Building Thinking Classrooms 2025 Annual Conference

Thin-Sliced lessons are the meat and potatoes of getting through a lot of curricular objectives. But where can we find them? In this session aimed at early and middle grades, we’ll design a sequence of tasks from scratch to take students from where they are to where you want them to go. Along the way, we’ll also create associated meaningful notes. Come join us as we hone our thin-slicing skills.

What do mathematicians do? What do they say? What do they think? What do they feel? These are impactful questions to ask any young mathematician, but this session will spotlight these questions with a major plot twist. What do elementary thinking classroom teachers do, say, think, and feel? Participants will ask these questions of themselves and access each other’s expertise in a great exchange of practical moves that can be easily incorporated into any elementary thinking classroom. As Peter Liljedahl has been known to say, “The smartest person in the room is the room.” Whether your thinking classroom is fairly new or well established, this is a room you’ll want to be in. Come join us as we pull the curtain back on our very best moves.

Embark on a journey into dynamic thinking tasks designed to enhance classroom collaboration. Through engaging activities that ignite active participation and stimulate thought-provoking discussions, observe a remarkable transformation in how your students interact and cooperate. This session offers valuable opportunities to cultivate and strengthen essential problem-solving skills within the classroom.

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!

Unlock the power of the Building Thinking Classrooms instructional framework to transform how you teach writing. In this interactive workshop, explore strategies that engage students in deeper thinking, foster inclusivity, and improve writing outcomes. Experience hands-on activities designed to model the framework in action, demonstrating how it makes writing instruction more effective and equitable. Walk away with ready-to-implement techniques to energize your English classroom and inspire confident, thoughtful writers.

Many North American Indigenous cultures use a Medicine Wheel as a foundation for teaching and learning that shows how different parts of life are connected and balanced. In this session I will share how we have been using a Problem-Solving Medicine Wheel with BTC instruction in my classroom as well as my colleagues’ classrooms to connect to non-colonial ways of knowing to create spaces of belonging for all students, to communicate the value of students and their thinking, and to enhance student learning by focusing on celebrating students' skills, knowledge, mathematical practices, and attributes.

Wondering how to utilize technology in a thinking classroom? This session is for you! Come and find out how to incorporate digital interactives to enhance thinking tasks. After a brief comparison of building thinking classroom practices with those incorporated in digital lessons, you will experience a lesson that integrates the best of both experiences. You will leave the session with an understanding of how to recreate the experience for your classroom.