data (not points).

In this session you will learn some strategies for “evaluating what we value.” You will learn how to take established norms for board work and create a daily grade.

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.

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.