The Grading Podcast

102 – Sean Morris

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Sean Morris: Don’t believe this little world they made for us. And I think that’s an incredibly important piece of all, that’s where critical pedagogy comes out of is you don’t have to grade. You don’t have to do these things that you think are concrete, necessary aspects of education. These were made up at some point and they can be remade. And so don’t believe the things that don’t sit well with you. Make different choices. Figure out how to make those different choices. As much as as much as you can.

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’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.

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: I am doing well. I’m going to do that podcast magic time travel stuff and say I had a great time at the conference. That is going to be in the past by the time you hear this, but it’s actually not in the past yet, by the time we’re recording this.

Boz: Yeah, we’re recording this a little bit before the conference, but yes, it will be coming out a couple weeks after. So if you’re surprised that we’re not talking about the conference, that’s why it’s actually still in our future in the past when this comes out.

But let’s talk about today’s episode. So I am super excited to welcome Dr. Sean Michael Morris to our podcast today. Sean has been working in digital education for 22 years. And he helped to essentially found or make it more visible, the field of critical digital pedagogy. And he co-founded the Journal of Hybrid Pedagogy, which I believe is where you really got to know Jesse Stommel, if I’m correct.

Sean Morris: Yeah, a little bit. We knew each other actually in grad school.

Sharona: Okay, so we’ll talk about that, I’m sure. But since then he is been at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. He’s been in several institutions including Middlebury College, University of Mary Washington, and University of Colorado, Denver. And then he has been very public. He’s got work featured on NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, inside Higher ed, Times higher ed, the Guardian Forbes Fortune Podcasts, spoken to audiences on six continents, which I’m pretty sure is several more continents that I’ve ever visited, and does alternative grading and also AI. And imagination in teaching and learning. He has co-authored several pieces including An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital P edagogy, and a couple chapters in the books, The Ends of Knowledge and Virtual Identities and Digital Culture.

So, welcome, Sean.

Sean Morris: Thank you so much.

Boz: Even though that was quite a lengthy introduction, is there anything that she missed or anything else that you want to add to your introduction?

Sean Morris: So I’ve always worked in professional development and faculty development, either unofficially or officially in various capacities. And, so if there’s anything more that I can do, I mean, being on this podcast, for example, helping teachers think through things I think is really important.

Boz: Well, and I’m sure that is something we’ll explore more in this. But before we get too deep into the weeds, something that we always like to ask a guest the first time they come on is just how did you get involved in the world of alternative grading?

Sean Morris: That’s a good question. So. I, like I said, I met Jesse Stommel in grad school. We were both at the University of Colorado Boulder. I was in the creative writing department and I was a grad student teacher, and he was in the literature side of the English department and he was also grad student teacher. And I was sort of given my first class in creative writing and I was given this very interesting syllabus that I was supposed to follow. And it was very rubric sized, like it was absolutely all about rubrics and here’s how you do creative writing. And I thought, this is weird. This isn’t how this should go. Creative writing is like this thing and people do it differently and there’s different voices and different ways of doing it.

And and so I immediately thought, I don’t wanna have a rubric. And in talking through with Jesse Stommel, some of the things that he had been exploring already in teaching the idea of basically not offering grades on people’s work. And finding other ways to evaluate or give feedback to students. And I felt like this was actually much more appropriate in terms of students who wanted to maybe go into the publishing industry, who actually wanted to have a writing career. They’re not gonna get grades from people. They’re gonna get feedback from people and that feedback will make or break their career, right? And so whether they can respond to that feedback is super important.

So it made sense to me to suspend the idea of grades in that moment and instead offer feedback, meaningful feedback and like personal conferences and that sort of thing. Really act as though I was an editor in that situation. That sort of then continued into my work at the community college, the Colorado Community Colleges online, where I was also the chair of the English program there. And started redesigning all of the courses so that if teachers didn’t want to do grades they could change that around and actually offer more, again, more feedback for writers coming up in that English program.

So I pretty much stuck to that the whole time. I never issued grades on papers. And students always have this, like why I need to know how I’m doing. And and I just kept with them and like kept them through it and they ended up loving it. I mean they always ended up loving that stuff. So yeah. So that’s sort of how it got started.

Boz: So, there’s two things in that story that I find incredibly interesting. First, it sounds like you started this either with your first class or very, very early on. Which again, is not unheard of, but is unique. We do not talk to many educators that actually start their education career using any kind of alternative grading. But the second one that I really thought was funny is you hear about this grading and you’re like, oh, I see how that would work really well with mine. Usually the what we hear is, oh, I see how that can work at someone else’s subject, but not mine. It’s usually, oh, I’m an English teacher, I see how that works in math, but not English. And the math teachers is like, I see how that works in science and not math. So yeah, I just find that hilarious ’cause of how many times we hear that argument.

Sharona: And the use of the word rubrics, like you threw rubrics out. And when we started this in math, we were trying to bring rubrics, what we called rubrics, in as opposed to points for mistakes. So like it’s different uses also of the word rubric. I don’t think that’s what you meant, like the rubrics we brought in are different.

Sean Morris: Yeah. I think that, and I also think that different different teaching styles, different subjects require different kinds of methodology. And so it’s, it’s really though just about being aware. What is it you’re trying to do in the classroom? What are you trying to prepare students to do? In a creative writing classroom, it didn’t make sense to have grades. It didn’t make sense to have rubrics, because one student’s gonna write something that’s a fantasy novel or a fantasy story. And one student’s gonna write something that’s creative nonfiction. And they both could potentially get published out there in the world. And so you have to kind of say, well, what does this actually look like in the publishing industry? And that’s going to be about feedback and whether or not they can respond to that feedback and improve their writing that way.

The grade didn’t make any sense. They’re not gonna get grades in the publishing industry. That’s just not gonna work, so it just didn’t make sense. Rubrics didn’t make sense. So it, it, I think it’s really about that sort of being conscious of and aware of what it is you’re trying to accomplish in a classroom and what relationship you wanna set up with students and what relationship you think students should have to their work.

Sharona: So I think what you just said leads me to my next question for you, which is, it sounds like you think teachers should be critical of what they’re doing in the classroom. And when I started preparing for this interview, I read a little bit about critical digital pedagogy. Could you maybe give us the elevator speech definition of what that is and maybe how that relates to this initial thought you had about grading in your classroom.

Sean Morris: Sure. That’s a longer story than my origin story, but I can give it a try. So critical digital pedagogy really takes the work of critical pedagogy, which Paolo Freire kind of got started for us, and then we saw bell hooks and Henry Giroux and other folks really take it and run with it. And it is essentially really concerned with building critical consciousness. So that students understand their place in the world. It’s about awareness. It’s about being understanding like your circumstance and what you can do to change that. So your agency in order to change that.

Critical digital pedagogy which, I am sorry, it’s very hard to say, and I apologize all the time to people who have to say it often, but critical digital pedagogy takes that idea from critical pedagogy and brings it into the classroom where that intersects with the digital. So that could be fully online learning. It could be anything that’s hybrid. It could be anything that is sort of inflected by the digital in the classroom. Obviously this is of great interest right now with AI. But so as that sort of evolved what we began to recognize is that there’s, and really it’s the same thing with critical pedagogy, there’s a need for teachers, when they’re doing their pedagogy, to really be thinking about their pedagogy.

Where does it come from? Why do they think they’re doing? What is it? What is the goal of how they teach? A lot of, especially in higher ed, teachers aren’t trained to teach, right? They don’t get that kind of background of pedagogy. And so trying to help teachers become conscious of their methods. Often these are methods that we inherit. That we’ve seen other teachers use. And that we just repeat it. We don’t even think about it, we just start doing it.

So the critical digital pedagogy really, and especially with the work that we did with Digital Pedagogy Lab and hybrid pedagogy, both were focused on helping teachers just sort of become more self-aware and do sort of the meta metacognitive work around their teaching. As you said, sort of being critical of their own teaching, but not critical as in like a criticism, but really critical of like, let’s look at it really carefully. Take it apart, understand what it is that we do. And then see is this actually in line with what we want to do? And then do we want to change it?

And I think that’s where the alternative grading, the ungrading, the way that I worked on grading. It comes under a very variety of different names and different methods, right? Because some people do contract grading, some people don’t do grades at all. Some people do self-assessment, some people do other things. So it really is a lot of different methodologies. But in order to pick that methodology, you need to really think through your teaching and understand what it is your goals are.

Boz: So my background, even though I do have one foot in the higher ed world, most of my background is K 12. So I do have a little bit more pedagogical training in my undergrad and in my programming, but still, one of the key parts that was missing was the grading part. And I think that’s something that the K 12 and the higher ed still have in common is this lack of critical thinking of the grades. Of course we grade this way, A is 90% ’cause it’s always been, and that’s what we got.

And just the unawareness of where that stuff came from and really critically looking at, okay, why do we do this? What does this do to our students’ grades and their learning? How does it focus their time and their energy instead of into learning, into point grubbing and trying to just get those points wherever they can to get the grade. I could wave a magical wand and that would be the one thing that I would want all educators to do is just take a little bit of time and really critically think about why you grade the way you grade.

Sean Morris: I yeah. And I think one thing I want to put out there is that I think especially when we’re banding about the word critical I think that it’s important that we recognize teachers have very little time. They have very little resources, they’re underpaid. When we’re talking about, you should be critical about your teaching to an adjunct who’s teaching 10 courses a semester, at multiple different universities, their life is just so different and it’s not really possible for them to just sit back and go, okay, yeah, I’m gonna get critical and be theoretical about my teaching. It’s like, well, I’m just trying to survive.

And I think that when I would work with teachers like that, or when I would work with with someone who said, yeah, well that may work for you, but it doesn’t work for me. Which was plenty of times, right? And it was really, well, okay then what does work for you? What small change can you make? What little thing can you do? Because if you start to look at your teaching, and we had this happen a lot of the time when we were doing digital pedagogy lab, teachers would say, I want something different, but I don’t have the time. I don’t have the resources to do this. And so you sit down with them and you say, well, what one small thing can you make? What small change can you make that gets you toward that? And then, you know what, make one small change this semester, then make one small change next semester, and then make one small change the following semester and soon you’re gonna get there.

It just takes more time if you don’t have much time. So I do wanna put that out there that , the assumption is not that everyone has the time to do this, but it is important. And I think also teaching becomes more satisfying as work if you are able to do this kind of inspection of your own methods.

Boz: And it’s not just that it takes time. I’ve been doing this for a while. I’m not done yet. It is ongoing. It’s continuous and yeah, it can be very difficult to figure out how to do it with all of the things going on in someone’s life when they’re an educator. A lot of educators are not only overworked, but they actually have multiple jobs. So yeah, it is very difficult. But like you said, it actually makes it much more satisfying as an educator. Once you start down that journey. And Sharona and I had a very different way that we came into alternative grading. She did jump off the deep end and go…

Sharona: which is why we now have a podcast.

Boz: Yeah. Whereas I was like, okay, I don’t like this thing. And I did exactly what you were saying. I kept trying to make small changes and it would help, but eventually it got to where I was like, okay, I’ve bandaid this thing enough. I just need to get rid of the grading and just this points, percentages and averages just doesn’t work. I’ve got a thousand different little bandaids on it. Let’s just throw it out and try something different.

Sharona: Well, and we have two episodes where we did go with small steps. So episodes 38 and 41. Episode 38 was 20 small, well, 20 plus ’cause we actually went more than that small steps to get started. And then in episode 41, we looked at Second Chance grading. A paper about doing that. So I completely agree with you. I also am hoping that we’ll get to a point where enough people have done this, that the smallest step you can take is grabbing someone else’s course that’s been done and trying it in as a whole and then editing from there. So that’s pretty cool. I also feel like we need to change the name of the Grading conference to the Critical Grading Conference. ’cause to be honest, the entire conference is people reflecting on the changes they’re making in grading across literally every discipline you can think of. So that’s kind of cool. I didn’t even know we were doing critical pedagogy, but apparently we are, I really need to read some Freire.

Sean Morris: Yeah., That sounds like an amazing conference. Yeah.

Sharona: It’s a lot of fun and I’m hoping that the not so small step, that Bosley and I and the other organizers are contributing to this work is having this conference. Which has the lowest barrier to entry to a conference known to man because we have our registration fees are $50 or pay what you can, which goes all the way down to zero. So you know, try to do that.

But I wanna shift a little bit if we can now, unless Bosley, you wanna go somewhere else? I do want to look at this new technology of AI and the biggest concern that I, and I think a lot of our alternative graders, have. We would like to start thinking critically about AI and its use, but it’s really impacting us in the alt grading world. ‘Cause those of us that shifted most of our evidence of learning methods to not in the classroom, not proctored ways of doing it, are now feeling like, how can I trust this as being authentic evidence of learning? So can you share a little bit about what you’ve been doing with AI and critical pedagogy, and then also specifically as it might relate to the grading.

Sean Morris: Sure. And to clarify, just for everyone who’s listening, I’m not currently in the classroom, so I’m not working with students around AI. I’ve been doing some writing and obviously I’ve been reading a lot about AI and what’s happening. I also, when I was at my former company I ran a course called AI Academy, where we brought teachers together to kind of stew on this and try to figure out what is it we should do with AI and what should happen now.

And so a lot of what I know about AI, I’ve actually learned from other teachers and what they’ve had to sort of deal with. But I think that at the basis of this, and this is, I don’t know that I have any answers, but I wanna throw out there, that I have foundations from which I would build answers. So to quote Jesse Stommel, longtime colleague, his sort of number one practice is start by trusting students. And I still believe that. I know that AI throws a lot of doubt on that.

When I’ve talked to teachers, what we’ve talked about for the most part is this is a moment to reconnect with students. This isn’t a moment to suddenly surveil. This is a moment to reconnect and to talk to students about what AI is, why they would use it, why they wouldn’t use it, how they like it, how they don’t like it. What would they want to do with it in the classroom. And actually just have those open, transparent conversations with students. Now, again, I know not everyone can do this. They have classrooms of 500 people. They have 11 classrooms a semester. There’s not really necessarily the opportunity to do this. If there’s a way to incorporate it into the learning in the classroom itself, that’s maybe a good way to get about to it.

But I do believe that that’s, that this is a moment when we have an opportunity to step back and say, what is it that we do? Why do we teach? What are we looking for? And how can we use this moment to connect with students as opposed to make that gap even bigger. That sort of trust gap even bigger. So yeah, those would be sort of the foundations.

And again, like I don’t, I don’t have answers to this, like I am confounded by ai. And when I look at it from a critical digital pedagogy standpoint, two things come up. And one is of course, it’s that idea of trusting students. How do you make this about student agency? How do you make this about students empowerment? How do you not jump into that power dynamic of the teacher has all the power and the student has no power. And how do you make that happen? And the other piece of it is how do you get students to be critically conscious of what AI is, how it affects their learning, how it affects their sense of themselves.

Especially in writing situations. Because writing itself is an act of thinking. And if you don’t do your own writing, you’re not doing your own thinking. And so how do you have those conversations with students? And really try to, again, it’s about that critical consciousness piece. How do you get students really thinking about this? So for me it’s less about can I trust ’em? They’re going away, they’re doing their homework, or they’re going away and doing an exam and they could be using AI. I would rather just have conversations with students about this stuff, rather than try to figure out whether or not they’re using AI. I’d like to make it transparent if at all possible.

Sharona: So, the challenge that I’m seeing is that I do trust students. I trust them to do what’s right for them. And the challenge is, a lot of times what’s right for them is to use AI when they’re not supposed to “supposed to”. And the reasons for that can be many. It can be their personal sense of efficacy, like if they don’t have a strong self-efficacy. It could be a time issue, it could be so many things. And I see for myself, like there’s these things that I’ve always wanted to do in my teaching. Stuff like bringing in culturally relevant pedagogy and rewriting assessments to be more effective that I don’t have capacity. I am one of those adjuncts. Not that I teach 10 courses, but I am an adjunct and I have three jobs and I also have a limited head knowledge. I can’t spend 16 hours researching a culture. But if I stick it into AI, I can write a much better, much more interesting culturally relevant assessment, documented a word problem or whatever.

So if I’m using that, then that doesn’t make any sense that I’m gonna say to my students that that’s wrong. So the alarmist piece of me, and, but alarmist is the wrong word. I think if I were a more traditional higher ed person, I would find it alarming. For me, it’s exciting, that it’s really gonna cause students to question many of the courses they take at all. The content that’s in those courses. So.

Boz: But is that a bad thing?

Sharona: For me? No. For everybody else? Yes. So I’m trying to put the hat on of somebody I’m trying to persuade to either do or continue to do alternative grading who is not as far down this path.

Sean Morris: Yeah,

Sharona: yeah. And say I absolutely trust students, which means I think they’re going to use AI. Because that is what is right for them. Sure. And so if I don’t want them to do it because I believe in my course content, because I believe that there is some sort of tool that I think will be more authentically taught if they don’t, how do I get them there? Because they don’t trust me.

Sean Morris: Yeah, this has been the question. So , I’ve been running some webinars recently around the idea of AI in the classroom and that sort of thing. And even when I was working with AI Academy teachers wanna be able to use it because it makes their work more efficient. They don’t want students using it because they feel like it’s a shortcut. They feel like it’s cheating. They feel like it’s plagiarism, which is another question altogether. And neither side wants to be transparent with the other. Neither side wants to be honest with each other. Like, teachers don’t want to tell students, Hey, I used AI to give you feedback. Or, Hey, I used AI to do this lesson plan, or AI helped me with my syllabus. They don’t really wanna say those things, because they don’t wanna give permission for students to use it themselves.

I think what you’re saying is fantastic that yes, students may use it because they have to, because it’s the best thing for them. And I agree with you, and I think that if, if they do use it. It and teachers don’t want them to use it, then there has to be a moment of reflection where you say, okay, so what am I doing in my teaching that’s forcing a student to use AI because they don’t have time, because they don’t feel confident in their own work. What is it that I’m doing? What can I do differently to open up a space where students can either use AI with permission or where they can feel they don’t have to.

And it really was a matter of his self-confidence. He felt like, well, I’m not a poet. I can’t do poetry, but I needed to turn something in. And I said, so what about my teaching kept you from just coming to me and saying, I don’t feel like I can do poetry? Because that’s where the problem was and not where, his self-confidence is something that he’s gonna work on his whole life. Right. But in that moment it was like, why didn’t you come to me? Because, you can trust me and I trust you. And so we can have this conversation. If you can’t do poetry, we’ll find a workaround. That’s okay.

And I feel the same way sort of about AI, if you can have those conversations with students then that gives them the permission to use it if they feel they need to. But you can also sort of look at, am I creating a need for them to use AI, and then giving them permission and look at teaching from that perspective too.

Sharona: When you say that, one of the things that comes to mind, that is a difference between me and my students, is that my students think that they’re learning something in places where we as experts know that they’re not actually. So, for example, all the studies that show that students prefer lecture over active learning because they “learn more”.

So if they think that that’s true, and we know it’s just not, are they just too immature as learners to understand that of course, it’s harder to not use AI, that’s the point. I mean, we want it to be hard because that’s where the learning happens. Like you said, if you’re not writing, you’re not thinking. Thinking’s hard and it brings up all of these internal stuff. So I don’t know. That’s what I’m, yeah,

Sean Morris: I’m not sure I think that students learn to be less engaged with their learning as it becomes sort of more rigorous, as it becomes more based on the grade. So a kindergartner or a first grader deeply engaged in learning, very imaginative, loves to learn. That person is the same person who’s a high school student. That person is the same person who’s a college student, but they’ve been conditioned differently by that time. So by the time they get to college, they’re like, well, I just need to get my degree because my degree’s gonna get me a job. And so I just need to get the grade.

That’s what they think college is for. It’s not that that’s all they want. They actually want to learn. I was talking to someone the other day who said that when students were provided with a diversity of readings that were beyond the syllabus, beyond the readings that were on that syllabus. 70% of the reading they did was on that list. Because they want to learn, but they want to learn what they wanna learn, right? They don’t wanna learn just this little narrow window of here’s what you should learn. So they are hungry to learn. It’s not that they’re not ready to learn, it’s that they are so focused on finishing, on getting that grade on getting out of class, on getting out of college, because that’s what we’ve told them that’s what they’re supposed to do. And I don’t think that we’ve invested enough in the message around the value of learning.

And I’m a humanities person, so you’re hearing humanities all over this, I’m sure. But I feel like that message is sort of lost. That there’s an idea that you come to college. My own kid went to college and they were concerned, what should I do? What should I do? And they wanted, they thought maybe I could do communications because I love communication. I love people. And then they were like, yeah, this is very bent on becoming a communications person in the field.

And I said, well, what do you love? And they’re like, well, I love people. And so I said, well, have you thought about anthropology or sociology? So they just tried out anthropology and they got their degree in anthropology. They’re not an anthropologist, they didn’t go on in that career path. But what they did was they loved learning the whole time they were in college and they were really invested in that. And that became something that they and of course anthropology is also all about critical thinking. And so they were very much that person, once they got out of college, they were able to take that person into the world. And they got a regular job and they’re happy, but they engaged the world differently because of that experience they had in college.

So. That’s, again, humanity speaking. But I think that message about why we learn is something that is being diluted by the time that they get to college. So they really are just focused on finishing.

Boz: So I, I have a question about that. Sharona, you and I have talked about what role we think traditional grading and just grading overall plays in that transition of the kindergarten that just is enthralled in learning and wants to learn for the beauty of learning to the high school student that is, whatever I have to do to get the points, to get the grade, to get to wherever they wanna go next. And like you said, that continues in college. It’s more about the degree than anything else.

Is that mainly an American thing? ‘Cause you, I know you’ve spoken on, like Sharona said, six different continents. You’ve seen education systems outside of this country and the influences of this country or where our education came from. Is this something that is universal in most education systems or is this something that’s kind of unique to Western culture?

Sean Morris: I think it’s probably more predominant in western culture. I’m not gonna say that I’m an expert on global education at all, but a couple of points that I wanna make. So one, I think it is more common in in Western education. I also think that Western education has been exported to a lot of countries, and so it has become more important in other countries as well. That’s part of sort of the imperialism of European and American culture. But the other side of it is, so I had the opportunity when I was in digital pedagogy lab to do a lab in Cairo. And what I saw there, with the teachers who were there, was this willingness to be incredibly collaborative and not be competitive. And I think grades you get naturally competitive, right? You’re either competing with each other or you’re competing with yourself, right? You have to get better. You have to get better. You get to get better. You gotta get the A or else you’re failing.

And, what I saw there, and this was largely attended by folks from the Middle East was this sort of desire to be collaborative with each other, but also be collaborative with students, have students be collaborative with each other. And it was not a competitive environment like at all. And I loved that and I thought, that’s really cool. And what if we could create more of that collaborative sense of education? This is something that has also come up a lot. That students aren’t supposed to work with each other on an assignment. They’re supposed to work independently on an assignment.

But what’s funny is you get to become a scholar and you work with lots of people on a paper. You work with lots of people in your research. But we’re not teaching students to do that except in really, really, really painful group work. And I think that if we had that sort of much more sort of collaborative and less competitive kind of attitude, we are all here in this together, learning together, trying to figure this out together and everyone can rise to the top. We don’t have to all just be like, we don’t have to be, certainly we don’t have any bell curve, but we don’t have we don’t have to be competitive. And that’s just a thought. Like that’s just something that had that kind of occurred to me. Because when you said that about global, I mean other countries and how they learn, what I did experience was it’s not everywhere.

Boz: Yeah. Well, no, I just, when I was listening to you, it, it had dawned on me that competition and I am a competitive person. I think that is what helped drive me in a lot of aspects of my life, is that competitive nature that my father and my brothers we all engraved in each other. So I don’t wanna make it sound like I’m knocking that. But that competitive nature in our education system does seem to be where a lot of these issues, and especially if we’re not looking at things critically, yeah, of course we’re gonna drive students to want to find ways to get around the learning to get to the goal. ‘Cause the goal of finishing, the goal of getting the degree, the goal of education and of students should be learning. But it’s not, it really isn’t. And it’s not their fault. It’s the design of our system that is absolutely driven them to have the goal of finishing, not of learning.

Sean Morris: I completely agree. Completely agree. And I wanna double down on that because I think often students feel it’s their fault. Teachers think it’s teacher’s fault, like they think it’s their fault. And they don’t recognize no, this is systemic. And we hear this all the time when they’re working with teachers. I hear teachers saying, well, students just don’t wanna learn. They don’t, they’re not, you know, they’re lazy. They say they just want a grade and I don’t understand how to get them to want something more than that. And it’s like, well then have you stopped grading? Because that would maybe help. And then students feel like, well this is just drudgery. Like I come to college, I’m not really learning. I’m just trying to get good scores on tests and get through this. Which isn’t what they should be experiencing, not what they want to experience at all. And yeah, so I think, but if we can identify it as, no, this is systemic, it takes the blame off of teachers and students and gives them maybe the opportunity to actually do other work. If they recognize that this is a problem in the system.

Sharona: So one of the things that I’m grappling, ’cause I agree with the systemic nature of this, I also definitely agree I think teachers blame students, at least in the higher ed world, then they blame themselves because they’re like we know very not self-aware a lot of times. One of the things that I grapple with listening to you is a disciplinary difference that keeps coming to my head. Because one of the problems I have as a math professor trusting students is that I can see the hierarchical path of some of our mathematics that you need to understand how to do this one thing before you do the next thing. And you need to understand how, technically how, to do this thing before the next thing. And since they don’t understand that hierarchy, they do not prioritize the skill or the learning behind the skill.

And so this is one of the things I’m grappling with where I can try to trust them. But I worry that even with the type of grading I do, I do standards based grading. They have multiple attempts, they have revisions, the learning outcomes are very clear. But even within a 15 week semester, they may not get enough mathematics. Because the goal might be two or three classes beyond where they’re at right now. Right.

So is it okay, I guess is the sort of the, not asking permission of you, but this is the question I’m asking of myself. Then I may need to bring some of my assessments back in the classroom for a mild form of supervision. Because I think it is so important that they do the hard work that I wanna set up a situation where, look, I’m gonna be looking over your shoulder. I want to trust you, but I know my discipline. You’re not gonna realize the importance of knowing this for too far into the future.

Sean Morris: Right? Right. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I, I feel like, I feel like it’s not I feel like there’s room in there to say, I do trust you. I want you to succeed. And I’m here to help you succeed. And what that means is you’re gonna be taking tests in class because I want you to succeed. And right now there’s this little devil on your shoulder called AI that says you don’t have to do it yourself.

Sharona: I’m removing the temptation.

Sean Morris: And removing the temptation. Exactly. It’s like AI isn’t actually, I mean, I don’t know anymore, but from what I understand, it’s not that good at math.

Sharona: Oh, unfortunately, it’s now excellent at math.

Boz: It made a major jump not that long ago.

Sharona: Six months ago.

Sean Morris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was bound to happen, right? Because of getting criticized for that. So the engineers said, no, we gotta fix this. But yeah, I feel like this dilemma of what do I do with students who I can’t watch is really difficult for people who don’t believe in surveillance, right? Who don’t believe in that sort of like, power dynamic. It’s like, well, I don’t wanna surveille my students, but I also am not sure they’re gonna learn what they need to learn. But what you’re not giving up is that you do trust ’em and that you do want them to succeed. You’re just having to change your methodology so that both of those things can happen.

And I think that’s fine. I, I think, and I’m not, I’m not giving you permission either. I’m just Right. I’m just saying like, I think that those, I think that it’s that moment of criticality where you look at your intentions and are your intentions the same? Or has AI invaded your pedagogy to such a degree that now you don’t feel like you can do what you want to do? And that’s where I would resist AI and say, okay, no, F that I’m gonna do what I want to do. My pedagogy needs to remain the same. What I believe about students and what I believe about learning has to remain the same. I just have to figure out what to do about this little devil on their shoulder and the devil on our little shoulders at this point. So yeah, I think that as long as that you do that reflection and you’re like, no, that my intentions are exactly the same, I still trust them. I still want them to succeed. I just have to change the way that happens.

Sharona: Okay. So you just said that. I’m gonna ask Bosley a question. If you were teaching our class, our statistics class, to an entire group of returning students who are perhaps in their late thirties and early forties. Would you trust them more than you would, say our 18-year-old freshman, to be able to resist the devil on the shoulder?

Boz: It depends on how well I felt at the beginning of my class that I messaged to my students and got them to buy in and to understand why learning what I’m trying to teach them is important. And I teach at Cal State LA I teach mostly night classes, so it is not uncommon for me to have non-traditionally aged students. In fact, it’s very uncommon that I don’t have at least a couple. The thing that I have found is because of the class that I teach and because of how I try to message its importance, my older non-traditional student students buy into it much quicker. ’cause they’ve actually seen how statistics plays out in so many different aspects of life. And the fact that I’m not trying to teach someone how to by hand find the standard deviation of a 10 data point system because that’s so unreal. No, I’m gonna give you the thousand point data system and technology and tools of how to find it and then to how to interpret it.

So I find my older students, it’s easier to get that message, but at the end of the day it’s gonna be which group did I feel after I did this process, did buy into it? Because if my students feel that what I am teaching is important, I think that they’re going to be less likely to use tools I am not meaning for them to use.

Sharona: And the reason I asked that question is when you said the little devil on the shoulder, when I’m not at the university I run an educational theater company and we have an age break. 12 and under. You’re not leaving the building. Why? Because we don’t trust you not to get hurt in the parking lot. It’s not that I don’t trust you as a person, but 13 and up? You know what, if your parents give us permission? We’re gonna trust you to go out in the parking lot without supervision. I kind of feel like as much as college students are “adults”, they haven’t been out in the real world and not in the just the educational system for long enough that I trust that their resistance to that devil is strong enough.

And so for me, I agree with you Boz, but for me, I would inherently trust older students to make the decision that is right for them, that is really right for them, as opposed to it’s right for them because it feels like it’s better. Like the lecture versus active learning thing.

Sean Morris: When I was, when I was teaching at the University of Colorado, Denver I was in the education department and I was teaching teachers and I was teaching K 12 teachers. And these are folks who are teaching kids. They’re adults. Many of them in their thirties and forties or fifties even looking for additional certification. I used to start by the first week we would watch Catfish. The documentary, the movie, not the TV show. And we would watch it and people would be like, why? This has nothing to do with education. I don’t understand why we’re watching this. And it was really because they needed to learn how to think critically.

And it was a documentary that proposes to be about this one thing, right? But it also is a documentary that turns on its own head the whole idea of documentary. And by the time we were finished watching and discussing that film, and it was a lot of fun. We would, we would all watch it simultaneously on Netflix on an evening ’cause it was all online. And then we’d be on Slack and we’d bet talking back and forth as the movie was going on. It was a blast.

By the time the film was over, they realized a couple of things. One, that they were more likely to believe documentary because it said it was documentary. And two documentary is also fiction because it’s been edited. It has a perspective, it has like, it’s sure it’s reality, right? It’s you’re recording reality. But at the same time, it’s, it’s been molded into a story. And so what was left out? What were the things that we didn’t see? What were the things that the producer wanted us to think or the director wanted us to think.

And there’s a couple of moments in Catfish that are particularly really perfect for this, because there’s a moment when one of them is just like one of the main character says something along the lines of, I just don’t want to say the line again. Like, you keep filming me and you keep wanting me to bring up the same emotions again. And it’s really, really genius because it, it totally makes the whole thing transparent. These were people who were teaching students. And their adults, but they didn’t realize that they weren’t critical thinkers yet until they got to that point when they watched this and they were like, oh, wow, okay, I need to take everything apart.

And that then enabled them to look at their own teaching. But I’m just saying like, from my perspective, it’s about what do we expose students to? Not necessarily what they’re capable of or whether they’re trustworthy or not trustworthy. It’s about what do we expose them to? What do we expect of them and what opportunities do we give them to rise above where we think they might be? And that’s kind of, I think the way that I, that I would approach that same question that you asked is I don’t know that I’d be more trusting of one group or another. It’s really, I would just trust ’em, but I would give them those difficult opportunities to really think through what it was that learning means.

Boz: So since you were talking about education and we are quickly coming up on our time. So I wanted to get this in ’cause I know you’ve been involved in a lot of like ed programs. And that’s one of the things that Sharona and I have talked a lot about with a lot of different guests is, how large of a part of a teacher’s life and job is grading, but how very few actually get any kind of training in grading. Mm-hmm. I’m curious as to what you think would be, what’s one of the big missing things that if most ED programs across the country started to do would help with this whole idea of critical digital pedagogy and alternative grading.

Sean Morris: I think, I mean, I don’t, and I’m not sure this would be an ED program or not, but I think we need to do more teacher training and I think we need to fund better teacher training. So much of teacher training is really rudimentary, or it’s very focused on like practical things like. How to manage discussions in an online classroom. It’s very basic, sort of practical things, or it plays into the sort of competitive environment between teachers and students. That lack of trust between teachers and students. How to deal with difficult students, that sort of thing. And it doesn’t do a lot of just reflective time on pedagogy and how you teach, why you teach what you think school is for.

When I was teaching Digital Pedagogy Lab, or I was running digital pedagogy lab, I used to sometimes teach a course called, or a cohort called writing about teaching. And essentially it was an opportunity for people for a week to just spend some time narrativizing their teaching. And often it started with reflect on why you teach, reflect on what you think school is for. And then usually there was some exercise in there where you had to write to a student about why they teach and what they think learning is about. And what I found was by doing those sorts of reflective exercises, their syllabus has changed. Their grading practice changed, their assignments, their assessments, all of that changed because they had spent some time actually doing that reflective work.

So I would love to see more of that happening in teacher training, especially in higher ed, but also in K 12. I think K 12 is also really focused on can you, you know, I mean so much of K 12 these days is teaching to the test. And but it, but I feel like give those folks, ’cause they love to teach, give those folks time to reflect on what it is they’re doing. I think that would be really valuable.

Boz: You know, as you’re saying that I, it just dawned on me one of the other things that’s been a common topic with a lot of our practicing educators is giving the students time, place and reason to reflect. Why do we not do that with teachers? I mean, we’ve had several episodes where we’re talking about the importance of meta cognitive reflection and giving students time to get feedback and do some sort of reflection on it. And talking with some professors about, okay, how much should we do this? Why do we not do that with teachers? Why do we not give them time, space, and guidance on how to reflect on our year, our pedagogy, our reasons? Why? Like that, it really is starting to surprise me how many, ’cause we were just talking about this on our last episode.

It was brought up that we have these, the ways that teachers and professors and tenure are graded and looked at with rubrics. How weird that would be if we ever did that on a hundred point system. Like how weird it would be if we treated them like we treat our students. And here’s another one, like we know the importance. That’s one of the things that is on John Hattie’s most impactful practices is giving our students the ability, time, and reasons to reflect. Why don’t we do that with teachers?

Sean Morris: Yeah. And what’s interesting is, and so we did a lot of that when we were running digital pedagogy lab. And, I did that also with AI Academy and what what’s fascinating is how much they learn and how much they love it. Having the opportunity to be in a room and talk to other teachers about teaching is something they just don’t get. It’s weird. You’d think they would, but they just don’t get it.

And when they have it, they love it. Like they sink in and they learn about their teaching, and they discuss teaching and they get really critical about their own work. And they just need the opportunity. They just need that space. Yeah. So I agree with you. I think that should be part of how we train teachers.

Sean Morris: Yeah, that’s, that, that’s something I have been talking to a colleague about a lot is the lack of mentorship in higher ed. And you have teachers who’ve been teaching for a long time and who may have really innovated pedagogy and stuff, but they don’t actually have the opportunity or the structure for mentoring new teachers. And so finding those opportunities I think is super important.

Sharona: And I think that’s what we’re trying to do with the Center for Grading Reform. We’re gonna be starting to do some grant writing, we wanna do some research, but maybe coming up with structures and researching structures to do that kind of support. Because part of the problem with the Centers for Teaching and Learning is they’re not like, we are entirely focused on grading, right. We believe that grading is the fire blanket that is smothering. Learning or as one of our keynotes at the grading conference said letter grades are learning cancer is what they said. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So coming up with models and structures and then trying to get them adopted at institutions might be part of the work we do.

Sean Morris: That’s good work to do. Definitely.

Sharona: So we’re coming up on time. I got all my questions answered. Boz, you have anything left or

Boz: I just, I wanted to give give you Sean an opportunity if there was any last minute messages or last minute things that you wanted to get in before we had to end this.

Sean Morris: I think this may or may not be relevant, but it is when I taught my very last class of creative writing at the University of Colorado Boulder, I thought what do I leave these students with? And what I left them with was don’t believe what they tell you. And there’s this line from a movie that I’ve seen that I can’t remember what it’s called, cousins. I think it’s Brazilian or Portuguese. And it says don’t believe this little world they made for us. And I think that’s an incredibly important piece of all, that, that’s where critical pedagogy comes out of is you don’t have to grade. You don’t have to do these things that you think are concrete, necessary aspects of education.

These were made up at some point and they can be remade. And so don’t believe the things that don’t sit well with you. Make different choices, figure out how to make those different choices. As much as you can make those little steps as much as you’re able to. I think that’s probably the most important message that I would put out there.

Boz: And I think that is an absolute great message and a wonderful way to end on this one. So I wanna thank you for coming on and spending some of your early morning with us. I appreciate it and I hope our audience had as much fun and got as much out of this as we did. 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 Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future 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.