In this hands-on session, participants will explore efficient ways to harness formative and summative assessment tools to guide instruction, foster student agency, and provide equitable feedback. You’ll complete a sample student-choice assessment, practice grading for mastery with a clear rubric, and learn strategies for scaffolding within assessments and assessing learning meaningfully. Discover time-saving techniques to communicate progress effectively with students and parents while keeping assessments manageable and impactful.
Participants will leave with four concrete, ready-to-implement strategies that build student independence through structured feedback, purposeful questioning, self-assessment, and supported note-taking. By experiencing each tool as learners first, participants will better understand how these routines create consistent expectations, promote productive struggle, and help students take ownership of their thinking and learning.
Participants will leave with a clear understanding of the philosophy behind using student self-correction of their assessments and reflection as a way to empower students and help them tell their own math story. Participants will learn how centering student voice provides immediate, relevant feedback and shifts traditional power dynamics in the learning environment. The session will share the origins of this action research project, findings, and a concrete classroom example demonstrating how self-correction, scoring, and reflection function in practice.
Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how to design and implement effective thin slicing that promotes sustained thinking, increases student ownership, and supports meaningful problem-solving in a Building Thinking Classroom, and will be equipped with practical strategies, ready-to-use examples, and planning tools to create thin slicing lessons that deepen student reasoning and keep learners actively engaged.
Participants will leave this session confident in their ability to transform word problems into meaningful sense-making opportunities for all students. By experiencing and scripting a 3 Listens Launch, educators will learn how to adapt the familiar 3 Reads language routine to promote thinking, collaboration, and equitable access to any word problem. Through active participation—experiencing the routine as learners, analyzing its structure, and practicing with peers—participants will gain the tools to design and facilitate verbal launches that keep students from “number-plucking” and steer them instead to problem-solving as they surface key quantities and construct mathematical meaning in context.
A middle school math and science educator in El Dorado County from 2002 to 2018, Chelsea spent 16 years guided by the belief that all students can learn to the highest levels. From 2018 to 2026, she served as a Math Curriculum Specialist for the Sacramento County Office of Education... Read More →
Kyle Ferreira van Leer (he/him) firmly believes that all students are capable of high level mathematics engagement. He began his educational career in the middle school sphere. Kyle spent 8 years - from Boston to Sacramento - teaching 7th and 8th grade math in Title I schools, mostly serving migrant students... Read More →
You’ve arranged your furniture, launched your random groups, and standing vertical surfaces are a daily norm. But how do you sustain the momentum when students hit a wall—or fly through the content? The secret lies in strategic task design. In this session, we’ll look at practical strategies for mining your adopted curriculum for core concepts and pairing them with online resources to map out your progressions.
Math Teacher 6-8, Robert Louis Stevenson/Saint Helena Unified
With over 25 years in education, I believe that strong relationships are at the heart of meaningful learning. I am passionate about helping educators create classrooms where students feel connected, valued, and empowered to think deeply. While strengthening mathematical thinking is... Read More →
Tom Lewis (he/him) is a consultant on the BTC U.S. Team and has been supporting teachers, schools and districts with implementing Building Thinking Classrooms in grades K-12 since 2021. He is currently working with Peter Liljedahl, Author of Building Thinking Classrooms, on several... Read More →
The goal of this session is to inspire teachers, educators, and school leaders to reimagine classroom spaces in ways that foster a true thinking environment. Traditional setups often prioritize desks and chairs, but do these arrangements actually support deep engagement and collaboration? In a Building Thinking Classroom, students spend most of their time standing and working at Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces, which raises important questions: If students are rarely seated, what purpose do tables and chairs serve? Are they essential tools for learning or potential distractions? This session will challenge assumptions about classroom design and explore how intentional space planning can transform the way students think and learn.
This session offers practical tips on developing and implementing student navigation tools which are visual unit roadmaps that map specific learning objectives to concrete examples of basic, intermediate, and advanced problems. By clearly defining the progression of mastery, the tool empowers students to track their own proficiency and take active ownership of their learning journey. They bring clarity to learning objectives and assessment pathways within a middle or high school mathematics environment. We will demonstrate their versatile applications in the thinking classroom: as a roadmap for daily objectives, as a powerful self-assessment and reflection tool for student ownership, and as a review and formative assessment aid for targeted feedback. Participants will walk through a collaborative, iterative process for designing these tools, which feature explicit, leveled example problems. Attendees will leave with the specific process necessary to start creating their own navigation tools and a clear understanding of how this approach promotes engagement, builds confidence, fosters student autonomy, and offers a scalable strategy for district-wide coordination.
