Building Thinking Classrooms 2025 Annual Conference

This session aligns with the Connections to Equity and Access strand by offering strategies to create inclusive thinking classrooms for IEP-eligible and neurodivergent students. It will demonstrate how the "Math Image Assignment" bridges home and school, fostering belonging and valuing diverse student experiences. The session highlights how personal connections and inclusive task design provide access for students with varying needs, such as speech, sensory, or cognitive differences. It will also explore how tasks with "no wrong answers" promote student autonomy, encourage multiple entry points, and ensure all voices contribute to learning, fostering creative thinking through multiple pathways to solutions.

This session will walk through the progression of a mathematics unit: building relationships with teachers; co-planning, honouring students’ cultures; redesigning a mathematics task to include cultural relevance and meeting the needs of students' IEPs; celebrating student voice; and long-range planning using mathematical modeling. I will share data that shows how student engagement and achievement are affected by redesigned practices that include BTC, UDL, and DI principles. Participants will have the opportunity to bring their own examples and adapt curricular mathematics tasks to embed with students' cultures and lived experiences.

We watch classrooms, co-teach, develop and deliver Professional Development (PD) , try to incorporate BTC into classrooms, and still change is elusive. Hear about our real and raw journey to transform practices in math  classrooms so everyone embraces BTC. Come discover how a new mathematics education coach and outside consultant developed research-based protocols to collaboratively implement PD while implementing resources and providing support through continuous improvement. Leave with complete rubrics, checklists, and resources to affect meaningful change in your coaching and PD as you create more buy-in, strategically introducing BTC.

Discover how to easily integrate basic fact fluency work in a thinking classroom while making it engaging and effective. This session will explore how to use authentic tasks, vertical non-permanent surfaces, and visibly random groups to build fluency and automaticity in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in a thinking classroom. Participants will experience hands-on activities and learn how to foster student discourse and independent practice while developing essential math skills.