The Grading Podcast

114 Marc Aronson

===

Marc Aronson: The liberation that can be gained from throwing away the percentage based scale as a mindset I think is something that people are on different stages of a journey toward. And I’m gonna do everything I can to help people move along in that journey. But if people aren’t ready for it yet, they’re not ready for it yet.

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 student success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: And welcome back to the Greeting 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 in a very good mood because I went last night to the theater with Aaron, which is a common experience. However, we went to see Fiddler in Yiddish at the Soroya, at CSUN. So this is the off-Broadway show that was running before COVID. And so first of all, we were really front and center, but it was such an incredible experience to experience Fiddler in the language of the people who would’ve worked at that time, since it’s such a family history. And we had a really good time. Joel Gray, the director, was there and we got to see him very close up. And so it just was an amazing, amazing night. So I’m in a good mood. How about you?

Boz: People that have been listening to the podcast for a little bit know I’m a huge football fan. I’m a huge university of Oklahoma Sooners fan, and so far my Sooners are having a really good start to the year. So yeah, I’m having a good weekend and this is always one of the highlights of.

Marc Aaronson: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Boz: So one of the first things we always love to ask a guest the first time they’re on the podcast is just, how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Marc Aaronson: So, in a weird way, I was a beneficiary of it. So when I was in boarding school in high school, we didn’t have number grades or even the typical A through F scale. You could earn honors or high honors or you could pass or not pass. And you know, there was probably a degree to which that wound up mirroring sort of an A, a B, a C, and a D. But it, it did put in my mind that you didn’t have to do things the normal way, but also, having come outta boarding school, knowing that I wanted to work in independent schools and boarding schools, that really did sort of dictate a pathway for me around what good can be accomplished if you’re working in a mission-driven institution, and how can you align the values of the institution with what you’re assessing students on and therefore how you’re assessing them.

Boz: All right. So I think you might be the first person Marc, that we have had on that their origin story actually starts with them experiencing alternative grading themselves instead of like coming to this epiphany of something’s wrong with our grading. So, you said you were a product of it yourself. How long were you a product of it? Like was your entire K 12 education or how.

Marc Aaronson: No, just the three years that I was in boarding school. So my junior prep school went through grade nine, so I started in, in boarding school in grade 10. But that had been their structure for quite a while. And there was a lot of narrative feedback given there were a lot of one-on-one conferences with teachers for that feedback. But just the idea that this was the set of criteria that they used to determine whether you passed or got on or their high honors was transparent upfront. And. I don’t know, really worked for me.

Boz: So then your K through nine, was that more traditional, like in, in classes that had more traditional grading and.

Marc Aaronson: Yeah, it was on the A through F letter grade scale. And those were tied to the percentage scale.

Boz: So as an educator then, when you started, I know you said you knew early on that you wanted to teach in the kind of environment that you’re at now. Is that where you started though?

Marc Aaronson: I started teaching for three years at a charter school in Marlborough, Mass, near where I grew up. I was living at home. When I got outta grad school, it saved me on rent. And it was actually a brand new school that was starting in grades six and seven. So I started with a cohort of seventh graders as a teacher. And I followed them into grade eight and then followed them into grade nine as the school expanded. But it wasn’t the world I wanted to work in, which was boarding school. And so when I got a chance to come down here to Connecticut to work in Cheshire I jumped on that and started in the English department here.

Boz: So, before you got there to Chester, then, those first few years that you were teaching, were you using alternative grading there as well, or were you using more traditional grading?

Marc Aaronson: Well, I was trying to bend the more traditional grading to sort of do what I wanted to do. We were a school that was using the percentage scale. But I always tried to make rubrics for my students where they knew sort of ahead of time, Hey, in order to get between an 85 and a 90, this is the quality of work that I’m looking for. And so I started to build in qualitative descriptors at that time, but it wasn’t really until I was a few years into my career here at Cheshire that I really felt like I found a system that worked. That was after we became an international baccalaureate school. And the IB uses criterion based grading, which is not dissimilar from mastery transcript or standards based grading, but it has its own unique characteristics. And one of the things I really liked about IB rubrics was they gave qualitative descriptors for across a set of criteria what a student had to accomplish to get within the mark Band to then get the score that they wanted.

Now, that’s a lot of complicated math to go from here’s a qualitative thing that leads to a number, and you add those numbers up and it gets you a different number on a different scale. But in principle, to me, the idea of saying, no, here’s the qualitative descriptors and I can give you feedback on where you’re at in each criteria based on those qualitative descriptors. That made a lot of sense to me. And so as a school, we’ve now sort of filtered that philosophy across our academic program.

Sharona: Can you expand on that? Like how does that work?

Marc Aaronson: So a few years ago we started requiring all of our faculty on their syllabus to be very specific about what the goals of their courses are. And we said that course goals had to be both a mix of content and discipline specific course goals, right? So if you’re taking a chemistry class, you should probably learn some chemistry in it, with some non-content discipline specific course goals. So it might be a course goal of the chemistry class to get better at looking at the world through lenses other than your own. Well, if that’s gonna be a goal of the course, then at some point we need to assess that. And if we’re gonna assess that, then we need to come up with metrics to use to assess that. I don’t know how you come up with a zero to 100 percentage based scale metric that measures somebody getting better at looking at the world through lenses other than their own.

So our faculty have had to be more creative in coming up with both assessments that measure those sorts of things and rubrics that you can use that tell students ahead of time. Here’s the kind of thing that you need to produce in order to get the result you want, because I’m very much convinced we’re never, I don’t know if I wanna say never, we’re unlikely to get past the fact that students are extrinsically motivated by grades. And our school is not one, based on sort of the demands of the college application process, that anytime soon could abandon having a transcript that has A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s on. But if students are gonna be motivated by grades, that gives us a big opportunity to actually leverage that, to take what we would normally see as an annoyance or a weakness, or can’t we just get past this and instead say, okay, if grades are a thing that’s gonna motivate you, we’re gonna actively decide to grade what matters, and we decide what matters based on our mission statement. And we’re gonna have to develop really high quality metrics to use to assess those things. And we have to come up with creative assessments to do that. So if I think that it matters that the students in my English class learn how systems and structures influence their individual lives as a goal of my course, then I have to come up with an assessment that shows that they have learned the ways in which systems and structures influenced their lives. I can’t imagine a way to assess that, that says, well, you got an 88 on it and you got an 87 on it, and those are different things.

Boz: Yeah. What’s, what’s that distinction between an 87 and an 88? That’s, that’s one of the things that Sharona a nd I do, when we talk about, you know, some of our, our PDs, one of our more popular ones is, the mathematical misuse of grading. And that’s one of the things that we talk about. Like, you know, can you really distinguish between, this is a, 87 and this is an 88. Like what is that one point distinction?

Marc Aaronson: Well, and one of the pieces of feedback that we started to get early on that was more critical was, okay, but aren’t you therefore making your grading more subjective? And my answer to that was both well, if we’re all trained professionals and people are paying tuition to have their students come here, is something being subjective actually necessarily a problem, if we trust that we’ve put instructors in place to avoid bias and things like that, but also there’s no such thing as grading that isn’t subjective. It’s just a matter of where the subjectivity comes in, even on a standardized, multiple choice math test, right? How hard the problems are and the wording of them and the arrangement of them, the choice architecture behind them. All of that stuff has subjectivity built in. It’s just a matter of where the subjectivity comes.

And I would rather, at a school where we have the freedom to be discussion based in our classrooms and get to know our students really well, I would rather trust our faculty to be able to determine, no, this is the kind of thing you have to do to get an a and that that faculty member and their department chair and I and the school sort of agree, yeah, this student did or didn’t reach that level or not, and the, the student gets a say in that too, right? We do a lot of “evaluate yourself on this.”

Boz: Yeah. That’s another thing that we do in a lot of our trainings is actually take student work and give it to a bunch of educators in a room and say, okay, you’ve got 10 points. How many points is this answer getting? And I mean, we’ve, we’ve done this literally with what, probably a couple thousands of educators at this point, and we range from like two to nine of the same problem with the people of the exact same problem. I, I’ve done it in a room with the exact same discipline educators from the exact same institution, and we’ll still get ranges of like three to eight, and then we’d redo that on a four level rubric and there’s almost no variability whatsoever.

So that’s one of our messages is a lot of times traditional grading, especially a hundred point scale or anything like that, it’s very subjective. That’s hiding in thinking and calling itself objective when it is absolutely not. So even though yes, the rubrics might look subjective, but when you compare them, there’s a lot less variability in those ratings. So doesn’t that actually make it more objective if you look at it as from the results standpoint?

Sharona: Well, and I would argue that we should in this situation, replace the word subjectivity with professional judgment.

Marc Aaronson: Yes.

Sharona: Because, in your situation, aren’t those people paying you for your professional judgment and expertise? And help? So, yeah, other than, as you said, avoiding bias, this myth of objectivity, especially the mathematical myth is one that bothers me. But I definitely have another question then. So it sounds like when you got to Cheshire, they were traditionally graded, like it wasn’t the experience you had growing up.

Marc Aaronson: There was a lot of teacher autonomy, but our transcripts were and still are you know, A, B, C, D, E, F, and those correlate to a 4.3, 4.0, 3.67 GPA. One thing we have done over the last few years is in our handbook, in all of our published materials and in all the guidance we give to faculty, we have removed the percentage grade, the percentage scale from that, that chart. So, if you get an A, that gives you your GPA, but it doesn’t mean you got a 93 to a 96 necessarily.

Now the learning management system we use is we’ll still do that conversion if teachers choose to use numbers to do that. So I encourage faculty as much as I can to use letters wherever possible because that cuts out one of those sort of mathematical calculation problems. And I think it just flattens the idea that if we’re going to continue to give grades, which we have to do, given the market we’re in, if we’re gonna continue to do that, it at least eliminates the, what’s the difference between a 77 and a 78 problem? It says that within this range you have done this well. And that is also what the IB does, and when we started to make this change was when we brought in the IB.

Sharona: So my follow up question to that is how much resistance was there? Because it’s very interesting to me. I don’t really think a lot about the end of term grade. I’m in an institution where I have to give an end of term grade, so I am not personally out there advocating for that change. But a lot of people, when I ask about grading, they either go to that one and they ignore what happens from day one to day-n, or they only go and they go, well, I, I put grades. And so like for me, the only grades I have left is the end of term grade. Everything else in the middle is what we call marks indicating progress. Mm-hmm. They’re not numbers. And in my case, they’re not even letters or words.

So, where is your school in that sense? In that between, I like we understand A, A-, B, like that’s a thing. Set that aside. What happens with the students during a term and how much resistance is there from your faculty or was there from your faculty, from getting rid of that during the term mathematical marking?

Marc Aaronson: So I think a couple things. One, in terms of resistance I, I love our faculty and I think they strive every day to try and keep at the center of their focus what they feel is, is best for their students. I do think there are times where for example, the liberation that can be gained from throwing away the percentage based scale as a mindset. I think is something that people are on different stages of a journey toward. And I’m gonna do everything I can to help people move along in that journey. But if people aren’t ready for it yet, they’re not ready for it yet, and they can still run their classes that way.

We have definitely moved toward a version of summative assessments that says they should be fewer further between larger in scope and include much more process in them so that your grade book, like my grade book for example, at the end of a term, is never gonna have any more. And our terms are semester length. So at the end of a semester, my grade book is never gonna have more than five grades in it. I’m probably at the low end of the spectrum on our faculty on that. But when I see grade books that are filled with sort of daily 0 1 2 or zero one sort of binary homework check things, that’s a good opportunity for me to have a conversation about what is the student actually getting out of that versus what is that doing to your workload, right? Versus is there a way you could more holistically look at the work that you’re asking students to do, either in or between classes? So that’s one answer to what you’re asking. I think bigger picture, there is some tension between what is the value that we see to reluctant learners seeing a zero in a grade book for something that they missed or are late on until they get it in and that zero gets replaced. And unless we’re able to develop something that compensates for that, that is something that a lot of faculty do rely on. And that we do find, again, because students are motivated by grades and their families are motivated by grades. There are ways in which sort of, despite some of my philosophical objections, there are practical realities that we’re up against.

Sharona: We have that push pull as well. I have sort of a combination. I’m not down at five because I do primarily standards based grading. So if I have 15 learning outcomes, I’m going to have 15 grades, one for every outcome. Mm-hmm. But then I have a separate grade book that is all of the other stuff. Mm-hmm. And I mush that together and I do a points accumulation. So the zeros don’t have meaning other than you just haven’t gotten points from that. But all you’re trying to do is get a certain number of points, not a percentage.

Marc Aaronson: Correct.

Sharona: And so that helps.

Marc Aaronson: Correct.

Sharona: But I also wonder though, about whether you guys have had any of the conversations about when you hand a something back that has both either a number or a grade and feedback. There’s been research that has been done to show that the students discount the, the feedback. If there’s a mark on it that has a sort of a summation grade, so to speak. Do you guys look at any of that?

Marc Aaronson: So one of the things that we do emphasize quite a bit is feedback. Feedback, getting to students before the assessment. Right. So if we’re moving to a model where we have assessments that are summative, assessments that are bigger and fewer, and therefore farther between the opportunity for faculty, to engage with students during the process goes way up and to provide ongoing formative narrative, qualitative feedback along the way goes way up. So our LMS has an official notes platform where I can go in and look at a, a student’s draft on day three of 10 that they’re working on, and I can, I can write them a, a note that goes to them, their advisor, their dorm parent, their coach, their family that says, Hey, when you came to extra help the other day, we talked about, ways that you could transition from one idea to another or connect this particular piece of evidence back to your thesis right . Here’s something I would suggest you, you look at in addition to that. I can do that along the way. So we, we try and do as much feedback as possible during the process. But we’re also fairly committed to the idea that students don’t get necessarily an infinite number of chances to redo or retake, but they get enough opportunities to succeed where the benefit to them in attending to the feedback makes it worth it.

Boz: Yeah, that you just said, one of the, the big misconceptions that sh and I come across all the time, so one of our key pillars in we’ve defined as alternative grading is eventual mastery matters. Like that’s what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for instant mastery. We’re not looking for, you know, could you get it the first time? It’s do you have it by the time you leave the class? And one of the misconceptions is that means you have to give students infinite attempts. And we’ve had friends and colleagues and educators attempt to do that. And I mean, just snowball under the workload in the grading towards the end of the semester. But yeah, that the idea of students having multiple opportunities does not have to mean infinite opportunities.

Marc Aaronson: Well, and it’s less helpful for the student too, because the more often they get infinite opportunities, the more they get snowed under. Right. Because they come down to when there’s two or three weeks left. They have 55 things they have to turn in in the next two weeks, and that’s just not doable. Right. And so also having conversations with students about, yeah, if you had infinite time, infinite resources and nothing else, you know occupying space in your cognitive load you could probably get an A+ on this, but you have limited time, you have limited resources and there are other things occupying space in your cognitive load. So can you figure out for you, what is available for you to budget for this? Looking at the rubric, what is that reasonably gonna lead you to get to, do you wanna ask for an extension? Can we give some agency back to students in that of saying, learn how to budget your cognitive load a little bit and learn, frankly, how to say good is good, but done is great.

Boz: I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. I’m absolutely stealing that. Good is good, but done is good at it.

Marc Aaronson: I haven’t had a chance to trademark it yet. So it’s all yours. I’m sure I stole it from someone.

Sharona: So, Boz, I wanna give you an opportunity, if you wanna shift to the other thing that I know you’re just dying to ask about.

Boz: You guys have something in your school and Sharona, you and I have talked about this on some of our different ways of the grading architecture, of wrapping up grades and looking at this whole idea of, you know, higher hurdles versus more hurdles versus clearing the hurdle better. But you guys, and correct me if I’m wrong, actually have that to a whole nother level where a student can be in a class and can choose if they want to attempt to do either higher quality or higher or more advanced topics or something to that degree to where they can get an honors designation on the class that they were in that didn’t have an honors designation before. Is that correct?

We’re a small school, but we offer a ton of courses. And scheduling therefore becomes very tricky. And you would wind up with students who either couldn’t take an honors section of a class that they would otherwise have been recommended for because it didn’t work in their schedule. Or you’d wind up with students who kind of had to take the honors section of a class, even if we weren’t sure they were ready for it, because It was the only thing that fit in their schedule. And that sort of brought to mind to a bunch of us, I was the English department chair at the time, that brought to mind to a bunch of us something’s inherently unfair with this system.

In addition to saying you get to be an honors student by dent of being placed in this class because someone ahead of time said, you are ready for it, that bothered me. I think it, it discounts the idea that students become ready for things at different times and paces and you let a whole year go by before you evaluate that again. So we tried to figure out a, a way to address that and simultaneously. Because we intentionally set out to serve a wide range of students, particularly for a private school, right? We are not a selective private school in our admission process deliberately because our mission wouldn’t allow us to be. And I would like to think if someone dropped a $500 million gift into our endowment, that we would not become radically more selective as a result because it’s not who we are.

So that means that there is a very high need for our faculty to differentiate. And we started over the last couple of years really over the last three to start to get students and faculty and families saying, Hey, I’m ready for, or this student is ready for, or My kid is ready for more than, than what they’re getting. So we needed a formal structure for our faculty to be able to differentiate up and. Moving to this honors designation system solved both of those problems. It solved the problematic nature of having honors sections, which also got in the way of flattening levels and increasing access. But it also, what it really solved was this idea of faculty saying, I need a more formal way where I can differentiate up for students who are ready for more. So what we’ve said is, rather than there being honors sections, if you’re in a class, you can earn honors on your grade in that class. If you hit the achievement milestones throughout the semester or throughout the year, that the teacher ahead of time has said you have to hit in order to get that designation. So you’re not in an honors section, you’re in a mixed ability level, differentiated class, but some number of you are ready to do more.

And by more, I don’t mean literally more work, right? It’s meant to be a higher level of sophistication, a higher level of depth, a higher level of analysis on the work that everybody else is doing. If you’re ready for that, here’s the six achievement badges that are available throughout the year. If you hit five of ’em and you hit them to the level we say you hit them at, you get honors on your grade in that class. So I might get an A in the class and Sharona might get an A- H in the class, having earned honors on her grade.

Boz: Would then Sharona in her transcript, would it then show the geometry honors?

Marc Aaronson: No. It would show geometry A minus H and then in our school profile that we send with every application to college, that goes from our students. It would explain if you see a student who has those Hs, that means they earned honors in that class. They didn’t take an honors section of the class. We don’t have that anymore. They earned honors on their grade in the class.

Boz: Yeah. See, and I think that is such a cool idea. ’cause like you were saying, one of the other issues that honors having the honors designated classes brings up that this would help is the small matrix, the program of classes. ‘Cause I am an instructional coach right now. I’m not technically like with a school, but I’m assigned to work with schools and the two schools I’m working with, like you, are very small schools. So, having a designated honors geometry or honors US history, when you only have two or three US histories period, puts such a limitation on student schedule that like you were saying, either a student that wants and probably should have it is not having the opportunity to take it, or they’re taking it and sacrificing an opportunity to take something else that same period. Correct. Or the potentially more harmful, the student that shouldn’t be in there, that doesn’t want to be in there, that isn’t wanting to try to make that push gets put in there. ‘Cause that’s the only other time that they’re available to take it. Yep.

I think it really addresses another issue. So I don’t know if you were seeing this before you guys did this, but as I am working as department chair at my old school, or interventional specialist or now an instructional coach, I really have had lots of colleagues struggle to define the difference between their honors and non-honors class. It’s like they could tell me how the students might be different, but what additional things are, how are, what the students come out of the geometry class versus the honors geometry different?

And once you have that mix. You then have to backwards plan from those course goals, what your syllabus is gonna look like. Adding in the honors designation actually helped refine that process, I think for a lot of folks because it required a level of clarity about what are we doing, how are we doing it? Why are we doing it, and how are we then gonna measure it? Because if I now have to find a way to measure a more sophisticated version of it, or a, a deeper level of analysis of it, that might make me go back and reframe what that goal was to the, to be begin with, to be something that is more closely aligned with what I think matters.

Boz: So do most of the classes on the different courses, when they’re looking at that honors designation, is it that the students are accomplishing something at a higher sophistication or, or depth of analysis? Or is it they’re accomplishing more things in that area? Or is it really up to the different courses and there’s a mix of both?

Marc Aaronson: We tried as hard as we could to say this can’t simply be about can kids do more stuff faster? Right? So, and we tried really hard to say this has to be about demonstrating a higher quality of work rather than a higher quantity of work. Now, that might mean a student might have to do more, but there’s different versions of more, right? So if I teach an English class saying to earn honors, you have to read this extra book and write this extra essay. That’s not, that’s not what we’re talking about. But I might say that on this essay you are writing about Bret’s Play Mother Courage. In addition to the essay about that, you have to link it to two other things that we read by Brecht and one of the poems that we read by William Blake back in September. And you might have to make sort of a meaningful link between those two things across whatever the topic is that you’ve chosen from the topic banker that you came up with yourself. Right? So that is more, they have to do more. That’s probably gonna be a longer paper. Right. But I haven’t said turn honors, that has to be 3,500 words instead of 2,500 words. Right. That, that, that doesn’t help.

Boz: See, and that, and that makes sense. When you put it in the English content, I, I would agree with you. Even though technically yes, the student is doing more, that is a more sophisticated level. But I’m also looking at my own field in mathematics and going, okay, well, could I, in my say algebra two class extend the, what we do with exponentials from just exponential growth and decay to include logistic growth like I could see taking some of those topics that I would normally teach and saying, if you want to get the honors designation, you know, you’ll, you’re gonna take this and you’re going to extend this into a different related topic. So that’s, in my mind, that’s what I was thinking about with more. So,

Marc Aaronson: yeah, I think the idea, I think the, the word I would go with for that is extrapolate, right? Can the student take what is the standard that everybody else has to do for an A and can they extrapolate that into a different context? Right? That, that’s a good way of, of doing that. We do have a couple of our teachers in science department have sort of, I, as far as I understand it, settled on an idea of on because there, there are still quite a few tests in some of our science classes that are sort of more traditional tests in that way. Either having the last couple of questions, the be there’s two, but then instead you could do the two honors questions instead. Right. You could try those, or on the test there is like a bonus problem that you have to achieve. You know, you have to get a certain number of the bonus problems across the year. Right. As one of the metrics used to determine whether you’re in honors or not.

Boz: Say that I, I love, I love my science colleagues. We’ve actually, Sharona and I have seen some similar to that, to where they didn’t do it for the honors designation, but they did it for the grade. Like, okay, here’s the standard question. If you want to do the A level question here is another question that’s, you know, completely related but just taken up a notch.

Marc Aaronson: But this is the critical, this is one of the critical things to me and we, we went back and forth a lot on this in our academic committee with the department chairs, is if a student is trying something for the honors designation and they don’t succeed at it, should it affect their grade in the class? And my answer to that is absolutely not. It should not affect their grade in the class. Right. That it, this is over and above. And Fiona, back to sort of what you were saying about the end of semester or end of year grade versus the grades along the way, when I would have this conversation with faculty, inevitably what I would come back to is, okay, imagine you taught your, the class you taught last year, who’s the one kid you would’ve given honors to if you could have. All right. Why? Right? And inevitably the answer to that question was something along the lines of, well, not only did they do stuff to the level of work required to get the A or the A minus, but when they did that, there was something special about it. There was a level of sophistication, a level of depth, a level of extrapolation, a level of connection, right? That went beyond even what the rubric seven A was. Okay. That let’s define that clearly and tell kids ahead of time that that’s what we’re looking for, and maybe even show them some examples of it, and let’s require some independence of them to earn it. Let’s do that.

Boz: Okay. So let’s say I’m a student in your class. There’s no way I’m getting a C H or a C honors.

Marc Aaronson: Correct. We capped it at B+.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So I think one of the things I’m challenged with this conversation is it does make total sense to me in the high school environment because I do understand how honors works like that it is a GPA bump that is like, at the end of the day, that’s what I honors does, and it is specifically for the purposes of ranking and sorting students for college admissions.

Like that is what honors is.

Marc Aaronson: So I will say we don’t do a GPA bump. Okay. We don’t bump our GPA for taking an IB class. We don’t bump our GPA for earning honors on anything. It doesn’t affect the GPA at all.

Sharona: Okay. But in general, the purpose of honors is for college admissions ranking and sorting. I mean.

Marc Aaronson: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It’s for college admissions. We didn’t want to take away honors sections and not have students have the opportunity to have honors on their transcripts because those look good. But we also feel it’s important to recognize, in a formalized way, work that goes above and beyond.

Sharona: Oh. Yeah. I don’t disagree with that, but I guess what my challenge is, is I don’t have honors at the university. It’s not a thing. Sure. It doesn’t exist. Sure. And I struggle with having any grade be responsible for good to great in a situation like that. Like for me, if I set a bar for A, I really want every student to be able to get to that bar. And so i’ve, and Bosley knows this about this, I personally grapple with good to Great in terms of a accessibility and fairness, but that’s because of my institutional context. Right. Plus, I’m in a math degree situation where I’m either dealing with non-math majors who are taking my classes for one of two reasons. It’s either a service course to their major or it’s a general education requirement. And so, mm-hmm trying to distinguish greatness in either of those situations is very difficult for me because either I have an obligation to get you the math that you need, and I’m not doing that, and that’s for all kinds of other reasons, or I’m just trying to get you to be a good global citizen of the world.

Marc Aaronson: Yep.

Sharona: So in my context, this is a very difficult thing because I would love to challenge students to do a lot of the things that you’re talking about. I just don’t know how to do it. In the institutional context that I’m in, at least as it relates to the grade.

Boz: There is a difference between the K 12 world and the higher ed world. And you are right that you don’t have the honors designation nor a purpose really for the honors designation in higher ed. But in the K 12, even if you take out the ranking and sorting and just the students’ self motivation to want to push themselves, which, you know, ’cause my school, when I was in high school, yes, we got a GPA bump for AP’s, but not for honors. So the honors was really a student’s desire to either attempt the harder class or to maybe, you know, in prep to try to do an AP later on. But I love this idea of i’m in your class. I’m enjoying your class, Marc, and I think I can try to do more. So I’ve got this pathway of trying to really you know, push myself and get some recognition of, yes, I accomplished this higher bar. So I absolutely love the idea of this.

Sharona: I was just say, I love the idea too. I just can’t figure out how to get that opportunity for me. That’s what I’m, I guess that’s where I’m going is like, how would I do this in my world?

Boz: But again, it might not be a, like I said, especially, I mean, the goal of what they’re doing. Yes. I can see you wanting to still do that goal, but the avenue of the honors. Yeah, the, it’s. That’s just doesn’t make sense in the hallway.

Sharona: Yeah. The problem is I think I probably just convinced myself I have to go to UN grading, which if you’ve been listening to the pod for a while, you know that that’s so not me.

Marc Aaronson: Well, I, you know, I do think one of the things you raise as an interesting question is, you know, there, there has to be an answer that isn’t zero, which is what’s the responsibility we have to try and address the fact that when the students get to us, they’re coming to us after having already gone through an inequitable system to get to us. Right. And so the degree to which we have some responsibility to mitigate that argues for what you’re talking about. Which is I should be trying to make it be the case that all my kids have the ability to get an A in the class. Because if I’m not doing that, then I’m saying that there’s something intrinsic about the kid that means that they’re not capable. Right. That right.

And all of the things that lead to that. One of my hopes for this is that it, it’s it, going back to what I said right at the start is that this is a way, if we’re grading what matters and we’re leveraging the fact that students are motivated by grades, that this will be another one of those rising tides that lifts all boats. Frankly, I’m hoping there’ll be a lot of kids who try for it, but don’t quite get honors, but wound up doing more than they would have otherwise done if that weren’t available to them. Right. Their overall level of learning and accomplishment achievement, my hope is, is going to go up is, especially for the kids who try it. Don’t get it.

Sharona: I love these conversations.

Boz: I did not realize that this year that you’re currently in is the first time you’re doing this. So , Sharona already said it. I’m, I’m gonna restate it again. I wanna get you, or you and a few other people from your school back, you know, sometime after the year, after you’ve had some time to kind of look at the results and, and see just how this went. You know, where, where were the hiccups, where were the successes, where, where are the modifications going forward? But, ’cause I really do, I’m blown away with this idea, and unlike you, Sharona, because I do have where we could maybe use this. I wanna learn more about this. ’cause I think it solves so many issues with the honors designation that I wanna figure out how.

Sharona: I say, can you imagine if LA Unified did this?

Boz: But that’s what I wanna try to do. I wanna try to figure out how to bring this in and at least play around with some of my teachers that I’m coaching that might be willing to try this.

Sharona: We have a little bit of time left and I wanna see if I can turn this to one last thing that you and I talked about when we had our pre-call. Mm-hmm. Because I think this relates a little bit to this honors designation is you’ve say that you’ve moved away from exams to final demonstrations of learning. Yep. Can you describe those a little bit, what those look like and how it might relate to your ability to do some of the things that we’ve talked about?

Marc Aaronson: Sure. And I wanna be clear, this is one I can’t take credit for. Credit for this one has to go to my predecessor running our academic program, Rachel Wright. She’s now the upper school head at Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She’d be a good guest for you. But but the idea here is everything goes back to the change that we made to require all of our classes to have both content and discipline specific course goals, but also non-content discipline specific course goals. The more and more faculty in their courses lean into those non-content, non discipline specific course goals. Things like increasing empathy, things like developing a more critical worldview more of those transfer skills, the more it became apparent that a traditional reading week, exam week just wasn’t gonna work. Now that’s not to say we don’t still have classes that don’t do an exam at the end. That looks kind of like an exam. Our IB students obviously are taking their IB exams. Although, you know, a notable difference between the IB and AP is that the IB does have those internal assessments, which are much more holistic and much more choice based and much more process rewarding. So there’s that. But we, we wound up saying, look, we have this span of weeks at the end of the year between our March break ’cause of the private school. We do march break and the end of the year, which is usually the weekend after Memorial Day, we have this span of time where what if faculty use that time to implement something that was designed to have students demonstrate their growth toward all of the course goals. So if faculty have four to six course goals on their syllabi, what’s a summative assessment that measures all of those? Is it gonna be one thing? Probably not. Is it gonna be a short, discreet thing that’s done in the span of a one hour, even a two hour exam block? No.

So we said design something that measures your course goals. It can take any amount of time you want in the second semester, usually limited to between, you know, the start of April and the end of the year. It can comprise any number of things that go in the assignment center or the grade book in our LMS. You can count it for however much of the semester and therefore the year grade that you wanna count it for. But don’t feel like you have to have it be a test. Don’t feel like you have to have it be an exam. Don’t even feel like as an English teacher, you have to have it be a final essay. Right. This can be anything from a podcast to interpretive dance, to an ongoing video project, to something that takes three or four different modes. And you have to pick of those three or four different modes, which two are you gonna do your final demonstration in.

And we’ve seen faculty come up with all kinds of creative things. And one of the things we’ve actually had to do is we’ve had to expand the line in, in the academic office’s budget for experiential learning, for faculty to be able to say, well, what if, for my final demonstration of learning, I wanted to take kids down to New Haven and have them interact with the refugee community there. There’s an organization down there that we partner with through our service learning and have part of their final demonstration of learning be get, collecting oral narratives from refugees that this nonprofit in New Haven helps. And turning that into a project here on campus or doing portraits of children in another country and, and sending those portraits to them through a pen pal exchange, kind of for an art class, right? Those sorts of things. Where built in is, are you doing these more metacognitive, global citizenship focused things? Now, again, a teacher could say, and we’re not gonna stop them, yeah. But I also want them to take a calculus test. Great. Do that. You also gotta do something that’s showing how they’ve grown toward the other course goals too, beyond just. Finding the area under a curve.

Sharona: So, look, Boz, authentic assessment, huh?

Boz: That’s exactly what I was thinking.

Sharona: We do PD around authentic assessment. And I was just listening to the dimensions you’re talking about going. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I see why it’s hard for a lot of our listeners, but it can be done.

Marc Aaronson: Yeah. I mean, I should admit to sort of the privileges that we have, right? And I probably should have prefaced everything I said with that, right? We’re not one of the world’s wealthiest private schools. Right? We don’t have a billion dollars in the bank, but we’re a private school, right? So we don’t have a lot of the restrictions that come with being a public school. We have a lot more freedom and autonomy, therefore, in a lot of ways. You know, we, we also are able to be creative in our budgeting and, and accounting for, for stuff. We have small classes, they’re discussion based. We have a very low teacher to student ratio, right? There’s a lot of flexibility and autonomy that comes just from that alone, right? So we’re, we’re in a position to be able to do stuff that is harder to do in other less privileged context. That’s a thousand percent true, but that’s also one of the reasons we’ve been able to sort of incubate a lot of this stuff, is we might as well do some good with that privilege.

Boz: And even though a school like the, schools that Sharona and I deal with directly might not be able to do everything, I think there’s still aspects and things that, you know, we can still take and try to modify to implement. So, yeah, I, I love, I mean, you know, like I said, Sharona, you and I do a whole PD series on authentic assessment, which is exactly what this FDOLs are.

Marc Aaronson: And yeah, that lingo caught on real quick, by the way, within a year of doing it, students and faculty alike, where, oh, what’s your FDOL this year? F Dal.

Boz: Alright.

Sharona: Well, yeah, well, people like Accurate, who wants to say final demonstration of learning? That’s just way too long. It’s too many Salas. I sure don’t.

So.

Boz: We are coming up on end of our time. So Sharona, was there any last minute thing that you wanted to bring up?

Sharona: I guess the only thing that I’m sort of present to is, is you did talk about the privilege, but the reality is one of the things I’ve done is I’ve looked at the history of grading and it comes from a place of privilege. So one of the places that I think we can make an impact is if schools such as yours and if those inform, say the Ivy League schools, if this grading reform takes off in the elite institutions, in the privileged ones, it does tend to trickle down eventually. It does tend to actually be a driver. So I’m excited for that. Marc, do you have anything that we didn’t touch on that you want us to talk about or things you wish we had done?

Marc Aaronson: No, I just, I just really, this whole conversation, I mean, as you can tell, I get passionate talking about this stuff. I really do think for students who have so much external pressure for students who are looking at, you know, particularly high school students who are looking at an experience that so often feels like a set of hoops to jump through that they have no control over. And that really feels like they don’t have any ownership over it. I, I feel like the more that we can leverage the things that do motivate them to try and pull out of them, that internal intrinsic motivation, the better. And so anything we can do that shifts the thing about grading that is motivating for them to be something that rewards more authentic agentic buy-in on their part, the, the better because not only will that improve their outcomes, which they’ll say the thing they want sort of transactionally. It improves their experience in the moment. Mm-hmm.

I start, every time we have an open house for prospective families or a revisit day for students who’ve been admitted, I start by saying to the families, like, your students aren’t just future people. They’re people now. And an an over focus on that transactional return on investment future thing gets in the way of the fact that they have something to bring to the table now. And I would like to, as part of this grading conversation, look at ways in which we can use grades to help students bring themselves to the table more in a way that is actually enhancing to their experience of now not just beneficial for some future transactions.

Boz: Well, I think that is a beautiful message to wrap this up on. So I want to thank our listeners. You’ve been listening to the Grading podcast with Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky, 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.