Results Update #5 (Building THinking Classrooms in Mathematics)

When I started chronicling my efforts to Build A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics two and a half years ago, I wanted to help fill in some of the blanks that others seemed to be searching for answers to.  One of those big ones was...

Where are the test scores?

Test scores were, after all, my major motivation for Building A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics in the first place in 2023.  My really wonderful class had done horribly on their end-of-year state math test to end the prior year, and I turned to BTC in an attempt to avoid that fate for my next group of students as well.

And it worked! 

And it worked the next year, too!

This fall, however, presented a new challenge.  I took my Thinking Classroom on the road.  I moved to a different school in a different district that used a different test to measure student achievement.  And if that wasn't enough change all at once, I taught a different grade level, too.

New everything.  Could the Thinking Classroom I was Building for the third time hold up in this radically different set of circumstances?

Before I get to the scores, here's a reminder I always like to include in my results updates. In Results Update #3, I shared the absolutely terrible end-of-year test scores that my students got the year before I pivoted to BTC. I hope that my sharing of the abysmal test scores of my final non-Thinking Classroom makes clear that I'm not sharing these results to brag.  My goal in this entire series of posts on Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics has been to provide certain information that I wish I'd had when I started and that I see a desire for in the broader community of other teachers building such classrooms, like:

• advice for getting starting Building a Thinking Classroom in Mathematics
• specific "nuts and bolts" details on the Building Thinking Classrooms practices
• videos for those who want to see a Thinking Classroom in action to better conceptualize it
• reflections on the joys and challenges of Building A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics

and most relevant here, of course,

• quantitative evidence that it works

Evidence can provide both justification and permission to implement something new.  For anyone out there needing either justification or permission to start Building A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics, I wanted to provide the evidence that it at least worked wonders for me.

That aside, onto the results.

The results I shared in Update #3 and Update #4 were from my 6th graders' end-of-year state testing in 2024 and 2025. The district I worked in at the time prioritized this test most highly, so those were the results I focused on. As I said above, I moved to a different school in a different district for the Fall of 2025, and that district prioritized the NWEA MAP Assessment most highly, so I'm going to share results on that assessment, which was pre-tested in August and then re-assessed for growth in December.

The end-of-year test that I used as a metric the prior two years prioritized achievement - what level of achievement with grade level content did each student reach?  The NWEA MAP test prioritizes growth - regardless of where a student started the year, how much did he or she grow in the half-year from August to December?

As I also mentioned above, I also changed grade levels - from 6th to 5th - in this move.  As such, I was planning all new thinking tasks and lesson plans every day - I couldn't re-use the ones I'd developed and refined the prior two years.

So how did it go?

​Here are the raw results:
​

If you're not familiar with the NWEA MAP assessment, here's a quick primer on how it works.  The kids pre-test in August to gauge their starting level (that's the "August" score above).  The test software then sets a "growth target" for them (column #5) that would indicate whether or not they had a "high growth" semester (column #6).  In December they take the test again, get a new score, and we see if the growth they achieved (column #4) meets the goal the software gave them.

I also added a "growth multiplier" column for my own reflection - a measure of by how many times over they met their individual growth scores.  For instance, the student in row #7 had a growth target of 4, she achieved a growth score of 12, so her growth multiplier was 3 because she tripled her growth target.

A quick skim of the data above shows that the overwhelming majority of students met their high-growth target, and that most of those who did exceeded it, too.  

A great start!  But let's dive a little deeper.  Here are the scores sorted by growth multiplier:
​

Sorted this way, 34 out of 43 students met or exceeded their growth scores, which I think for a new grade level, new test, new school, and new district, is a pretty good outcome!  And a full half of those 34 doubled (or more) that growth target.  Even better!

One of the reasons I'm so focused on test scores is that, at least where I've worked, the kids' scores on tests like these are what determine their future course opportunities, and I always want my students to have the best possible opportunities moving forward as they get older.  The yellow and green color coding  above are a reflection of that.  Any student whose score is highlighted in a certain color hit the cut score for a certain future opportunity that they wouldn't have had otherwise.  By my count, that's 15 students - a full third of them! - whose experience in a Thinking Classroom moved them into a new tier of future opportunity.

Here are the same scores organized from lowest to highest pre-testing score:
​

On the NWEA MAP, 220 is on the high end of an "on grade level" start for a 5th grader in math.  As you can see, I had a huge number of kids starting there or higher - starting above grade level for 5th graders.  But of the 18 students starting "on grade level" or lower,

• 17 hit the high growth target (the 18th missed by only 1 point)
• 10 of the 18 at least doubled their growth target
• 5 at least tripled the growth target
• 1 quadrupled it.

The experience in a Thinking Classroom certainly benefited the students who needed it most, which I found to be true the prior year as well. which I found to be true the prior year as well.  To me, this is a huge deal.  As I've written before - and as any experienced educator knows from experience - students who fall behind rarely catch up.  Getting growth from kids who are behind is the holy grail in this profession, and this is two years in a row that Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics has delivered real results to that end for my students.

Fascinatingly, the results were pretty good for the kids who started above grade level, too.  With so many students in that range - and with no prior experience having above-grade-level students in my first two Thinking Classrooms - I had to write my thin-sliced tasks with a very high ceiling so that there would be adequate opportunities for those kids to think through above-grade-level concepts if they were ready, and that seems to have been successful - quite a few of the kids who tripled their growth targets were already well ahead of grade level to begin with.  The mother of the student 15th from the bottom of the list (who moved from 228 to 241) even called me early in the semester to tell me that her student had been "stuck" around the same score for several semesters and to tell me that she was watching closely to assure that I was doing what was necessary to get the student moving again, despite his above grade level start.  The school has had past troubles keeping above-grade-level students growing beyond a certain point, and she wanted me to know that and to know that expectations were high that I'd be able to break that trend.

The kids didn't just show great growth, either - they really enjoyed it.  Just look at some of these smiles!

 By the end of the semester, the kids were regularly lamenting to me that they'd be going back to a "typical" math class next semester using the pre-packaged curriculum that the rest of the school used and that they'd grown up with in past years there.  They loved the Thinking Classroom experience and genuinely didn't want to leave it.  As Daniel Willingham teaches us in Why Students Don't Like School, it is hard to get students to think, but when they do, they often quite enjoy it.

This crew of kids certainly did.

Another Thinking Classroom Built, and another pretty successful finish.  Even in a different school in a different community and on a different grade level, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics really delivered for my students, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  

That, I think, is something to celebrate.

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