2025 MidSchoolMath National Conference

Meet and mingle with fellow attendees while enjoying complimentary coffee, tea and breakfast snacks!

If you have not yet picked up your Conference T-shirt, make sure to stop by the T-shirt station in the Lobby this morning!

Refresh your coffee or tea and then head to your breakout session!

Are you ready to transform your math classroom into a dynamic learning environment but you can’t help but think of all the reasons why it can’t work in your room? Do you have concerns about the budget? Is your space or furniture challenging? Join us for this session when we'll confront those excuses and concerns explore how to apply the principles of Building Thinking Classrooms to any classroom.  

We'll address common concerns and provide practical solutions to help you overcome challenges such as limited budget, space constraints, and resistance from colleagues. Discover how to repurpose existing materials, find affordable options, and secure funding for classroom improvements. Learn creative ways to maximize your classroom space and create a sense of openness and flexibility. Gain strategies for building buy-in and overcoming resistance to change.

By the end of this session, you'll feel empowered to break free from the traditional classroom setup and create a space that truly inspires and engages your students -- and a toolkit of practical strategies to implement with your students!

Learn from the MidSchoolMath team as they share their learnings in applying Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms Framework to MidSchoolMath’s multi-dimensional growth mindset curriculum!

Join us to immerse yourself in practical techniques, see impactful examples from real middle school classrooms, and discover how these practices can transform math instruction, making learning both meaningful and exciting for students.

Note: This session is specifically designed for educators who use Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath with their students. 

Integrating writing in the math classroom can deepen the learning for all students. In this session, we'll look at ways to creatively integrate writing, first starting with low-risk topics and  then (over time) moving into math tasks that push students to reflect and connect their math knowledge to the new learning

You'll have the opportunity to participate in introductory writing tasks, then move into the creation of larger tasks that require deeper mathematical connections including reflective writing. Leave with handouts and the knowledge needed to implement academic writing to support math knowledge with your students. 

Learn how math study cycles can be an effective tool to develop teacher leaders as change agents in their school and districts, and how this continuous improvement design helps ensure equitable access to high quality mathematics instruction for all students.

In partnership with our Math Teacher Leader Network (MTLN) teacher leader colleagues, we co-developed an approach to support the effective implementation of mathematics lessons in the classroom–math study cycles. Firmly grounded in this research and in support of NCTM’s Effective Mathematics Teaching Practices, math study cycles are conducted in three parts: (1) the planning - teachers plan the lesson together, do the math, anticipate students’ strategies, and develop meaningful questions; (2) the observation - teachers observe the lesson as a group collecting data on how students engage in the mathematics practices; and (3) the debriefing - teachers use a protocol to provide feedback on the lesson. Members of the MTLN testify that this professional learning process has been the most effective approach to improving their practice and the mathematics outcomes for their students.

During this session, we'll share video testimonials from our teacher leader partners in Blanco Elementary School, and then analyze a completed Math Study Cycle Template/protocol.

Meaningful change requires persistence and resilience. By embracing feedback loops and iterative improvement processes, we, as educators, can overcome barriers and cultivate a climate of continuous learning and growth.

In this session, we'll explore how to build a culture of valuing data; how a “top down” approach requires persistence and patience and to embrace the idea of continuous improvement. We can all learn from the mistakes and successes to create long-term plans on how to use data as part of shifting your schools and districts to a culture of continuous growth!

This session will begin with a short introduction to conceptual metaphor as a lens for thinking about mathematics teaching and learning. For example, our spatial understanding of up and down, along with our experiential understanding of stacks of objects, leads to a metaphor “up is more”, which we see in phrases like “above average” or “higher test score.” Drawing from this work, I will share some examples suggesting that metaphor is a normal part of teacher language in a math classroom, and that we can use metaphors strategically to improve student understanding.

Following the conceptual overview, we will play several counting games to find different patterns, leading to metaphors for variables, evaluating expressions and solving equations. During the games, specific teacher moves and mathematical extensions will be discussed, ensuring you can envision how this story and games can develop foundational algebraic ideas. You'll leave with an understanding of how to use this game with students, how elements of the game become metaphors for mathematical concepts, and how to involve game concepts into future math lessons.

What began as The Daily Dice and Domino Do Now (4-D Now) many years ago, has become a go-to activity, from the elementary grades through high school algebra.

In this session, I'll introduce and explore one of my favorite formats to use for openers, main lessons, reviews, and at-the-board games, with full classroom engagement, participation, and discussion. 4-D lessons involve all students. We'll use dice and dominoes to generate numbers to practice & confirm the 4 operations of fractions, decimals and percents on graph paper and The Square Abacus.  You'll leave with an understanding of this versatile and adaptable lesson.

This session explores the intersection of mathematics and design thinking, challenging the traditional perception of math as rote learning. The session will incorporate the human-centered principles of design thinking to address problem-solving and innovation. We'll follow the design thinking protocol to empathize, define identify, ideate creatively, generate solution as prototype and test to refine solutions, and iterate on the design process.

You'll get an overview of the Design Thinking process and use it to problem-solve real-world situations in your learning environments. Practical tools and techniques for creating innovative and user-focused solutions will be discussed for a deeper understanding of the intersection between mathematics and design thinking. Through examples and interactive exercises, you'll gain the tools and mindset to apply design thinking to their mathematical work, leading to more innovative, user-centered, and impactful solutions.

Help yourself to popcorn, along with fresh coffee, tea or water, before you head to your next Breakout Session!

Snack and Beverage stations are located in both the Lobby and the Main Hallway.

Join Scott Laidlaw, Co-Founder of MidSchoolMath and Jacqueline Johnson, Director of Professional Learning, to get an under-the-hood look at the new features and resources coming to Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath!  

Note: this session is specifically designed for educators who are already using Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath and those who want to learn more about adopting and implementing Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath with their students. 

Practicing math can become redundant. It’s easy to fall into the same routine: assign the page number, assign the math problems, and students get to work. Suddenly students are zoning out, their heads are down, they are engaging in off-topic conversations and now it feels like you are “putting out fires” and math practice comes to a halt.

In this session, we'll share what happened when we trialed and tweaked our approach to practice problems to allow for increased fun, increased engagement, and a highly collaborative MidSchoolMath Component: the Practice Printable. We have found these activities to include little to no prep and are perfect for Multi-lingual Students. Our strategies are designed especially for Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath but will hold value in any math classroom.

We know we want our students to collaborate and work together but aren't sure how to facilitate this? In this session, I'll share how I move beyond saying "work with your group or partner" with collaboration routines!

I'll share three collaboration routines I have implemented and assessed in my own classroom: Collaboration Cards at vertical surfaces, Everyday Language Routines to apply to any problem, and Competitive Collaboration for game based engagement. You'll get to experience the collaboration routine as a student, discuss the impact, then review my collected data related to student perception and preference of the strategy. These strategies complement the recommended macro and micro moves for Building Thinking Classrooms while troubleshooting areas of concern.

Middle school students are natural pattern-finders and exception-finders. In a mathematics classroom built on thinking and reasoning, we want students doing both! Come and participate as we walk through two mini-lessons meant to harness both the generalization- and snark-making machines that are middle schoolers.

The session will start with a Problem String, an instructional routine developed by Pam Harris that exposes students to high-dose patterning as they reason about adding integers. Problem Strings ask a series of intentionally-sequenced, easily understood questions and allow students to see a relationship made visible through teacher modeling, repeated in ways that are similar enough to encourage generalization and different enough to keep the interest of students coming from all levels of experience. As teachers we want to ask more of what Peter Liljedahl calls “keep-thinking questions” to help students reason about relationships without overgeneralizing. With this in mind, the second portion of this session will look closely at how exception-finding emerges as a natural and powerful extension of pattern-finding in mathematics, specifically through the lens of geometric “prove or disprove” statements.

Throughout the session, you'll have the opportunity to share strategies and ideas with each other, in partners, small groups, and as a whole group. Together, you'll learn from one another's perspectives and strategies as we do math by experiencing what one aspect of the mathematics of thinking classes could look like.

We know that our students learn far more wrestling with our questions than listening to our lectures!

This fast-paced, example-laden discussion will model a range of questioning techniques that foster student discourse.

Encore Session: This popular session is being offered twice! Please only sign up to attend one of the two sessions. 

In this session, we'll look at two key strategies to support students in understanding and doing long division. We'll move away from the basic DMSB acronym, and look different ways attack division through the lens of multiplication/creating equal groups and counting up.

Using the question "How many groups of X fit inside Y?" and partial quotient strategies will prepare you to be able to teach division without the use of DMSB. These strategies can be used to teach division to students, whether it is the first time it's being taught or data suggests there is an intervention needed. You'll leave with experience in the strategies and handouts so that you can use these approaches with your students.

In this session, we'll share how our school has created a culture of seeing the opportunities in mistakes, using tools such as reflective journals, templates, and prompts, ultimately fostering a culture of continuous learning.

You'll engage in interactive discussions and activities that model these techniques, allowing you to see firsthand the impact of metacognitive strategies in the math classroom, including metacognitive awareness, error analysis, and reflective writing  By the end of the session, you'll have with practical tools and actionable strategies to implement reflection and error analysis with your own students.

Wrap up your Conference Experience with this reflective and inspiring session, including the announcement of the 2025 Gladys Graham Awardee