The Grading Podcast

105 – tipping point

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Boz: Prime example. Zeroes for assignments not completed. This whole idea of giving fifties for students doing nothing. If that’s the only thing you hear, and you don’t do any of the other, you don’t actually read Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity. You don’t look at the math behind it, you don’t look at some of the alternatives to it. You just hear we’re gonna stop giving zeros to kids that don’t turn anything in, and we’re gonna give ’em 50%. That’s going to put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, and I get it.

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 Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing very well. I’m actually quite tired because this week was when our second summer camp at Encore started at the theater company. So I’ve been out late for the last couple of nights doing callbacks and casting. So, we start a camp on Wednesday and by Friday we have a cast list of 37 students put into all their roles. So it’s really fun, it’s really exciting. It’s kind of tiring and it’s kind of cool because it is an educational environment where every single student has asked to be there and there’s no grades, like, so It’s just getting to see, and I’m just so much more aware of how fun it is. To teach an environment where there are no grades and no assessments and no reporting, except of course you have to do casting and auditions. So we like, we see the growth, we see the, so anyways, I’m having a lot of fun and it’s exciting. So good. I don’t think your week’s been quite as nice and I think it’s my fault. How are you doing?

Boz: I’m doing fine.

Sharona: You’re just doing a lot of coding work for me, so.

Boz: Yeah. Fighting with that, which is yesterday was, it was winning. So what are we talking about today?

Sharona: I feel like the last four weeks has been a little bit of a whirlwinds because we had the conference, we had some great conversations, so I was preparing to think about what topics we could maybe do. That’s one of the things we often do as we, we brainstorm, and I went to look for some recent news articles about grading and there were so many, I mean three, four or five pages of recent articles, recent articles about grading. So as I was looking at this search, it just felt like it was really getting to a certain critical mass, and that reminded me of a book that I have not read everything of, but I read, part of which is Malcolm Gladwell’s, the Tipping Point where he talks about moments in time where either an object or an idea tip over from sort of an early adopter niche stage into a much more broad acceptance. And I was really, sort of playing around with that idea in my mind, because of course, you know, we’re on The Grading Podcast, we kind of wanna get this to mass acceptance. Right, exactly. So that was, that was fun. And so it feels like we’re kind of at a tipping point here.

Boz: Well, before we get too far into this, because I. I know you’re a lot more familiar with that, that book and those readings than I am, and I’m not sure, you know, how familiar our listeners might be. So can you kind of summarize like what are some of the, the indicators or the points or you know, in that book, the tipping point, what does the author say? What are those indicators?

Sharona: Absolutely. So the full title of the book, which I think is the first entree point into this idea. The title of the book is The Tipping Point, how Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. So the idea that Malcolm Gladwell was exploring in the book was, what were that tiny, those tiny little nudges that took something from a niche to suddenly being whether it’s an idea, a trend, or a social behavior. Spreading like a virus essentially. So it contains really four key concepts that anchor the book the tipping point itself, which is the moment that that idea or behavior crosses over and starts to spread rapidly. I think about it kind of like the boiling point of water. So the water is totally smooth. 99 degrees CEL Celsius, 99.5. 99.7. You hit 100 degrees and it tips over into this chaotic state. The other key concepts is he has this idea of the law of the few, so a small number of people, he calls them connectors, mavens, and salesmen who play a crucial role in, in spreading these ideas and the message. How sticky is the message He calls it the stickiness factor. So the content must be meaningful, impactful, and stick with people. And that the power of context, so the context, you know, our behavior is strongly influenced by environment and situation. So a small change in context can lead to a big change in behavior.

Boz: So the, like the whole broken windows theory in criminology and crime reduction.

Sharona: Exactly. That if a community tends to have a lot of broken windows, or once you fix those broken windows, you see a reduction in crime. Right. So I thought maybe we could kind of analyze or, or explain or share some of our thoughts on these four key concepts, but also he has a series of indicators of when you might have reached a tipping point or might be reaching them. And I thought we could maybe bounce those against what we’re seeing in the alternative grading community.

Boz: So again, just real briefly what were those four indicators?

Sharona: So the first one, and and again, he’s using a virus model, so this kind of makes sense, right? The very first indicator is the exponential growth or the rapid uptake of, or uptake of usage of, or talking about the behavior or the trends. Like an example of this from a few years ago is the ice bucket challenge for ALS. Right, which I definitely participated in and I did donate to ALS where they had this small little group of people that suddenly it was everywhere. Right? So that was one of those tipping point. Also, the engagement level of just a few of these key pic, key people, the law of the few, so the connectors, the mavens and salesmen if some of these influencers. And I think what’s really interesting, I’d like to see Malcolm Gladwell update the book for social media ’cause this really predated a lot of the social media that is out there today. So when you see you know, social media influencers, like they might be a big part of these, law of the few. So that’s the second indicator. If your message is becoming memorable or persuasive, that is the third one. So how sticky is your message? How much is, are people who hear it retaining it? A fourth one is a shift in the context or the environment. And to me, there are two recent shifts. One was the impact of COVID, which not the COVID itself, but the spread of, of tools like Zoom and asynchronous and all of the different questions that we had about how we run our classrooms. And then of course the, the AI disruption, the two last ones are word of mouth becomes self-sustaining. So people are sharing this stuff without us prompting it. So suddenly people are talking about this idea without any of the like core group of early adopters being the ones pushing it, and then a small tweak creating a big change. So those are the six indicators that we might go through.

Boz: All right. So now that we kind of have a very base understanding, at least some common language. Yeah. Let’s, let’s get into this. Where do we think we are and, and what are some of our justifications?

Sharona: Well, let me, I’ve already done a bunch of intros, so let me kick it back to you. Do you have one of these in particular that are, that you’d like to kind of share your thoughts on first and then I can. Or do you want me to share mine first?

Boz: So, let’s talk a little bit about the law of the few, okay. In that we, we talk about, you know, these, these kind of three different groups and like, what are we looking for in that?

Sharona: So we have these three types of people. That are named connectors, mavens, and salespeople, and it feels to me that we’re seeing all three of those types suddenly popping up. In particular, the connectors. A lot of our centers for teaching, they have been doing this work off and on for a long time, but I’m seeing more focus from Centers of Teaching learning on grading and assessment, whereas before. I used to see more about learning outcomes or active learning, teaching pedagogies, things like that. I feel like I’m seeing a lot more workshops and trainings and institutes and articles coming out from Centers of Teaching of Learning, and these are connection hubs. They are the connectors of our campus communities. So I think that’s one group that are really engaging.

Boz: Yeah. So, and I, I know thinking about, you know, the mavens looking at, ’cause we have, we’ve had experts in this, talking about this for 60 plus years. I mean, Guskey goes back 60 years, but we’re starting to see a lot more publications, more writings, more people really stepping into this like field of study and really, you know, doing a lot of work and becoming experts in this.

Sharona: Well, and I wonder if one of the reasons that some of this is getting more traction is, like you said, this has been around a long time, primarily in writing or in like specific keynotes or PDs, but I think both the world of podcast, especially the world, all podcasting, not just us, but I’ve been seeing people like Dr. Guskey, people like Robert Talbert. They’re getting out there and they’re being heard. Not just read. Yeah. And there’s more reach. So when I, when I was doing my little search, not only did I find a lot of news articles, but I started to see a lot of videos on YouTube from different centers of teaching excellence from different podcasts. And then I went and I looked, I actually looked on. The vertical social media. So I looked like at Instagram and I looked at threads and I did some searches on Facebook, and I’m starting to see the social media vertical videos on the topic. So I wonder if the addition of audio and video is one of the things that is pushing us to more accessibility of these concepts.

Boz: So we definitely then are seeing the engagement of the law of the few we’re, you know, we’ve seen Mavens for, you know, 60 plus years, but we’re also seeing those increasing. We’re starting to see those connectors, whether it’s, you know, centers for teaching and, and learning really taking on grading specifically . We’re seeing, you know, more. Conferences around, not just the grading conference that’s, you know, we just had our sixth annual grading conference, but we’re seeing others. You’ve spoken at a couple others. We’ve both spoken at the STAGR centers conference. So we’re seeing those connectors. And, you know, we’re definitely not just seeing salesmen where we’re seeing increasement of sales, whether it’s through audio like podcast or, you know, direct conferences or you know, keynote speeches or written forms. So, we’ve got all three of these and we’re seeing increasing amounts of these.

Sharona: And that’s which one of the key points of the tipping point is that exponential growth. So when I did my search, so we’ve got the engagement with law of the few, but I do think this reads directly into the exponential growth. So I went searching for recent articles. I. And the breadth and quantity that I’m seeing. So everything from, there’s a May article in Newsweek, there’s a May article in the Wall Street Journal. There’s a March article out of Purdue. There is a June article from a website called Faculty Focus. There’s an article out of Dartmouth in May, like when we used to search for this. 2, 3, 4 years ago. You go back six months, you might get one news article maybe. And now just on the first page of the Google search results, I’ve got like eight. So to me that’s really speaking to the exponential growth and the increasing number of contacts that we get from individual school districts or to come speak at different conferences. Also, you know, we’re getting ready to go to Math Fest. I normally go to Math Fest for like two, three days and I have to figure out what I’m gonna do. I think I’m booked solid for at least four, and I think I’m going for six. So I mean, it’s, it’s crazy. It busy and it’s all alt grading related. Everything I’m doing, we have over 20 people signed up for our mini course at Math Fest. Right now we have, I think we got 15 submissions for presentations for an alt grading series of talks that we’re managing. I’m on a panel. We’re, yeah, it’s like we we’re having lunches, we’re having dinners. It’s crazy. It’s insane. Like, I’m like, this is so exciting.

Boz: Yeah. And that, that exponential growth, I mean that’s, that’s something that’s come up before with the amount of published books, not just research articles, but you know, full published books. I believe that was Guskey that talked about that, you know, we, we had, you know, mastery and learning come out in the sixties and then nothing for a very long time. And then, you know, in the last few years the amount of of books has just exponentially grown.

Sharona: So when I first went down this path, I bought two books. I bought Linda Nielsen’s Specifications Grading and Susan Bloom’s. UN grading compilation. That was all there was to get, ’cause of course the grading for growth book wasn’t out. That’s what I could find. There was. There was probably also like Teaching for Learning was out, but I didn’t know about it from Guskey and a couple of others. I literally have two full shelves of bookcases and I’ve only been buying books in the last six years.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And they’ve all come out in that last six years, so that’s pretty cool. What about shifts in our context? I know I mentioned two, but do you think there’s any other contextual shifts that you or, or even the ones I mentioned, like how those are impacting the spread? I.

Boz: I don’t know if it’s, if it’s affecting the spread, but it’s more of an indication of the spread. And, and I do think one of the things that you mentioned deserves a a little bit more time talking about, and that is just the amount of different context that we’re seeing this in. From, you know, when we started this, we saw it in some of the kind of core classes, your math, English, social studies, science. But we have seen it now in so many different contexts and so many different fields, and so many different levels and in so many different ways that I think this really is one of those, you know, indicating of just how much ground and momentum that this is getting. And has gotten.

Sharona: I would agree. I would also say that the combination one, two punch, well, maybe 1, 2, 3, punch of CVID, getting the students out of our direct supervision and into their homes where you could not really control what access to materials they had during assessment times. Then the impact of AI, which even further put a tremendous amount of factual knowledge, literally at their fingertips, very easy to find affecting our assessments. And then the third thing being the political environment that we’re in, and particularly the funding environment, like even in California. We’re having a huge budgetary issue with education funding, that it’s affecting our class sizes, it’s affecting all of these things. Those three things have forced people to really look at assessment. You know, can I gather authentic evidence of learning? And so they’re scrambling to ask this question and I think that is part, that’s a contextual change. Those three things that are, are sort of. A lot more people to open their eyes to needing to look for something.

Boz: See, I don’t know if I would agree with that, so I’m gonna, I’m absolutely agree with your, your AKA first punch of COVID, and we, I mean, we said that since this podcast started we, I’ve said that well before we started doing this, that the disruption that COVID and Distant learning caused, you know, some places, it was, you know, a few weeks in California, it was almost two years like. At, at the Cal State level? At the college level, it was two years. Mm-hmm. It was a year and a half at the high school level, but this level of disruption really did cause a lot of things. One of them, you know, being a mass and rapid increase in education, technology, communication technology, and just the necessity of people having to learn how to use it. Like that’s one of the things that in, in my 20 years in education, I’ve seen lots of new technology. That just kind of goes by the wayside. ’cause it never really rapidly catches on because people don’t have to. And quite honestly, a lot of time K 12 educators don’t have the time to learn it. Right. We were forced to in COVID, like there, there was no if, ands or buts about it. You were learning how to use, you know, your Google suite different platforms, whether it was Jamboard or Google Docs or whatever. And. Communication I think meant mass majority of us was, was Zoom, but there were other ones. But yeah, and I do think these changes did make a lot of people stop and look at and question the way we did things traditionally, I. And I do th that is when a lot of this work for you and I really started when we were, you know, doing this through College Bridge. People were like, okay, this just doesn’t work the way we did things traditionally. So I agree with COVID, with the context of COVID really pushing this forward. AI, I don’t know if that’s pushing us forward or backwards, and I think we’re we’re enough in the beginning of this still, even though it’s been around now for, you know, a little over, well, for us in math it’s a little bit over six months because before that things like ChatGTP couldn’t do math very well, but they can now. I mean the last six, eight months, it really has. So I don’t know if we. It is going to have an impact. I don’t know what that impact is, and I don’t know if it’s actually pushing us forward or backwards.

Sharona: Well, let me, let me clarify one thing, I do think it’s a shift in context that can trigger the tipping in the sense of knowledge of an awareness of these practices. Now, whether or not adoption happens. That’s where I agree with you. We might be moving towards more, or we might be fighting against it and moving towards less. But I think that the conversation and the ideas, even for people who are resistant, they’re like, no, because of AI, I need to wall myself off more and double down on traditional. They’re still doing it in a world where they’re aware that there is an alternative, even if they disagree with it. So I don’t, you’re right, it might, it might cause a rejection, but I do think it’s spreading the idea, even if it doesn’t spread adoption. So we might have to agree or disagree a little bit on that. I think that you’re right that we are so early in the AI journey, but I mean, AI hit a tipping point, right? In the, that, I mean, that is clear. ’cause we went from nothing to everybody.

Boz: Yeah, I don’t know if that was a tipping point or a bomb that just

Sharona: Well, it was a tipping point. I mean, it is the classic indicator of a tipping point because those models didn’t spring outta nowhere. They had been years in development and testing and available to different groups. I mean, they, OpenAI just didn’t go a month before, Hey, we should do this thing. And a month later they turned it on.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So somehow it went from, we’re out there to, holy crap, everybody’s using it practically overnight.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So that, that part was a tipping point for AI, not so much for us. And the other thing I wanted to mention along that whole adoption or tipping point or not, when I mentioned the number of articles I wanna mention, full disclosure, not all of them are good. And we can get to that, but just because it’s an article about alternative grading, I wasn’t actually mentioning that it was an article in favor of alternative grading.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: What, but what about the funding environment? Do you not think that that one, I mean, is that one again, it could be driving us towards more, it could be driving us towards less.

Boz: I, so the funding is a change in the teaching environment that we’re in, that’s going to affect a lot of things. I don’t know if it affects grading or getting the message out about alternatives to traditional grading. I don’t know. I mean, I agree with you. It’s a huge impact on our overall environment, but if anything, I think it slows everything down when it comes to any kind of messaging of any new pedagogical theory or you know, instructional practice. Because anytime you do, you know, we have these kind of budget cuts. What happens? Class sizes go up funds for, for PDs and conferences. Go down like.

Sharona: So let me clarify. Yes, funding is one element of the political context that I am concerned about, but I think there’s much bigger ones that are in part driven by funding. ‘Cause one of the things we’re seeing now. Is a real look at entire programs and whether or not they should, in quotes, be present at a university. And there’s some guidelines coming out from the federal government about that, that a lot of programs are now having to justify their existence in ways they may not have had to in a long time. And along of the, a lot of them are turning to the learning outcomes of their programs and of their courses and trying to, so, I’m seeing an increase in interest in the grading piece as a justification for I can show that my students are learning these things, which justifies my program’s existence.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Okay. So there’s, at least, again, there’s a, there’s a scrambling of the environment that I think I’m seeing at least an inquiry into listening and learning more about grading because it can help potentially articulate the value of some of these programs.

Boz: So I, I, I see where you’re coming from and because our context is so different, even though we both kind of dabble in both worlds, I dabble at the very shallow end of the higher ed. So I’m not personally seeing that, but I can see your point in it.

Sharona: Yeah. There’s some new rules from the federal government that basically said, if you can’t prove that people who get your major, earn more than a high school graduate. You can’t offer that major. And so there are groups and that are trying to come up with ways to better, and some of them might be redesigning their programs and saying, how do I make sure that a student who comes out with my major has articulatable skills that are transferable out into a working environment? So it, I think it’s just, again, it’s stirring up the waters. It’s a change in the context that I, I think I’m seeing more interest in actually looking at grading and assessment practices.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So we’ll see how that goes. So we’ve talked about growth, we’ve talked about the law of the few. What about the message stickiness?

Boz: And this is the one that I actually find the most interesting because this is where I think we are getting, we’re showing some indication, but this is also what’s causing some of our pushback. I, I think we can look at this. You know, if we look at some of the different iterations that some of the messaging has gone through in this community, I think we’ll actually show some of those indicators.

Sharona: Okay. So can you gimme a couple examples?

Sharona: I actually think it was the first two years Mi It might’ve been. Yeah, it might’ve been. So we, it was not the grading conference, it was the Mastery Grading Conference.

Sharona: No, because for example, in our Canvas grade book, it is the Learning Mastery Grade book. That is the name of the grade book,

Boz: and that was gonna be my point. Even though a lot of us in the commu in this community do not use that language anymore, for one reason or another, almost every LMS system that is trying to support alternative grading, I have never seen it called anything but mastery.

Sharona: Right. And, and yet I know very few people who use that language anymore. At least in the higher ed world. Yeah. Almost everyone is using anything. But

Boz: yeah, I don’t know anyone that still uses it really. But then we also had, you know, this onslaught of different terms, you know, whether it was, and we still do and, and some of the terms do have some distinct differences, but we went through this phase of really trying, you know, almost having a identity crisis of, what are we calling this? That debate kind of went on for a little while.

Sharona: Well, and it is still going on in the sense that everyone I know who talks about their personal grading. Has a term for it that they are most comfortable? Yeah, so I know for myself, some of my classes are standards based grading and some of them are specifications grading.

Those are the main two I use, and the more I learn about something like labor based grading, I’m not using labor based grading and I’m not using contract grading. Right. I’m my students at this point in time. I may change that ’cause I’m open to the idea, but I don’t sit down with my students at the beginning of the course and decide on the grade levels together with them. It’s just not what I do. And I know that competency based education. Has taken off in a lot of professional programs. So they have these terms, competency based assessment, but there is no, as far as I know, competency based grading. So even people using competency based assessment, they tend to call it competency based assessment, and assessment and grading are not the same thing.

Boz: Yeah. But yeah, we, we do have a, a lot of these different terms. I, I know for a little while we had. You know, a fairly large debate about kind of the, what was going to replace mastery-based grading as a overarching term. And I know for a while it, it was, you know, are we gonna use un grading? Like it, it’s just been interesting and we’ve gone through these different iterations. I don’t hear as much and it might be. That I’m just not hearing it and not aware of it. I’m not hearing that kind of argument as much. So I’m thinking we’re maybe getting to terminology that’s starting to stick.

Sharona: Yeah, and the one that I’m seeing stick the most is alternative grading or alternative grading practices. Because alternative, at least at the moment, seems to be the least. Forcing in any given direction. Right. So for, so another big term that’s out there in the K 12 world is grading for equity because of Joe Feldman’s book, one of those articles I was talking about. So San Francisco Public Schools was gonna do something I think really cool. They had set aside some money. To do a pilot to pay for teachers who chose to do it, to participate in a pilot program. They were rolling it out. They were gonna allow, but not require 70 teachers across 14 high schools to experiment with alternative grading practices. That’s literally a quote from the article they got, but it got communicated as grading for equity because it was being hosted by Joe Feldman’s. Institute or center or whatever he has. And they got so much backlash that they had to pull back the funding for the pilot, which I am just completely horrified by.

Boz: And that’s the part of the message. And you know, when I was reading this message stickiness, I’m wondering if miscommunication of message is the opposite of the stickiness, if it’s part of it. But I do think there is a huge amount of miscommunication about the message and what alternative grading is. That is not only a huge barrier, but it seems to be getting bigger.

Sharona: Well, and I think that one of the issues is anything that says grading for, and even though I’m a huge proponent of all the grading fours, but grading for equity, grading for growth, grading for something gives people who are opposed to the fundamental principles of alternative grading practices, something to hook on so that, so for example, if you say you’re grading for equity, there are people who actually don’t want that. They don’t want equitable grading practices or they say it’s not actually equitable what you’re proposing. And then other people say, well, grading for growth. We shouldn’t grade for growth. We should grade for accomplishment, for meeting criteria. So I just feel like some of those grading for language, it puts sort of a value of that last term to say, well, we want this thing, we want equity, we want growth. And there are people out there who are like, no, we don’t. That’s not what grades are for.

Boz: See, but I think it goes much deeper than that. Okay. ‘Cause there are I have heard plenty of people argue, and and some of them that I really do believe ours, you know, they’ll say yes. They, they want their grades to mean something. They want their grades to be equitable, but then argue against some of the principles of grading for equity. ’cause they really don’t believe them. It, it’s not that they don’t believe in equity. It, it’s, they don’t believe in some of these practices. So, and I think that is actually the bigger issue is there’s a lot of these messages about what alternative grading is and what it isn’t, and a lot of them are miscommunicated or misunderstood. And then that becomes the fighting point. A prime example, zeros for assignments not completed. This whole idea of, you know, giving fifties for students doing nothing, if that’s the only thing you hear. And you don’t do any of the other, you don’t actually read Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity. You don’t look at the math behind it. You don’t look at some of the alternatives to it. You just hear, we’re gonna stop giving zeros to kids that don’t turn anything in, and we’re gonna give ’em 50%. That’s gonna put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, and I get it. And I think that’s, and and things, there’s a dozen of things like that where the practice isn’t completely explained in, in the broad messaging, and it’s very easy to take out of context and then rebel against it,

Sharona: I guess. I see both things. Because,, I don’t disagree with anything that you just said. I completely agree that there’s a huge amount of misunderstanding. I also think that there is a group of people who, whether consciously or unconsciously, are the beneficiaries of the current practices and believe that they should stay in place for the very reasons that we are fighting against them. There’s, there is a belief system out there, sort of the Mr. Incredibles or the Incredibles. If everybody’s special, no one’s special.

Boz: I, I, I don’t disagree with that at all, but I think that is a smaller group than the group that just doesn’t actually understand and are, and is getting, and, and there, and there might be, and I’ve said this before, I think there’s also a very huge middle between those two extremes, right? Of people that. Do have some unconscious unexamined beliefs and again. I, I’ve made this point a dozen times that I’ll probably make it a hundred more before, you know, before we finish doing this podcast, whenever that might be. Part of the reason things are hard to change in education is because it’s led by those of us that were successful at the current model. Right. Whether it’s, you know, I, I’m not gonna go as far as say that there is some unconscious bias or you know, anything malice. But it’s still, we succeeded at some level. If you’re an educator, you’ve succeeded at education at some level. You had to have, you have to have at least a bachelor’s degree. A lot of us have master’s degrees. We, you know, we most states have multiple competency tests that you have to, like, we’ve succeeded at some level if you are an educator. Yes. So especially if it’s really unexamined and I think that’s the bigger point. It’s, it’s just unexamined. It’s hard to change a system that you were successful in. Like, it, it’s hard to, to want to, until you really examine those practices and that’s that huge middle. I think that if they took the time or had the time to take to really examine some of these practices, they very well would change, but it’s getting people to A, actually do that. ’cause it is uncomfortable when you first start, and B, just have the time to freaking do it.

Boz: So we can actually probably keep talking about this for, for quite a bit longer, but we are starting to get towards the end of this and I want to make sure we kind of hit our next point, which is. What do we do next? Like you and I? I, I think, well.

Sharona: Before we go there, okay. If I could, because I think this directly ties in. The two things that we haven’t mentioned from these six things are small tweaks, creating big changes. I think we’re all tweaking all the time, so I’m not so worried about that word of mouth becoming self-sustaining. And to me that’s where we’re gonna go with what you’re saying is let’s talk about. What you can do, like you said. But I wanted to point out that talking about what we can do, I think is in this word of mouth thing. Does that make sense to what I’m saying?

Boz: I think I might have been going somewhere related, but not.

Sharona: Go back to what you said then. That’s fine.

Boz: But I, I do want, because I, I think anyone that knows us, if you were gonna, you know, give us one of the three terms of the in the law of the few. I think you would, most people would probably call a salesman,

Sharona: which is not something I ever thought I would be good at, by the way. I did not think I would, I didn’t go into sales for a reason. But yes, I would think that you and I are salesmen.

Boz: We, we are definitely trying to, like, we wanna push this, we wanna push this to the tipping point and beyond. Like we, you know, our, our big audacious goal or aspiration is that the word alternative drops off of this. And when people talk about grading, this is the type of grading. So where, what do we need to do? Like looking at some of these indicators, looking at some of where we are, what needs to happen to get us closer to that tipping point?

Sharona: What needs to happen? Do you mean like what can people do as a like, I don’t know that. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, he says, these are indicators. They’re not necessarily, I think, drivers per se. Okay. So I would rephrase this to what can we do, whether or not it’s needed. I, I don’t know. Okay.

Boz: Okay. That that’s fair point, fair point.

Sharona: What can people do? And I do think what can people do is. In the two areas of word of mouth becoming self-sustaining and the law of the few. As much as I absolutely love how much we’ve grown this podcast, we are still the few. If you’re listening to this podcast, I wish I could say you were one of 60,000 people who listen to the podcast every week. We’re not there yet, but you’re one of the few, and I think it comes with sharing, like that’s one of the biggest things is the sharing. Whether it’s giving a talk yourself or if you’re a social media person of any kind, put a story, record yourself, become an influencer. Put a story up on threads or Instagram or Facebook talking about what you’re doing in your classroom with this. I think that would be really cool. What do you think, what do, what do you think people should consider doing if they wanna help us move this to, to a tipping point?

Boz: I, I think the next step or one of the big needed next steps, and, and this again, is not something that’s new, but we’ve seen some changes in environments. We’re getting past the point of theory and into practice. I, I think we need to, to really do some research about these actual changes. I, I know you did something, you know. You’re gonna be, I, I hope, planning on publishing some of your results if you can with looking directly looking at traditional versus alternative graded classes. But I think that we need to have more of that. There’s a lot of great research out there that’s been done with some of the motivation things, but I think looking at those changes in our environment and really researching the effects and even some of the possibly long-term effects of those changes can. Like is one of those things that would then help the salesmen, would help the, the stickiness of the message is being able to back that up. So I think that’s, as a community, that’s one of the places that we really need to go.

Sharona: I agree. I agree. And we’ve talked about it before. We are trying to put together a research conference. One thing that occurs to me relative to that research is that language challenge we were talking about earlier.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: Is one of the reasons we’re having trouble accumulating the research is we don’t have a lot of commonality of terminology. We have lots of different names and they have important differences. So finding the literature that’s out there and creating a repository can be challenging.

Boz: Well, not even the differences of language that do indicate differences of practices, like there really is differences between standards based grading and specs grading. Like the, the way we set things up there really is difference between contract grading and standards based. Right? What’s really the difference between you know, EGI or equitable grading and instruction and standards base, or difference between that and competency based. Those differences are a little bit more minute, and I think that’s the bigger issue is this has come up and we’ve talked about this again, this metaphor of all these small pockets, these small snowballs that have come up. Well when you’re doing this. And you’re in this small bubble, you end up making, you know, your own vocabulary. You have to, and then you research and you research and you’re like, wow, there’s nothing on this. We’re not realizing that there really is like, especially I think because standards based is one of the ones that I would argue, and I, this is my opinion, and I could be completely wrong, but I would argue is one of the oldest methods of alternative grading. ’cause that really is what mastery grading was originally called and can date itself back to the sixties. I think there’s a lot of different terms out there that are very similar, whether it’s, you know, EGI competency base. We need to. Unify some of those. You know, I, I, and again, I’m not talking about the differences that actually mean differences, but if we’re looking at, you know, un grading, contract grading there’s a third term that I’m labor drawing,

Sharona: labor based grading, labor based grading and collaborative grading labor. All,

Boz: all, all of those, like some people that, that are experts in these might argue there’s some minute differences, but like, what are the. So that unification of language,

Sharona: I would, I would definitely agree. That’s, especially for the research side. And then we also have to decide, I mean, grading and assessment often are not the same thing and yet sometimes are used interchangeably. So, that’s also a challenge. I would also, I was thinking about this also. One thing I think a lot of people can do is if you go to a professional conference regularly, ask the organizers of that conference to include or look for either keynotes or speakers or run sessions with the theme of alternative grading. ’cause I think that could really help spread. The word is if at the joint math meetings I’m gonna be speaking in a couple weeks at the Transforming Undergraduate Education in the Molecular Life Sciences Conference. I know that we have the National Council of Teachers of English and Teachers of Mathematics. We have the National Education Association, the American Association of College and Universities has conferences, if you are a regular attendee or an irregular attendee at any of these conferences, start requesting that they have sessions on this stuff. Because if we can get it out into all the major discipline and educational conferences, that would be

Boz: extra stuff. And here’s, here’s the interesting point about what you’re saying. Grading is such a big part, whether we like it or not, a big part of an educator’s life. It could be appropriate at almost any kind of education conference, like Right. You know, and I’ve seen it. I, I’ve gone to, you know, PLC conferences, which PLC conferences, you know our PLCs is a very distinct different thing than grading. And yet at a PLC conference, having a session or two about grading is absolutely appropriate and fits the PLC model. If you’re doing this, you know, setting up some of these practices or grading architecturals at the PLC level. So, that’s the nice thing about grading is it is such a huge part. It could be appropriate at almost any kind of conference.

Sharona: Exactly. So I think that would be amazing if it suddenly showed up in almost any discipline’s. Education conferences. Yes. It doesn’t necessarily belong at your disciplinary conference. Like if you’re there talking about drug delivery systems in biology, that’s research. That’s discipline specific. But if it’s an education conference, I think that would be amazing.

Boz: That’s really, I, I think the message that, how do we push this forward? If you’re listening to this, you should already be a connector or salesman.

Sharona: You probably are not just should. You probably are one of that. You probably are,

Boz: but yeah. Let’s, let’s, let’s get out there. Let, let’s, let’s start really. You know, selling this and champion this and, and show just how diverse of a group and of educational settings this really is.

Sharona: So I think we’re coming up on time. Do you have anything last that you wanna share?

Boz: I, I think my, what I just shared was, was my final point. Your last, yep. Okay. What about you?

Sharona: My last one is just to encourage people, anyone can go out there and, and, and record yourself either vocally or video. Put it out there. People are tired of just reading academic papers and trying to interpret words. I really think audio and video is gonna be the way we move forward. So use your socials if you’re on social, come on the podcast. If you wanna come on the podcast. We’d love to have you. And then suggest it, like, if you don’t wanna be the voice or the face, but you listen to an education related podcast, suggest to them that they get somebody on. Doesn’t have to be us, although I’d be happy to be on other people’s podcasts, but just get other people to, to want to talk about this. That’s my final point.

Boz: All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for sticking around and, and listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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.