The Grading Podcast

Sharona: ​Or traditional schooling, as Jesse Stommel would say, we’re going to have him on as a guest shortly, but schooling with a capital S is what he calls it. So much damage has been done that one of the things that I need to get my students to buy back into is that they’re in class to learn. That learning actually matters.

It matters to me, and I want it to matter to them. And I want them to feel like they have some control and power over their learning. Traditional grading has done a tremendous amount of damage to most students desires to learn in a classroom setting.

Bosley: Welcome to The Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

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

Bosley: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts, here with your other host, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m doing very well, Boz. Thanks. You know, I’m in a really good mood because I feel that I’ve had one of the better starts to my semesters, and that’s good because the topic for today is really a very important one for the beginning of any semester.

We’re going to be talking about buy in. And this is very interesting to me, because you and I were getting ready to record this podcast, and we discovered that despite the fact that we’ve been teaching on this and working together for several years, we actually didn’t have the exact same definition of buy in.

And it seems to come partly from the difference in how we’re approaching this from our institutional structure.

Bosley: Yeah. You know thinking about to that conversation, we really did. It was, it was kind of funny because, you know, we had a good 20, 30 minutes of going back and forth before we realized the reason we were going back and forth is because we actually had some different definitions and some things that I took for granted because, you know, I did start my career in the K 12 world. I’ve been teaching in the K 12 world for like 19 years where this is only my fifth in the higher ed. So it was interesting that the prep work for this one was different.

So yeah, I’m curious to see how this goes and I’m excited to see where this episode goes.

Sharona: Well, I think we need to start by giving someone who is listening to this an idea of where we’re hoping this episode is going to go. In particular, I think we’re going to be talking about three main topics through the course of this episode.

The first topic we’re going to talk about who we’re talking about when we talk about buy-in, because there’s not just a single group that we need to buy in. Secondly, and this is where I think we’re going to get a lot of the meat of this episode, what exactly are they buying into? And then third we’ll hopefully touch on some ways of doing buy-in. How do you get these different groups to buy in.

Bosley: Exactly.

Sharona: So with that being said, when you are asked who are you trying to get to buy in to the idea of the way your course is structured, or I don’t know, maybe there’s this, is there a question before that even? I go back and forth of why does this even matter?

Bosley: Yeah, and the why it matters, I actually think, is more important of a question than some people realize because especially with, let’s just say, in our biggest group of buy in is our students. Like that is the main group that we’re talking about. We are going to talk about other groups, but that’s the group we really want to buy into this and looking at "why is it important?" is important. I mean, it’s "why do we want our students to buy in?" Because we are asking our students to do things that they’ve not been asked to do before. And with our feedback loops and the reassessments, if our students don’t buy into that and don’t believe that this is going to work, they’re not going to engage in those feedback loops, and this does kind of fall apart at that point.

Sharona: Exactly. If a student does not engage in a feedback loop, It breaks the loop. And then the system is no better than any other grading system. So I think that’s, that’s critically important.

Bosley: And I would even say, because we’ve talked about this before, my expectations and what I’m looking for from my students since I’ve started this, has gone up, compared to where it was when I was doing traditional grading. Because I have opportunities for the students to learn from their mistakes, I do have a higher level of expectation. So if I have a student that isn’t engaging, in a student that, like you said, breaks that feedback loop because they don’t understand it or they haven’t bought in, it’s actually harder to pass my class. Like it’s, it’s not just as bad, it’s maybe worse than traditional.

Sharona: Exactly. So we’ll get to that, I think, when we really dive into the student buy in portion, but who else have we heard about, or have you thought about, that we might want to get to buy into the idea that there is another way to grade and that it can be very good for students.

Bosley: So, and this is definitely where the two different worlds of K 12 and higher ed are going to have a little bit of overlap, but a whole lot that’s not overlapped. So, in my K 12 world, one of the other biggest groups that I should be concerned with are my parents. It’s dealing with the parents of my students. So that’s really probably, at least in my experience so far, been the second hardest. And I know in the higher ed, that’s a group that you don’t even have to worry about, really.

Sharona: Not only do we not have to, but we essentially can’t, because I legally cannot speak to my students’ parents without my students’ express permission and usually with the student present.

So parents are not a factor directly. They may be an indirect factor if the student is grappling with the system and trying to get help from a parent, but parents are not a part of my world.

Bosley: Yeah, so that, that’s another big group for my K 12 world. I think one that we would agree on is our colleagues.

Sharona: Yes, and I do think there’s a big difference here too. Because there’s the colleagues in terms of other people who might teach the same course, or that might teach a subsequent or precursor course. But my colleagues, so to speak, are also, to a degree my administration, like my department chair, who I really do need to buy in, is also a fellow faculty member.

So how I approach them might be different than how I approach other administrators, such as the dean’s office. Because my administrators may have much less control over my course, they have a lot less say, potentially, depending on your institutional context. And I also don’t have some of the legal requirements that you have in K 12 in terms of course content and things like that.

Bosley: And not just legal from like EdCode standpoint, but also districts can place a lot of requirements and criteria, even though by EdCode my final grade is my final grade. No one can say anything about that, but they can put a lot of regulations and sometimes those regulations I’ve seen at some districts is kind of a stepping stone or a roadblock to people trying to do alternative grading forms.

Sharona: Absolutely. But let’s go back to students because this is where you and I had, not a disagreement, but a fundamental difference of understanding even when we were just talking to each other.

So I wanted to lay out sort of what I posed to you and what we had trouble with. I feel that many courses in higher ed, there is not an effort to get students to buy into the course structure. It’s sort of just laid out. This is what it is. Here’s your syllabus. First day of class. Here’s how I’m going to grade it. Hope you do well.

Ideally, most of the listeners of this podcast are probably well beyond that. They’re not, that’s not how they’re running their courses. But I think many of us would say. That’s how the majority of our experience was. I wasn’t asked to buy in, I was given a choice. Either do the work the way the instructor wanted it done, if I could figure out how that was, or don’t pass.

But what was I buying into? Yeah. And then your perspective, from your institutional context, is different.

Bosley: Yeah you know, in the K 12 world because students, in the higher ed world students are choosing to be there.

Sharona: Exactly.

Bosley: In the K 12 world, you’re there. Like, a student doesn’t have the choice of not being enrolled in school after third grade. So it gives a kind of different dynamic between the students and the teacher in the class. I do think because of that and because of just that relationship, we do have to build a little bit more buy in with introducing ourselves, introducing our courses, laying some of that stuff out, starting to build that relationship.

And again, no offense to any of my higher ed colleagues that might be listening, but there’s a lot more outside education things that a K 12 teacher I think is expected to deal with and handle to some degree than you have at the higher ed.

Sharona: Well, you’re required to attempt to teach every student.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: You can’t really kick students out of your class, except in very specific circumstances. So partially what you’re trying to get students to buy into is to making the day to day experience a pleasant one for everyone involved.

Bosley: Getting a classroom environment to where learning can happen for everyone to begin with. Because, yeah, if you’ve got 30 people in your class and you’ve got 4 off the chain because they don’t see the value of the class. Yeah, you don’t have that in the higher ed. But in K 12… You might have that in every single period.

Sharona: Well, and what’s been striking me as I’ve been thinking about this more and more is I feel like traditional grading has done so much damage to students or traditional schooling as Jesse Stommel would say, we’re going to have him on as a guest shortly, but schooling with a capital S is what he calls it, so much damage has been done that one of the things that I need to get my students to buy back into is that they’re in class to learn. That learning actually matters. It matters to me, and I want it to matter to them, and I want them to feel like they have some control and power over their learning.

Traditional grading has done a tremendous amount of damage to most students’ desires to learn in a classroom setting.

Bosley: Now, and you’re saying that as a higher ed educator, where again, students are choosing to be there now, imagine that in the K 12 world, where a lot of students, if they had their choice, probably wouldn’t be.

Now, there were some years in there where I wasn’t, I was off doing other things, but I feel like I was a huge contributor to that damage, unwittingly and unknowingly. So I don’t want to blame any faculty member, whether it’s K 12 or higher ed, because I didn’t know, none of us knew. We just, we didn’t understand the perniciousness and the pervasiveness of grading practices.

So now that I’ve started thinking about them, and I know there’s other people that have thought a lot more about them than I have. One of my biggest goals the first couple of weeks in the classroom is to build enough trust with my students that they will begin to believe me when I say I truly care about their learning, because many of us have said that, and without knowing it, have done grading practices that completely are counter to that belief.

Bosley: Yeah, I mentioned this in one of our earlier episodes. In fact, I might have mentioned it more than once. But for years I had a poster in my room that, you know, had math spelled out as an anagram, Mistakes Allow Thinking to Happen. That has always been one of my core beliefs. Yet until I left traditional grading and went to alternative grading, my grading practices absolutely were a contradiction to that belief.

And without knowing it, I was shooting myself in the foot with those grading practices, even though I tried to give that message, and even if my students believed that message and believed that I believed in it, still the grading practices were still hindering that and a direct contradiction to that belief.

Sharona: So when we say what are they buying into? What is a student buying into? I can think of several things I want students to buy into. Number one, they have to buy into the idea that learning matters in this class. That the measurement system, the grading system, actually measures learning. And it measures the learning of the things that I say it measures. So my clearly defined learning outcomes have to be clear, they have to be defined. The second thing I want them to buy into, and this takes more time, is they have to buy into the idea of trusting me that I’m not going to suddenly do a gotcha or aha moment of ha ha ha you trusted me, But actually this thing’s going to hurt your grade. And then the third thing they have to buy into is those feedback loops because they have to take action.

They have to take an assessment or turn in a project or turn something in, and they have to turn it in in a time frame and in a manner that there is an opportunity for me to provide feedback. And then they actually have to use the feedback. So it’s got several actions on the part of the student. And if a student is not bought into doing something, they won’t do

it.

Bosley: Yeah, we talked about this in our feedback episode, where the fact that we all give feedback, feedback is not something new, but we did a whole hour long episode on how to give feedback and why it’s so difficult and why it’s so important. And part of that was we have to deprogram our students that have probably had a traditional grading system most of their educational career, and that feedback really wasn’t that big of a deal because you couldn’t really do anything with it. So, yeah, that’s part of that buy in because even if we take the time and train them on where to find it and train them on what our personal feedback looks like and how they should be using it, if they’re not bought in, they’re never going to use it, so that just ends up being wasted instructional time that doesn’t go anywhere.

Sharona: When does buy in happen in an alternatively graded system ?

Bosley: Well, again, and not unique to alternative grading classes, but the buy in process definitely starts minute one of any course. Trying to get the students, maybe not to buy in, but to really understand, and understanding and buy in kind of go hand in hand, but I have actually found that to be a little bit difficult because, like I said earlier, we’re trying to deprogram our students on what likely could have been ten or more years of experience with traditional grading. So I used to try to do this right from the beginning, like, Oh – I’m going to sell my students on this and they’re going to love this idea and it’s going to get them excited to be in the class, and none of them really could picture or understand it when I’m sitting up there that first week, you know, going over the syllabus and trying to explain this grading practice, they’re all like, "Oh yeah, sure. I understand." And really had no clue.

Sharona: The number of times we get, "So wait, the assignment worth zero points, why would I do that?" and it’s literally the most important assignment in the course because it’s where we’re checking for learning.

Bosley: Or my favorite one is always that week six to week nine student that comes to you just in a panic of like, okay, I’ve failed all these quizzes and these tests and, even though that’s not what we call them that’s still what the student would refer to them as, is there any way I can still pass? And looking at them going, "you still have an opportunity to make an A, like there’s nothing here. I don’t care that you have not gotten mastery on any of our checkpoints. You still have plenty of time to get an A." And that reaction of, "well, what do you mean? But I failed all these things." And I’m like, "No, you just don’t have mastery yet. You still have opportunity to get it."

Sharona: Well, and that’s been very interesting for me too, because I’ve definitely played with "what does my first week look like" and the balance between trying to explain a grading system in a timeframe where my students are trying to figure out where their classes are, trying to figure out how they find the assignments and the assessments because they’re navigating multiple technology systems, sometimes multiple tech systems from the publishers. You know, if they have four classes, they could have between four and eight different technology systems to deal, with trying to figure out physically how to get around campus, and now I’m starting to try to explain to them that this grading system, that at least they felt that they understood and they just kind of needed to check on the weighting for that particular course, is different. It’s a cognitive load that is too much for them. So I have started to do a lot of my beginning of the semester community building with a thread of how human beings learn.

So it’s really much more infused with the idea of humanity. Even though I’m a mathematician, you know, humanities is not necessarily my forte, but I am infusing all the stuff that I do, the first week especially, with acknowledgement of my students as human beings. So getting them into groups where they actually spend extended time talking to a fellow student, exchanging not just names and superficial hobbies, but their thoughts on school and its role in their lives. A time, we do sometimes stories of failure because I share my own failures and trying to get students to normalize the idea that you make a lot of mistakes while you’re trying to learn something, and then coming in with, "wow, if this is how humans learn and if I claim that I want to measure your learning, shouldn’t I have a grading system that lets you make mistakes?" and that, I’m building towards that.

Bosley: Yeah, and I spend a lot of that first week doing similar things, both in my K 12 and higher ed worlds. Spending some time with growth and fixed mindsets, doing some activities about learning outside of academia. And yeah, and I also really like to share some of my personal stories of failure. I do share a lot of personal things with my students. I think that’s how you can build that rapport with them and start building that trust and I do, I share a couple of my failure stories.

Sharona: So if we’re not getting full buy in the first week, when does it start to happen for you, in your class?

And once they understand it, most of the time they’ll buy into it. Like as soon as they understand that, "Oh, so I don’t have to get a 90%. There’s no percentages." And then my second point is really after about the third checkpoint of the first couple of standards. So the way our grading architecture is set up, we do the N times method of wrapping up a learning target, so when we get to that third one some people have already completed it, there’s still some people that might not have any yet, but without any additional checkpoints could still get it, so I’ll do it there. And again, this is usually around that six to nine week, people start to understand, "Oh, I’ve had little to no success so far in this course, but I am not locked out of an A yet, I’m not locked out of any grade." So I get a big chunk of people then. What about you?

Sharona: I definitely agree on the first assessment of the first standard. That’s a critical point, because since they have their own checkpoint and their own feedback to look at, they are highly motivated to understand it. That’s when I bring it up. I show them, first of all, where to find this information because it’s not obvious.

It’s not like I’m handing back a paper test that has a score on the top.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: All of my stuff is done electronically, so they have to know where to find it, they have to know where to look at it. They have to know what things mean, because one of the things I’ve done is I’ve gone away from words in my marks, I use emojis mostly.

Bosley: And we went into a lot of detail as to why you do that and the purpose of that in our feedback episode. So if you haven’t already listened to that episode and you’re kind of wondering why is this crazy person not putting any numbers at all, that episode we really go into depth into what our proficiency scales look like and why, the rationale as to why we do away with numbers completely.

Sharona: I have to find out, I find out that I have to explain the emojis at that point, even though they’re in the syllabus, I’ve talked about them previously. Now they’re finally seeing them in context, but without any of the wraparound language. Like I have a lot of wraparound language in the syllabus that defines these little icons, but once they get to the rubric, they’re not there. So now they’re looking at this little hand with a pencil and saying, well, what does that mean? And that’s when I really get them the first time and I also show them how the LMS system rolls things up. So that’s the first one.

I do it again after the second checkpoint on the first standard, because that’s the first time anyone has a chance to master anything and be done. And then usually I’ll say something when I’m leading up to the first reattempt that is not required for everybody, but that’s more to just remind the people who have it to not do it. So that’s another aha moment.

But yeah, I find that week 10 of a 15 week semester is a really big one if I haven’t lost anybody to attrition. So I’m definitely intervening earlier with people who are starting to not attend or starting to not take something. But right around week 10, I pull up the tracking sheet. Because again, in week 10, nobody’s passing yet. We haven’t assessed enough. Because something we haven’t really talked about yet on the podcast is I frontload content and I backload assessment because human beings need time to learn.

Yeah. So I push the material a little bit, early, that way the last couple of weeks of class is really solidifying and working on problems and those kinds of things. So the last four to five weeks of the course is where a huge amount of the assessment happens. So we’re in a very rapid feedback cycle, and that’s where I start to get a lot of aha moments. But I do need to retain them up until that point. So that’s been, sometimes, a challenge.

Bosley: And that same period of time is when I get my third group, when I get that. It’s usually not as big as my first two, but I’ll get those, you know, handful of students that the light will just come on. They’re like, " Wait, what? I can still do it here and here?" And, they’ll turn it on. And that’s when they’ll, all of a sudden, be spending every minute they can in office hours with me, that’s when they’ll really be, you know, attempting everything. And it’s funny because those are the most fun to see that light bulb come on because they’re just sure that they’re failed. Like they’re done. Like, can I withdraw from the class? And, it’s Week 10, because there’s no way I can pass. And it turns out, "oh yeah, you can still pass and you can still get a fairly high grade" depending on exactly which week it is. But…

Sharona: Well, and in the statistics course I now have 7, 000 data points over the last several years, literally 7, 000, we’ve had over 7, 000 students go through the course, so I know what the patterns look like. I can look at a student and their pattern, and I can’t do it much before week 10 because there’s just not enough, right around week 10 I can look and say, "Oh, I know this student’s going to pass. So let me get them up to an A or B" or, "Oh, this student’s really at risk. Let me really make sure they’re clear."

So I have students who come to me and say, "is there any way I can get a C?" And not only do I tell them they can get an A, but I’m like, "Oh, no, you’re definitely going to get a C because I can see what you’re doing. I know what’s coming. I guarantee, I know you’re passing," even though technically they’re not passing yet, I can see it.

Bosley: You can see that pattern.

Sharona: Exactly. And I’m looking at them and going, "No, you literally have every learning outcome that has completed assessment at this point. You have every single one of them." They’re essentially at a hundred percent, but because this is so strange, they think they’re failing. Because they only have six and they’re going to need nine.

I’m saying, "yeah, but we’ve only finished assessing six of them." And even then those six are not even done because you can do them on the final. So that part’s really fun. And then the other thing that I really enjoy, and students don’t even know that they’re doing it, what they buy into is the content of the course, because all of these conversations are about content.

Bosley: Yeah, we keep coming back to this. I mean, we’ve probably mentioned this, you know, there’s probably third or fourth that episode that I can think of that we’ve talked about the conversations we have with our students. It’s so much fun not to be playing the points game with them and, "oh, how can I get more points? How can I get extra credit?"

Instead, it’s talking about the math and, what’s really fun, this semester in that stats class, I actually have a couple of students that have taken this class before and not succeeded. And because they have a little bit more understanding of the grading system, because they’ve already experienced it, they’re coming in and they’re kind of driving my entire class.

Like they came in, bought into it immediately, they helped explain it to my students, but a lot of the conversations we’re having and stuff, they’re kind of driving and it’s doing a lot of the other class a whole lot of good. And it’s a lot of fun. And then I think about and compare that to a similar conversation I had to have with my own daughter, who is a junior in high school, that just broke my heart because she’s in a class that’s traditionally graded but, you know she came to me, when was this – about a week and a half ago, just in tears. Just bawling her… her math grade had gone from a high A to an F overnight. And just you know, she was devastated and worried that you know she’s going to disappoint me and stuff. So we start looking at her grades. We start looking at you know, what’s going on? She’d had one test. And because 70 percent of her grade and she didn’t do well on this test like I said overnight, went from a high A to a mid range F. She went to like a, I think it was a 55, 56%…

Sharona: which is a top of the range F by the way.

Well,

Bosley: depends on how you define the range. Yes. If you’re, yeah, I know.

Sharona: Couldn’t resist.

Bosley: And to make it even worse, she’s trying to, like I said she was more upset about it than I was, but she’s trying to say, "oh, dad, please don’t be mad. I’m going to continue to work really hard on the homework and I’ll get it up."

And I had to explain to her, not only can your homework not get your grade up, if you aren’t perfect on your homework from here on out your grade will go down. Because her grade was a, she had a hundred percent on her homework at the time. And having to explain this points thing and explaining the point game to her and how to work it, because that’s the system she was in, was not only breaking my heart but making me sick to my stomach because I’m, none of it was – we had no conversation about math. We weren’t talking about linear and exponential growth, which is what her material was on. We weren’t talking about pattern recognition, you know, like some of the eight standard practices of math of mathematics, weren’t talking anything about that. We were talking about the game of points. And it was just heartbreaking.

Sharona: I told this story last night at dinner. And I think you’ve heard this story, but you know, my son, my younger son, is a math major. He’s not planning on going, doing math as a career, but he enjoys it enough. It’s he’s willing to do it to get a degree in it. And so he’s currently a sophomore in college. He also just turned 18.

So he’s very young, because he was very accelerated in school, but back when he was in the eighth grade, so he’s very young for the eighth grade too he was 11 or 12, something like that, and he was taking geometry. Which is absolutely the highest math class offered at the middle school. Because he was that accelerated in math.

And, as 11 year olds sometimes do, he decided to slack off on homework for about a month right around March. Now this teacher was out. They had had a long term sub due to a medical issue on the part of the teacher. I was busy. I was working, I wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t do his homework for a month, tanked a couple of exams.

Okay, that’s fair enough. His, his issue. Went to talk to the teacher said, look, what can we do? You know, he’s 11. He’s in geometry. Yeah, these are literally there’s eight students in this class. They are the top eight students in the entire school when it comes to mathematics. So the teacher lets him make some stuff up. He takes a cumulative final. Gets over an 80 percent on the cumulative final. Okay? So this kid knows his mathematics.

Bosley: Yeah

Sharona: The teacher has to make a "participation" decision that is entirely within the teacher’s discretion. And he gives him one point less than what he needed to hit 70 percent and get a C. He had a 69.4%. And that teacher gave him a D in geometry at the age of 11 in the top eight students in the classroom. What’s the lesson?

Bosley: Yes, when a student slacks off and a student gets behind, yes, their grades reflect that. But like you said,

Sharona: Maybe.

Bosley: Well, it, no, no, let’s, let’s be fair, it, it should, but it should also reflect the amount of learning they have by the end of the semester. And a student getting a, you know, like you said, over 80 percent on a cumulative final should have said something about the learning.

And if we go back to you know, a definition of grades being some sort of measurement of learning, did that grade do that? Did that grade really reflect his level of learning in Geometry?

Sharona: I’m going to argue absolutely not. And worse than that, it actually hurt his ability to learn mathematics. Because what he learned, because he absolutely learned from that experience, and what he learned was what you know doesn’t matter.

What you learn doesn’t matter of the content. How well you behave and follow the rules is all that matters. And that just makes me sick to my stomach. I also know that in K 12, you guys have some rules around behavior or compliance or things like that. There’s like citizenship standards and other kinds of things that you’re supposed to report.

We don’t have to do any of that in the higher ed world. And I would argue that unless you have a learning outcome that specifically is trying to measure students compliance with the rules or, or things like that, then no, it, it actually does not belong as part of the grade. You know, you should only be measuring what you’re attempting to teach the student.

And if you decide behavior’s what you’re trying to teach, then you better have a learning outcome on it.

Bosley: But we’ve kind of went adjacent to our topic.

Sharona: Well, but this is part of the issue with buy in, right?

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: Because if a student believes that you’re going to grade them on compliance then they’re going to buy in one way, and if they believe that you’re going to grade them on learning, they’re going to buy in a different way.

Bosley: Yeah, and if they, like we said at the top of this, if a student doesn’t buy into the feedback in the feedback loops, this whole thing kind of falls apart. And students with this kind of experience – yeah, you, you really do have to deprogram them and sell this idea that there is value in mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

Sharona: And I think at the end of the day, that’s what I was trying to get across when we were having our conversation. I don’t need them to buy into the grading system per se, they don’t have a choice. I’m going to grade them the way I’m going to grade them. But they do have to behave, they do have to buy in to the behaviors that they need to take in order to be successful.

And that’s really, at the end of the day, the more that I think about it and look at it, I was trying to get them to buy into the idea of the system, but really what I need them to do is to buy into the behaviors.

Bosley: Even if they don’t buy into all of it, if you get them to buy into the value of the feedback and the feedback loop. That’s really the heart of what we need a student to to believe in and to engage. In the rest of it I can sell as we go.

Sharona: So that provides a segue for me into one of the other groups you mentioned. And honestly, it’s probably at the core of why we’re doing this podcast. Which is, I think all of this stuff with student buy in would be so much easier if they had a lot more classes like this, which means getting our colleagues to buy into this. Which is why we’re doing a podcast the end of the day. Right?

Bosley: Yeah. Getting more colleagues to buy into this, to start to make this more system wide rather than individual or pockets here and there.

Sharona: And so there’s a couple of things I wanted to mention about faculty buy in. And then I wanted to open it up to you because again, you’re having this situation with sort of the top down nature of the stuff being implemented. Which I think is a bigger issue on the K 12 world, but in our world we have this NSF grant, and we had some faculty that have been working to redesign courses, and one of the sort of mid-level, midterm results of this grant, is that there’s some people who are coming to believe that maybe this is too hard. That maybe this is too hard for most faculty to do, which I don’t agree with, but that’s the feedback that I’m getting from some of the people that are, maybe not directly involved, but peripherally involved with this grant. So if this gets a perception of being too hard, it will freeze in its tracks. That’s a concern that I have and that’s one reason I’d like to work with fellow instructors to bring the good parts.

The stuff about conversing about content with students and the joy that that brings to the classroom. And I want to get that out there. A lot. But you guys have an issue, I think, that is important to talk about, which is there’s some districts trying to do this at a district wide level.

Bosley: See and that’s actually kind of interesting. I have seen different districts, around not just the state of California, but around the country that have made this a top down decision. And really, in the last couple of months, I’ve also seen some articles about districts that did make top down decisions about this. Implemented it and trained on it really badly, and it failed miserably. And I think I want to do some episodes talking about some of these things that have been coming out about districts going back from what they called mastery, or EGI or whatever they might’ve called it, going back to traditional because it didn’t work.

Because they did, it was top down and it was so poorly trained and implemented. It’s interesting to see this because in my district, in LAUSD, they haven’t done the top down yet. They’ve been really good about offering a lot of incentives for people to get trained and to people to try to implement it.

They haven’t done top down yet. But there are definitely some things in the pipelines about some of the guidelines about grading practices that might make some people feel a little top down. So we’ll see how that ends up going.

Sharona: We’ve talked about the fact that grading is extremely pervasive in the classroom and it’s extremely personal. It is the instructor’s value system. One of the issues, that I have seen with buy in on the part of colleagues, is that it does require a level of self awareness and self examination that someone has to be willing to do. And it’s not going to feel right if you don’t do that, because then whatever you’re trying to do might be at odds with your personal value system.

So I think giving instructors the space and the proper access to resources and expertise to be, to have these conversations be facilitated. This is not easy, especially for those of us in academia. Because we say our students have had 10 to 12 years of this. Well, I’ve probably had, you know, 40 years, because I’ve been in academia so long.

So we’re even more embedded in these systems. So I do think that colleague buy in, in terms of the grand scheme of things, is extremely important. How much buy in you have to have as an individual instructor from other instructors Is going to be very situation dependent.

Bosley: Yeah, and I think this is true of both the K 12 and higher ed world.

Different areas, different institutions, different schools have different levels of department cooperation and collaboration compared to teacher autonomy and dependency. So, my particular school, high school that I teach at, we’ve also been practicing PLCs, or professional learning communities, for a decade now.

So there is a lot of time spent within our like departments and our PLC teams planning and doing a lot of things similar. So getting, trying to do a change to your grading system in that kind of setting does actually take getting the buy in of your colleagues. Because as part of that PLC, a lot of your grading practices are in line with each other.

By the time I kind of really started to transition from traditional grading to alternative forms, I had really one year where I had permission from my algebra two team to kind of try it out, but I never really had to work with trying to sell them on it until I actually left the algebra two PLC.

But yeah, as a individual teacher, I would have a little bit of pushback from my department chair and from my colleagues about going this kind of rogue without getting some buy in from my colleagues.

Sharona: And I have been. I was the lone wolf for at least a year when I started doing this. I just kind of didn’t mention it to anyone.

At my institution, there’s a, there used to be, I wouldn’t say there still is, a very hands off approach. As long as you followed the faculty senate guidelines and you covered the material that were in the course learning outcomes as provided by the department, you were good. You were left alone. They came in and evaluated you and looked at your teaching and looked at your teaching evaluations and saw how your students did, and it was fine. After about a year, I kind of, some people knew I was doing this, in particular Dr. Silvia Heubach. Convinced her to let me do it with the statistics course and suddenly it became a much bigger deal.

Bosley: Okay, but let’s also kind of explain when you say a little bit bigger of a deal. I know we’ve talked a little about the structure of this class, but that first year, how many courses, how many teachers, how many students are we talking about here?

Bosley: Yeah. So we’re not talking about a small, you know, three or four people here. And I was there at one of those first trainings where you introduced this to the faculty in general.

Sharona: Yeah. You almost got into a fist fight with somebody on that one.

Bosley: Not a lot of happy people. And it’s funny. Some of the ones that had the biggest issues and the biggest pushback are still teaching in the program now.

Sharona: And they’re actually happy.

Bosley: Yeah, it’s been what, this is year six?

Sharona: I think it’s technically five, year five. No, actually, year six. Yeah, you’re right. We are, and we just started year six of that program.

Bosley: So even so it took us a little bit But yeah, it was not, it was interesting to say the least.

Sharona: So that is a decent segue then into administration.

Bosley: Well, let’s back up because we were talking about how did you end up getting some of those instructors that had so much, you know, just disagreement with the things that we were saying, you know, about late policies and all this stuff. How did we, how did you, get them to buy into it?

Sharona: So I like to say that I used a carrot and a stick. So the course was redesigned as part of a mandate from the Cal State University chancellor’s office. So we knew we had to do a course redesign. It was being required. We knew that we were going to get a different group of students. And all of the people that teach in this particular course are adjuncts. So none of them have tenure. They’re none of them tenure line. So they are some of the most precarious faculty. Many of them had contracts. In the Cal States we do have unionized contracts for Cal State, but they are the most precarious. So they only could push back so far without feeling like they were risking their jobs, which I might have taken a little bit of advantage of, in their own self interest to be honest. So the stick was, if you want to teach in this course, you have to do it this way. Because this is a coordinated course, it is under mandate from the California State University Chancellor’s Office. This is how our institution has decided to do it. Sort of take it or leave it.

So that was the stick of at least trying it.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: The carrot was, I did all of the work along with you and Silvia, to develop all the materials. And it wasn’t just the grading system. We flipped it, we do active engagement, clicker slides. I mean, it was all of it. And so we made it as easy as possible for the instructors. Especially for adjuncts, many of whom are teaching at multiple institutions. To have the burden of course preparation removed from them was huge.

Additionally, one of the things the Chancellor’s Office did very, very well is they provided money to train faculty on these coordinated courses. And at Cal State LA, we have a very, very good Center for Effective Teaching and Learning, run by a woman by the name of Catherine Harris.

And they partnered with ACUE, the Association of College and University Educators. And we put 44 faculty through the ACUE teaching certification that year, and I helped facilitate that. So we had hours and hours of training on effective teaching. Both in the classroom and in the syllabus and everything. So we did intensive training on the things like giving effective feedback and writing a proper syllabus and active learning and inquiry and iClickers.

And then I built it all. So then we told the instructors, give it a semester. Try it. This is very new. Try it. And that first semester was awful.

And yet it was still way better, so they didn’t abandon it. And they sort of all jumped in and started trying to make it better. And by this time, six years in, I would say that every faculty member on the team feels that they’ve contributed something significant to the design of the course.

And they didn’t have to, they could have dumped it all on me and they didn’t, which is amazing. We have these incredible, it’s a team, I mean that’s, at the end of the day it became a team. We talk more to each other as an instructional team than I think almost any other instructional team on the entire campus.

Bosley: Yeah, and that kind of gets to, you know, before I really got into grading reform and alternative grading practices, one of the big things that I was trying to do at my school was bringing in the concept of PLCs and the importance and the value of them. If any of you are listening to, have not read some of the DuFour books, Whatever it Takes, by the DuFours really changed me as an educator more than probably any single other book. You know, rest their souls. But.

Sharona: We’ll definitely link that in the show notes. And just for reference, PLC stands for professional learning community.

Bosley: Yes. Yes. I’m sorry. In education, we’re really bad about our jargon and our acronyms.

Sharona: Yes. But, so now let’s go on to administrators, because I do think that’s an important point, and then we do want to touch on parents as well. So what do you have to do at your end to get administrators to buy-in ?

Bosley: And see, and that’s an unusual one because in the K 12 world, our administration can be a lot more invasive than I think you deal with at the higher ed. But just because they can be doesn’t mean they all are. So we have some, I’ve seen some institutions and work with some math departments that admin doesn’t care. I mean, they trust their department. They’re like, okay, you want to do it? Go ahead. So there’s no buy in required.

I’ve seen others that really will micromanage their school and are very invasive and very in the teacher face. And you do have to show them and get them to buy in because otherwise they’re just not going to give you the space to do it.

So the admin one is a weird one because there’s such a wide range of types of admin that you might end up having.

Sharona: In the higher ed world, one of the biggest challenges we have is the wide variety of institutional contexts and the greatly varying level of job security on the part of faculty. So a tenured faculty member may have a tremendous amount more latitude than an adjunct or a non contract professor.

And so, I don’t know that I can speak enough to any sort of broad principles with admin. I do know that Robert Talbert has written a blog post on this, so we’ll make sure to link that, but I’d love to hear from people listening, what have been some of the challenges that you’ve had to face with administrators? And were you able to overcome them? How did you overcome them? So I would love for people to contact us using the contact us link in the website, and share some of the administration stories. Because I think that we get a lot of questions and worries by people who want to try this, and that is one of the big barriers, one of the big fears, is what is my admin going to say?

Bosley: And if you are an admin and listening, or you’re at a school that has either had a really strong supporting or opposition admin, love to hear from you guys. I know we’ve talked to a few people over the years and the grading conference that we just had the fourth annual one this summer that, I’ve done this district wide, so I’d really be curious to hear from some of our admin out there or people that have had to deal with whether it was extremely supportive or absolutely had to fight against or fight for. Because I’ve also seen admin that are very top down that are like, no, we know things aren’t working. We have to change something. We’re going to change the grading and you’re going to change it this way or you’re going to get left off the boat.

Sharona: So the timing on recording this podcast is interesting for me because I have to go in to my new deans next week and teach them about the course. Because they’re not familiar with it and they’ve heard bits and pieces, some of that they’ve gotten wrong.

So I know I have one associate dean who’s not so thrilled and, but doesn’t really know what we’re doing, and then I have another one who’s a co PI on a grading grant with me. So I have to go in and sell my own admin this coming week. So it’s going to be interesting.

Bosley: Might be an interesting followup.

Sharona: Exactly. And then that leaves us with one group that I have nothing to say about, which is parents.

Bosley: Parents, which, and again this one can range from one extreme to another. And I’ve actually taught at both types of schools where you do have that very, I don’t want to say invasive, but the helicopter parent that is very much involved. And also, unfortunately, I’ve been at schools that parent involvement is at a minimum when it gets to the high school level.

I actually don’t think I am an expert at this at any means. By the time I was doing this in the high school world, other than one algebra two class, most of it was the dual enrollment program that we did together. So they were always seniors and at that point the parent involvement was minimal.

So this is one that I know is a big deal, I know, actually one of my colleagues that was on on before, Joe Zaccola, he’s got a lot more parent involvement that he has to deal with. So this is a topic that I want to recognize that we need to talk about. But unfortunately, I just, I don’t think I have the expertise, so I’m hoping that this becomes another episode where we have some guests come in that have a little bit more experience and a little bit more expertise on it.

Sharona: I remember when we were speaking with Matt Massey, who is the principal of, I think it’s called the Alabama School of Cyber Technology? Something like that? They, they launched their school this way. And one of the things that they learned is that a comprehensive letter to parents can be a important tool in doing this. Yeah, so maybe when we get a chance, we’ll try to get Matt Massey on and he is somebody who could talk to this.

Bosley: I would love to have him on. He was great at the conference, what was that two or three years ago?

Sharona: Yeah, the k 12 conference.

Bosley: Yeah, he was great there and again, when we talked to him then, they were opening a new school where everyone was doing this. It would be great to, now that that school has been open for, I think it was, had been open for a couple of years then, so it would have been year five or six now at least. So it’d be interesting to get him on it and see where their journey has gone since we talked to him at the conference.

Sharona: So I’m hoping that this conversation has provided food for thought, has allowed people to explore maybe some of their own concerns.

But we might have missed some things. So again, I’m going to invite anyone who’s listening to send us a question or send us a thought or send us a comment. You can, of course, also record your comment or question. And if we get some of those, we might be able to play those on the air on a future episode.

And we’re also wanting to know what other topics, you know, we have a whole list of topics, but we’re by no means the only experts or even experts. We think we know something. So please reach out to us and let us know what you want to hear. This podcast is for the people listening. Because we want this movement to spread and we want to get buy in. We want to get buy in to changing the way we grade.

Bosley: And we’re also wanting to do real nuts and bolts. So if we’ve got a listener that thinks that they’ve got some good ideas about how to do some of these. Or a topic that we haven’t talked about? We’ve had some guests, but we want to reach out. We want more guests on. So I’d love to hear if you think you would be a good guest, there’s a topic you want to talk about, yeah, please contact us. We’d love to have you on.

Sharona: Speaking of guests, I’m really excited for some of our upcoming episodes. We’re going to be talking with Dave Clark about artificial scarcity. We’ve got an interview coming up shortly with Jesse Stommel and his new book Undoing the Grade.

Bosley: And we’ve also got Joe Zeccola coming back on before too much longer.

Sharona: Exactly. So in the meantime, I hope everyone has a wonderful week and is out there just doing the good work and helping us help students learn.

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.