The Grading Podcast

Joe: And then just be able to be explained to the student what they need to do to do better. That’s the only part that you have to have, right? Because if it doesn’t become a good tool for the students to know how to do better, then you’ve got a real problem. But I would say use your professional judgment. And the smile I saw from Bosley’s face suggests if he wasn’t exactly there, he was close.

Bosley: Oh, no, that’s exactly what I was going to say. You know, going back to one of the biggest themes and, that runs through most of Guskey’s books and speeches and everything else that he does, is stop giving your professional judgment up to a computer algorithm or a formula.

Welcome to the Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach, and instructional designer.

Whether you work in Higher Ed or K-12, whatever your discipline is. Whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Bosley: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your hosts. And with me always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharana?

Sharona: I am doing well. And I want to welcome back to the pod, as our very first repeat guest, Mr. Joe Zaccola. How are you doing today, Joe?

Joe: Well, now that you told me that I’m doing really well. That’s what I wanted to hear. I wanted to be a first of something.

Sharona: Well, actually, I actually want to take you, promote you even further. I have a request. Can I call you our first guest host instead of just guest?

Joe: You can call me whatever you want. I told Bosley I wanted friend of the pod or something. I wanted, you know, some sort of special like I’m happy to be your lackey whenever you want me. So, yeah.

Sharona: Well, that’s what I think. I feel like you’re actually more than just, you know, one of the guests that we have on the pod. I feel like the three of us are somewhat of a team in this area. So yeah, I’m going to call you a guest host. So with that said, Boz, I’m going to kick it back over to you to introduce the episode for this week.

Bosley: All right. Well. And I’m really glad you’re on for this episode, Joe, because this is actually one of my least favorite things to talk about when it comes to, especially trying to train and, and, you know, convert people to alternative grading and that, and it’s also something that’s pretty unique to K 12. I know there are some higher ed institutions that have to deal with this, but all K-12, and that is interim grades.

We talk a lot about, you know, the final grades, how we wrap up a final grade, but how do you do, these interim grades? At the high school world, I know you and I both are in LAUSD, we actually have to do grades four times a semester.

We do it at the 5, 10, 15, and the final 20 week grade. So that’s kind of what we’re going to talk about today. And like I said, this is one of my least favorite things to talk about in training, because this is maybe the one spot where traditional grading does actually have an advantage. I don’t think the grade tells you anything, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to calculate an interim grade.

Sharona: Well, and that’s what my question to both of you is, could we start with what is an interim grade? What’s it used for? Because those of us in the higher ed world are like, what the heck are you talking about? And then you just said it’s easier, but my question is easier for whom? So could one of you guys say what the heck is this thing and what’s it used for?

Joe: Sure, I’ll, I’ll do it. Basically, under the current LAUSD rules, we have to give three mandatory notifications, or three mandatory grade reports, which is the 10 week, the 15, and the 20. And then there’s a five week that’s optional that, in practice, is optional pretty much in no place. So every five weeks out of a 20 week semester, we’re supposed to let parents know, and let kids know, how they’re doing.

For obvious reasons, you’re trying to do anything you can to make sure a kid doesn’t fail. So I think there’s a lot of logic in why it is what it is. In practice, it becomes a mess, especially because in LAUSD, the first semester is not a 20 week, it’s a 17 week. So now you’re getting even shorter time spans where you’re supposed to be giving grades to kids.

So that’s, that’s what it is. And it’s just at those periods you have grades given. The only one of any consequence, other than the final one, is the 10 week because that has impact on athletics and activities. That if a student is not performing up to par at the 10 week, then they have an issue with not being athletically eligible. But the five and 15 are nothing more than progress reports and notification to parents and family.

Bosley: Which I still think is really odd that the 10 week being used for eligibility for sports and other activities. I mean, the school district I went to as a student, that was checked every week, starting at week three. Like we had weekly. And that just made more sense, I think, for at least athletic eligibility. Because with the 10 week, like I said, you can get halfway through a season and be failing all your classes before you’re ineligible.

But then the flip is also true. If you’re ineligible at that 10 week mark, you got to wait another 10 weeks before you can even try to be eligible again. Which doesn’t seem very motivating to me.

Joe: And to add to that at present, it’s gamed, right? You have a student who’s bombing for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then, especially with traditional grading practices, they’ll dump a lot of work, get the points to where they need to get it to a C at the 10 week and then proceed to stop working again. So yeah, that there should be a way where they can just get connected to the grade book for sure. Because you’re right, it creates, there’s a lot of problems with doing it the way they do it.

Sharona: And these are letter, these are multi level letter grades that you have to give? Like you have to give an A or an A minus or B? They can’t be narrative reports of any kind?

Joe: They’re never narrative. And Bosley and I have a different practice for the, for the five week that I know some teachers try to use again on the 15, which is sort of gross, but the five and 15, because they’re not mandatory, you don’t have to give a letter grade.

Well, the 15 is mandatory, but it’s not, it has no consequence like the 10 and the 20 do. So you don’t have to give a letter grade. So what we do, what Bosley and I do, is because both of us think it’s pretty ridiculous that in four ish weeks I’m going to have A to F assessed, we both give what’s called an M, which is meets, which is C or better, and then D or F, depending on how much a student has done of the little that would get them to a D or F in the first few weeks.

And for me, an F is almost impossible in the first five weeks. I need to see nothing. I can usually justify a D. Whereas other people giving the A’s, I think Bosley and I would argue it’s a mirage A. It doesn’t tell you anything. We haven’t done any real summative assessments. There’s nothing that we’re looking at that’s going to tell us legitimately if a student is an A or a B or a C. We just know they’re doing okay.

Bosley: So let’s kind of get into how you actually do that. Because that is, probably, one of the three biggest questions I get while I’m doing any kind of training. And I know you also are a LAUSD EGI certified instructor. So you have been training people on this, but, before we kind of get into the hows that you and I both do this and kind of compare and contrast, I want to take a minute just to look at our different grading architectures. Because we do have a slightly different grading architecture, and I think that will also help explain some of the differences in how you and I do these. Especially the five week, but, and correct me if I’m wrong, you use really the, what I call the Guskey method of looking at a preponderance of evidence to decide what the overall learning target level of mastery or proficiency is.

And then you, for your final grade wrap up, look at how many learning targets a student is getting at one level compared to another level. Is that?

Joe: Explain the second part again, please?

Bosley: So your wrap up, how you come up with the final A, B, C, it’s based on how many learning targets a student gets at an acceptable level and how many they get at an advanced level. Your threes and fours.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. The fours. Well, the fours are. Yeah, my twos and threes, the threes being proficient and the twos being approaching proficiency. Yeah, that’s so, my C’s or above are all determined by two or above on the proficiency scale, depending on the grade that we’re looking at.

So yeah, that’s true. And then with some exceptions that I’m currently in process of working on, it is mostly preponderance of evidence, the Guskey method, I am doing with specific learning targets because of the Guskey/Bloom mastery learning cycle. There’s some things where I’m actually doing just a strict formative, getting them where I need them, and then just kicking that can to the summative, which will be essays.

So for example, for my analysis skills ,and for like a thesis, I’m going to give them some summatives, some formatives rather, early on while we’re doing a larger unit, and I’m going to check them off as "you’re where I need you", and then I’m going to, the rest will be seen when I get the summatives, once I know they’re where I want them. But for my most important targets, three of them anyway, which is my reflection target, my reading process target, and my collaboration to construct knowledge and develop skills, which is speaking and listening at a high level, those are preponderance of evidence because I’m assessing it often, and it’s the engine that makes my class run.

Bosley: Alright, so to compare that with the grading architecture I use in most of the classes that I do this with, where I do N times, I don’t do the Guskey method, I do what we call N times where I have a specific amount of times I’m going to assess a learning target and a student has to achieve proficiency on so many of those attempts, regardless of if they get it at the beginning or the end.

It’s just so many times and then I just do a straight count. You know, if I have 15 standards or learning targets throughout the semester, at eight or nine would be my C. So that’s kind of just a little bit of difference of our overall grading structure. Now, with that being said, let’s get into how do you do your interim grades?

Joe: What I try to do, and a lot of this came about because of this sort of problem, but a good friend of mine just helped me build a grade check sheet that solves this even better, is I just try to get to certain places by those weeks. So for example, I’ve really focused, on the first few weeks, on working three targets.

So I would have them to a place I needed by the five week. And in reality, I’ve only assessed one target meaningfully. So I just sort of, again, I’m doing meets or not meets. But by the 10 week, my goal is to have six or seven targets assessed at some level, three or four of them at a pretty strong level and a couple enough just to go, "do I like what I see?" I’ll throw him the grade. If I don’t, I’ll excuse it for this time. So I’d make sure that I’ve got, they’re sound on the targets that I’m assessing, that I’ve got enough evidence and I’ve spent enough time that I can give real feedback on it. So for me, it’s just about what can I get done in those first 10 weeks.

And it’s usually the collaboration, the reading process, the reflection. And then at that point, they’re going to have at least one essay and revision for me. So by that point, we’re going to have thesis, we’re going to have developing a line of reasoning. I should have revision, so I shouldn’t, at that point, we’re talking six, seven ish targets.

And then unless one of them is particularly bad across the board, it was enough evidence for me to say the class is not where they need to be. That’s a teacher problem, I’ll kick that one out, I just assess those targets. And I try to keep it to those targets and that tells me how they’re doing at that point.

And by the 10 week, I’m going to have enough evidence to say A through F with some confidence. And the kids will be able to still have plenty of time to improve on the other ones. So I would actually say , sort of to say yes, and to your point about why you dislike them, traditional grading has an advantage on us, but that that advantage just magnifies the sort of pointlessness of traditional grading practice grades, right?

At least I’m doing the things I need to be doing in that time. I’m getting them to a place where they have a sense of, okay, I can write a thesis. My reflection is good. I know how to construct an argument with evidence, even though I’m not quite good enough at it yet. I know how to do it basically, and I know what to do to improve. So they’ve got, information about how they’re progressing, and they know what to do to do better. Whereas it’s much easier for a teacher doing traditional grading to do an interim grade than it is for us. It’s meaningless. And, I would say even more so. But, you know, for us, it is certainly harder.

Sharona: So as I’m listening to this, what I’m wondering is how much opportunity, it sounds like there is opportunity in LA Unified because you’ve got this M, right? So you can be pretty generous to say, "you’re getting an M" means "you’re doing what I need to do" that I’m pretty confident by the end of the semester I can get you to a passing level of competency, right?

Even if a student starts so low that they’re not at your proficiency yet, they’ve made so much growth that you can see their trajectory, right?

Bosley: See and I even, especially at the five week, I use the M a little differently. Like the only students that don’t get an M are students that have shown me something that I should be concerned with.

So it’s not even about, especially at that five week, it’s not even about what they’ve shown me where they are. It’s "okay, have you shown me something in your habits, your study habits, your work habits" with just not doing anything that I am actually concerned. If I’m not concerned yet at the five week, it’s an M.

Like Joe was saying, he almost gives no Fs. I’m the same way. And the 10 week, I feel better about my 10 week grades about them really messaging something to the student. But at the five week, the only thing that really messages, if you have a D or an F, like we need to talk, there’s, there’s ,something going on, some habits, something that we already need to discuss and we need to kind of try to nib in the butt right away.

Joe: That, that’s actually, we’re not different. I mean, the only grades that like, I don’t really do 5 week grades. I look at the grade book and see if I’ve got a bunch of work missing, which usually I’m going to know anyway, but I’m looking to say, did I miss anything? Is there a pattern here that’s disturbing?

It’s exactly the same thing because if students are doing work for me, I can’t think of a situation where I can’t get them to a C, right? Because they’re doing work. I can get them to that 2. As I tell students, when they get a little anxious about my grades is that if you’re trying, the two is a lift you’re going to be able to get.

The three is where it gets challenging, right? Like, proficiency is a legitimate high expectation for a student. But the 2, to get into the ballpark, I mean, there are certainly students where it’s a struggle to get them there, but we can get them there. And if they’re trying, it’s not going to be hard. And a C for me is a super majority of your learning target scores are a 2, which means they’re approaching, they’re doing it at a basic level, not complex. They’re playing the game that we want them to play, just not in a proficient manner yet. So. All I’m really looking for essentially is, are they doing stuff?

And by the five week I’ve read their writing, I have some indication of what’s going on with them, I’ve heard them speak in class, or not speak, which is the first alert, the kid that tries to hide, but I’m doing the same thing Bosley’s doing. There’s no genuine assessment involved in that five weeks because the genuine assessment is happening on one learning target, but I’m just not concerned about it. Even if their learning target score was a 1.5 on that learning target, they’re still going to get the M from me because I can tell that’s going to shake out in the wash. The 10 week, that’s a different thing. I’m going to have more time to push them. I’m going to have more time to give them specific feedback, right?

Because you spend so much time in the first few weeks getting to know students and you know, there’s an AP philosophy that I stole from a really good AP teacher about how to take the test. And it’s called, the philosophy is called, go slow to go fast. That you have X amount of time to do this timed right.

That you spend the first like 15 minutes out of 40 for the essay, really slowly figuring out what you’re going to do. And then you just go pedal to the metal. And I teach it methodically, I’ve been doing this for about five and a half years now this way, and students said to me, like last year, do you realize that’s also your teaching style?

And I’m like, Oh my God, you’re right. That what I do is I really methodically build stuff in. And once I feel like they can do what I’m asking them to do in terms of thinking and talking and reflecting, you know, all the learning tools that they use to construct knowledge in my class, then we go much faster.

So, again, early on, I’m not looking for what other teachers are doing. Like I’ve got a teacher who I handed a bunch of AP Lang students to last year and she’s an excellent teacher, but she’s got, they were on like their fourth essay. My Lang kids wrote one as a diagnostic, they’re going to get it back in two, three days and we’re going to start rewriting it methodically.

There’s too many other dispositions that I want to construct for them before I have them quickly writing and rewriting. It’s just now at work. So it’s very easy for me to use the interims in this way. I just have to be careful. I just look at the calendar. I look at what I need to get done and I make sure I can get them to a place by the 10 week where I have a reasonable sense of what’s going on so the parents are getting a fair shake if we need to call all hands on deck for a student.

Sharona: Well, and it sounds like, and Boz, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m hearing three or four audiences for these interim grades? I’m hearing the student, I’m hearing the parents, I’m hearing the administrators, and either as part of the administrators or as a separate, I’m hearing the coaches as far as like any eligibility things that happen around that 10 week.

So, is the communication to those three groups or four groups different at these different stages? It’s one thing to put an M in an LMS system, but is there a different conversation happening with the students? Boz, I think you have some of these conversations with your students, right?

Bosley: I’m constantly having conversations with my students so yeah, we talk a little bit about the interim grades themselves, but most of my conversations with my students are about learning, not about, you know, actual grades.

Like I said, learn the material, the grades will follow. Yeah, I have some conversations just to kind of let them know what’s going on with it. But no, if I’m talking with my students, I’m going to be talking more about their learning, their progress through the class, rather than their grade. Now, with the 15 week, it’s different. Then I’m close enough towards the end that I’m like, okay, this is where you’re at, this is where if you keep going this pathway, this is where you’re likely to end, and this is what you need to do if you want to end someplace better. So the 15 week, it’s a lot more looking towards the end than the five or even the 10 for me.

Joe: I’m the same way. I’m having constant conversations, especially this time of the year right now, like as kids are walking out, because we’re doing a lot of whole class discussions early on that ends up breaking off into more purposeful group work where they’re constructing knowledge together or they’re revising together, doing different things, right now there’s a lot of pulling it together, and as kids are walking out is one of the few chances I get to talk to them. I’m pulling kids aside, I’m patting them on the back. I’m saying today was good, do more of that. There’s a lot of that stuff happening early on. We’re always giving feedback with the scores we give, but the 15 week is the one time that it’s explicitly about grades.

LAUSD has this great form that they created back in the day and they’re rarely used. So if any teachers from LAUSD hear this I guarantee you there’s probably 4, 000 of them in your counseling office. You can go get them. They are triplicate forms that say " the student is in danger of failing" and there’s one other option and you list the class, you list the date, you list the student’s name, and there’s some check boxes for why they might be in danger of failing and the best part of the form is at the bottom the student has to sign and when they sign, it says on the form, I promise to take this home and show my parents or guardians and it’s in triplicate. So, I give them the top sheet and I keep the other two for when the parents say, "I never saw that" and I say, "yeah, well, the student signed it saying they would show it to you". And I tell that to the students because I don’t want to win, I want them to show it to their parents. And you know, if I give, usually I’ll give somewhere in the vicinity of 18 to 20 of these total across my classes every 15 weeks, and I would say of those kids, three or four max end up failing. The rest it solves the problem.

So the 15 week is a grade conversation. It’s a "how do I save you" conversation. The rest of the time? It’s about learning.

Sharona: So in preparation for this episode, because again, I don’t do this, I mean, I was a parent of high school students, but I was already in the grading world, so I knew to ignore all their stuff, I was researching this and there is one report, I’m sure you’ve heard it. That really bothers me, which is a study that was done in Florida that if report cards are sent home on a Friday, child abuse calls to family services goes up on the weekend. And that does not happen when report cards are given out any other day of the week.

And so the solution, the suggestion was, don’t send them home on a Friday. And I wanted to say, maybe we shouldn’t be sending them home at all? But do any of your students have issues at home because of these interim grades?

Bosley: Especially where Joe and I teach, and this is not something unique to LAUSD or to California, but our students have all kinds of different issues that they’re dealing with. I think that thing, and I’ve seen that study that you’re talking about, I think that is extremely disturbing. I don’t know if not ever reporting those grades is an answer.

I mean we do want our parents to be an ally and a resource to help educate our students. When done right, parents can be a great asset and a great ally for educating the young. So that’s not something we can take away, but at the same time, do our students have life issues?

Yeah, they have a lot of issues that they’re dealing with and unfortunately, that is one of the realities.

Joe: Yeah, I kind of feel like we fall on both sides on the other side of it. What I mean by that is I’ve got either students who their problems are bigger than this, right? So the grade is secondary. Or if I’ve got kids who are in the high achieving magnet, they’re having anxiety attacks over other issues, but the issue about failing my class usually is, it’s not going to cause that.

It’s actually, that actually might get them in gear. You know, I know we had a student who basically had an attempt to die by suicide last spring. And the irony was I wasn’t the cause of it because I’m one of the people who accepted the late work, right? What the student was doing was overloading themselves.

They had told themselves they were going to be that kind of student. They were up till two or three in the morning, every night. And I even said to them a few weeks before, because after their like, you know, 30th late assignment to me, I said, and then they gave me this, this ridiculous sob story that was, that was ridiculous about it was that there was nothing sustainable about the way they were going.

And I had said to the student, something’s got to give kiddo. This is not going to work out for you, if you don’t change what you’re doing. And what I’m, what I said specifically was you’re doing too much. Like back off of one of these classes. It’s not going to work. And it didn’t work right. It didn’t work to a major, major degree, but it wasn’t because of ours. And so again, I didn’t get the sense the parents were abusive. I got the sense that the parents and the student that sort of agreed to this pact that this kid was going to be going to Harvard on his own steam. And the way to do that was to take every possible AP course imaginable.

And then, because I took late work, I became the outlet for where they could find a place to slack. And the problem was that still wasn’t saving them sleep. But I mean, so we’ll have that occasionally, but that’s a self created problem with the student. And then we’ll have the kids on the other end where like getting them to do anything is a stretch, but it’s not because of anything other than they’ve got pressures that are far different.

So school is just a place to hang out, you know? So I certainly, I think if, If those issues are happening for our students, I would argue that’s because that problem persists and the grading’s an excuse for that problem. Just one more trigger that would allow that horrible situation to arise, if that makes sense.

Bosley: So I kind of want to shift Joe from talking about how we deal with these grades to how do you, because again, you are also someone that is training people to do alternative grading, so I want to shift to how do you address this in those trainings? Because like I said, this is one of the three most common things that come up in mine. And it’s the one that I dread when it comes up because I don’t have good answers.

Joe: Yeah, I guess I feel like I do have a good answer. What it boils down to is the stuff that you say all the time, Bosley, which is you can’t do a reboot of your grading practice without doing a reboot of your teaching practice.

They did a really nice slide set up at the EGI training in August. That we gotta get Bosley to start coming to again just for logistical reasons. He didn’t, he’s not there even though he’s one of the biggest EGI champions in our district. But the slide said, and it started in this order, it said, "change in grading practices, leads to a change in assessment practices, leads to his change in instructional practices, leads to a change in planning practices."

And the whole point is that when you take a step in one direction towards grading and all of a sudden you realize it requires you to make all of these changes? And when you come out the other end of this arduous journey, you have a transformed teaching practice. But my argument would be it forces you to ask yourself the question of what are you doing and when, right? If you’re just doing every learning target all the time, yeah, it’s going to be a mess, but who does that? You have to start thinking about when am I teaching this target? When am I teaching that target?

And you come up with some deadlines for yourself. And, by the way, if teaching is getting in the way and I was going to take me to week 11 to get something done in the week 10 grade report, but then the week 10 grade report comes out and my grades aren’t quite as accurate. And I always reserved the right to do a phone blast home or something if I need to, but in general, I can get to places that are meaningful by that time and it just makes me look at what am I teaching and when am I teaching it? And I think if you do the entire process and you don’t just start with, yeah, I’m changing how I grade. If you really, with fidelity, take this journey, it’s going to cause you to be much more mindful about everything you’re teaching.

And then you just look at a calendar. And you decide what am I teaching by this point? What am I teaching by that point? And I do tell teachers, give yourself permission. Again, if you thought you were going to be done by week eight with this learning target, and it takes to week 11, then it takes to week 11.

You score what’s there, right? It’s just a progress report. And again, you should have some ideas. And when in doubt, by the way, I’ll say this for record, make up the grade. And what I mean by that is your evidence isn’t quite in, but you feel like this kid is failing. Say the kid’s failing. Right?

It’s not the 20 week. The idea is to make sure the parents are alert, everyone’s alert. Now, if it’s going to affect their athletics, that’s a different thing, right? Because then you better be really sure because that’s going to have a consequence for the kid. But I’m saying if I’m sure this kid is failing and I don’t quite have the evidence, I’d rather have to explain that to the parents in a way that gets them to get on the kid and to help make sure the kid does well, then to do the opposite and go You know, whoops, you know, because again, the goal, like I said, with those fail slips is to get the student to pass and better yet to thrive.

But for me, if you’re doing it the way that we all talked about doing it, like, look what you did Sharona working with me how we met. I mean, the whole point was you’re so invested in your practice you want to do things the right way. I think if people take this journey. It’s an easy move to just pull out a calendar, decide what learning targets you can teach by when, and you just make sure whatever your grading architecture is, that it is flexible. Because for me, I don’t know if your syllabus works the same way, Bosley, it may be different for you because of college, but I’m a year long teacher anyway. So my syllabus has the year’s worth of learning targets. I don’t promise to get to them all in the first semester, so it’s okay. I get to the ones I get to when I get to them.

Sharona: I have an analogy that I compare traditional grading versus alternative grading. And it’s climbing a mountain. So traditional grading, a helicopter takes you up to the top of the mountain, and that is your syllabus assignment.

So the helicopter ride is the syllabus assignment that you take home, you get it signed, and you’re dropped at the top of the mountain. And then you try to spend the entire rest of the semester attempting not to slip too far. That’s my perception of metaphor for traditional grading. Whereas in alternative grading, you’re starting at the bottom of the mountain.

And in fact, the first distance is the gentle slopes, right? And you start to climb and people climb at different rates. And the goal is to get as far up the mountain as you can get during the term. Whatever the term is, whether it’s a semester or a year or whatever. And I’ve been doing my classes long enough that I can tell what pace is fast enough in general.

And usually, if I were to have to give an interim grade, the only students who would get one is ones who’ve already checked out of the journey. Because, and Bosley and I were talking about this, if a student is still engaged at week six, I can probably get them across the finish line and I know that. So that’s another way to metaphorically think, I think, of your interim grades is, do you have markers along the path?

Bosley: Yeah, but Joe, you said something and I think it’s It’s something that’s very profound and I want to highlight that. And it’s something that Sharona, you and I have talked about, I don’t think we’ve talked about it on the podcast, but, and that is when you go through this process, if you really go through the process of adapting and redesigning your course to do any kind of alternative grading methods, it ends up altering, not just your grading, it ends up altering your entire teaching style. And there’s lots of people that I’ve seen and there’s all kinds of articles out there about how people have tried to do alternative grading and it’s failed because one reason or another, but one of the biggest ones is not doing the first process, the first part of this correctly and rushing through it.

But if you don’t, if you actually really go through the redesign, it does. It completely changes your practice. And Sharona, you and I joked about this because we don’t talk about the instructional practices, especially in the higher ed world as much, because we don’t want to try to turn somebody off.

But everyone that we know in the higher ed world that has done this and really gone through the redesign process, it ends up completely redesigning their whole pedagogy style and process through the entire class doesn’t it?

Sharona: Well, and that’s why my first reaction to what you’re saying is "shh, we don’t talk about that, remember?" That’s the quiet part you’re saying out loud. But yet when people ask me, well how does this work with active learning? And I say, well, I hate to tell you this, but the students are going to drag active learning into your classroom whether you want it there or not at the higher ed level.

Because if you’ve done this and if you’ve done it with some authenticity, The students are going to trust you enough to say, "Hey, you need to stop talking. We have questions."

Joe: My hope for both of you is that you find a better term than alternative grading. I don’t know. Genuine grading? Real grading? Not BS grading?

Sharona: Okay. So do you know why this podcast is called the grading podcast?

Joe: Because you’re talking about grading?

Sharona: Well, no, it’s because I’m trying to recapture grading, the word.

Joe: Yeah, good for all of you.

Bosley: I am trying to cause grading to mean this type of authentic assessment. That’s why it’s the grading conference too.

So, as an interim, the community has agreed to call it alternative grading until such time as it’s no longer the alternative. But we had this whole conversation a few years ago when we renamed the conference. Because we used to call it the mastery grading conference and we got a lot of pushback on the word mastery and its connotations and who decides when something’s mastered and the old joke that you don’t master something till you teach it the first time.

So we were tossing out words and tossing out words and tossing out words and I finally said, you know what, I just want to call this the grading conference because ultimately this is what I want grading to be. So we’re calling it alternative grading for now while we educate people about what we mean by traditional grading, which is points and percentages and the misuse of mathematics. But that’s the aspirational goal is we’re just going to call this grading.

Joe: Yeah, the nightmarish abuse of math that we call grading. Yeah, just to echo, I put you all in an aside there would echo Bosley’s point about the transformation. I’ve got teachers now who are just starting it. And they’re embracing it wholeheartedly, but one of them, a woman named Katie, I don’t want to say their last name, who knows if they want to be publicized, but just profoundly said, "Oh my God, I feel like I’m in so much more control of what I’m teaching now."

I’m like yes, that’s what happens now. You’ve developed learning targets. You spent all this time and then we’re talking about there was a couple weeks. We’re going back and forth. Does this work? Does that work? They’re thinking about what they’re teaching and why. Everything gets easier once you do that, it’s just it’s hard to get there.

And I mean, to say everything gets easier, it’s not like the clouds part, it’s easier. But what it means is the questions you start asking are real teaching and learning questions. Because what you’re thinking, then this is what I’m teaching. Okay. Well, how am I making sure they’re learning it? Is my assessment lined up right? Am I doing what I need to do to make sure it’s easier for them to learn? I mean, all the right questions start to evolve from that.

And now you’re doing that teaching thing. You know what I mean? Which most of us thought we were doing our entire career. And then we realized our grading practice, and everything that produced, made it something that we were sort of trying to fudge on the back end with the grade book because we were not doing anything aligned with skill acquisition. Right? That we were teaching in a way to try to help them acquire skills, but our measurement tools were actually making it harder for us to make sure that they could do it and harder for us to adjust.

You know, if I heard the word formative assessment a million times before I did this, that would be an underestimation. But I never thought about them the way I think about formative assessments now.

Sharona: Yeah, I don’t like formative versus summative. I get the distinction, but for me, everything’s formative until they succeed and it suddenly becomes summative.

Joe: A hundred percent. The only reason I would say summative now differently is to think about it like for me, it’s just an essay. But you’re right. They can redo those over and over again. So again, there’s no high stakes end, right? It just means you’re doing a bunch of them together. Just sort of show me, and if you don’t do them right, I’m going to tell you, go revise it.

So you’re right. Everything’s formative. Everything.

Sharona: Right. For me, the student’s success is what changes a particular assessment from formative to summative, because I’m like, oh, you’re done? Okay, I don’t have to assess you anymore. Check that off the list. But going back for a minute, though, to interim grades, I also think what both of you were saying about how this changes your whole practice. I think one of the reasons you guys are getting questions about these interim grades is because as yucky as traditional grading feels, these interim grades have got to feel even yuckier to someone who’s beginning to wake up to this.

So, what can faculty, what can teachers do if they are in a district that has required interim grades but maybe they don’t have that M? And it sounds like you guys can’t use that M at the 10 week. You can only use it at the 5 and the 15.

Joe: Yeah. And at the 15, it’s useless, but I’ll let Bosley build on this, but I would just say I’ll do the biggest Guskey quote, right? Use your professional judgment.

And that means if the evidence doesn’t back up the grade, but you’re sure it’s where it is, that’s what you put because they’re interim anyway. There’s no consequence. No one can use ed code, like in California, there’s only four reasons that we can be forced to change a grade as a teacher.

And that is a clerical error on our part, a math error, some sort of error, right? Incompetence, bad faith, or fraud. But none of that has anything to do with the first three marking periods. So it’s only the 20 weeks. So when in doubt, use your judgment. I’ve done that plenty of times where I would stress myself out and I have colleagues who do this, where I’m behind on grading.

But I’m not really behind, I was grading too much and I would just go, Oh my God, what am I going to do? Having also.. What do I think the kids at? Put it down and then just be able to be explained to the student what they need to do to do better. That’s the only part that you have to have, right? Because if it doesn’t become a good tool for the students know how to do better, then you’ve got a real problem.

But I would say use a professional judgment. And the smile I saw from Bosley’s face suggests he was if he wasn’t exactly there. He was close.

Bosley: Oh, no, that’s exactly what I was going to say. You know, going back to, you know, one of the biggest themes in. That runs through most of Guskey’s books and, and speeches and everything else that he does is stop giving your professional judgment up to a computer algorithm or a formula.

But that’s what I have discovered through so many of my workshops and my trainings is that there are some teachers that are so tied to that, they don’t trust themselves. That’s what worries them about these interim grades is they’re so used to looking at a computer and looking at that percentage, that number, and that telling them their grade that it does, it completely freaks them out to think, Oh, wait a second. I can’t, I don’t have that to look at. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. What, what, what, what do I base my grade on? Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. It’s, it’s funny if it wasn’t disturbing, right?

Joe: It’s like the Toy Story moment, right? The claw knows, let the claw decide, right? You’re a teacher.

Sharona: Well, but here’s my question though. Is it because they’ve been so programmed into the points and percentages that when they’re grading, they really aren’t evaluating student work?

They’re spending so much time making points decisions that when you say, well, how’s the student doing? They are literally looking at you blankly because they’re like, do you think I remember which sixes, sevens, and eights and why I gave those? I couldn’t have done that and I’m a freaking mathematician.

Okay.

Bosley: Well, it’s even worse. Usually when you ask them, you know, how’s the student doing? Oh, they have an 87%.

Joe: Right. One of my favorite words and our generation, the three of us will get it. Remember the show, the Jetsons?

Sharona: Oh, of course.

Joe: So the dog Astro, if you remember, he was owned by a rich family initially, and his name was Troufas.

And he hated that name. He’d say Troufas, yuch. He just hated that name. But whenever I hear gibberish, I just go, yeah, Troufas it. Like that’s what 87 means. It means Troufas. It means nothing. Right? How’s the kid doing? Troufas. And then when they look at you like you didn’t say anything to me. Correct, neither did you.

Sharona: It’s actually worse than that. It does actually mean something, but it means something so awful that we don’t say it anymore. What it means is this student has been ranked against other students and in this gibberish world, they’re better than this other student’s gibberish. Because when you look at the history of grading, it is very much all about ranking students and not about measuring learning. So I have a whole talk on that one, too.

And this teacher said, in this really warm way, and it’s, I quote it verbatim in my syllabus, and students love it, and I still use it, and I stole it. It is not mine. It is, "the only person I’m measuring you against is you." And that was sort of the first little step I took on this journey without realizing it because I saw that and it just, it filled me with warmth and also a sense of justice, right?

That’s what grading should be. Where do I need you to be? Where are you? How do I get you there? Right? Nothing else whatsoever. And that’s a very good point, Sharona. And it’s one that when people like me and Bosley and you get into this, I think it’s worth remembering. At least for me, like I’ll forget that, I’m not doing that, but I forget that’s one of the injustices we’re trying to undo with getting other people to make the shift.

Sharona: Exactly. It’s disturbing how much, when you really look into this, how much of grading is based on elitism. It’s very much based on white supremacy. It’s based on connections. A lot of the initial grades that were given at some of the institutions of higher education were all based on family connections and things like that.

It was not, there was never meant to be a measure of learning. I’d…

Joe: It sounds so woke.

Sharona: Well, I know. And then worse than that, well, yeah, but then, but then you bleed in it still, even when we went to the a hundred point grading scale. This was during the industrial revolution and when they were designing all of these scientific in air quotes tests, which were put onto a bell curve, and bell curves are, by their very nature, designed to rank the data in terms of how close or far it is from a measure of center. And it’s got it’s roots in eugenics and racism. I mean, it’s just, blaagh I just want to puke its so gross.

Joe: Right we call it, you know, it based on some articles they gave us to really see the factory model, right?

It’s designed to put the majority of kids in the factories to make them workers regardless of what their potential is. And I was making the point to a colleague in an email. I think it’s in between our two recordings, where he was claiming somehow that what I’m doing is in some way inflating grades.

And then when I pointed out, basically, the flaws in his thinking with the percentage based system, I basically said, it sounds to me like you’re deflating grades. That by doing this, again our measurement is success is the 3, right? Success is proficient. And then I also pointed to Marzano, who even says, if you’re going to try to put this thing on 100 point scale, you shouldn’t but if you are, the A is the 3, not the 4, right? And he very clearly says that. But it was a whole back and forth. And I really laid out for him that the only person deflating here is you. Because all we’re doing is trying to see that the kid can do it and I can I could go through that argument, we got there, but that was that’s the point like what you’re talking about, right?

It does have its roots in white supremacy. It does have its roots in classicism and my biggest shift in all of this was to realize well, the 3 is the A, not the 4. Why am I locking an A into you’ve got to be exceptional at something as opposed to you can do all the things I need you to do and that’s not an A? And they’re like that’s a B. And why would that be a B?

Like, what’s B about that? The kid can do everything I need them to do. If there’s something more they need to be able to do then let’s set that as the goal. But let’s not make it, oh, you need to do extra to get the A and there’s that whole thing, right? Where are you ranked in your class? And I think to me that should certainly, if that’s even going to happen, should be a conversation for college, right?

Like, and I get it. They have to figure out all these GPA things and all the other stuff. I think that’s their problem, not ours. Our problem is teaching kids to to do well and help them acquire the skills they need to succeed. So it’s certainly not a game I ever want to be playing again.

Sharona: Well, and we had an episode, I believe it came out this week, where we are talking about artificial scarcity and how grades very much are artificially scarce.

And there are places that they are used that are truly scarce. That are not artificially scarce. Or at least they’re truly scarce today, like spots in graduate schools. Now we can also argue that spots in graduate schools are only scarce because we don’t pay for them, but, you know, there’s some level of reality there.

So this issue of ranking, there might be a legitimate reason to rank students against each other, but then you need to come out and say it. You got to come out and say, we’re ranking students for this reason, and I’m not sure that any given single class should be that ranking, except maybe a capstone course in a college.

Joe: That’s a great point.

Sharona: I teach sophomores, I teach freshmen. Why am I ranking them within a single course?

Joe: And artificial scarcity is such a great term, but like the idea that if I’m teaching kids how to analyze and they can do all these higher level thinking skills in an AP class, again, why am I ranking?

I’m teaching them skills they didn’t have before. I’m teaching them skills that they usually don’t get until college. What’s the purpose? If they can do all these things, they can do all these things. And then, forgive me for what sounds a little braggy, but my last time I taught AP Lit, I had 100 percent AP pass rate and 100 percent AP take rate.

So why am I ranking? They all did what they needed to do. They all got college credit. They all win. Right? Yes. Everyone gets a trophy. Yep. Everyone got a trophy all right. They made their school look damn good. And they made their teacher look damn good. They get a trophy, right?

Bosley: Which is hard to do, if you’ve ever looked at a mirror.

Sharona: I saw that coming, and I wasn’t going to stop it.

Joe: Total setup, yeah, you know it’s coming. Also, by the way, I forgot to say, the thing with the grade deflation was what the teacher was getting mad at was I wasn’t rewarding work habits. And they were saying why are you doing that? How come a kid who doesn’t do the work can get just as high of a grade and these kids who do work deserve something for it?

And my response was they get something for it. The assessments are easier for them. They did the practice. They’re going to be fine. I said, but, in your case, if you’re giving them points that allow them to get an A without passing the assessment because they did all the work, and our kids are only getting the A if they can pass the assessment, which one of us is grade inflating.

Bosley: Yeah, I love that argument of, oh, this is grade inflation and I’m just making it easier. No, since doing this conversion, my expectation of my students has actually gone up. Quite a bit.

Joe: Me too.

Bosley: Because I’ve got now things in place with the grading and with the structure of the class that allows me to have that expectation but still have a way for students to actually meet those expectations without punishing them for being far away from those expectations at the beginning.

You know, the mistakes they made early on doesn’t hurt them anymore. So I can raise those expectations and my students leaving with an A or B now? Guaranteed, as a whole, know more than my students that left with an A or B 10, 15 years ago, so.

Joe: 100 percent. Right? When you know what you’re teaching, and obviously that pushes back to our last Episode together, the learning target stuff, when you know what you’re teaching, you’re being so precise about it, it makes it much easier for you to set higher expectations because you’re already there anyway. You’re already looking at, okay, well, I want it here. Because now I’m being so specific about it and being very precise in what the standards are two things happen. You can explain it in far more detail and the students can do it because you’re being clear about it. And that’s the biggest shift for me, that we could do a whole other episode about, is once you are clear about what you’re teaching, it is so much easier for the kids to do it.

And I didn’t say this last time, but just worth putting it out there to see where you both take it with all your ideas about this, because if there are two people spending more time thinking about this than me, it’s the two of you, it’s the idea when you’re very specific about what you want kids to do, you create a situation where all of a sudden they’re able to do it. Which created me thinking about the assessment I never gave to myself was, this is where I was going that I want to see the two of you take it, if I’m a teacher, and forgive me for sounding like an ed reformer because I hate those people, but if I’m a teacher, shouldn’t my self assessment of my work be, are my students learning?

And this is a thought that came to me, I mean, literally, last year. Not that I wasn’t looking at where my kids were. I’m saying, my self assessment. I need to be looking at, are they doing the things they need them to do? And until I switched to this practice, right? Despite my senior moment, which makes you wonder if I just, like someone with narcolepsy, just lose my train of thought in the middle of the day, multiple times.

Like, I’d never thought about that so directly. Like, look, if I’m teaching this, If I’m good? They’re learning it. Because what I should be doing is checking in, right? If they’re not learning it, what am I doing differently? How do I change it up? How do I make sure it happens? And until you do something like this, you’re playing that little traditional graded game.

Well, I taught it. Right? But no, you didn’t because they didn’t learn it.

Sharona: So that’s why I went here is because I was doing that self assessment. I’m a multi generation education, math education. So I sat here, growing up from the age of 12, listening to a mom is like, Cooperative learning and this and that and active learning.

And I’m bringing this into the classroom and I am failing. My students are not learning. And I think I’m a pretty good teacher. I know I’m a pretty good teacher. People tell me I’m a pretty good teacher. My students are not learning. So I am frustrated that supposedly these tools and techniques that I learned from people that I respect, I’m sitting here going, what is wrong with me?

Why is this not working for me? For me, the reason I became a grading evangelist is because this was the barrier. This was the thing that makes all the rest of it work. Because grades are the most important relationship in the classroom. They are all pervasive. They are all powerful.

It’s still even true in an alternative graded class. It’s just that the system prioritizes the learning. So therefore, I get to do the conversations and the learning. It’s still overlaid by the pervasiveness of grades. So I was doing that question that you asked, and I think that leads also to the faculty or the teachers who are thinking about these interim grades.

What do they mean? Because at some level we’re uncomfortable because they don’t mean anything, but they can mean something.

Joe: They do for me now. Right. They, again, the five week just means on track, not on track. Right? But the other ones, I don’t do the M in the 15 week. I do ABCD the rest of the way. Especially the 15 when it’s my last chance to red alert family members.

Like that’s my biggest concern about the 15. Because the kids who want the A are going to want the A regardless of a grade report. But, they do mean that, right? They mean you are learning this, this, this, this, this, and I hope we can eventually get to the place where we stop even calling them grades.

Because we think of grades as some sort of a, there’s an identity associated with it that makes you good or bad as opposed to the way we talk about it. Even the district says like grading and reporting, right? We are reporting back. We are giving feedback. We are communicating what they’re learning and grades mean that to us, but to other people there’s a disconnect and they don’t realize it.

They’re right. There should be a disconnect because what they’re teaching and what they’re grading probably don’t have much of a relationship, right? But I would even love to evolve even beyond that because what you’re talking about is so much more than just grading, right? It’s real feedback.

It’s, it’s really cementing the learning process in the reporting back process.

Bosley: Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve recorded an episode before this one that will actually come out after this one. But we were talking about, with that guest, about kind of the emotions that are tied to some of the terminology like grades and some of the trauma and emotions tied to those, that lexicon. And talking about how we maybe should be calling them something besides grades because those have a certain meaning and like I said, a certain level of trauma even.

Sharona: Well, and I have picked up the use of the word marks from the English system. Especially because I feel like the word mark has an action that I’m marking like on a piece of paper. So I’m marking work. I’m not taking a sharpie to your forehead. Right? So..

Joe: I mean, maybe not. I mean, it depends on how much they annoy you, right?

Sharona: Right. But I do like this idea, because my marks that I use throughout the course, I reserve the word grades for the final letter grade, throughout the course I’m marking and I’m marking with either my check emoji, which is complete, or my little writing pencil hand emoji, which means you need to do some revision, or my little yellow smiley face thinking person, which is like, hey, you gotta do some more learning because you gotta retake this. But they’re action oriented marks that help communicate my feedback.

But they’re not marking the person, they’re marking the work. And I think if we can continue to reinforce that I think that’s a really good step we can take.

Joe: Yeah. LAUSD just made that a little harder for you because they want to call marks now, if you remember Bosley, the just work habits are marks and the academics are grades, whatever.

I agree with you I use scoring a lot. I got that from AP and yeah, I’m scoring your stuff, but I agree grades are the 20 week, that’s it. You know, the rest is how am I doing? Yeah, I think this is the sort of magic place that you both are really just drilling down on that. I hope more people are really tuning into is the idea that we’re trying to do something with learning here because, you know, you started at the place where I finally got to. Where I was before that was a place where you already also were also, is just the idea of, again, once I switched to this for a kid to improve their grade, they had to show me they learned.

Right? And that’s the answer to the question. How do I get an A? Show me you know or can do this. And that’s a start. But to me, that sort of holistic idea of we’re in this together. My kids this year have really bought into, that I’ve said to them, and this is another reason why I don’t think interim grades are the reason to fret that people think they are, is that I say to my kids, I’m your teacher, I’m your assessor, I’m your coach, I’m your cheerleader, I’m your biggest fan. And they immediately sort of look at me like, what? I’m like, right, that’s my job. I want you to get an A. It’s in my interest for you to get an A. It makes me look good when you get an A, but we’re not going to cheat it. We’re going to get it.

And they just sort of looked at me like, that’s really different. Like, cause some of them have actually gotten to the point where they thought of us as adversaries. Right? Which is just..

Sharona: Unfortunately, my experience as a parent is that some faculty at the higher ed level and some instructors at the levels before higher ed are adversaries.

Joe: Oh, I know who they are too. Yeah, we got them. Bosley and I know who they are. No, you’re right. It’s very sad. And you see these sort of, I can’t speak to higher ed obviously, but with my peers, you see people who it’s like they’re hanging on to the last bastion of power they have. And that ability to sort of bludgeon someone with the grade is what they got.

Sharona: And unfortunately, they don’t realize how much more powerful it is to sit in the space that we’re in. Because I can change lives now in ways I couldn’t before. So.

Joe: Word.

Sharona: All right. So Boz, do you feel better about having conversations about interim grades now?

Bosley: You know, like I said, I still don’t like having those conversations when it comes to trying to train and sell teachers on this. I, especially when I get that group of teachers that are so tied to that percentage and utilizing that as such a crutch, that "oh, I don’t have to think about their learning because I just look at my LMS and it tells me 76 percent so that’s a C."

Joe: But it tells you nothing. It tells you nothing. Troufas, Troufas. Kid’s a 76.

Bosley: You know, so I still dread those conversations. I was thrilled with having this conversation with you, Joe, just to look at how we do these and hopefully give some people that are listening that idea that, you know what, Guskey says it the best, but stop giving up your professional judgment to a freaking computer LMS or an algorithm.

Joe: Especially when you put in the inputs for that algorithm, right? It’s this weird thing where you decided those category percentages, you decided the point totals for the assignment, and then you decided all of that is so sacrosanct and etched in granite that whatever spits out the other end, even though you don’t understand the implications of it because you’re not a mathematician like both of you are, most people are not, right?

So they don’t understand what that equals, but they’re going to go, Nope, that’s what it says. Right.

Sharona: And that’s a very disempowering place to sit. So I guess if that’s the message of this, both with interim grades and with the whole thing, we can take back our power and we shouldn’t be afraid of this.

This is so much more of a powerful place to sit. I know that I’m loving it and it’s not powerful against the students. It’s not power of my students versus them. It’s my power to uplift them.

Joe: To do what our real job is right? To help young people, or adults if you’re teaching in higher ed right, to help people learn the things they want to learn or need to learn to succeed.

And that that’s what makes this a profession worth being proud of.

Sharona: Exactly.

Bosley: And I think that’s a good point to start wrapping up on. Joe, as always I want I want to thank you for giving up your time to join us here. Again, we do plan on having you here, not just as a guest or a interviewee, but as a guest host.

So there might be times where either Sharona or I can’t do this, that we might be calling you going, Hey, you want to join one or the other?

Sharona: Well, and sometimes it’s just a three chair host too.

Joe: That’s awesome.

Sharona: Because these conversations get better the more people participate in them.

Joe: Agreed. And also, Bosley, when you get in those conversations where they’re really frustrated about this, just point them to me. Because this actually is another way for me to bolster why they should do it.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: Well, thank you both very much. And with that, we’re going to wrap this episode up and thank you again to everyone who’s listening to us. We’ll be in your ears again next week.

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The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.