Highlights of the CAC 2025
The Day Before the Conference
Morning Featured Presentations
Building Thinking Classrooms: The Little Things That Make Big Differences
Building Thinking Classroom is most well known for having students working on thinking tasks in random groups and on vertical whiteboards. But it is more than that. There are 14 practices. And there are hundreds of micro-moves—the small things we do—in a thinking classroom that make big differences in students’ experiences. In this session, I will present on some of the little things—the micromoves—that are often overlooked but are instrumental in building your thinking classroom.
Peter Liljedahl
Simon Fraser University
Dr. Peter Liljedahl is a professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of the book “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning” (2020).
Community Discussion of Counted Out
Counted Out investigates the biggest crises of our time—political polarization, racial and economic inequity, a global pandemic, and climate change—through an unexpected lens: math. In our current information economy, math is everywhere. The people we date, the news we see, the influence of our votes, the candidates who win elections, the education we have access to, the jobs we get —all of it is underwritten by an invisible layer of math that few of us understand, or even notice. But whether we know it or not, our numeric literacy—whether we can speak the language of math—is a critical determinant of social and economic power.
Maisie Gholson
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Maisie Gholson is an Associate Professor at the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan (UM), with a background as a high school mathematics teacher and a patent writer in Houston, Texas. She is a member of the UM National Center for Institutional Diversity, an STaR Fellow, and has received several other prestigious fellowships. She earned her PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Illinois Chicago and her BS in electrical engineering from Duke University.
Diane Owen-Rogers
Kalamazoo RESA
Diane Owen-Rogers, Ph.D. is the Director of Culture and Belonging for Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency (KRESA). Along with colleagues, Diane hosted the Counted Out screening on March 14, 2025 as a strategy to spark a community conversation about how to better engage young people in meaningful mathematics. Her 24 years in education includes experience teaching secondary mathematics, K-12 instructional coaching, Regional STEM Director, and facilitating professional development at local, state, national, and international levels.
Afternoon Featured Presentations
Collaborating to Reimagine High School Mathematics
The high school mathematics experiences of too many students leave them without seeing the relevance and usefulness of the concepts they have learned. Examine what can be done at the K- 12 level and the post-secondary level to change this. We must work together to increase opportunities for success and to make the vision of NCTM’s High School Mathematics Reimagined a reality.
Kevin Dykema
Mattawan Consolidated Schools & NCTM
Kevin Dykema is a Past President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) from 2022 to 2024. At the CAC 2025, he will provide an overview of the NCTM’s new publication, “High School Mathematics Reimagined, Revitalized, and Relevant,” and invite all of us to investigate what opportunities for collaboration are needed and feasible to truly effect change.
Collaboration or Change: Finding a Sustainable Stride
In this talk, I will describe the role that my colleagues and I played in creating and maintaining GeT: A Pencil, a community of instructors of geometry courses for teachers. I will contrast this role with other roles available for mathematics education researchers to play in collaboration or change efforts. I will argue that to make progress through collaboration we need to find a modus operandi that not only allows us to use our knowledge and skills but that also honors the complexity of the work practitioners do every day.
Pat Herbst
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Patricio G. Herbst is a Professor of Education and Mathematics at the University of Michigan. His research interests include the practice of mathematics teaching and teaching knowledge with particular emphasis on the teaching of geometry in high school and university. He is also interested in the use of multimodal representations of teaching practice in teacher collaboration and learning and the semiotic analysis of such uses. Between 2021 and until the end of 2025 he has been serving as Editor of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.
