The Grading Podcast

118 – Alt Grading Institute with Michael Palmer

===

Michael Palmer: Are there a set of characteristics that define every grading scheme, whether instructor knows they’re at play or not? And over the course of four years, we’ve identified 14 discriminating characteristics, and what we’ve done for each of those characteristics is look at a range of possible choices you can make for each of those characteristics. And we’ve ordered them in such a way as, as you move from things that have less evidence base to things that have more evidence base.

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

Sharona: I’m doing well. I’m a little bit tired ’cause I just did a 24 hour round trip to Denver to work on a project that is in the direction of improving math education. So it was an amazing 24 hours, but I’m tired. I’m tired. How about you?

Boz: You know, as we record this, this is OU Texas weekend, so I am really excited about the, the big football game coming up in a couple hours after we record this.

Sharona: Well, and you warned me that you were taking a half day off on a Saturday ’cause of that game.

Boz: Oh yeah, nothing comes between that game, so.

Sharona: So, yeah, so it’s been a really amazing couple of weeks with the different projects, but i’m really excited actually, about a project that’s coming up. The registration deadline’s coming up for us at the Center, and as a result, I reached out to our team and I said, Hey, you know, we kind of haven’t talked about this stealth project on the podcast. We kind of probably should because we have an entire alternative grading institute. And so we have someone in the virtual studio with us today to talk about the Alternative Grading Institute. So we have with us Michael Palmer. He is the Barbara Fried Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Teaching Excellence. As people have heard on this podcast a lot, we love Centers for Teaching Excellence and we call it at my institution Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. So absolutely love centers. Michael leads a amazing team ’cause I know several of them committed to supporting efforts to expand equity informed and inclusive teaching, improve students’ learning, engagement and sense of belonging, and increase instructor’s joy in teaching. Michael himself currently teaches first and second year seminars on the science of learning pedagogy, living your Best College life and Infinity. And uses variations of specifications in grading in each of his seminars. So welcome Michael to the podcast.

Michael Palmer: Yeah. Well thank you for the invitation, Sharona and Bosley.

Boz: And correct me if I’m wrong, but I, think Sharona, you might have left something out. Are you also a recipient of the Bob Pierleoni Spirit of POD Award.

Michael Palmer: I am a recent recipient of that award. Very humbling experience. You know, it’s one of those things that if you feel like you deserve it, you probably shouldn’t have. Got it. So I don’t feel like I deserved it, so but I’m very appreciative of that award. It, it means a lot to me.

Sharona: Well, I left it off because he didn’t put it in his own bio that I’m reading from. So, you know, talk about humbly.

Boz: So one of the things, Michael, that we always like to ask any of our new guests is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Michael Palmer: Yeah. We have four or five hours, right? And that’s gonna, it’s gonna take a while, you know, it’s a slow journey. Maybe I’ll start, I’ll start back, but I’ll, I’ll speed up. As an undergraduate, I was a STEM major. Eventually got a PhD in chemistry. My academic experience was very traditional. I had went to lots of lectures, did lots of homework, took lots of midterm tests. Almost all those courses were graded on a curve. And so it was very traditional in, in many ways. There were two formative experiences that really, in terms of grading that stood out for me. One was a, a second semester physics class. Mr. Ord prided himself on no one ever passing one of his tests true to form. At the end of the term, the average in the class was about a 35%. I ended up with a 26%, which earned me a B. So I guess I was above average probably, but I absolutely did not learn anything.

And to this day I have, it feels like a type of ptsd when I think of physics unfortunately, although I became a quantum chemist, so, so clearly I was able to overcome a little bit of that. The other experience was in a calculus class, actually the third semester calculus class, Mr. Stein, he had this really interesting homework. It was different than anything I’d ever experienced. Anyway, this this homework policy where we did homework after every class, just like most math classes, and. He would randomly pick up that homework on a given day. You never knew when he was gonna pick it up. And when he picked it up, he randomly only graded three or four of the questions, and yet I was inspired, compelled. Motivated to do the homework every day. It almost became a game. It’s like, is he gonna pick it up? Because I got all the, all the homework problems, right? I’m confident. And then on other days it would be, ah, I didn’t get this. I hope he doesn’t grade that one, right.

But it was a really interesting experience and I felt very liberated by that. Fast forward to my very first teaching experience as a primary instructor. Oddly enough, even though I’m a chemist, it was a calculus class. The engineering school here at University of Virginia teaches their own calculus classes. I was a postdoc in chemical engineering and I was teaching calculus of all things. And so I adopted that practice of homework where I would pick it up randomly over the semester, even though it was due every every day, and then randomly grade a few of those. Thinking that that was a better way to do things, although I still graded that course very. At the end of that teaching experience, that was about three years, I transitioned into our Center for Teaching and Learning here at the University of Virginia. And so I started reading a lot, a lot of literature and realizing, wow, there’s, there’s actually, people thought about these things. I don’t have to make all this up. And, and I really started thinking about the, the difference between, you know, systems where you take away points from students kind of as a punishment. Versus systems that could build them up, they accumulate points. And I thought, oh, well that’s an interesting step. And so I was actually shifted back into chemistry, a first year chemistry lab course, and I adopted that model where the students accumulate things and it wasn’t just, you know, they were doing lab reports, but there was a lot of formative assessment in there because I was having students do a lot of writing, believing that you learn chemistry by learning to write about chemistry, but if a first year student came in, they actually shouldn’t be able to do either of the chemistry very well or the writing very well.

So I actually expected low grades on the writing assignments, but I didn’t want that to punish them. So I built in lots of formative assessments that would build that up, kind of be a buffer, so that by the end of the semester they were getting high grades on the writing. But they buffered the, the start with all these formative assessments. And so there was like. Pre-lab checks, there were, I did peer peer feedback sessions and they got grades, associated peer feedback sessions, did all these things. And as that went on about 10 years, I kept pushing the boundaries of, of how could I get students to do things willingly outside of class rather than holding onto a grade. I’ll only do it in class if I have a grade. This kind of whipping carrot kind of thing. So I developed this scavenger hunt for my class and, i’m surprised nobody ever called me on it. But there’s a bunch of things students could do. They could get credit for coming to office hours. They could get credit for coming to my writing sessions that I would hold Sunday afternoons. They get credit for doing this thing I called Molecule of the Week, where I would give them the molecule and they have to go look it up and find it. Another one where photo photos in chemistry. So they would go out in the world and snap a picture of something that was a chemical process. And then they would go and look it up and tell me a little bit something about the chemical process. The thing I did with that though is I said, if you do enough of these spread out over the semester, I’ll actually increase your letter grade a third of the grade at the end of the semester. Just without question, you do these, I will increase your grade. So a B minus becomes an A minus or, or whatever.

And it was amazing how many students did that. But when I asked them why they did that, and I gave them a whole list of choices for the grade, almost never came up. It was because they found those things really interesting. I’m like, wow, that’s, that’s really interesting. So I started playing with this ideas, what if I really just. I got rid of the grades, would they do more? Would they engage more? Would they comply? What, what’s the difference? And so at that time, I, I, I stopped teaching chemistry and started teaching first year seminars and just happened to be teaching for the first time, of course, on the Science of learning. And I thought, well, if this is about the science of learning, I should actually really apply the science of learning to everything I do in that course. And one of those is a lot of information we know about the, the negative impacts of grades. And so I said, okay. I’m gonna try to get rid of all of them. I didn’t know how to do that. It was kind of at the, the beginning of kind of some formal conversations. Linda Nielsen had just published her book on specification grading. I grabbed that book. It was over, I distinctly remember. It was over Thanksgiving break. I went to a coffee shop. I had a notepad of paper, I had my syllabus. I sat down there for, I don’t know, half a day, mapping out the structure of this specification grading scheme, going chapter by chapter through her book, all the examples. And that became the core of the foundation of basically all my grading schemes. Since then, I’ve never used anything other than, an alternative grading scheme, mostly specification grading. So a long past slow progression dissatisfaction with what grades were doing, but also the things I was seeing in students and their ability to be more engaged, more motivated, less stressed learning more, producing, better work the first time, all of these benefits. And so it was kind of a no brainer at that point.

Boz: Yeah, I mean, talk about a great book though, to pick up and start with. I mean, that’s, yeah. You know, really if, if you’re asking me my Mount Rushmore, you know, Linda Nielsen is absolutely one of the ones on that, but I’d love to hear the fact that. It was kind of a slow transition for you in that you tried some different things along the way because that was my journey as well. I did a lot of bandaid fixes and so many people that we have on here, you know, we’re more like Sharona, where they just jumped head, you know, head first into the deep end. So it’s nice to know I’m not the only one that did a lot of little changes before you got to where we are now.

Michael Palmer: Yeah, well, you know, I take a scientific approach to my teaching, right? So if you change all the variables, you don’t know what works and what doesn’t work, right? And so, and part of it, you know, I think for the listeners, they’ll, they’ll resonate with this. Your own values, belief systems change over time as an instructor. You know I, I remember being very rigid and, and having hierarchical structures in my class, and students are gonna call me a certain thing and you gotta put in, in all these measures around cheating. And then over time, you start to ask yourself, what am I doing? And why am I doing this? This makes no sense. You know, there’s a grading evolution. But there’s also a personal evolution that I think comes along with this and, and if in some ways if those don’t actually come together, I think you can end up with systems that don’t really work very well. The instructor doesn’t know why they’re doing it, students don’t know why they’re doing it, and you don’t actually see the benefits of what we’re trying to do in terms of alternative grading.

Boz: And, well just with any kind of grading. It becomes the chore that grading is for so many people. I mean, I know before I transitioned into alternative grading. Grading was one of those things that I had to do. Yeah. It was one of those things I dreaded doing and could, you know, would look for any possible way to try to somehow shorten this task that I spent so much of my, you know, teaching and education time doing instead of, you know, planning out better lessons instead of really looking for ways to differentiate my instruction. It was spent on this task that I had to do, but absolutely hated doing it. Yeah. And it, it was, it was because, especially one of my core beliefs, which has always been math stands for Mistakes Allow Thinking to Happen, was a exact, you know, contradiction to my traditional grading that punished students for all those early mistakes. So yeah, that mismatch of core beliefs and fundamental grading practices, and I don’t think people, most educators realize that. Until you take the time to really self-inspect your belief systems and what your grading is doing and the message it’s giving to your students, whether you meant for it to or not.

Sharona: So I have a question. How’d that first implementation go?

Michael Palmer: Well, it, it went well. Probably exceedingly, well, you know, I have the luxury of my job is to think deeply about teaching and engaging conversations around teaching. And so in a slow evolution, I knew what, what to expect. It doesn’t mean there weren’t bumps in the road. You know, one of the biggest bumps is at the time, I, I, I think you see more students familiar with some alternative grading techniques systems. Now, they weren’t then, and so I didn’t anticipate how much coaching I needed to do and how frequently I needed to do that, how much reassuring I needed to do to help them recognize that. You don’t have this grade to kind of help you gauge your progress. There’s certainly lots of measures along the way or lots of indicators along the way that you’re doing what I want you to do. And so it just became, I, I learned a lot about how to coach students to let go of this thing that there’s so conditioned to need and to help them realize what happens, the freedom that comes with not being tied to that thing. So again, not that everything went great, but overall it went really positive.

Sharona: That’s amazing.

Michael Palmer: And so on, on that point, Sharona, what I would say is if you’re doing this, reach out to your center for Teaching and Learning because they have experts and expertise in there and many of them are probably using alternative grading techniques. So you can help them. And in fact, I work with a lot of instructors and because I see so many different schemes at this point. I can pretty much quickly identify where problems are gonna be and so, you know, reach out, have people look at those, get ’em in front of students, let’s see if they can poke holes at them and that will help alleviate some of the bumps when you first start in this space.

Sharona: Yeah, because we often say on this podcast, almost every we know had one of their worst experiences teaching the first semester they switched, and yet it was also one of their best, which is why they never switched back. I mean, there are elements of it that are just gargantuan mistakes. Usually to the detriment of the faculty member. Almost never to the detriment of the students. Right? But the number of times that I’ve heard people say, well, I thought removing all deadlines was a great idea. You know, no. Or I thought unlimited retakes is what you meant. No, so.

Michael Palmer: Yeah, so yeah, those are the things we can help folks pinpoint. Yeah, don’t do that.

Sharona: Exactly.

Michael Palmer: You wanna think about, you know, equity for both students, but also equity for instructor , and I think instructors don’t often think of the labor that that they’re taking on when they make some of these choices, which I think is, as you’re alluding to, can, can make it for a bad experience for instructor, even though it might be a good experience for students.

Sharona: Well, and we’re actually seeing a lot more. Both writing and literature, but also commentary that, you know, a change like this is prone to misconception. And so there’s ways that Bosley and I talk about this, that we’ve changed how we emphasize things like we used to say, Hey, re-attempts without penalty, I don’t say re-attempts without penalty.

I say re-attempts without penalty note, I didn’t say re-attempts without limit. So that whole phrase has to come out because people here without penalty to mean without limit. And I actually don’t believe without limit. I think that is detrimental to students. Similarly, we are gonna have an episode coming up with Emily Pits Donahoe and Sarah Silverman, who talk about things that students who have something on the neurodivergence spectrum that they may need things like hard deadlines or at least deadlines, whereas something we think we’re doing to benefit students may not benefit all students. So I like the nuance of the conversation that we need to have, but yeah, you need the nuance.

Michael Palmer: One of the things we’re doing to, to help with that nuance is my colleague Adriana Streifer here at the University of Virginia, we’ve been working on what we call a grading scheme Anatomy. And that work came out of this idea of, well, it came out of another project. We were analyzing spec grading schemes and chemistry courses. A DBER researcher in our chemistry department had collected syllabi from across the country from instructors who claim to be doing specification grading. And as we were analyzing those syllabi we kept saying, this is not spec grading. This is not spec grading. This is standards based grading. And almost all of them all except for we had 80 syllabi and I think all but two or three of them were actually standards based grading, not spec grading yet. They were all decent grading schemes. So there’s this, this confusion about what it’s named, but they actually identified some of the important characteristics that that lead to positive outcomes. And so that got me thinking. Are there a set of characteristics that define every grading scheme, whether instructor knows they’re at play or not? And over the course of four years, we’ve identified 14 discriminating characteristics, and what we’ve done for each of those characteristics is look at a range of possible choices you can make for each of those characteristics. And we’ve ordered them in such a way as you move from things that have less evidence base to things that have more evidence base. And it’s interesting for some of these characteristics, I think this gets at your point of what Emily and Sarah are doing is the extreme is not always the better thing. So if you take one of the characteristics was his choice, an instructor that allows students to, to make various choices about the types of assignments, the way they complete the assignments, when they turn those, those kinds of choices. Instructor who doesn’t allow any choice, that’s not great. Instructor who offers tons of choice, that’s not great. Moderate amount of choice tends to be the most evidence-based decision. And so, this anatomy allows an instructor to kind of mark out like 21 different decisions of, this is my grading scheme. And then if they wanna make them better without going to spec grading or standards-based grading, or collaborative grading, they don’t have to name it. They can just say, oh, I wanna move this characteristic to a more evidence-based thing, this is what I need to do. And so that really gets away from what am I doing? What does it name to what are the levers I have to actually increase the, the educational outcomes that I want.

Boz: Is that published somewhere?

Michael Palmer: Well, you know, we are busily doing this. The challenge of this work, and the reason it’s taken so long is the 14 characteristics to, to be able to say the right decision choice. The right handed decision choice is the most evidence-based means we have to do essentially 14 literature reviews to prove that. And that has just taken an enormous amount of time, but the structure of the anatomy is in place. We’re gonna talk about the alternative grading institute in a minute. That’s gonna be a core feature of that because we want people, to not get hung up and I wanna do this specific thing, but what I wanna do is actually improve student learning outcomes.

Boz: Yeah. When, whenever you do get that published down the road, a) I just wanna read it personally, that, that sounds fascinating. I would love to look at, you know, all these individual levers and see where I am at, see where I can improve my own practice. Love to have you back on and get that linked and, and out to as many different people as we can. That sounds incredibly fascinating. But you did bring up. The Grading institute and you said that that’s gonna be a key part of that. So can you first, before we get into the details of how those two things interact, just give our listeners a little bit of information about what this Grading Institute is focused on and what’s it about.

Michael Palmer: We hope this will be the first of many that you’ll have other opportunities in the future if you don’t make the deadline. The institute is it was an idea I had, it was kind of born out of work we’ve been doing at the University of Virginia to support instructors adopting alternative grading practices. I am a firm believer in the work I do in that I don’t ever try to tell an instructor to do something if I’ve not done it myself. There’s just so many things, nuances that happen when you actually implement the thing. So you can read Linda Nielsen’s book and say, oh, I know how to do this, and you create the scheme and you go do it, and it just all falls apart. And so our work in Virginia is to help instructors do that. Our expertise is in specification grading. It is, I think, probably the most versatile alternative grading system there is, but it doesn’t work for everybody. It doesn’t work really well in STEM-based courses. It doesn’t necessarily work in performance-based courses. And so. What I wanted to be able to do is provide some sort of institute like experience where there’s some general information about alternative grading where you can tap into those values and think about the grading scheme anatomy. And then from that point, once you have this, this. Essentially a theoretical foundation. You could then decide which of these grading schemes is best for me. Do I wanna do a spec grading or standards-based grading, collaborative grading, whatever. And then what we would do is we’d break out into groups and there would be experts that could help you who had actually done those things. And that was the idea of the institute. Let’s bring a bunch of. People who are experts in different types of grading schemes, general knowledge about all of them, and create this fascinating experience where we pull all that knowledge together on general alternative grading ideas, and then split ’em apart so they, for, so that participants get very specific help on whatever scheme they’re developing. So that’s the origin of, of the idea.

Boz: So it, it sounds like unlike the grading conference that is a place for us, you know, to come together to, you know, showcase some of the work we’ve been doing to present some of our research to, you know, have some panel discussions. This is much more of an actual like PD type of setting where participants are going to get to come in and like really learn that some of the nuts and bolts and, get the, some of the theoretical first, but be able to dive in and really get that kind of professional development training on how to do this. Is that correct?

Michael Palmer: Yeah, the institute’s a, a big workshop and participants will leave with a completely redesigned or a brand new grading scheme by the end. There’ll be lots of work time, there’ll be opportunities for feedback, both peer feedback from other participants, but also feedback from the facilitators. There’s six facilitators that are part of the institute. So yes a very hands-on immersive professional development experience.

Sharona: So, the institute’s, I think two days, right? Virtually.

Michael Palmer: Two days virtually. Yes. So first I’m curious, I’m curious. Mm-hmm.

Sharona: Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was just gonna say

Michael Palmer: The first day is the kind of that theoretical foundation. What are your values around this? Understanding the levers you have to change your grading scheme. And then day two is we split off into those smaller groups. We we’re focusing on three of the bigger grading schemes. Specification grading standards are basically grading, collaborative grading. There’ll be two facilitators as part of those, and the facilitators will walk participants through the development of their personal grading schemes.

Sharona: So Bosley and I have done something very similar. But typically when we do a full course redesign, ours is a five day, it’s about a 30 hour training. So and yet I’m talking to someone who’s putting out a, a book on designing course Design Institutes. Right. So what’s the thinking behind, I mean, do you have any best practices or suggestions for people who wanna help train other people the two days versus five days versus half days for three weeks? Like what’s the thought on structural impact for these kinds of workshops and why do you think this is gonna be a good way to start for, for the Alt Grading Institute?

Michael Palmer: Yeah, so at UVA we run a five day course design institute, and that’s nuts to bolts from essentially blank blank page all the way up to a fully designed course including aspects of a grading scheme. Course design’s really hard work and it takes a lot of time when I talk to people who are like, can’t you do that in two days? It’s like, well, I’m a quantum chemist. Do you wanna learn quantum chemistry in a week? No, you don’t. You can’t, you can’t do it. It’s just hard work. And there’s just lots of pieces, right? You gotta understand motivation, the science of learning learning theories. You need to understand effective assessment, grading schemes active learning, all this kind of stuff. To design a course, we set up the alternative grading Institute for. It’s intended for people who actually have a solidly designed course already, and what that basically means is they thought carefully about their learning objectives. They probably have a fairly good set of assessments that go with those. Those assessments are aligned with the learning objectives, and so that the grading scheme is just a layer onto that. So that we think in two days, if you have a, a decently designed course, two days is enough to actually just revise that grading scheme. So if I were doing this for a full course design plus the grading scheme, right, you’re talking about seven to eight days to do all that. And so we’re just stripping out the first part with the expectation that participants will come in with that well-designed course and then we can just layer this next complication onto it.

Sharona: Okay, that makes a lot of sense because we do a five day grading, one specific to grading, and yet most of our participants don’t have, you know, a well designed course. People think they’re like, I’m coming in to do calculus one. Everybody knows what Calculus one is. Well, not quite so much when you’re trying to get accessible learning outcomes. So. Yeah, that makes sense. So I’m like, I’m looking at it going, how are you doing this in two days?

Michael Palmer: Yeah. In fact, at at UVA, we offer essentially an institute focus on specification grading, and we don’t let people sign up for that unless they’ve done our course Design Institute. We feel like it’s actually a type of, of educational malpractice. To encourage an instructor to change their grading scheme when the underlying foundation is kind of rotting. And so we really wanna make sure that foundation is solid and they can build on top of that. Because if, if you’re learning objectives are not good, then none of it pulls together, right? And everybody’s frustrated in the end. If you wanna set someone up for failure teach them how to do alternative grading when they don’t know anything about course design.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, I guess for me, I can’t separate the two. I mean, I can, in the sense that I’ve seen plenty of institutes that don’t deal with grading, but anything I teach on grading, you have to do the learning outcomes. I mean, and I have to teach you how to do the learning outcomes. So yeah, that’s just, I can’t. I can’t teach on grading if you don’t have the learning outcomes. So, oh yeah.

Boz: That’s a foundation of which all this is really built on. Like, you know, like Michael was saying too, you can’t build a alternative grading scheme or system on a foundation of learning targets that aren’t there.

Sharona: I, well, I wanna be careful ’cause most of us did at the beginning, like. This stuff didn’t exist a decade ago when I was doing course redesign, so I did try to write learning outcomes and they weren’t totally terrible. But I don’t want people to shy away from, oh, I shouldn’t try to do this because I don’t have my learning outcomes. It’s just, I think something to be aware of that if you, what we find is that people who struggle to redesign their grading scheme and who run into roadblocks in the process of redesign. 90% of the time, there’s a learning outcome problem that’s behind that. That if they’re saying to us things like, well, I, I wanna use a four level rubric and I wanna distinguish between good and great. I’m like, okay. What does that look like? What does that mean? Well, I kind of know it. When I see it. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. You’ve gotta be able to define in this learning outcome what’s good and what’s great, because otherwise the students can’t do it. And it, a lot of times it comes down to the learning outcomes. Those where all the roadblocks are.

Michael Palmer: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that at all. You know, when you’re designing courses, you’re always thinking about situational factors and what kind of constraints the design. For this pilot of the Alternative Grading Institute, we wanted to constrain the situational factors a little bit so that we could learn learn how to do this really well. And one of those was, let’s, let’s start with instructors who have thought deeply about those learning objectives. You can imagine a situation where we’re gonna actually take you back a lot of steps and it’s more kind of a, a beginner’s experience. We can walk you through the whole process. So again, it was just a decision we made during this pilot phase that hopefully we can relax at some point because I, I wouldn’t wanna discourage anybody from doing it either. One of my jobs in a Center for Teaching and Learning is to help you get to the thing you want both faster and better, right? And so that’s the goal of the institute as well.

Boz: I do have a question in your role of working at the Teaching and Learning Center at UVA, . One of my things that I keep bringing up and I’ve been pointing out is that grading is such a large aspect of, you know, any educator’s life, whether it’s a K 12 or higher ed educator. And yet there’s so very little actual learning about grading in, you know, your edu, your undergrad programs. And when you’re learning to teach, whether it’s K 12 or, or higher ed, it’s such a missing piece for something as large as what grading is and what we do. So I love the fact that we have centers, you know, so many centers, so many really great centers out there trying to help, but are you seeing any more, or you know, programs that are actually starting to build this in before someone gets in front of students?

Michael Palmer: No, I think is the answer. And it, and part of this is, you know, one of the dirty little secrets of higher ed is that most faculty aren’t taught how to teach, right? They’re disciplinary experts. And so by virtue we, we put them in the class and, and the idea is that they can convey that information to others. And so I think coming back to earlier conversation, there’s a lot of work that has to happen to, even to, to even have this conversation. You know, I’ve given workshops. Ton of workshops at UVA around the country, even around the world. You ask people, do you like grading? And every one of except for one said yes or said No, I don’t like grading. I hate it. The one who said they, they actually like, it didn’t actually mean what they said they meant when I, when I probed a little bit, they liked the feedback process, which you and I know is not the grading process. Right. It may be the thing that eventually allows us to hang a grade on this, but it has nothing to do with grading. So people don’t like it. And it’s actually a pretty, I think alternative gradients a pretty easy sell for most people, especially when you start to pull into those ideas of what are your values, what are your, what are your core values as an instructor? And then now, now let’s compare these to what you’re doing in grading and do those two things align? The other thing that, that I think convinces people a lot is when you share just a little bit about the history of grading, where it comes from, that it comes outta behavioralism, that it comes outta eugenics practices and natural intelligence. It comes out of industrialization and capitalization and, and all of these things. And they’re like, whoa, wait. Right. And, and they’re thinking they’re, they’re immutable and inevitable, but they’ve only been around a hundred years. It’s like there’s something else, there’s something different. And, and they’re craving for that something different. They don’t wanna be spending all their time equivalent between an 87 and an and an 89. Right. Nobody wants to spend their time doing that. What they wanna spend time is giving really good feedback to students, asking students questions, having a conversation with students and seeing students grow through that conversation. So it’s a pretty easy sell. How to get it in front of them, when to get it in front, front of them is, is sometimes the challenge, right? Because sometimes they need to go through their own personal evolution. To get to the point to where they can say, I can do this. And let’s be honest, not every instructor can do what, what others can do, right? In terms of the precarity of the position, their identities, their barriers, systemic barriers that make a transition to an alternate grading scheme difficult, more difficult for some people.

Michael Palmer: Yeah, well, we’re hung up on this idea that we’re supposed to credential for employers. We’re supposed to sort students, and, and I don’t think that’s the purpose of higher ed. And so I, you know, if we can be a little bit rebellious and push against that, even though at the end of the day I have to give a grade, right? My institution requires the grade, but can, can I do everything in my power to minimize the negative impacts of that thing? I’m gonna do it.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, and the, the other thing though that I, I wish that I agreed with you that alt grading is an easy sell. And unfortunately, one of the things I’m been running smack dab against recently and I’ve talked about on the podcast is there are some identity issues at play here that I think those of us who really, truly believe in, students may not have as part of our identities, but we need to recognize in others, which is. Every single faculty member in higher ed is a, not only a survivor, but a survivor to a very high level of traditional grading practices, most of them, and it forms part of our identity. I am proud to go out in the world and say, I’m a math professor. It gets me kudos to this day. Oh my God, she’s so smart, and. So a lot of people, their identity is very wrapped up in this success. And so what I’ve come to realize is even some of my faculty that are very, very committed to student success, like if you talk to them, if you look at how hard they work, super committed to student success. What they don’t recognize is they have a very narrow definition of success, which is how do I get my students to learn to behave the way I behaved so that they can be successful? And when you challenge the grading scheme, you’re actually challenging the core of what they made them a success. And that’s very insidious and it’s very hard to fight against. And some people get very, very angry.

Michael Palmer: I-G-I-G-I guess I should have qualified that a little bit. You know, the work we do at the Center for Teaching and Learning it, it’s voluntary it’s optional, right? So, so people are coming to us to try to find answers and so it’s an easy sell for those folks. You are, right. Teaching is, is so much a part of your own personal self-worth. That’s why it’s such a private endeavor, right? People don’t want other people to go into their classrooms and see them. It’s this private thing and and, and it’s because it is. Tied up in their self worth. So, so yes, departments don’t get it, institutions don’t get it. A lot of faculty want to do something else. And so those are the willing, and I think if we can start with the willing coalition, get enough of them on board. And that’s what I’m seeing at, at, at places like UVA, just a lot of instructors embracing the idea. I think other instructors start to be curious. Even if in the end of the day they say, oh, well that’s not me because you know this, these other things are important to me. They, they get curious and they start seeing the impacts of that. So I guess I’m hopeful that there’s, people are more receptive to the idea that, that we don’t need grades to actually engage students and get them to learn deeply.

Boz: So is, is this something that you are starting to see become pretty widespread at your university, this alternative grading practices, regardless of which flavor they might be.

Michael Palmer: Yeah. Well, I mean, these things are hard to measure. You know, people ask me all the time, how many people are doing active learning at your school? It’s like, I don’t know. I’m not in their classrooms. And even if I can look at a syllabus and say, oh, it looks like they’re doing it, sometimes I go in the classroom, it’s like, yeah, they’re not doing that. So it’s hard to say. We’ve given, we’ve led workshops to hundreds of people who as far as we know, have adopted many of the practices. We did a pretty large scale research project that spanned over I think three years of courses. All levels first level through fourth level, different class sizes, different disciplines where we study student perceptions in those courses. So we have a little bit of evidence in terms of how widespread it’s, you know, and, and it’s also one of these things, you know, this I think is once, once somebody does it, they don’t go back. And so there’s, you know, there’s that kind of impact. So I wish I had a better answer and I knew exactly how many people are using it. I know more and more are using it all the time. We could probably offer a spec grading, alternative grading workshop, you know, four or five times a semester and they would fill, so there’s, there’s lots of demand.

Boz: Oh, that’s, that’s excellent.

Sharona: Yeah. How big is UVA? How many, how many students and approximately how many faculty?

Michael Palmer: yeah.

Sharona: Okay. So you’re about the same size as Cal State la. And to hear that you can fill it four or five times a, a semester is very heartening. I have a fantastic center, but they have not done anything as far as I know with grading reform and we’re probably under a hundred faculty. Maybe under 50. Who do this in any way, shape or form. About 20 of whom are in the course that I coordinate. So,

Boz: and, and a lot of the others are in the courses that we helped redesign in the engineering. In the engineering department.

Sharona: That’s true. Yeah. That’s amazing. So I do wanna go, so you have a book coming out. Called Developing High Impact sorry, not coming out, but Came out. Came out, yeah. Developing High Impact Course Design Institutes. So, you know, the people who listen to this podcast are, many of them are pretty well along the path of alternative grading. Many of them might want to find a way to host these things and train other people. So what are, can you share some of the key principles from that book and that you used , in the development of the Alt Grading Institute?

Boz: So, I’m curious, and I, I don’t know if you’ll have an answer for this, but as I’m listening to you describe how, you know, it was designed to look at how you do course design institutes, but is really equitable to almost any kind of professional learning setting. I’m wondering. How many of these things can be transferred to K 12 settings and different, you know, PLC or things like that in the K 12 world?

Michael Palmer: That’s a really good question, and I’m gonna come at it from two angles. I’m a chemist by training. I went to UVA first to do a postdoc in chemical engineering. It took me three years to realize. We were talking about the same thing, but we were using very different words. My wife teaches K through 12. She’s a second grade teacher. Over years, I’ve realized we’re talking about the same thing. We’re just using different words, right? And so they actually translate really well, right? Whether you’re talking about a lesson plan versus a syllabus, or whether you’re talking about, you know, whatever it is, they actually do translate very well. There has to be some translation though, right? And so if I were gonna do some professional development experience in with my wife’s colleagues, I would want her working alongside me to, to do that translating for me. But the general ideas, they work regardless.

Boz: Okay, well I just found my next book on my reading list.

Sharona: Yeah. I may have already ordered a couple copy Boz. Did you? Okay, great. Well, that’s one of the beauties of the center is it is intended, although a lot of our initial work is in the higher ed space, because Bosley is a K 12 instructional coach and a university professor in the math department. He and I together, we try to bridge the gap. We try to to align because one of the things that we hear all the time, every educational setting looks to the next one to say, well, I have to do this this way, because that’s how they do it there. And we finally came all the way to the point. We had one realization. The one place they don’t do it is nobody says, because they do it this way in graduate school. That’s where it breaks. Right? In graduate school, even though traditional grading is still there, almost nobody talks about their grading schemes in their graduate courses. So. It kind of disappears in graduate school except for the professional schools, whereas like medical school, I mean, you wanna talk about somebody that’s completely moving in a, you know, standards based or competency based world. It’s those professional schools. But so it’s just interesting. So we like to bridge the gap K to 16 as we call it.

Michael Palmer: I, I think it’s important gap to bridge because we can learn so much from each other. There are a lot of things K 12 teachers do just because of their training, the fact that they have coaches, the fact that they have ongoing professional development, they actually, many, they know way more than in higher ed faculty do. Again, it comes down to this translation. You’re never gonna get higher ed faculty to get over the fact that, you know, someone who teaches second grade could actually teach them something about teaching. Right. They’re gonna struggle with that, but it doesn’t mean that the conversations that be had aren’t valuable and are productive. So I, I would, I, I look for all opportunities to kind of, to definitely bridge that and, and have more shared conversations.

Boz: Alright, well we are starting to kind of come up on time, so I, I do wanna give you Michael a last chance to anything else that our listeners need to know about the grading Institute if they are signed up for it, what, you know, what to expect in their experience in those two days?

Michael Palmer: Yeah. I guess what I would expect is to. Expect to be a student, right? I think one of the, one of the things that we forget is what it’s like to be a student and how difficult it is to learn and and that, you know we’re gonna give you homework. We’re gonna do you have, you do peer feedback. You’re gonna you’re gonna make mistakes and you’re gonna learn from those mistakes. So, you know, I’d encourage people to just, just be open to the possibilities open to new perspectives. Even if in the end you pull a lot of the things maybe you’ve already done back into it. But I think if you’re open to those possibilities, then good things can happen. And I think in the end what will happen is there’ll be a closer alignment between your grading practices and what you value most as a educator.

Boz: Alright, Sharona, anything that you still burning to ask or close with?

Sharona: No, just encouraging people to go ahead and, and sign up if registration is still open. If it’s not and you’re interested in it, go ahead and drop us an email at the center and say, Hey, you know what? I missed the deadline, but I’d be really interested. Because the more demands that we hear, the more that we can offer this. It’s actually extremely affordable. As far as professional learning goes, I think it’s $200 this first time for two days worth of work and it’s just, I’m really excited to see how it goes.

Michael Palmer: Yeah. Two days of work with six experts in the field. Yes. You don’t get a, a better return on investment than that.

Boz: Yeah, I know anyone can look it up on the Center for Grading Reforms website looking at the alternative Grading Institute facilitators, but can you go ahead and, and name some of those? I know you’re one of the actual facilitators as well. But yeah. Who are some of the others?

Michael Palmer: Yeah, so I’m joined with a couple, my UVA colleagues, Adriana Streifer. She and I will be working with those interested in specification grading. And then another colleague, Derek Bruff and Drew Lewis will be focused on standard based grading. And Lindsey Maslin and Emily Pitts Donahoe. We’ll be helping support those interested in collaborative grading. So, an Allstar team. It’s been fun planning this. We’ve been working on it for about six months now. We’re just excited to get in front of instructors and help them become the, the educators they dream of being.

Boz: Yeah, it really is an Allstar list. You know, we’ve had several of these people on you know, Emily sits on the organizing committee for the grading conference. So does Drew Lewis. So you really do put together, you know, a, a dream team of people. So anyone that is registered, I’m sure you’re gonna have a phenomenal time. Anyone that is not able to this year, hopefully this is going to be something that we are doing at least annually, if not, possibly even more if the interest is there. So I, I also look forward to either having you or one of the other six of you back to hear about this institute a after it’s done, see how, how it went what the reception was, and, and just hear all about it.

Michael Palmer: Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. Thank you.

Boz: All right. Well, you have 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.