2025 MidSchoolMath National Conference

Ever wonder how to create an environment to boost student thinking? Or how can one get middle schoolers to actually embrace their mistakes?  Or get them to just work together?

It’s possible! This session will focus on how to create a classroom climate that celebrates mistakes and where the focus is on learning, not just the grade. You'll gain ideas and activities to support implementation of Building Thinking Classrooms, with Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath and other Curriculums. The session will explore how to create a safe classroom culture, use non-curricular tasks to increase student thinking, and even housekeeping suggestions to get your classroom up and running smoothly!

Through creative questioning we can find ways for all students to engage in math through inquiry, find the fun in
thinking and create opportunities for authentic discourse and confidence building.

Using the Building Thinking Classroom approach, we'll look at content and non-content based problems, looking for more ways to engage our students in thinking rather than memorizing facts or being passive learners. We will discuss the techniques to keep students engage and thinking and how to extend problems so that we can differentiate within the room.

You'll leave ready to share these ideas with your students!

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.

Take a peek inside a classroom to see what makes Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath so effective and why it integrates so well with  Building Thinking Classrooms . Find out how students are able to easily recall lesson and standards from months prior, and see how they can be engaged in problem solving through The Math Simulator.

Led by Jacqueline Johnson, Director of Professional Development for MidSchoolMath, this session will provide you with an in-depth, in-person curriculum tour. You'll leave this session with trial access to Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath, an understanding of the curriculum's components that drive learning and the research behind them - plus a special MSM hat!

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

When students explore visual, tactile, and relevant problems before a unit of study, they are able to use their prior knowledge, construct new understandings, and connect their learning to the world! In this session, we'll explore some anchor problems using Building Thinking Classrooms practices, and talk about how to make exploration and learning memorable and durable.

We'll then discuss how then displaying mathematical representations of these problems around the room allows you to refer to the math throughout the year, intentionally helping students look for patterns and connections, deepen their learning, and build conceptual understanding. You'll leave having deepened your understanding of the Building Thinking Classrooms practices and resources to use with your students.

Join us to see how educators engaged in an action research project using Core Curriculum by MSM over the course of a school year. This session will showcase teachers from Wisconsin, New Mexico, Colorado, and California, who dedicated their time and talents to collaborate with peers in order to support student learning in their classrooms, as the first-ever cohort of MidSchoolMath Certified Teachers . Whether or not you use Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath, in this session you will learn practical and powerful instructional strategies that can be used with your 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.

Take a peek inside a classroom to see what makes Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath so effective and why it integrates so well with  Building Thinking Classrooms . Find out how students are able to easily recall lesson and standards from months prior, and see how they can be engaged in problem solving through The Math Simulator.

Led by Jacqueline Johnson, Director of Professional Development for MidSchoolMath, this session will provide you with an in-depth, in-person curriculum tour. You'll leave this session with trial access to Core Curriculum by MidSchoolMath, an understanding of the curriculum's components that drive learning and the research behind them - plus a special MSM hat!

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

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!