October 21, 2025
On why I care about Building Thinking Classrooms
Friends, thank you for reading the Coaching Letter. You rock! As you probably already know, we (Partners for Educational Leadership) are hosting The Building Thinking Classrooms Conference 2026 in New Haven, CT, Monday June 29 to Tuesday June 30, 2026. In addition, there will be pre-conference offerings on Sunday, June 28. Many of you are already on our BTC Update list, which is where we’ll be sharing updates on the conference, but if not, please click on this link to add your contact information. I’m not planning on writing much about the conference in the Coaching Letter beyond this one, so that you are not barraged with duplicate information. Here are the conference strands, and call for proposals (which are due right after Thanksgiving, so get cracking!) When we add information about registration and hotels, you can be notified via the Sched app (same app as this year’s conference in Seattle), but we’ll also communicate that via the BTC Update list. Registration will go live in the New Year after folks who have submitted proposals have been notified whether theirs was successful. Please, if you know of anyone with interest in BTC, can you please forward this information to them? Thank you!
Beyond the conference, this Coaching Letter is about why we got so interested in BTC in the first place. I’ve written about BTC before: In CL #198, for example, I got really snippy with detractors who think that BTC can’t possibly be effective, because lessons do not begin with direct explication from the teacher up front, because students’ working memory must get overloaded, or because they are not given worked examples—and I try to show why they are wrong.
And then it sort of occurred to me that thinking about BTC as a new way of teaching that has to be proven with its own research base is the wrong way of thinking about it. The practices that make up BTC (the language that Peter uses is of 14 practices—many of which are further broken down into macro moves and micro moves— organized into 4 toolkits). But these practices, in various combinations, already have a research base. There is nothing in BTC that floats free of research, and I think I can say with some confidence that every one of its core moves shows up in decades of scholarship, sometimes under different labels, sometimes buried in specialized literatures. The smart thing about BTC is in pulling those strands together and making them usable for teachers in a way that I don’t think anything else has, at least in math—and now of course its influence is spilling over to other content areas. Here is a good start, but nevertheless a partial list, of how BTC operationalizes existing research:
The centrality of task. BTC tasks are not just busywork; they are designed to carry mathematical ideas. That emphasis goes back a long way: Doyle (1983) on academic work, and Smith and Stein (1998) on selecting and implementing high-level tasks. BTC didn’t invent the idea that “Task predicts performance,” (that comes from the book Instructional Rounds), yet it does offer a practical set of routines to make that idea real in classrooms.
Random grouping. This is one of the key practices of BTC and one that many teachers have a hard time with. Ilana Horn (2010) and others have written about how groupings affect classroom dynamics and student participation. Random groups interrupt the familiar hierarchies that form when students know who’s “good at math” and who isn’t. And while Peter’s book doesn’t spend much time on school-level decisions like whether to track students, he himself has been outspoken in opposing tracking because it cements those hierarchies rather than disrupts them.
Maintaining cognitive demand. A central BTC practice is to start with challenging problems and then hold that level of demand while students work. This isn’t new either: Margaret Smith and Mary Kay Stein (1998) laid out the “Mathematical Tasks Framework” to describe how cognitive demand often erodes during instruction, and how teachers can maintain it. BTC structures are a direct mechanism for enacting that research—giving students access to low-floor high-ceiling tasks and keeping them engaged at that level (what Peter calls flow, from the construct described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Personally, this is the part about BTC that I am most invested in, because the research on maintaining cognitive demand is just so depressing. For more on this, see my colleague Tom’s excellent lit review of the topic.
Teacher discretion and in-the-moment responses. Deborah Ball (1993) and later Ball, Thames, and Phelps (2008) showed that teachers’ discretionary decisions—how they respond to what students say, which ideas to pursue, what to press on—are where much of the heavy lifting of teaching happens. This is also known as adaptive teaching—see the work of Graham Nuthall (2007)—and real-time formative assessment (which is why Dylan Wiliam has said that he thinks it might have been better if he and Paul Black had used the term adaptive teaching instead of formative assessment, which is so often misunderstood as tests and quizzes and exit slips). Liljedahl builds that into BTC: teachers circulate, listen carefully, and decide in real time what to suggest, what questions to ask, what to connect, what to leave for the consolidation.
Whole-class discussion and consolidation. A common misconception is that BTC sidelines teacher talk. In reality, teacher talk is abundant—including some direct explanation—but it happens at consolidation, when the class comes back together to make sense of their work. This is exactly the space Jackson, Garrison, Wilson, Gibbons, and Shahan (2013) identify as crucial: the concluding whole-class discussion where students’ opportunities to learn are shaped. BTC leverages that moment rather than front-loading explanations. (This is also the article we cite all the time regarding cognitive demand: only 6.7% of tasks make it from start to finish of the lesson without the cognitive demand being lowered by the teacher, and 64% if the time that happens at initial framing of the task, which is why Peter emphasizes launching the task in the first 5 minutes).
The holding environment: belonging and expectations. Finally, we can’t forget the research on the “holding environment” of the classroom—the extent to which students feel both supported and challenged. It’s not enough for teachers to believe they have high expectations; what matters is whether students experience those expectations as real and directed toward them (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999; Ferguson, 2003). BTC structures—random grouping, visible thinking, public consolidation—are as much about cultivating belonging and shared responsibility as they are about math content. This lines up with research on stereotype threat and belonging interventions (Walton & Cohen, 2011) showing that students’ experience of being seen as capable is itself a lever for learning.
We are, therefore, interested in BTC because it is a very clever, elegant and practical packaging of what is, in fact, some very old research. I say this not to minimize the power of BTC, because creating a very clever, elegant and practical packaging of the research is no mean feat, but to point out that it is possible to overstate how novel it is. There are so much floating out there in the blogosphere about how BTC can’t possibly work, but we see it working all the time, and frequently it is most obviously working well for the students whom teachers see as less capable, which makes us all the more enthusiastic about it.
So please come to the conference! And please consider applying to present! And fun fact—for the second year in a row, Peter was here in Connecticut on publication day for one of his books. While he was in Connecticut, he ran a workshop for all the high school teachers in Waterbury, and I told those teachers that if I could have given them copies of the new book, I would have—but as next-best-thing, I brought them cookies—picture of one of said cookies at the top of this post!
Let me know if I can do anything for you. Best, Isobel
Isobel Stevenson, PhD PCC
860-576-9410
@IsobelTX
Author of The Coaching Letter
Author with Jennie Weiner of The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders: Principles and Processes Routledge, 2021
Author with Sarah Woulfin & Kerry Lord of Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools Teachers College Press, 2023
