The Grading Podcast

113 – Jen Smielewski

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Jen Smielewski: Just the idea that when we answer kids’ questions with questions, they will get frustrated. And it’s okay. Because they also need to recognize that they have answers and they don’t need someone else to give them the answer to everything all the time. They’re much more capable than they believe.

Boz: And admin? Same thing. If you answer your teachers’ questions with questions, they will be frustrated at first.

Jen Smielewski: They will. They will, and we’ll get there too.

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-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing okay. It’s not quite as good as well, which is what I normally say. But I have to admit, I have been fighting with code for the last few days trying to get our check it system working again with its graphics. And I am one of those people that has, although I took coding when I was young, I even took an assembly language class, I don’t wanna be coding. So I’m just resentful that I have to do this. So that’s what’s top of my mind today. How about you?

Boz: Well, on that same note, ’cause I’ll be doing a lot of that coding as well, like once we worked together to try to figure it, figure out what the problem was. I’m gonna be the one going back and recoding everything. And unlike you, I am completely self-taught, so it’s always challenge.

Boz: But, the nice part is at the time of this recording, this is actually Labor Day weekend and not only does my district get a three day weekend, we actually had Friday off as well. So I’m in day two of a four day weekend. So that’s always really nice.

Sharona: I could say so many things right now. I’m just, I’m not going to, I’m going to resist. Instead, I’m gonna welcome. We have another person with us in the virtual studio. We have with us Jennifer Smielewski. She is a school teacher at Avondale High School, and she’s actually a math teacher, which is really exciting. But this is her second career. She first spent 13 years in the corporate world doing title insurance. So we have that in common in the sense that I’m a real estate agent. But she’s been teaching for 21 years and now she teaches at Avondale High School. Who you may remember, we had the principal Doug Wilson on a bit ago in episode 1 0 1. So welcome, Jen.

Jen Smielewski: Good morning. Glad to be here.

Boz: So one of the things that we always like to ask our new guests when they come on for the first time is just how did you get involved in this kind of crazy world of alternative grading?

Jen Smielewski: Grading never felt right. From my first year teaching to probably five years ago, it never felt right. When you go through a program, you’re taught, you know, a percentage is quizzes, a percentage is test, a percentage is homework. And I never felt comfortable assessing practice because it artificially inflated grades for students who just had supportive home environments and a place to do the work. It artificially deflated students who didn’t have that environment. And I wasn’t sure, ’cause I kind of have a love for sports, why we would count practice in a score category, why we would use it as data when baseball teams don’t count time in the batting cages for their batting average. It didn’t make sense. And I have kind of. Railed against that for a couple decades now, and got to a place with people where we were like-minded and able to really move forward with that.

Boz: Okay. So, you said something that I wanna question. You said that, you know, when you were getting your degree, you were trained, you know, to use certain percentages for quizzes and were you really? That’s one of the things that I have made a lot of points about. Most of us don’t get any kind of, you know, grading training like my, my training. On how to grade came from my student teaching experience and just kind of mimicking what my master teacher, who was a great, I cannot thank her enough for the experience she gave me as a student teacher. But she did do traditional grading and I did pick that up. But did you actually get some training in your prep program?

Jen Smielewski: I would say the training I got was not your homework has to be 20%. Your quizzes have to be this percent what? But it was guided on how are you going to grade and doing it in a formative feedback standards-based environment was never presented as an option. So the only thing you saw was how am I graded in the classes I’m currently teaching? Yep. And then reflecting on your own high school experiences and what that looked like. And then like you, I went to a student teaching environment where I had an absolutely phenomenal cooperating teacher, but it was 10% homework, 30% quizzes the rest test. And even the students coming out of education programs right now are seeing a lot of that. Yep. In our area, at least, even if their non-education classes have moved to more of a standards-based feedback type situation, it because I do a lot of work with students who come and do their observations, their student teaching, and overwhelmingly, they are still coming to us with that mindset. Again, even though that wasn’t their experience in their non-education classes.

Boz: Well that’s actually interesting that you’re, you are getting more student teachers coming to you that have at least had some experience with non-traditional graded classes? ’cause that’s it’s been a few years since I’ve had a student teacher because I don’t, you know, teach a full load if I’m teaching at all. For the last several years I’ve had other outside of classroom duties. So I. Usually only taught a couple classes, but when I was in the class full time, I got student teachers a lot and, and I loved, you know, being, trying to pass on what my master teacher did for me. But I never saw that. So that’s interesting that you’re at least now seeing, you know, people coming outta college with some experience with classes that aren’t graded, you know, with points, percentages, and averages.

Sharona: I have a couple of questions though that I wanted to follow up with that, and particularly, I mentioned in your bio, this is your second career. So I’m curious to have you talk about that transition, like why did you move from title insurance to teaching and how do you think that plays into this feeling that you had? Is there anything about being in the corporate role that helped inform the fact that this grading stuff didn’t make sense?

Jen Smielewski: There were a few things and that initially spurred the moment, and then as I got farther away from being in the corporate world, I realized there were other reasons that I hadn’t even known at the time. The first was my best days at work had gotten to a point where they were the days that I was coaching and empowering other people to do their jobs better. And overwhelmingly, when you work in an industry like real estate, like title insurance, there’s a lot of math. That’s a lot of practical application of math, but it was the math that I was teaching and I thought, you know what? If this is what you like, why are you only doing it part of your day instead of your whole day? And you know, married with two little kids at the time, going back to school was gonna be a big lift. And it was, but it has been so worth it. The thing that I carry from that corporate world experience right now is when we were teaching people how to do their job and how to understand the numbers, we did not expect them to go home and do homework. They learned it in an applications based setting, and the next day they were better at it, and the next week they were even better at it. So I’d sit in my classroom like, how can I get students, first of all to get better without doing three hours of homework every night? Also not coach them to work, quite frankly, like we work, we don’t need to do our jobs 12 hours a day and we don’t wanna teach our students that that is what their future holds.

Boz: That’s an interesting point. I have never heard anyone make that point, but that is, that is a really interesting point. I have a follow up question on that. When you were in the corporate world. You know working with, with people and with their math, were you ever making them do it by hand with no technology? No calculators, no devices of any sort.

Jen Smielewski: I live in a world where number sense matters. I don’t teach elementary, but if you don’t understand it, you don’t have the ability to double check when what you have typed in the computer is wrong. You at least have to have enough number sense to recognize reasonableness. So yes, there were days when we did it all by hand, and this was the mid nineties when I first got into title insurance. So computers weren’t quite as advanced in thinking for us back then as what people have access to now.

Sharona: So you went from title insurance, you got your degree, your credential, you start teaching, then you come to Avondale. What was that experience like?

Jen Smielewski: When I got to Avondale, there was a very, it’s post COVID, it’s fall of 21. Everybody is still trying to figure out how we do school now ’cause everything’s different. The structure in the math department was very traditional, but I’d sat in an interview where I got a vibe that this was not traditional. And I met with Doug and I said, I’m not sure what I’m doing here because this is what I picked up in the interview, but that’s what I’m seeing in the department. And he said, I need you to do you. And I said, okay.

Anytime you went to him with a, this is what I wanna do, the question was always, why? How do you know it’s what’s best for kids? How will you know it’s what’s best for kids? And as long you stay focused on the students, what you’re doing is gonna be good. If the focus comes off of the kids, you probably have strayed from your original goal. So we start down this path initially of just totally decreasing homework. There’s no extra credit. Everything we do, we’re doing at school. And for a hot minute, I was kind of alone in that regard, at least in that department. Math people tend to be very structured and rigid, and now we have a math department that is so flexible, so forward thinking, it is absolutely insane. We have other districts that in the county that come to watch us teach so that they can see how we do real time assessment and question our kids and go through those processes. Because sometimes you just have to see it to believe that it’s true. So having an administrator that not only said you can do it, but when students would question it because you’re the only one or caregivers would argue because you’re the only one, it’s different. Had your back. Made it possible.

Jen Smielewski: There are six full-time math teachers plus special ed co-teachers, some English language development teachers for additional student support.

Jen Smielewski: Yes. And a lot of that change was through retirements. Okay. And the people who retired, lovely, talented, advocates for our students, but I also can’t fault somebody who knows they’re gonna retire in a year or two for saying, you know what, I can’t go all in right now. I’m on board with the team, but I can’t flip my whole script for one year or for two years. But they were still team players in the process. And everyone now we use a building thinking classrooms mindset as our methodology. We view that as a practice, not a fad. We are very “experience first, formalize later”. And initially we were reinventing the wheel, developing those types of low floor and high ceiling lessons over and over. So we went with a specific curriculum that supported that. I don’t know if I can give them a plug here or not.

Sharona: Yes, please. Sure, sure.

Jen Smielewski: We use Math Medic. Okay. It’s an entirely online platform for teachers. The kids do not have to log in, but, having those lessons already thin sliced for us so kids can experience and construct their knowledge instead of just being shown things, is profound. Because if they can build it, they don’t forget it and you don’t have to teach it again.

Boz: See that what you just said about not having to teach it again, this is a conversation that Sharona and I have not so much on air but off air all the time when we’re looking at our different roles and looking at, okay, what should you know, what should be taught in in a college pre-calc? And I’m letting her know, yeah, that’s some of the stuff we teach in high school algebra. But you end up reteaching and reteaching and reteaching. So many times it’s the exact same way it was taught originally, and then we wonder why the kids never retain it. But yeah, we have these conversations all the time of comparing what is taught in high school compared to what is taught in the freshmen and sometimes sophomore level math gen ed courses.

Jen Smielewski: Oh, absolutely. Sometimes in like on level algebra one, I feel like I’m teaching seventh grade math. Mm-hmm. I know you guys learned how to graph align and calculate slope. Why am I doing this again? And I think that’s why with our alternative grading, our standards-based grading system, our highest level of proficiency isn’t labeled proficient or mastery. It’s labeled ownership.

Boz: Oh, I like that.

Jen Smielewski: Do the students own it? The next level is just understanding, which is Yep, they can do it. But do they own it? That’s where that highest level of mastery and understanding comes in.

Boz: I love that language. I have never, I’ve never heard, I, I, now I’m curious, what are all of your categories called?

Jen Smielewski: Let’s see. The highest is we have three different sets. In our math department, we have what we call our introductory or beginning that are used by our ninth and 10th grade classes. We have an advanced set that is our 10th and 11th grade classes and our honors classes, and then we have a different set that we added this year. Oh, go ahead.

Boz: No, I’m curious what, what’s the language in, in your rubric or your proficiency scales?

Jen Smielewski: Yeah, so the highest is ownership.

Boz: Mm-hmm.

Jen Smielewski: Then we have understanding, developing, engaging. If you’re at a zero, that would be limited or no evidence.

Boz: Okay. So the lower two levels I’ve heard before, but I have never heard that understanding and especially owning our ownership. I love that language.

Sharona: We do too. Yeah. That’s pretty cool. I wanted to follow up on one of the things you said, Boz, about reteaching because. One of the things, I’m a first year math coordinator, which means I have our quantitative reasoning with statistics course that I coordinate in our pre-calculus, and we are giving a mathematics diagnostic test at the beginning of pre-calculus. It’s called the MDTP Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project. It’s a joint project at the University of California and the California State University, and we give it to all levels of our pre-calculus. So we have a one semester pre-calc, a two semester and a two semester supported. And even in our one semester and our unsupported, maybe two students in any given class of 30, will show ready on pre-calculus in one or two categories, not all six. There’s like six topic categories.

So the students that are coming to us are not testing is ready for pre-calculus across the board if they place into pre-calculus and they’re coming from schools that supposedly have taught them pre-calculus as well as Algebra two, algebra one. So is that what you saw in the past and that’s now changing for the students that are going through your exploratory and ownership process, do you think?

Jen Smielewski: We are definitely seeing major steps in that area. We’ve been able to mostly eliminate that beginning of the year review type mindset for the students who got to ownership, obviously not everyone gets there. What we are seeing is the younger students are maybe not Algebra one ready is their learning environments are different. Maybe they’re coming to us from different schools, different districts, that kind of thing. As we move them from algebra one to geometry, that foundational understanding appears to be sticking better. From geometry to algebra two, the same thing.

The other practice I guess that’s helping with that is we don’t give those end of unit tests anymore. What we were finding was the minute you closed the book on a chapter, students would be like, okay, I never need to know that again. So by going continuous learning and doing some type of assessment almost every day, even if it’s just verbal feedback for a student, they were growing without, first of all, the fear of, oh, am I gonna get an A on this today? And without that cramming the night before. That allows them to short term, get through a major assessment and then forget it. We have been able to show that the content builds. And some of the analogies we use with students are very simple. Folks, you don’t learn how to read one syllable words and then forget that and go do two syllable words. Everything builds on everything else. And getting our students to understand that has been foundational.

Sharona: So that reminds me of another follow up on something you mentioned a little bit ago that you sort of just mentioned again, right now. You said people come to look at you to watch what real time assessment looks like. Can you give us an example or like walk us through, if I were to come to your classroom, what might I see that constitutes that daily realtime assessment?

Jen Smielewski: I can get 10,000 steps in a day with never leaving my classroom. It’s kind of funny, I don’t sit. This is the first year in the last out of four that I actually have a teacher desk. I had it moved out of the room to create space for student movement, and I go student to student every class period, every day, doing some type of assessment. Sometimes it’s scored, sometimes it’s just feedback. They are very much depth of understanding questions. I walk around with my tablet or my clipboard, whichever I’m in a mood for that day, and they don’t, I’m not about the answer. It’s about the process. And I don’t answer questions like, Hey, Ms. S, is this right? You tell me. How do you know you’re right? Describe your process. Describe your thinking. What we’re finding, and I think you probably see this at the college level, when students aren’t retaining things that you would’ve expected them to know, it’s not their ability to mimic, to follow standard algorithms is the problem. It’s their ability to apply what they know in a different context.

So when they leave my four walls and they enter yours, all of a sudden they can’t do it or they believe they can’t do it. So a lot of our work is, we have a standard called investigation where basically what question do you have that math could help answer? And it’s not the kind of question where you just, Hey, what’s the average age of students in the room? You know, what is the deep question you want to know about a career path you’re interested in about something? That they can dig deeper into. So we do those. We walk around. We’re assessing verbally do sometimes students have to do something on paper and I have to look at it and provide written feedback. Absolutely, because that’s the other advantage of this is students get a multiple variety of ways to show they know. Instead of it always being, here’s your quiz, here’s your test.

Boz: For anyone that hasn’t already read or done some work with building thinking classrooms, ’cause you mentioned that earlier, everything that you just said was absolutely textbook from building thinking classrooms. You know, the students are up and actively en engaged. The Miss am I doing this right, Mr. Is this part right? Those kind of questions never answered those. So anyone that hasn’t read building Thinking classrooms or even for specifically math teachers, building thinking classrooms and building mathematical thinking classrooms. Two great books go, go out. They, they will change your practice if you really take them to heart. And yeah, you were saying that, and I’m like, yep, there’s. Check wood, there’s check two. There’s.

Sharona: So I have a couple more practical questions because I’m, I’m translating this in my context, right, which is very difficult because one of the biggest differences is you guys see your students a lot more than we see our students. So I see my students either three times a week for 50 minutes or two times a week for 75 minutes in a pre-calculus class, maybe plus a workshop. How do you manage your time? ’cause I assume your classrooms are 30 plus students, right? How do you get around to 30 students in a 50, 59 minute classroom every day?

Jen Smielewski: It’s not easy. There are days when I miss the mark and teachers who are going on this journey have to give themselves permission to miss the mark once in a while. We tend to, because we care about our kids. We’re passionate about what we do, not give ourselves space to make mistakes. There have been times, and last year I had an honors algebra two class with 34 students in a 55 minute class period, and I got to the end and bell rings we’re still doing things. I’m still trying to assess. And I said, sorry guys, I’ll get you tomorrow. Now, is that an equitable assessment situation? Not really. The students I hadn’t assessed yet do have an opportunity to go home and practice what they’re gonna say if they think they know what question I’m gonna ask them, because it’s not worded the same way for every student. But along the same lines, by that point, I had also coached them into, ’cause we don’t need to go home and do math work. They were comfortable coming in and getting their assessment the next day, and that one took two days. Most of the time I can do it.

It took me a lot of practice to get to that point, and it’s how you word the question. The students need a lot of practice giving clear and concise answers. When you first start, that one student will ramble for five minutes and never say anything. So it’s also why one of our standards is communication. Can you verbally explain and model what you did and why, in a way that people can understand it without reading a five paragraph essay. And once they get better at it, it also gets easier to get to everyone in the time that you have available. In your situation, when you’re only seeing students two or three times a week, it’s got to be harder to build the norms that make it possible to do that ’cause they don’t get the daily practice.

Sharona: Not only, well, I mean, it’s not only hard for me to build the norms, unfortunately, even with the most active of my classrooms, I don’t even get to know everybody’s name in an entire semester. I just don’t see them enough and there’s not enough interaction. I use a team-based inquiry learning environment or an active classroom. So, I’ll visually recognize them. Separately, I will know their first name, last name in my grade book, but I don’t always put the two together. Mm-hmm. In a 15 because I, again, I also only see them for 15 weeks and I lose the first week to building community and I lose the last week too, so I don’t know if it’s just me, Bosley manages, he gets everybody’s name. I don’t.

Boz: Well, again, it’s, even though I’ve been at the college, this is now my seventh year teaching at, at Cal State LA It’s my 21st year in high school, so

Sharona: Right. And I claim 35 years of teaching experience. But I had a big gap in the middle, and I never taught in that intensive environment where you’re doing it every day, six hours a day. So in terms of actual classroom time, he blows me out of the water.

Boz: So, you kind of mentioned this earlier and we were talking about this before we actually got on this morning, but we asked you to come on because we had your principal on a few episodes ago, which we absolutely loved, but one of his big things was just how he questions everything. And you’ve already brought that up when you were talking about, you went to him after being there for a little bit and asked him, why are you there? So I’m curious, first, does he really like, questions you guys about everything. Like, like he doesn’t answer anything when you came to him. Is that really how it’s like there?

Jen Smielewski: It is absolutely how it is there. And initially I think it frustrated a lot of people and now we’re kind of in a mindset where, well, we went through, so there were was a time period when people were frustrated by it. We kind of fall into the student mindset ourselves once in a while where, can’t you just give me the answer? And then we’ve gone through this phase because there’s a organization called Fame: Formative assessment for Michigan educators, and a few of us are now FAME coaches. We’ve gone through the training, kind of understand the mindset behind this a little bit more.

So as through that process, we went through this phase of, I’m gonna go ask Doug and he’s gonna ask me a question. What question he is going to, so it was a game. What question is Doug gonna ask this time? And now, I would say almost everyone, if not everyone, understands that he doesn’t want to give us his answer. Because his answer might not be what’s best for us in our classroom and our kids. He’s not in that space every single day for 55 minutes times six hours. He wants us to get to the answer that we have that is best for our kids in our classroom.

Boz: I was gonna say, i absolutely love that. And the parallel between you guys as staff and our students and the amount of frustration that I know my students have when they first come into my classroom, especially if they’ve not had a teacher do this to them before. And, at least with my students, it’s usually about halfway through the first unit, maybe a little bit further, where they’re just looking at me like, can you just for once give us an straight answer? But it’s usually not that long after that point that you’ll start to see the turnaround in the students.

So it cracks me up how much we talk with educators and the experience they have mimics something with our students and we never like, oh, if we’re doing this for students, maybe we should be doing this for adults. Or if we’re doing this for adults, maybe we should be doing this for the students.

Jen Smielewski: Oh, absolutely. And now that we’ve been on this path for a few years we had a math department meeting after school a couple days ago and everyone was just saying you guys, nobody’s fighting with me about having to work in a small group of people they don’t know. Nobody fought with me about standing at a whiteboard and working instead of sitting at their desk and being told what to do. And we were, we said we knew we would get here, but it was a hard journey. And it’s not over. It is absolutely, because when we talk about, you know, how fast you have to move to try and assess students in a 55 minute class period. Is that a challenge? Absolutely. I can say I know my kids better than I ever have in my career before now, because I actually speak to every student every day.

Boz: And do you think that you also have a better and more honest opinion and evaluation of their actual math skills?

Jen Smielewski: Absolutely. I know because they’re being asked to explain things and apply their critical thinking skills, whether they actually understand a concept or if they’re just mimicking something they saw. One of the, I don’t know, pieces of like content knowledge, transferability that we were seeing. It’s students could do it the way you showed it to them. But man, if that slope was on the other side of the equation, they didn’t know how to recognize it or how to manipulate the equation so that they could see it. So our standards are designed to teach them to take something they know and apply it in a different context, and that is the one standard that our students are showing the most growth in because they need to.

Boz: I was just gonna say, mentioning, looking at something slightly different, the amount of time that I spend with my statistic students when we first show a regression line, because it flips, you know, instead of doing slope intercept, it does intercept slope. And it uses different variables. But yeah, it’s amazing how that little change if, if the students haven’t gone through like what you’ve been talking about and really internalized it and understand it more than just mimicking it, how much that slight change really screws with their understanding and their performance. And it, it does it, it takes me a more time than it should to get them to understand. Oh, I just switch ’em around.

Sharona: Like, and God forbid we put decimals in there.

Jen Smielewski: Yeah. Oh, heaven forbid. It’s kind of like, you know, calculus and physics are very closely related, but students look at them because they’re taught in different spaces by people in different departments as being totally foreign to each other. And I will just look at them and be like, you have AP physics, right? You did this. The variables were just a little different. And that connection that they hadn’t seen on their own, as soon as they make it, everything gets so easy. And when they make the connection themselves, it’s not broken later on.

Sharona: Yep. So number one, I want your complete list of pre-calculus standards as soon as possible because I have a feeling I might end up back in a pre-calculus classroom in the spring. And if I do, I’m gonna blow up ’cause I haven’t taught pre-calculus in the classroom in about six years. And my personal grading journey, and all of that has all happened in that last six or seven years. So I’m pretty confident in our stats class, although I still would change it if it were just me, but I need a set of good pre-calculus standards, and I need to somehow get the math department to understand that the one semester pre-calculus is just a nightmare, but whatever.

I had another question though that I wanted to ask you to follow up on something you said, and right now I’m blanking on what the question was. Well, here’s one of them. So you said you talk to your students every day, but you also said you’re not doing like a written, scored assessment every day. So what does it look like when you’re introducing something new or you’re trying to take the students in a new direction with new material? How does that look a little bit different. How do you still talk to students every day? Do you do a little mini introduction or you set them a task to work on to discover it? How does that work?

Jen Smielewski: We call them launches. And they do follow an experience first formalize later mindset. Sometimes it is a, what we call a rich task, a big idea thing. Mm-hmm. Can you figure out how to do this even though I know you probably don’t have the foundational honors algebra two. What could you bring from your prior knowledge to get through this? Sometimes it’s using a real world example. That is thin sliced to build them up to the capacity of the learning target for that day. Typically a random group, they go to their groups, they do that exploration. Then we come back together and while they are working, even if it’s a day I’m not assessing, I use a different color marker than everyone else. And I’ll go through and make smiley faces stars, and they’re like, what does that mean? I’ll tell you when we get there.

Those are things about their work that I wanna make sure everyone knows. It might be a common misconception that I saw across several different groups, and we need to correct it together right now before we leave. It might be okay, this is an example of this new vocab word you don’t have yet. We are finding that by attaching the vocabulary in context, students can retain the words and use them, and we have a very high expectation that they use them the next day. Not necessarily fluently, but at least in a practice environment. I was that teacher 21 years ago who, oh, you finished the test early. Here’s your vocab assignment. Write down the definitions. That was the worst thing I could have ever done for children. Here, learn this word out of context and hopefully we can figure it out in a couple days. It doesn’t work. That’s not how we learn language. So we have tried to say, well, when you’re three years old, you learn what a truck is. You see one on the road and somebody told you what it’s, well, now you’re gonna learn what an asymptote is because we see one on a graph and I’m gonna give you a name for it. And it, it makes the learning much more meaningful and lasting.

The consolidations, as we call them when we go through, might take 10 minutes. Some days. If it’s a big concept, they might take 20. But we do get to them. It does not mean that we never, ever do direct instruction. We’re dealing with kids and sometimes there is a place for direct instruction, but it doesn’t need to be every single day. They are much more capable than we often give them credit for.

Boz: See, and I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions that I’ve seen from teachers and admin about. You know, doing something like trying to do a building thinking classroom, that direct instruction has no place at all. It absolutely does. It’s just, it’s, it’s in support of all the other pedagogical strategies that things, it’s a support piece. It’s not the entire piece, but the number of times that, I’ve seen an observation and been parts of observations and someone doing a little bit of direct instruction getting like, you know, oh, that we shouldn’t be doing direct instruction. No. And I have read cover to cover the building thinking classrooms, like I said, there’s a math one specifically. I’m about halfway through that nowhere in there have I ever seen. Direct instruction is not allowed, and yet so many people kind of have that mentality. It’s weird.

Jen Smielewski: Yeah, that that is definitely not the intent of this methodology to say you can’t actually ever show students how to do something. The idea is we need to give them a safe space to try. Then support them when they need it. Yep. Many classrooms don’t give them the safe place to try. So they’ve been coached to sit back and be spoonfed and they don’t know how to try, and they have a fear mindset. Then when they’re asked to. The biggest struggle for an experience, first formalized later mindset is that you have to be in tune with your students. productive struggle is fantastic. Yep. Especially when they get to their aha moment. You can’t ever take that away from them. But if the teacher is out of tune with what’s going on in the classroom and that moves into frustration, you’ve lost them.

So managing that mindset and being in tune with what your kids are saying and doing, watching their body language, listening to their volume tells you, okay, I need to actually step in right now with this group, or maybe with a whole class. To make sure that we don’t get to that frustration point because too many students have, let’s be honest, they’ve got math trauma. Absolutely. We, we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna add to that for them. We need to make sure that we are diminishing that as much as we can.

Sharona: So how much of this is driven by, or facilitated or allowed by the grading changes? Like, like what came first? Did the grading come first and then you built the thinking classrooms? Did you start the building thinking classrooms and then realize you needed the grading? And also maybe could you tell us what exactly, I mean, are you standards based? What’s the grading system you’re using? We never asked you that.

Jen Smielewski: So. Let me do the journey, the abbreviated journey part first, and then we’ll talk about the standards. Sure. Does that order work?

Sharona: Whatever works for you.

Jen Smielewski: So, my first year at Avondale, I taught the first year of the Algebra two over two years sequence. Students who have not had fantastic math experiences, maybe not demonstrated math at a level that. They would’ve liked to. So they’re given algebra two as an option to take over two years, much so slower paced class. And I, to a fault believe everyone can do. And I said, you know what? These students are gonna do first semester algebra two this year. However, we have to make it happen. First thing I did was take homework off the table. That got some pushback from a few other teachers because they were still giving homework and now their classes were, the students talk, well, this teacher gives homework and this teacher doesn’t. So I was like a favorite for about five minutes with the kids and then they realized how hard they had to work when they were in class. The opportunity to practice and get feedback without that A, B, C, or D right on it in that moment allowed students who had seen so many D’s and E’s to remove their fear and be willing to try. So I had to get to a point where they could try.

Then Doug as principal takes us down this “we’re moving on this standards based assessing path” and whoa, wait a minute. That’s an absolutely different type of assessing. That means I need different assessments. The standards we have written do not work for a traditional test. If you just give students standard algorithm problems, you cannot use our standards. We had to give them applications. We had to give them opportunities to investigate, to critically think, which meant the test got shorter when we gave them, but they did not get easier. There was a higher expectation of what they turned in for each question.

We’ve all been in that classroom. Just show your work. Okay, I’ll show three steps. Here’s my answer. Teacher looks at the answer and nothing else. We focused on the process. So in most of our classes we have three standards, communication depending on which level you’re in, it’s either critical thinking or analytical thinking. And for the lower grades, it’s problem solving. And for the upper grades, it’s investigation. We, just this summer, the AP teacher, the other AP teacher and I got together and we took the college board rubrics for AP pre-calc, AP stats and AP calc, and made a hybrid AP set for our classes to use with consistency across them. We wanted to be careful that our students were not feeling like everything was foreign when they moved room to room. And we have a lot of students who are in both AP Calc and AP Stats.

So we were trying to keep it streamlined for them and for us, what we are finding is these standards can be applied to every mathematical concept. So communications means you can explain it, you can offer a model. You can do this in writing, you can do this verbally. You can present your findings to a class. The difference between critical thinking and analytical thinking really has to do with the level of analysis and depth that is age appropriate as they move through the math classes. Problem solving is more focused on a scenario provided by a teacher, and then when they move to the upper grades, investigation is more about a problem a student can identify and apply the current mathematics to solve for themselves.

Throwing away all the assessments that you’ve ever written and starting over there was a bit overwhelming. I would not recommend doing every class that you teach all at the same time. I know when Doug was on with you guys, he mentioned that everybody kind of got the step into this at their own pace, but there was an end date when people had to kind of get there. And I’m one of those people that I’m like, well, let’s just rip the bandaid off. I’m jumping in and 60 hours a week for three years later. I’m like, yeah, okay. And there were moments where I’d be like, why isn’t everybody else right here with me? Oh, because they’re sane.

And there were times, because I do like to jump in, that people made an assumption that it was easy for me. Well, you did all of this because it was, no, this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it was so worth it, so worth it.

Boz: So you and Sharona are like soul sisters when it comes to that part because

Sharona: I converted three classes in three weeks. That was not fun.

Jen Smielewski: Oh, I love that for you.

Sharona: Well, I, let’s be clear, converted was just the grading system itself . And then, ’cause I had to come up with new syllabi. But yeah, that was interesting.

Boz: Yeah. You, you, you went to some conference, right? And or some.

Sharona: No, I found Kate Owen’s blog three weeks before the semester when I was teaching classes that were brand new to me. I had three classes, they were all new to me, so I had to have some sort of syllabi. And so I took all three of them to standards based with three weeks notice, but it was not the fully thought thought out, philosophically based. It was just kind of like, oh, this is cool. We’re going. Don’t do that, people. So, but I have some questions.

Jen Smielewski: One thing I would suggest, oh, one thing I would suggest about standards to any school that goes on this journey. Our first year when we had standards in the math department, every math class used the same set. We did not feel it would be appropriate to just launch even our advanced learners on this really, really crazy high level assessment methodology without scaffolding it into them on some level. So we lived with that for a year, then we added an upper level, then we added an AP level. So the kids got to scaffold into it the way we did. We got to master each level of standards before we were trying to assess on the next level.

Boz: All right. So I have, Sharona, if it’s all right. I, I’ve got like four questions that I know I’m not gonna have time for all of them. But the first question that I really wanna ask is Michigan a common core state.

Jen Smielewski: Michigan is a common core state, yes.

Boz: Okay. ’cause what you were describing with your standards like that is the eight mathematical practices and like in any common core state, those are supposed to be done from, you know, beginning to end. And I know so many, I’ve seen so many instructors that ignore those standards, but like you guys were saying, that’s actually the essential, that’s, that’s the part, you know, the, can I communicate a viable argument and critique the argument of others is your communication, the seeing structures and using patterns is like, I love that. Those competencies, those standards that you were just talking about, like I can see the eight mathematical practices in those three that you just described.

Jen Smielewski: The beauty in that is we didn’t start with the eight mathematical practices where we wrote our standards. Yeah. We sat in a room and asked the question, what do we want our students to be able to do as mathematicians when they graduate? And everything that came out was, we want them to be critical thinkers. We want them to be problem solvers, that kind of stuff. And we wordsmith this giant list and then we sorted that list into categories. Then we went and looked at the math practices and said, you guys, we got it all. Yeah, we organically got it all. And part of me wonders if we’d gone the flip side, would we have felt like those topics were forced upon us instead of us saying, oh wait, we actually are in line with these eight math practices. We just are assessing them in three or four standards instead of eight.

Boz: I love that, that’s a great point that you guys went to those afterwards, and you’re right. Had you flipped them, it might not have, have felt the ownership that you had.

Sharona: I know you have four questions, but I have one I have to ask. I’m sorry. Okay. How does the three standards translate into an end of term grade? Do you use an A, B, C, D, E, or F, like final grade structure? And if so, how do you do that with just three?

Jen Smielewski: There’s a lot of setup in, we started with the logic rule and it was this idea that if you had certain number of threes, fours, combinations of twos, because we recognize that our students and caregivers are living in an A, B, C, D world and having them wrap their heads around everything being totally different than whatever they knew was gonna be a challenge. It did prove to be a challenge and last year the district said we have to be able to let them see A, B, C, D throughout the term. We can’t wait till the end. So it’s averaging, standard rounding when you get to the end. If you’re three average to this or higher, it’s an A. If it’s in this range, it’s a B. Would we all in a perfect world have a standards based report card that, so whether a student can communicate, critically, think, and problem solve? Yes.

Our world isn’t perfect. Students need to, and their caregivers need to, and while many universities are comfortable reading a standards-based report card, many are not. Being able to calculate that GPA is still important when we’re talking scholarship applications and that’s the space we have to live in. So we have found a way to kind of convert our standards based system into. A way that everyone can understand the outcome.

Sharona: Sorry, you can go with your other questions now Boz. I just had to know.

Boz: So I I actually on your school’s website, and I’m looking and I’m going through and reading some of it, but one of the things that, and I do in a lot of our trainings, whether it’s with individuals, departments, or whole schools. Is we ask them what is the purpose of grading? And we recommend that they actually come up with a purpose statement for grading. And you guys have that, like you guys have your mission statement, you have your vision, but you also have a, what you call vision for grading statement. I’m curious ’cause it, it sounds like, sounds like Doug has been there as principal longer than you’ve been there as a teacher. I’m wondering, were you there for any part of that development of the vision for grading statement?

Jen Smielewski: I am a member of our school improvement team, and I do remember a lot of those conversations happening. We were not the ones that sat down and wordsmithed it per se, but Doug is very much a collaborator. He is not a top down type administrator unless he has to be, which every leader has to be at some point for something. The idea that, you know, these are the key words. This is what we come up with. So between him, a curriculum director, the rest of the administrative teams, they then can take the stuff from the buildings and create a cohesive statement like that.

Boz: Yeah, I, I don’t know if you’ve read that, Sharona, but I, I wanna read one of the lines from it. Students learning will be supported through consistent and clear expectations. Grading will be inclusive of self-evaluation, time for reflection, academic responsibility, and opportunity to advance understanding and mastery. That self-evaluation and time for reflection I think are two of the most important things for real learning, whether it’s in mathematics or any other class that I don’t think happens enough, and the fact that that is in the DNA of your vision for grading statement, I think is absolutely amazing. I. If I am ever in Michigan, I’m gonna, I I’m gonna hit you or Doug up and see if I can just come and walk through the halls to see what this environment is like. ‘Cause this sounds like what my ideal environment for teaching would be.

Jen Smielewski: I love it. I could say I do what I do with joy, and it is because of the style of teaching, learning and assessing. I get to be creative again. Not just lug home stacks of paper to mark things right or wrong. And the creativity is where the fun is. The interacting with the kids is where the fun is.

Boz: All right. We are coming up on time, so is there any anything else that you were wanting to bring up?

Sharona: No. I think just, it’s really, it’s been interesting to me that we’ve now spoken to several schools that have come to consensus across multiple disciplines or across multiple courses in ways that I would find shocking at a university level. I mean, we can barely get two math teachers who teach the exact same course to even talk to each other, let alone come to this level of commonality. So I just have a lot to think about and how it would apply in my context. So thank you for that. Not, how about you, Boz?

Boz: I just wanna thank you, Jenny, for coming on. That was one of the things when we were talking to your principal, Doug, where we were like, oh, we so want to talk to some of his teachers to see what this is like because of especially just how much he talked about questioning. And it was great having you come on. Thank you so very much.

Sharona: I do wanna give Jen a moment. Do you have anything final that you would like to say that we didn’t touch on or didn’t get to?

Jen Smielewski: I don’t think so. Just the idea that when we answer kids’ questions with questions, they will get frustrated and it’s okay because they also need to recognize that they have answers and they don’t need someone else to give them the answer to everything all the time. They’re much more capable than they believe.

Boz: Admin. Same thing if you, if you answer your teacher’s questions with questions, they will be frustrated at first.

Jen Smielewski: They will. They will. And we’ll get there too.

Boz: All right. Well, I wanna thank you, our listeners. You’ve been listening to the grading podcast with Sharona and Boz, 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.