Building Thinking Classrooms 2025 Annual Conference

Pre-Conference: Leaders Supporting Building Thinking Classrooms

Immerse yourself in the transformative journey of supporting Building Thinking Classrooms in this pre-workshop designed for educational leaders. Start by stepping into the role of a learner, experiencing the dynamic and engaging environment of a thinking classroom firsthand.
Explore the 14 research-based Building Thinking Classrooms practices that effectively shift students’ non-thinking behaviors—like slacking, stalling, faking, and mimicking—into genuine cognitive engagement. These practices foster equitable access to grade-level content, ensuring success for all students, including multilingual learners and those with neurodiverse needs.
This workshop goes beyond theory by providing you with actionable tools and resources to support your educators’ implementation journey. Learn strategies to build capacity within your team, empower your teachers, and create sustainable, impactful change in your schools.
Additionally, this is a unique opportunity to expand your professional network. Connect with a community of like-minded leaders who are equally passionate about fostering thinking classrooms. Share insights, exchange strategies, and build a web of collaboration that supports your collective growth as champions of this critical work.
Join us to strengthen your leadership, gain fresh perspectives, and cultivate a culture of thinking and engagement in your schools!

What does a Building Thinking Classrooms lesson look like start to finish? In this workshop, you will experience a thinking task from the perspective of a student and unpack the teaching moves used to unlock student thinking and understanding. We will be exploring a task that is rooted in Indigenous language and ways of knowing to deepen our own understanding of numbers. Whether you're new to Building Thinking Classrooms or have been fully implementing for some time, there will be something for you in this session.

To facilitate mathematics learning for all, students must have opportunities to talk with, respond to, and question one another to create a classroom community centered on discourse. To support the mathematics learning of all students, effective teachers establish an environment where students regularly engage in productive mathematics discourse. Join me for this session to engage in rich math tasks to model the use of BTC Collective Knowledge Practices and the eight effective math teaching practices to facilitate productive discourse, foster student autonomy, and promote problem solving, reasoning, and critical thinking skills in a student-centered classroom.

Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) is revolutionizing math instruction in oh-so-many ways, so how do we, as leaders and coaches, support all teachers on their BTC journeys?  In this session, you’ll explore two powerful coaching models: the observation-feedback cycle and the co-teaching cycle. The observation-feedback cycle helps you assess where your school stands with BTC. The co-teaching cycle—also known as Math Studio—creates deep, transformative change as you walk alongside your teachers. You’ll leave this session with practical tools for both models and a fresh vision for how BTC coaching can elevate teaching and learning across all content areas.

Launching with an engaging story is powerful, but how it ends matters just as much! In this session, we explore the bookends of BTC: crafting compelling launch stories to spark curiosity and designing meaningful consolidations that center collective meaning-making over predetermined conclusions. Rooted in storywork and decentralized knowledge-building, we’ll examine how re-storying tasks can honor diverse ways of knowing, challenge traditional narratives, and shift from teacher-led conclusions to collaborative knowledge-building. Come experience the joy of re-storying tasks and designing consolidations to refine how you launch and conclude BTC practices for deeper engagement and learning.

This year, we launched a new after-school math class based on Thinking Classrooms pedagogy for 4th-6th graders. Students collaborated in random groups to investigate rich math tasks. We used various tools, including AI, as BTC teaching assistants to support student learning. Thin slicing problems is key in Thinking Classrooms, especially when working with diverse learners. AI tools, like ChatGPT, helped thin slice problems to engage and challenge all students. Join us to learn about our BTC work in a multi-grade setting and to discover AI tools that will support your own BTC classroom.

Managing manipulatives in a thinking classroom takes a bit of pre-work, and it's totally worth it! During this session, we'll explore use-it-tomorrow ways you can help students think about, think with, and represent thinking using manipulatives during thinking tasks. An emphasis will be placed on how the Building Thinking Classrooms practices naturally lead to important conversations regarding the connection between physical, visual, symbolic, verbal, and contextual representations.

In this session, participants will be introduced to several practices in the Building Thinking Classroom Framework through engaging experiences and interactive tasks. After a discussion about these experiences, participants will leave with a clear plan for starting their BTC journey.

Manipulatives by themselves are inert, hold no magic, meaning, or insight. However, when used thoughtfully, they can become powerful catalysts for thinking and learning.
Join us as we explore the use of manipulatives in the Middle Years and Beyond through the lens of the Thinking Classroom framework. Discover how to maximize their impact by guiding students to:
* Think about the manipulatives
* Think with the manipulatives
* Represent their thinking using manipulatives
Unlock deeper engagement, reasoning, and understanding—one hands-on experience at a time.

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.

Are you craving the need to dig into textbook-y tasks to find ways to thin-slice and modify them into more thinking lessons? This session will focus on identifying characteristics of good thinking lessons and enhancing tasks to get students engaged in deep thinking of mathematics. Participants will also work collaboratively in groups based on grade bands to build thinking lessons from textbook resources provided in the session. All grade levels are welcome!