The Grading Podcast

101 – Doug Wilson

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Doug Wilson: Everything has to be tied to it, which is why I talk about culture. Every single thing that we did for years was all focused on how do we make this change in grades? But it impacted everything. But every time, every pd, every meeting that we had was always focused on, this is what we’re looking at, this is where we’re going.

And we gave it to them in chunks that we said, okay, there’s a month between these things. We don’t need you to go out and change the world. We need you to go out and try this one thing. And before you go outta here, what is that one thing that you’re going to try?

Boz: 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 will look at how grades impact our classrooms and our student 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.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today? Sharona?

Sharona: Well, I’m glad it’s the afternoon when we’re recording today. ’cause this morning, I just could not get moving. It was one of those June gloom type things that we have here in LA.

Anyone who’s been to LA, in June we get this marine layer cloud cover that comes in every morning and I was looking outta my windows and I’m like, God, this is the grayest day. And so my mood was super gray and now it’s nice and sunny. So I’m in a much better mood now. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: Well, unlike you and, you know, we’ve been talking about this on the pod for the last couple of weeks. I’m still in my semester and doing more work at the end of the semester with all this planning and stuff I’m having to do with my new office. So I am really ready for the semester to be over.

Sharona: Exactly. Exactly. And speaking of semesters and moving into the summer, we have a guest in the pod today, so we’d like to welcome Doug Wilson. Doug is an administrator at Avondale High School and he reached out to us based on some of our things. So we’re really excited to talk to another admin and, and see how this conversation goes.

So welcome, Doug.

Doug Wilson: Thank you very much.

Boz: So welcome to the podcast. One of the things that we always like to ask a new guest when they come on is, how did you get involved in this kind of crazy world of grading reform or your origin story into this whole thing?

Doug Wilson: It really started when I began teaching. I didn’t go through a traditional education system. And so I’d actually not wanted to be in education at all because I didn’t really enjoy my education when I was in high school. So I came in with a a little bit different perspective on what education could look like.

Started off pretty traditional with some mentors, but I kept asking questions about what are we doing and why are we doing it? And are we really doing what is best for kids and was able to really start asking some of those deeper questions when I was at a charter school and was working through my AP classes, my biology classes and really going, okay, how can we do things different where we can really reflect on our kids’ learning rather than work in a system that really penalizes our kids for iterations and for a longer processing time.

So I really started doing some of this work when I was teaching and then I became an administrator and was really able to have some bigger conversations. And so at the charter school that I was at, we started working through a version of standards based grading.

And as we started working through that, there was still more that we needed to do. I transitioned to to the school that I’m currently at right now and really began some of the deeper work about creating rubrics and having conversations with our staff and our kids about what should learning look like?

We, as the adults, were giving them information rather than allowing for them to live through that and talk to us about what their learning was and having them be a partner in there. So the last 10 years has really been a journey through that to ask the deeper questions of, are we doing what is right for kids?

How do we do what’s right for kids? And at the core of that is grades. When we put grades in front of our kids, the learning stops and we try to figure out the best way to get the best grade possible with the least amount of effort. And none of that has to do with learning. And so we really have to take a step back and look at what we are doing in the class, what kind of culture that we’re creating in the class, and how as we as adults are creating that and giving our kids opportunities. And then how do we take the grading conversation out of it and talk about learning and what progression looks like and give them an opportunity to reflect.

And so that’s kind of where we got to up till now.

Boz: So you said about 10 years. Is that when you started in the charter school or have you been at your current school for like 10 years?

Doug Wilson: I’ve been at my current school for 10 years. This is my 10th year now. I was at the charter school for eight years prior to that.

Boz: Okay. So your journey sounds like it started almost two decades ago.

Doug Wilson: Yeah. I’ve been in education for about 25 years now. But this major journey has been about two decades long.

Sharona: So I’m curious, because we’re finding that doing this grading reform is hard. What made you stick with it?

Doug Wilson: Honestly, it’s the kids and the knowledge that if we don’t continue to move forward and challenge what is out there, change will never occur. When we are outside of the school day, everybody learns through the kinds of ways that we’re talking about without grades. And we talk about the real world and we talk about the school world, but to us, one of our philosophies is, how do we get our kids to adult better?

An adulting veteran means that they know how to do all of the things that we do in silos, together. And so that drives this forward. Education has done a phenomenal job of killing curiosity. And at the core of my soul is how do we reinvigorate that? How do we get curiosity to come back in both for our teachers and for our kids?

Boz: See, and that’s really interesting that you and I have some similarities, it sounds like, when it comes to some of our core beliefs about education and about how a lot of the things that in our public education really is counterintuitive to how someone actually learns. But it took me almost 11 years to realize just how big of a part that grading played in that. I always tried to talk to my students about mistakes are how we learn and I had a poster in my room that said math stands for mistakes allow thinking to happen. It wasn’t until after I changed my grading. That they really started to buy into it.

So it took me almost 11 years to come to the realization of just how much of a linchpin grading is. And every time I think about it, it blows me away. It is such a big part of an educator’s job. A like I said, a linchpin in the whole education system, and yet there’s almost no training, there’s almost no education about the art of grading.

It blows me away just how much it’s taken for granted and just like, oh yeah, sure this is how we do it. We add everything up and divide it and find averages and percentages. It’s ridiculous.

Doug Wilson: Really where it started with me was asking questions. If you talk with any of my staff, you talk with my family, they are like, Doug, you need to stop asking questions. But questions to me are what really drives us forward. When I asked the questions, a lot of it was, what is the root cause?

What am I actually trying to get to and what are the barriers that are getting in my way? And when we started having those conversations with our staff, it was the same thing. We have great teachers. And when we asked them the right questions of why are you doing what you’re doing?

And the question comes back with, well, this is what we’re supposed to do. It doesn’t answer the goal of what we’re trying to get to. ’cause what is the goal? Well, we want our kids to be better adults. We want our kids to be successful in the world. Well, what does that look like? None of those things are ever tied to grades, but it’s the core of what we do.

Everything that we do in the classroom is focused on either learning or getting grades. And to me those two things are are very, very far apart from each other. Even if you have a great teacher in the classroom, everything is about grades in their classroom. They’re still missing the component of the major part of learning because the kids don’t have the freedom to go down those paths.

So we need people to be able to ask questions, to challenge people’s thinking, for them to realize themselves, I don’t have to do this. There are better ways to figure out what is going on. But the trade-off is, is that it takes more energy. You can redirect that, right? If you’re not spending all your time grading, then you can spend your time working with kids and conversing with them and talking to ’em and asking them the questions rather than being the leader.

And it really starts to change. The philosophy of grading is a very teacher heavy thing. Once we take the grading away, then it becomes very student centered. And you start to change the whole culture of the classroom just by removing that, because everybody’s mindset has to go along with that in order for it to be successful.

Sharona: I want you to put your administrator hat on and say, what is it like to do this work as an administrator? Because I comprehend what it’s like to do this as a teacher and as a coach of other teachers, but I’ve never been in a administrative position where I have the power of an administrator to, or the temptation maybe, to say you have to do this. So what has it been like for you? What’s been your process of being an advocate as an administrator?

Doug Wilson: The journey was really about visionary leadership. What does it look like 10 years down the road? And then scaffolding that backwards of, I call ’em spiderwebs. So how do you see all the spiderwebs that intermix in order to get to that point? Part of that is how do you ask the questions to get staff members to recognize that their practices can be modified and that you’re not adding something new to theirs, but you’re taking pieces away in one area and and allowing them space and time in another to use those resources.

How do you do it in a scaffolded way? You always have those individuals that are quick to jump out on something, and then you have those individuals that are going to be a little bit slower and wait for others to do it. And then you’re gonna have those that are really slow and want to kind of dig their heels in.

A lot of that happened with smaller conversations where I would go in and have conversations with our staff members about, Hey, what’s going on in the classroom. And then I would ask a question that would kind of lay the foundation for me to be able to come back and ask some deeper questions later on.

As we continued that through, we really did that in departments. As we continued on, we set up specific times throughout the year where we would all come together as a group and we would ask questions like, okay, what do you find as important for our kids to be able to be successful in science regardless of what class they’re doing? We would get to the point where it didn’t have anything to do with the content of what they were talking about. That’s the vehicle that they were doing. But it was really the skills that they were looking to do. So communication and argumentation, all of these transferable things that we see as adults and out in the world.

And so how do we leverage that to make rubrics that define where our learning journeys are going to be through the course of time. And then we start asking the question of, okay, so what does an A look like in this? What does a B look like in this? And people are like, well that doesn’t work in this.

You’re like, well, why? Well, because our kids have to progress through this. Right? Okay. So if the kids have to progress through this, what if you assign them a D right now? And a lot of times I would use analogies, and I use this with our parents and stuff too, is riding a bike, right?

When we started riding a bike, when we were a little kid, nobody judged us. Your parents never told you that you were a failure because of the first time you fell off your bike. They coached you, they put you back on, they asked you what you needed to do, and you tried the next thing. And you continued on and continued on, continued on.

And now you may be jumping off of ramps or doing whatever, but it’s the iterations that that really matter. And so it’s that learning progression. And so once we started having those conversations about do your practices match with what your goals are? We started to gain some momentum with larger groups of people.

And then it came to a point where we said, Hey, what does this look like? And how do we do this as a building? How do we get this to be across the board so that all of our classes are doing this with fidelity and that we are removing this so that as a building, we have this culture.

Now I just shrunk that down into like three minutes of time, but that’s 10 years of work that was consistent and intentional building through where the staff was, where they needed to go, and asking them incremental steps and giving them the onus. And that’s really where me as a building administrator came into play, was planting the seeds and allowing for the next steps to occur and giving them what we call “homework”.

So I put those in quotation marks. ’cause when we say homework, we talk about what are you gonna do before the next time that we meet is going to happen? How are you going to experience the things that we’re talking about? So when you come back, you have a foundation of what we’re trying to do.

And notice all these things that we’re talking about is what we’re mirroring for them in class. So we want them to be able to do these exact same things that we’re working through in their classes to practice those things. And we were very intentional about calling those out. We’d pause in our meetings and say, Hey, look, this is what it’s looking like when you have these kinds of conversations.

Look at what’s happening when none of you are being graded right now. Right? But you are all learning. We’re having conversations and we’re dialoguing and you’re getting feedback through this. When you come back, you’re gonna offer feedback and we’re going to continue to grow. And so that’s what it’s been like as an administrator.

Boz: There’s several things that I wanna ask you, Doug. And some very specific technical questions. If for any reason I ask a question that you don’t want to answer, that’s fine. But I’m really curious about, if you’re doing this school-wide, what kind of things are universal to the school and what kind of things are not universal to the school that maybe are to the department. How much consistency and how much is, yes. As long as you follow these things, you can have these other freedoms. I’m really curious as to kind of the hard and softs of what you expect.

Sharona: We’ve been doing this too long, Bosley, because that was my question.

Doug Wilson: We spent a lot of time collaborating. So this is not an administration kind of developed idea. This is a how are we sitting down and collaborating on what those hards and softs are? So I do wanna preface that. when we were working through the process, we got to a point where we were using what was de defined as a logic rule. In order to determine where the students were at as they continued on, we came up with three to five power practices that we would call them. So that’s part of the sauce is each department had their ability to define three to five standards or power practices or competencies that were defined in the rubrics based on what their definition of what a successful learner would be in that department.

So those were some of the softs. As we went through the development of what the grading practices were, some of the hards were, we are going to look at the most recent five assessments that are going on to look for a pattern to determine what the overall value for that specific standard would be so that we would know, and the kid would know, and the parent would know where that student is currently at, at that given time based on all the evidence that has been collected.

The reason that we were looking at the most recent five, and we settled on the most recent five, is because it gives our students opportunities to fluctuate in their learning. We know that we know that every kid is not going to be perfect every single time, and a four for us was not perfect. A four meant that they had reached the bar that was set for them.

So I wanna be clear that a four does not equate to a hundred percent. We didn’t have a percentage that they were equated to. It was a proficiency level that that they would be able to reach. So just like there’s many levels of professional athletes, right? But once you reach a professional athlete level. You are now a professional.

So there was tons of space above that that students would be able to get to. But the 4, 3, 2 1’s were set on what those were equating to. The language in those had to be similar across the board, but they had to be content specific.

Lemme rephrase that. They had to be skill specific, but a lot of times that allowed for a little bit of content to go in there. And then we did use the last five, and those were some of the hard pieces that we were looking at. We did not allow for extra credit. Almost all of our assessments were in real time assessments. We did not weigh any standards more than another. So every assessment was “worth” the same all the way through. That way if you did give a quiz, which we didn’t give very many quizzes and we didn’t give very many large tests, there were components as it went along. ‘Cause again, we’re looking for their continuation of their learning.

We did say that they had to have eight to 10 assessments for each standard. And so those were some of the hards and soft that we worked through as we got through the process.

Boz: Okay. And then you mentioned one of the other key components for educators like us, K 12 educators, that our higher ed colleagues don’t have to deal with, that’s parents. That was one of the things that at least in my opinion, I think Sharona, you agreed, that that parent communication should really start with admin. Especially if you’re trying to do it at a schoolwide. So I’m curious how you did that parent communication and what was that like?

Was that a big fight? Was that a take a lot of time to get parents to understand? Was it something that they jumped on board really quickly?

Doug Wilson: There’s a little bit of story that goes along with this one. We set up a lot of opportunities for our parents to come in, whether that was whole group meetings, whether that was individual meetings, and a lot of that was admin to begin with, to just talk about what does that process look like.

We did board meetings where we went in and talked to our board about what was going on in the classrooms. We invited people in to see the things. Over the course of time, we built the capacity with our staff members to send out videos for our curriculum night that would talk about what was going on in their classes regarding standards-based assessing.

And we would have more and more parents coming in and doing one-on-one. When we were doing a whole group, there was a lot of I think being blown away by something that was so different than what people had been raised in. But when we had one-on-one conversations, there was a lot of connection to, oh, this totally makes sense. I see where this is going. But still some apprehension that was there as well of well, I don’t know if this is really what should happen because we’re not seeing tests and are they gonna be college ready and are they gonna be ready for the real world if we’re not giving them three hours of homework every night?

But we’re looking at, at trying to really assess their learning in real time, right? And with things like, okay, you don’t get extra credit and there is no more, we’re not looking at late work because we really want to see where you’re learning right now. So we can give feedback real time and then you can continue to grow.

That was a big journey. We did get to a point this year where we had a little bit of a reset based on some feedback that we received. So we did move to a point where we are currently giving grades on a consistent basis. And so we are are looking at how we as a school can circumnavigate that to make sure that we continue to push forward with our standards based assessing model and what is good for kids by putting them at the forefront.

Boz: So I’ve gotta ask, because I’ve heard this from a few parents, I’ve heard this from tons of other teachers, though, especially in the high schools. Did you get this argument from your parents, or this concern from your parents, “but that’s not how it’s gonna happen in college”?

Doug Wilson: Yes, and and we actually had we actually had a lot of counters to that. A lot of our new staff that are coming in that are teachers for us in their early twenties are like, this is absolutely what is going on. They are doing standards based assessing like, I just got out of a four year program and this is what they’re doing.

We worked with a couple colleges and universities when we were working with NGSX kind of initiatives, and they also said the same thing. They’re like, not only are we doing those kinds of things, but we’re looking for high schools and we’re looking for kids that can think for themselves.

And the way that that happens is by removing those grades because that we’re not in competition with each other. We are moving forward because of our learning. And so we absolutely saw that. It’s a difficult thing to break the mentality of because our parents are not in the buildings all the time. Our kids are really resilient and whatever you put in front of them, if you can justify it and they understand what’s good for them, yes, they’re gonna push because everybody wants what’s easiest. And extra credit and just doing what the teacher tells me to do and getting a grade and moving on and not having to think about anything is the easiest thing to do.

But we know as adults, we do have to think about what happened yesterday and what’s gonna happen three days from now. And it all matters together. And so our kids were super resilient. Our parents continued to think about, well, this is not what it was like and this is not where they had come from. And it’s difficult to separate that ’cause they’re not in the system every single day.

Boz: I know this is only, when we record, we see video, but we only put out the audio. I wish we had camera on when I asked that question, sharona. You rolled your eyes so hard, they almost went to the back of your head. Because we have heard that this is not how they do it in college argument so much it was hilarious to see your reaction.

Sharona: And then we get the argument in college, oh, but this is not what they were used to in high school and we can’t expect them to adapt. I am so tired of the conversation that our kids can’t…. fill in the blank.

Doug Wilson: Yeah,

Sharona: I, I’m just tired. They are super resilient. I’m so tired of it.

Doug Wilson: Right. They are super resilient. I have yet to see a kid that can’t do something that we give them an opportunity to do. It may take longer, and they may need some coaching, right? But that’s what we’re here for.

Boz: That’s what we’re supposed to be here for. Yeah.

Doug Wilson: Correct.

Sharona: That’s crazy. I wanna go back though for a minute to something that you were talking about, if it’s okay. I wanna go back to that consistency. ’cause it sounds like you came to a very high level of consistency with the five most recent things across the building. And one of the things that we’ve been working with schools on is, in my experience at the higher ed level especially, the disciplinary differences that come up can be pretty intense, which is why we have really different flavors of alternative grading in my world.

So we have standards based, which is get your learning outcomes. You collect evidence on your learning outcomes and you do something like five most recent or whatever. But then you have a specifications based structure, which to me it’s based on your standards based, but it overlays project completion things.

Yep. That, yep. And so did you have any pushback or is there room for faculty and different disciplines to have some of those nuances in their grades? Or how do you account for disciplinary differences?

Doug Wilson: So that was really where our standards came into play. So we have CTE, which is our career tech education classes, in our building.

And they were actually thrilled to do something along these lines because they’re in career tech. In career tech, if you go in and you’re a computer engineer, you’re not taking tests all the time. Like you’re not getting grades all the time. You may have to take tests to get certified in things, and that’s what they used. And so when we would sit down and work on what do the rubrics look like and what are assessments going to look like in here? That was absolutely on the forefront of CTE of, Hey, how do we use our certification exams as a portion of what is expected?

And we looked at thresholds. So we had to think about, okay, how do we give them opportunities along the way to be able to wrestle with some of these certification exams so that they can be ready for it when they come to it? At the end of it, it’s about being very intentional in what opportunities that we are putting in front of them with an understanding of what that end goal is supposed to be.

And that was the same for all of our disciplines. Our AP classes looked at different levels of of standards than our regular level classes did. Because they were looking at different sets of skills. And so what we found is initially there was a lot of separation.

The philosophy that we work on at our building is good teaching is good teaching. So no matter what discipline you’re teaching, there are core examples of how to get students involved in their own learning. Right? And it doesn’t matter whether you’re English teaching or math or social studies or whatever. And so what they found was is as they continue to have more and more conversations, we could really give assessments to anybody, regardless of what department they were from, and they would be able to look at it through this level of the skills and go, okay, that kid is at a two or a three.

So we spent a lot of time with interrater reliability so that we could see cross-departmentally it made sense and we could have better conversations about our kids and blur the lines better as well between our classes.

Sharona: I’m really curious about the details. I don’t know if we have the capacity, but because we work with all of these different disciplines and they really wanna know, how does this work for me?

Doug Wilson: Ask a specific. And.

Sharona: Okay, so, so let’s take a math class versus a science lab class. Like a lab portion. Okay. What would a specific learning outcome or standard and the associated proficiencies level look for, say, algebra two versus someone who’s trying to show proficiency in a lab portion of chemistry or biology.

Doug Wilson: Okay. So, this is gonna potentially push a little bit. In our buildings, all of our power practices were skills. If you look at any standard in in Michigan, any of the Michigan State standards, they all start off with power verbs, right? Evaluate, analyze. And so when we were developing our our power practices, we took out those power verbs and those were really what our people identified as what our students actually needed to do.

So if you have to analyze in, let’s say for example, you’ve gotta problem solve in Algebra 2. Problem solving, there are specific steps to go through for problem solving. There’s a critical thinking component. There’s an analysis component. There’s a number sense component, right?

And so there’s all of these things that go into what a definition is of problem solving. That doesn’t matter what content it is. So when we look at Pythagorean Theorem or we look at the quadratic formula or whatever that may be, we are looking at a skill that transcends the content. So over the course of time, they are constantly able to show their problem solving skills no matter what we’re allowing them to to do.

In our case, we use a building thinking classrooms model, so our students are up on the walls. You guys nodding your head. Okay. So, you know what’s going on. You want me to So building think.

Sharona: You want me to pull my Liljedahl book out? I mean, it’s right over there.

Doug Wilson: No, that’s, that’s all right. So, so we use building thinking classrooms because again, our goal is to get our kids up communicating with each other showing their thinking on the walls so that it’s not just hide and seek with their their pencils, right?

We’ve got whiteboard tables, all that kind of stuff. But it’s really about visible thinking, but it allows for our teachers to, in real time, recognize what problem solving looks like and where our kids are at along that trajectory. It’s literally the same kind of thing. If we’re talking about data analysis in a lab class, we’re not looking at whether or not they can do the specific lab itself because we’re going to be teaching them how to do that.

We’re gonna give them opportunities to be able to do the lab. But if our goal is how do you actually collect the information, how do you assess the information? How do you analyze the information? And how do you present the information in a way that is authentic and shows that you understand the concepts that we’re talking about?

We are looking at analysis and that to that, to us is the skill that we use. So no matter what happens, they’re gonna do seven labs in a lab class. All of those labs are going to have three or four core essential skills that we are going to be able to look at and assess through the lens of the content.

But it’s going to give us an opportunity to see it over the course of time so that they are able to show us, with evidence, that they can actually analyze things. Because at the end of the day, we don’t care whether they can do a titration lab. If they’re gonna go off and do chemistry, they’re gonna go off and do titration labs til they’re blue in the face.

We care can they collect that data in a way that makes sense? Can they articulate that data? Can they analyze that data? And can they communicate that to us in a way that shows us that they understand science? And then if they can’t early on, we give them feedback, they look at the feedback themselves, and then they continue to grow by getting that experience over and over and over again.

So that is how we look at it. So what you end up seeing is, well, hey, you know what? There’s a lot of overlap between the skills that you need to be a scientist and the skills that you need to be as somebody who is exceptional in English, right? There’s reflection and perseverance and all those kinds of skills that we call soft skills, but are really very intentional things that we typically don’t teach.

Because when we look at a standard, we look at the last half of it and we go, oh, we need to teach Pythagorean Theorem, when in reality that’s not what we need to be doing. We need to be looking at what are we actually supposed to be doing? What is that skill that is going to translate?

Sharona: So I just wanna let you know that Bosley’s currently preparing his resume ’cause he wants to get a job with you now. I would too, but I don’t have a credential, but I just wanted to point that out except I don’t know that he wants to move to Michigan, but.

Boz: So I have a question ’cause I’m not familiar with Michigan. Are you guys a common core state?

Doug Wilson: We are.

Boz: Okay. So then you guys have 8 standard practices of mathematics. So are a lot of those things that you’re actually assessing are more tied to those and like learning to be an actual mathematician rather than learning how to mechanically do the Pythagorean theorem or the quadratic formula?

Doug Wilson: Correct. But there is a there is a requirement to be able to do that, right? I can’t be proficient in my math, I can’t show you my problem solving skills if I don’t know how to do those core things, right? Yeah. So there is a step to do that. But if the goal is for them to learn, learning happens in authentic manner, it doesn’t happen by providing the same way of thinking every single time and then trying to ask them to just regurgitate that to us.

It is what is the thinking behind it? So why are we doing what we’re doing? What is actually happening with the numbers that we’re moving around? Why are we creating this kind of scenario? And so those math practices that you’re talking about allow us to do that because we can continuously move the pieces around to create authentic opportunities.

And it’s not about whether you can do math on a test. It’s about whether you can do math because you can think about it and you see a problem in front of you and you’re like, oh, you know what? I can put these pieces together. I may not have all the answers to begin with, but I am good enough at thinking through this to be able to take these pieces that I see and I can identify and I can put all this, I can put it all together.

Boz: See, I don’t wanna get on my bandwagon ’cause I can really go on about this, but I think that right there is at the core is one of the biggest problems with American math education, especially in the K 12 world, is we’re so hyper-focused on the mechanics of solving equations rather than the understanding of the why and the how. We so focused.

Sharona: It’s not just k12.

Boz: Well, but that’s the world I’m mostly in. Yes, you need to be able to do that, but that’s part of the process of, you know, the bigger pieces and we just, we stay so focused on that and then we wonder why a student that sees Pythagorean Theorem for the first time in eighth grade, when they come to 10th grade, they’ve acted like they’ve never even heard the thing before. Is because they only learned the mechanics of doing it and not the bigger picture. And that’s what’s.

Doug Wilson: Well, I’ll actually bring that back full circle. I would say that a lot of that has to do with grades. Yeah.

Boz: Yes, it does.

Doug Wilson: I was just talking to my kids the other day. When they’re done with a unit, I’m like, Hey, when are you gonna see that stuff again during this semester?

And they’re like, no, I’m done with it. I don’t have to worry about it anymore. So they just, it’s out their head and it just moves on. There’s no reason because there’s no learning continuum. There’s unit stops. So we get to the point, we end it and we’re like, okay, you’ve shown me that you have learned this in this pocket of time.

And what we’re saying is that it’s irrelevant. If we’re not going to continue that process on. It is irrelevant to them. Yep. Which is where the skills come into play for us to go regardless of what you’re seeing in front of you, how can you go about looking at this? But the other piece that I would say is that inquiry in math is generally lost.

We don’t put problems that are unknown, even though math equations themselves, somebody was curious about something was like, how can we figure this out? We typically give the solutions to the problems before we actually give the problems, and then we eliminate the curiosity that goes with it and we just wait for somebody to tell us what the next equation is going to be.

Boz: Yep. And then we also whitewash it so much to make it to where it can be done by hand. ’cause for some reason that’s so important and get nice reasonable answers. We take all the reality of, because math can model real life beautifully, but the math is usually ugly. It’s not.

Doug Wilson: Yes.

Boz: You know, you don’t get answers like X equals three.

Doug Wilson: Right. Right, right.

Sharona: It’s fascinating. And listening to you talk about the world that you’re existing in, right? Because it sounds like your school is now to the point where you’re existing in this world of authentic learning. Would you feel, not that you’re done with your journey, but you’re in a space where that is probably more often than not?

Doug Wilson: Yes, it is. It is something that we consistently have conversations about and are constantly figuring out how we can create more of those opportunities. Yes.

Sharona: So if someone is looking at this, and let’s say they’ve started the grading conversation. And they’ve got some people doing it and some people not doing it yet. What are some of the critical intermediate steps? Maybe if there’s two or three where if you were to look back over your 10 years and say, here’s a couple of things I think we really did right.

Doug Wilson: Are you talking about from a building administrator perspective or a teacher perspective?

Sharona: From a building administrator perspective, if you were to say to another administrator who wants to walk the path you walked and is really unclear other than just asking good questions. ’cause you know, we heard that, are there a couple of critical milestones or things that you would lay out sort of as a path to allowing an administrator to walk down that path?

Doug Wilson: Yeah, I would say the first and most important piece to start this journey is that you have to be able to picture what it should and could look like five, 10 years down the road as a building. You’ve gotta be able to close your eyes and see and feel and hear what a classroom is, or the building is, going to sound like when you walk down the hallways and when you walk into a classroom.

And not that it’s going to end up like what you wanted in your head, but you have to have a picture of what that goal is going to be. And you’ve gotta be able to see all of the components on how they all work. And then you’ve gotta take the time to walk through with your staff and have a conversation with everybody in your building to know where they are at.

And it doesn’t mean where they are at in your vision, but where they are at in their thinking with kids and education. And you’ve gotta be willing to, I’m gonna say this, I’m sorry. You gotta be willing to ask the question to them about what do they actually think their goal is down the road?

That will give you a lot of insight. And then you have to be willing to spend the time with all of the staff members, not at the same time, but all of the staff members continuously and helping them to see what their next step is. And once you’re able to do that and help them see where their next step is, then it’s okay, how do I put some pieces in front of them that they have to experience then so they get out of their own comfort zone and start to challenge their own thinking.

And once you can do that, then the pathway really starts to take hold of itself. You do have to guide it some, but there are people that start to take the reins in that and start to move forward. And then it’s how do you get everybody to move in a space and a pace that is doable and recognizing when you can and can’t take the big steps.

Sharona: So I. Really relate to what you just said, and I’ll let you go Boz one second. But because I, unlike the two of you that actually started questioning your practices around grading, I stumbled into it.

I was looking for materials for calculus two. It was my first time teaching it in many, many, many years. And I stumbled across some blog posts that were about calculus two that happened to be about grading. And what I came to realize is why I was so frustrated with myself is I had a sort of unconscious vision of who I wanted to be as a teacher, but I hadn’t done the work to figure out what was in my way. And it turns out that grading was the big stumbling block. So if someone had been there to ask me that question, I think it would’ve been amazing.

Doug Wilson: And that’s what I’m saying is, and I know it’s cliche at this point, ’cause I’ve said it so often, but it really is like that. That is if you can see the vision and you have the ability to ask the questions. Again, it’s not why are you doing what you’re doing? It’s, hey, what do you feel is the goal, right? And you can hear what they have to bring to the table. That unlocking that is, is super powerful.

Boz: Well, and I don’t think it’s cliche at all that, especially considering you have a science background, that’s question is driving everything.

Doug Wilson: That’s, that’s fair.

Boz: That’s what should drive, but I did wanna kind of ask the opposite version of that question. ’cause you’ve been on this journey for 10 years, you’ve had to have hit some potholes or some pitfalls. So are there any of those that if I was a administrator that’s trying to do something similar to what you have done, is there any of those that you would caution or at least say, Hey, be on the lookout for this?

Doug Wilson: Yeah, I would say that, I mean the current road bump that I talked about earlier is doing everything possible to bring as many parents along as possible. They’re going to be the ones that that question the most. But other than that, the thing that I would offer is understand that in education change is not something that people like, but if we do it and they know that there’s support that goes along with it, time is on your side.

There’s always going to be an uproar. There’s always gonna be pushback, but if it is grounded in the work of what is good for kids, everybody will always come around to it. This change put a lot of pressure on all of our teachers because they had to rethink everything that they were doing.

It impacted absolutely everything. It wasn’t just about grading. It was about, okay, now that we’re doing grading, what does assessment look like? How are we asking questions in class? What does our culture look like? How are we going to build community so that we can have conversations with our kids as opposed to just offering feedback on a piece of paper.

All of that is uncomfortable. And you have to be willing to put people in an uncomfortable space and partner with them along the way and know that they’re gonna be there and be resilient. You’ve gotta be able to persevere and understand that there are going to be trials along the way, and you have to persevere through that with the knowledge that you are doing what is best for kids.

Time will allow for everybody else to come along. And it doesn’t mean that you push people too fast, but it does mean that you continuously move them so that they don’t ever jump off of the track and go nope, I’m not doing this anymore.

Boz: That’s interesting that you said and you brought up time. Because that’s one of the things, especially in the K 12, one of the issues that I run across the most is everything needs to be done next week.

You go to two 2-hour trainings on alternative grading and we wanna see changes on Monday. It doesn’t happen that way. Literally, i’ve done some of these trainings and by the end of the first 30 minutes they’re like, okay, sure, we’re bought in just teach us how to do this in our LMS system and tell us what you wanna. And I’m like, no, no, no, no. That’s not how this works. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that I would like to say to any administrator out there listening is you’ve been on a 10 year journey. You just said how time is your biggest asset. It’s only asset if you give your teachers time to develop it. Yeah. This cannot be rushed.

Doug Wilson: No, not at all. And the time has to be 1 – intentional, and 2 – they have to be continuously on the journey. There can never be a okay, we did a PD on the first day of the entire school year, and then we expect this to be done at the end, right?

Everything has to be tied to it, which is why I talk about culture. Every single thing that we did for years was all focused on how do we make this change in grades? But it impacted everything. But every time, every pd, every meeting that we had was always focused on, this is what we’re looking at, this is where we’re going.

And we gave it to them in chunks that we said, okay, there’s a month between these things. We don’t need you to go out and change the world. We need you to go out and try this one thing. And before you go outta here, what is that one thing that you’re going to try? Okay, cool. Now that you’re gonna try that, you’ve got an accountability partner and know that I’m gonna be coming down and I’m gonna have a conversation with you.

’cause I want to know how is this going for you? And then we were able to take the next step and the next step and the next step. But without those intentional steps, time is irrelevant because people are just gonna settle back in unless there’s a continuation of the learning forward.

Boz: See, and I’m sure this happened, but I want to spell it out for any of the admins listing. So let’s do a hypothetical. I am a math teacher in, in your school. We have one of these. I’ve made a commitment. We get back together. What happens if I’m unable to fulfill the commitment or I tried it, I tried to fulfill it and it just bombed. Like what happens to me as the teacher?

Doug Wilson: Nothing happens to you as a teacher. We have a conversation and surprise, surprise i’m gonna ask you questions. I’m going to go, Hey, talk to me about what happened. And if you’re like, you know what? I didn’t get to it. My, my conversation is gonna be cool. Okay, so you didn’t get to it today. When are you going to do this?

Because I want to come back in and have this conversation, you know that we’re meeting in three weeks from now, so when next week are you going to be able to try this? Okay, you’re gonna do it on Wednesday? Okay, cool. I’m gonna come in on Thursday. And now we’ve got that accountability, right?

It’s not a you’re in trouble. It is a, Hey look, I wanna partner with you and I can only partner with you if you try it. If the teacher was like, you know what, I tried this and it failed miserably. Okay, cool. What did you learn? What does this look like to you? How do you think that you’re going to adapt it? Did you talk with the kids at all about what happened?

Why do you think it happened the way that it happened? Did you talk with anybody else? Does anybody else running the same kind of thing? Do you want me to come in and partner with you? So you’re looking for a partnership there. If you want them to trust you for them to fall forward, you’ve gotta be able to allow them to do that and know that that’s exactly what we’re expecting our kids to do, right?

And so we’re mirroring that with them and saying, look, we want our kids to do what you just did. We want our kids to go in and try something and be like, I completely sucked at this. And be like, okay. Why? Why did you, and how do we do better when we look at it the next time? And that’s really where the trust comes into play and the culture builds, and then people are like, okay, cool.

I’m not gonna get reprimanded for this. I’m gonna get applauded for doing this. And then at the next staff meeting or the next meeting, I may go, Hey, cool you know what? You tried this. Can you talk to us at all about your experience? And then we celebrate that kind of stuff. And then it becomes a culture of cool, we can do things that we can try things outside of the box.

Boz: Yeah. And I was gonna point the mirror the of what you said out to exactly what we are doing as educators in the classroom. You gave feedback. I had another attempt without any kind of penalty to it. It’s mirrors exactly what you would want the teacher doing with the student.

Doug Wilson: Exactly. In the, and guess what? There’s no grade right? There’s no grade. Yeah. You still grew, you learned. Right? It’s amazing how that works.

Sharona: I know we’re beginning to come up on time, so I have one last question for you, and then Bosley, you can ask whatever last questions you have. Can you share any key resources that you think would be valuable to administrators who are listening to you and saying, well, gosh, I don’t know how to ask these questions, or, I don’t know what questions to ask, or I don’t know how to start this journey. What would you recommend that administrators do to get themselves going, to feel like they can do this?

Doug Wilson: The best advice that I can offer is everybody should have a critical friend. And you need to find somebody that is going to be willing to be that critical friend to you to try stuff out. A lot of the administrators that I work with, and I coach, we work together and I’m a critical friend with ’em, and I listen to what they have to say, but I lay it out first.

So like, if I know that I’m struggling with questions, I’ll go into somebody and I’ll say, look, I’m struggling with how to ask these questions or what I want to do. This is the goal that I’m trying to get to. I’m gonna ask you some questions. Can you give me feedback on that? And that really allows for some relationships to be built, but also to develop some critical friends that are going to help you through that process.

I’ve done that with teachers when I’ve been trying to work through some difficult stuff. I’ve done that with other administrators. But really, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ve gotta be able to ask somebody and go, okay, I can’t do this. This is what I’m trying to do. Let me try this out with you.

Because a book is not going to, there’s things like adaptive schools, right, which does a great job of helping people coach things. But it’s a very prescriptive program and you can’t do it unless you go and practice it. So having somebody that you can go to and go, look, I need you to be completely honest with me. I’m gonna ask you some questions. How do they come across? What do they sound like? And then if you’re a building administrator, develop a team that is going to be honest with you. This is my goal. This is what I’m trying to do. I need you to give me critical feedback so that I can figure out how to do this better.

Boz: Like Sharona said, we are coming up on time. It has been an absolute pleasure. I did wanna throw one thing out there ’cause I think this is a unique situation. I would love if there’s any of your teachers that would like to come on and kind of do a part two of this and kind of get their viewpoints and how they see things and their experience as someone that saw this kind of leadership and went through this process with you. I’d love to have a couple of them on and kind of continue this conversation from the teacher point view. But.

Doug Wilson: Bunch of them that would love to have this conversation with you.

Boz: Absolutely love it. I wanna thank you for coming on. This has been a great conversation and for everyone else wanna thank you guys all and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com.

Or you can share with us publicly on Facebook or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a featured topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky.

The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.