2025 MidSchoolMath National Conference

Join the discussion about how we can open the door to rigor and challenge for all of our students. In this session, we will share our journey to build a "tiered" assessment that provides students with the scaffolding to demonstrate general competency, while also inviting them to dig deeper using their problem-solving skills. By giving students choice and agency, we can open the door to authentic challenge to all of our students.

In this workshop, we will investigate our own assessment practices. We will discuss the values in our classrooms and then consider how we reinforce or reward these values. This approach, which can be used at any age and applied to any standards-based metric, is a powerful way to improve transparency and access in systems with leveled groupings. It can also help mitigate implicit bias, opening access to challenging material to all students and giving them a chance to exceed our expectations.

You will leave this session with examples of how we have used a tiered approach in our school and ideas for how you might implement this tool in your own classroom.

In celebration of the tenth in-person MidSchoolMath National Conference, we'll share our favorite mathematical and collaborative activities from their long history of MSM sessions. From our experience, we have found these to be effective, motivating, engaging problem-solving activities involving probability, function, fairness and graphs.

In this fast-paced session, you'll make and defend mathematical conjectures, explain your thinking and reasoning in the context of collaborative problem solving, and identify mathematical concepts in puzzles and games. Table and whole-group discussions will reinforce appropriate application of the activities, and you'll leave with handouts, take-home activities, and links to online resources.

Have you ever implemented a problem-solving based lesson, encountered situations where students disengage, and been unsure how to resolve the situation? This session will prepare you to resolve this!

Together, we'll complete a low floor - high ceiling simultaneous equations activity that can be solved in multiple ways, then discuss our own struggles in the activity and reflect on their students’ experience of struggles. We'll then take a closer look at the structure and theory of identifying 5 unique types of struggle: cognitive load, opting-out, expressive language, perseverance and fatigue. We'll talk about what to do - and what not to do - for each type of sturggle. Learning disabilities will also be addressed, to help support all students in problem solving.

You'll walk away with a better understanding of types of struggle that occur and be prepared to support your students during these moments of struggle!

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.

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.

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.