The Grading Podcast

124 – Replay of Townsley Book_Fire

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Boz: Hello and welcome to the grading podcast. Sharona and I are taking the week off as we enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with our families. We hope you’re able to do the same. We will be back next week with a brand new episode, but until then, sit down and join us as we, relisten to our episode 46, where we sat down with Dr. Matt Townsley to discuss their new book, Extinguishing the Fires. And until next week, we’ll see you later.

Matt: So we wrote this book really for educators that are maybe trying to convince their colleagues that this is a good idea, or that we can move forward with this idea, or also school leaders who are in the midst of maybe one of these fires and are trying to figure out how to extinguish that fire, but also we, we believe this book is really there to both help educators extinguish the fires that are maybe happening, but we also hope it will help them prevent the fires from ever happening to begin with.

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

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

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

Sharona: I’m doing well. People who have been listening to the pod for several weeks know that I’ve been enjoying the end of the semester. But that was yesterday and today I’m now on to my stuff for the summer and so now I’m really diving in and looking forward to two things. The grading conference is coming up June 13th, 14th and 15th and I’m switching hats into my job as the executive producer of a youth and community theater company. So I’m very focused on our upcoming production of The Addams Family, the musical. So I have switched hats. And that’s where I’m at. How about you?

Boz: Yeah, I’m, I’m doing well. You know, we finally got through the monster that is testing. So now from here until the end of my semester at my high school, it really is switching gears into planning for next year. So I’m happy to have finally gotten through that monster length of time of testing.

Sharona: Well, that’s, I’m very happy for you. It’s nice to see on your face, the lack of stress. I know our listeners can’t see it, but I can see it. And speaking of seeing things in our virtual studio. We are so happy to welcome back today, the sportscaster of alternative grading, Dr. Matt Townsley. Just a few reminders Matt, you were here last on our episode number 18, and now this episode is going to be somewhere in the forties. So that’s pretty amazing. He’s the author of quite a few books, one of which we’re going to talk about today. And he’s a associate professor.

Matt: Hey, how did you know, Sharona? Yeah, just got the new title here starting the summer associate professor of educational leadership at The University of Northern Iowa and Cedar Falls. It’s a great place to work. It’s a great place to lead others and their Oh, aspirations to become school leaders. I don’t know. Like, I’m feeling pretty fortunate right now. I don’t know how many people get invited back to the podcast. I’ll take that as a compliment.

Sharona: Absolutely. I think you’re, you’re maybe only the third or fourth repeat guest. So, congratulations and congratulations on Associate Professor. That is super exciting.

Matt: Yeah, thank you very much. It’s as, as you all know, if you’ve had your feet in higher education at different points in time and it’s a big deal. So thank you very much.

Sharona: Do you want to explain maybe for some of our listeners who are not in higher ed, why the term associate professor is such a big deal?

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the higher education world you may have heard like the phrase, publish or perish, right? You get hired on a, what’s called the tenure track, which means, hey, we kind of like you, but we want to be friends with you for about six years. . If you’re friendly with us, in other words, you show us that you’re good at teaching, that you are good at being a committee member on a number of different opportunities across campus and across the field in your area of expertise. And you show us that you can do all the writing and research. You show us that you’re a well rounded academic and scholar, then we’ll kind of sign you to almost a lifetime contract. It’s not literally a lifetime contract, but it creates a lot more professional stability. They call it tenure in higher education. And. So I’ve been an assistant professor for the past six years and now I’ll be an associate professor with tenure, which means I think there’s not maybe as much pressure to write as maybe expeditiously, but perhaps to write more enjoyably and to continue, I think, to provide some really great resources for educators out there like the one we’re going to talk about today.

Sharona: Well, and you can take more risks.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe, you know, I don’t know challenge a few others out there and their thoughts and maybe challenge myself and some of my own previous thinking as well. You bet.

Boz: Well, it’s great to have you back. And I think last time we did that you were on, we did talk a little bit about a couple of your books, but we wanted to ask you back to talk about your brand new book title is extinguishing the fires within assessment and grading reform. And, at least to my knowledge, this is a very unique book. So just to start us off, who is the audience for this book? Because that’s unique.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So the book is called extinguishing the fires within assessment and grading reform. I coauthored this book with Garth Larson, Becky Peppler, and Don Smith, and all four of us have experience as teachers or instructional coaches or administrators in, in PK 12 schools. And what we found out in our experiences in schools is that we oftentimes schools will be apprehensive to get started or maybe unsure if they can move forward because it seems at some point in time, something is blowing up in the school system or something is about ready to blow up. And if you, you know, if you catch the, the national media headlines, you will see this happening, right. A school district that’s thinking about you might be taking a step back or unsure if they can move step forward because there’s some parent community or other stakeholder pushback. And so this book really encapsulates those fires. That that will pop up in school districts or that will potentially pop up in school districts. And so we wrote this book really for educators that are maybe trying to convince their colleagues that this is a good idea or that we can move forward this idea, or also school leaders who are in the midst of maybe one of these fires and are trying to figure out how to extinguish that fire. But also, we believe this book is really there to both help and Educators extinguish the fires that are maybe happening But we also hope it will help them prevent the fires from ever happening to begin with. Let me just give you an example This book has I believe it’s 16 Yeah, 16 fires that we talked about and all these fires are real Boz like We just didn’t make these up. These are fires that we all have experienced as we have been in schools or the schools that we have supported. And so every single chapter is a specific fire. And we start out the chapter by just sharing a personal story, whether it’s myself or one of my co authors, we just say, here is what was happening in a district that we were a part of or that we have supported. And like, It’s real, right? Like you will often hear like, well, we can’t do it. This is actually a fire 16. We can’t do this whole thing, or we can’t move forward with this thing because I heard about it and it’s failing over in that other school district, right? That school district next door, or that we saw in the headlines somewhere.

And so we want the people reading this book to say. Hey, this might happen to you, or if it is happening to you, how do you move forward? And so we share our stories of the fires. We share our stories of how to prevent and extinguish the fires. And when appropriate, we provide some practical resources for educators to support their colleagues moving forward or for school leaders to help their entire system move forward. So I don’t know, Boz, the best way to say is it’s, it’s for those fighting the fires or those getting ready to fight the fires in their school district. Admittedly, this book doesn’t tell, you know, math teachers exactly how to do it in their math classroom or science teachers exactly how to do it in their science classroom. It’s more like one level up. At more of the systems leadership level, if that makes sense.

Boz: And as someone who is in one of those roles for my district, it’s called the EGI champion. You know, EGI is the name equitable grading and instructions, the name that my district renamed what was formerly known as mastery grading, which although not identical to standards based, it’s very, very similar in a lot of its structures. So, and I’ve been one of these people for a long time. And you said that these 16 fires are real. I’ve personally experienced 14 of the 16. Anyone that’s listening? Yes. There are 16 chapters, what they call fires. And yeah, I’ve personally experienced 14 of them.

Sharona: I may have all 16.

Boz: Do you?

Sharona: Yeah.

Boz: But you didn’t experience them from a training point. Some of these you experienced from..

Sharona: All of them except fire 14. I think I experienced from a training perspective. Fire 14. I experienced as someone who does this in training, but with my own children. So fire 14 says, why would we make these changes when we are already one of the best schools in the area? And I just want to say thank you for personally writing me my own personal 114 page book. And I also think you could have shortened your entire explanation of who this is for to everyone who listens to this podcast.

Matt: There you go. There you go. Yeah, no, for real. Like it’s, What we found is there’s a lot of great books out there, right? That convinced us to make changes in our grading practices. Those are great books. And there’s also some really great books out there. That talk about how to actually make the changes at the school level or at the classroom level. And there’s some really great, you know, training and conferences out there to help, you know K 12 folks and higher education folks, for example, get better at doing this in our classroom.

But what we found is there really just wasn’t a resource out there like when things are almost literally blowing up. Or, or perceived to be blowing up how to handle those situations. And so when I try to describe like my, my passion my scholarly endeavors, if you will, like I had to write all this stuff up actually recently for all of my tenure and promotion portfolio. I just said, Hey, I, I love to live at the intersection of , change, education and grading practices. And I really feel like that’s where this book sits, right? Whether it’s at the individual classroom teacher, who’s like, not really sure about what’s going on anticipates or, or, or is in the middle of one of these changes or someone like you’re talking about Boz, who’s like, Hey, we’re trying to help the system move forward and things are on fire or about to catch on fire.

And so we think this book is, is very practical. Like we just cut right to the chase. This is not a book to try to read to convince somebody else that EGI, or standards based grading, or proficiency based grading is the way to go. It’s once we’ve kind of drank or, or tasted the standards based grading, the proficiency based grading Kool Aid and we like how it, we like it. And we’re all, we’re well on our way or almost on our way. Like this book is going to help us make the path a little bit smoother or to smooth out the already rough path that is ahead of us.

Boz: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s, you know, if you want a book on why, you know, go grab Grading for Equity, go grab one of any, you know, Guskey’s dozens of books. You want one on how, you know, go grab Grading for Growth , by Dr. Robert Talbart and Dr. David Clark. But this is a real need from again, from someone who is in one of these roles of trying to move their school, their district, their community forward. This is a real need. And what’s, what’s really funny is the day I got this book, I mean, I hadn’t even opened it from the package. I, you know, my wife had just said, Hey, that book you’ve been waiting on finally got in.

I got a call from one of my other EGI specialists who is also a friend and common name on this podcast, Joe Zeccola. And he was telling me about a PD that went sideways on him. And I’m like, dude, I just got this book. I haven’t read it yet, but I know the author. It’s I’m sure it’s a great book. I know him and I think a couple of his colleagues have already gone out and bought it. And I mean, it, his was. a variation of fire 11. I mean, it’s, but yeah, this, this book really does fill a need.

And I love how this book is broken into like you were saying, you introduce it with a real personal story, which I’m sure we all could come up with dozens, if not hundreds of these. And then you go into some of the explanation and then how to put out the fire, which from a trainer’s standpoint is great. But then you go a step further, which is a part I really love, which is talking about how to prevent it from ever happening. And I know as an educator, I do this in my classroom all the time as a trainer I don’t know if I have done this as much, but as an educator, part of our lesson planning has always been anticipate where the students are going to struggle. And come up with a plan of how you’re going to address that struggle, you know, is it that they have some arithmetic knowledge, background deficit, is it that they’re not understanding?

So as an educator, my, my lesson planning has always included that reading this and reading those, those how to prevent, I’m like, Oh my God, why was I not thinking of this the whole time as a trainer anticipating that some of those issues? And I mean, Sharona, some of our training definitely does. And it’s, it’s scary how much reading this trying to use some of the stuff that you and I do is in there. I’m like, well, that makes me feel good. I was doing accidentally doing it, doing it well to begin with, but I love that part of each and it’s of each and every single chapter. It’s how do you prevent this from ever starting?

Sharona: So before we dive into the book itself a little more, can you share a little bit about how the book formed and how you decided on this structure of telling the story and then extinguishing it and then preventing it? What led to, to that structure?

Matt: Yeah, my colleagues, Garth, Becky, Don and I, again, we all have this common experience of both being a part of so many of these fires personally when we were in PK-12 schools again as a teacher or instructional coach or administrator. And then all of us in different kind of capacities right now also support schools. And so it’s so it’s incredibly common for us to get one of us All of us to get phone calls, emails from schools and say, Hey, oh my gosh, you wouldn’t believe what’s going on. And so we start to just start to write down a list of all of these different, you know, oh my goodness moments. Whether we got emails from them or we were actually directly supporting schools and we just started to think, wow, there’s a whole list of these fires that need to get put out and extinguished.

And so it just kind of started from listing out you know, these common Oh my goodness moments. And then as we started to list out those, oh my goodness moments, we started to curate all right, how would you handle that one? How would you handle that one? How have you handled that one in the past? And we found ourselves saying, oh my goodness, like, wouldn’t it be great if we could have some, common resource to support schools in doing this. And so it kind of bubbled up through a long list of the fires and then start to think about how to extinguish them. But really to make the book even better, right? Like we know that not everybody is literally in the midst of all those fires. We also wanted to talk about how to prevent them to begin with.

And to your point Sharona, and, and earlier, what you said, Boz, we also feel like that’s a very powerful part of this book. It’s just because you’re maybe experiencing fire 12 right now, doesn’t mean that there’s not a potential for fire 14 to happen six months from now. So make sure you read all of the fire chapters. It’s a kind of prepare yourself from maybe what may be ahead. Here’s the thing, right? I’m a former district office administrator. I never thought that the fires were going to happen, right? Like I just wasn’t, I wasn’t proactive enough to think about those things. If I would have had this book, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort through our communication with stakeholders, to the training that we provided our teachers, to the conversations that we were having with our school board, for example, all of those things, I think we could have maybe, you know, maybe not totally avoided, but at least minimized along the way. I don’t know.

Like, I kind of feel like it’s a. You know, if you ever go like a, like on a camping trip and they say, all right, here’s the packing list, or if you ever go on a cruise and they say, here’s what you should pack, here’s what you should anticipate. We kind of feel like this is a field guide for those that are supporting significant grading shifts and that’s how we want it to be read. I mean, Sharona, Boz like, you know, this thing’s not even 125 pages. We want it to be a very quick, efficient field guide like book where someone can just pick it up and they can pick up and just read fire 15. Show me that some research that says this actually works. They can just read chapter 15 or, but they might also be skimming the contents and say, all right, well, I’m kind of need to know more about fire 15, but yeah, I heard about that school district next door and it seems like things are blown up over there. I might also want to read Fire 16. I heard they tried those things over in the other school district and it failed miserably. We got to proactively get after that in our school system here so their future news headline in the school district next door doesn’t get in the way of us moving forward.

So again, it just started out with the list and how to extinguish the fire. And then it really got to the point of how can we help others also prevent the fire from happening to begin with. And I think all of us as educators and those that support educators, we really don’t want these fires to happen. We really don’t because we believe so passionately about this work. I mean, every single person, right. That listens to the grading podcast is like, I want to do this. I want to do it efficiently. I want to do it at a high level. And so this Extinguishing the Fires book, we hope will help many of the listeners out there. Not only extinguish the fires, but hopefully, I don’t know, like make the training ground so wet that the fire can never get started. How’s that?

Boz: You’re right. You can read this, read this book chapter by chapter. It’s great. Or you can, each one of these chapters are fires are completely independent and you can, you know, just read the parts that you. That you’re looking for right then and there. But yeah, I plan on using this and I’ll admit I’m only through fire nine right now. I’ve not completely read all of it, but I plan on like this being right next to my computer when I’m playing PDs as kind of a checklist on some of the preventions of, like I said, I do this when I lesson plan my classes. Here are the potential problems that I think my students might have. Here’s how I’m going to prevent them. Same thing here. Here are, with my audience, I think that, you know, these three things are likely. So here are my things I’m either going to proactively do, or things I’m going to have in my back pocket in case it comes up. And it cracks me up just. How much of these I’ve personally experienced and how often I’ve personally experienced it. I mean, you could change the names of a couple of these stories and it would have identically matched. No, no, it’s funny how, how common our experiences are

Matt: to your point, boss. I think that’s what makes these personal stories at the beginning of every chapter. So, Accessible. Like we, we wouldn’t, we didn’t make up a vignette here. We didn’t have to, because we have experienced it. And, and we think that that will really draw the reader into just, as you said, Boz, like, are you sure they weren’t at my school district yesterday? Are you sure they weren’t my staff meeting two weeks ago? That’s how personal these personal stories are that begin each of the fire chapters.

Boz: Now, I did want to talk briefly or ask you a little bit about there was one thing in the introduction you do, you do a small introduction of kind of what standards based grading and grading reform and you talk about the four pillars grading for impact, which are not worded the same way that the four pillars that Sharona, you and I talk about but if you read them, they are essentially the same, but I’m curious of where I think it said STAGR or it came from somewhere, but I’m curious about where those four pillars came from and what role, if any, you had in designing that.

And so about twice per year, First Educational Resources has a virtual STAGR conference and the need for schools to be supported in their grading reform efforts standards, targets, assessment, grading, reform efforts in particular has a blossomed a center within first educational resources that they call the STAGR center. So if you could imagine a kind of a subset of a larger organization that says, Hey, we’re here to support you with all the things related to standards, targets, assessment, grading and reporting. That’s what the STAGR Center is all about. And so as a part of that, they have developed a framework, which to your point Boz is probably pretty similar to what others out there are saying are things like grade for equity. Standards based, proficiency based grading. Except the STAGR Center calls them four pillars when grading for impact. Things like ensuring formative practice is not counted in academic grade, number one. Two, allowing for reassessment to occur without penalty. Three, removing non academic factors from the academic grade and report them separately. And four, report student proficiency against specific learning targets or standards that As the basis for the academic grade and we just wanted to kind of plant the flag in that in the introduction and say, we’re not here to try to explain away all of how to do this.

We’re not here to try to explain you why you should do this. We, we assume by reading this book that you are on the same page with us that these four pillars when grading for impact are what you want to do. And so that’s why we kind of added that in the introduction because we knew that you know, what’s going on in school district A as far as how they’re approaching their grading reform may be slightly different than school district B, but we feel like these four pillars are common amongst almost every school district that’s trying to do grading better and probably agreeable pillars for most everyone that’s listening to the grading podcast. If I were to guess.

Sharona: So I have a question about this though. This was one of the ones that I wanted to talk to you about because I have taken a slightly different perspective on practice work. So I don’t use personally the terms formative and summative anymore, because to me, everything is formative until it succeeds and then it’s summative. But my question is, In a, and this comes from my perspective as a university faculty member, because we don’t currently have the ability to report multiple things out of class. We have like one grade and I’m still wanting to incentivize students to do some of the things I think they need to do to be successful. So in my mind, I’ve reformulated practice actually three things, preparation, participation, and practice as things that students doing them is them learning how to learn. So instead of not reporting it, I’ve created a learning outcome that, in my opinion, encapsulates these non they’re not, they’re still kind of academic, but, it’s things like showing up and participating in class. To me I’ve turned that into an academic factor.

How do you feel about something like that? Where it’s I’ve defined a different learning outcome that encapsulates these things that are not showing evidence on the content standards, but that are what I think are essential behaviors for students to learn, and where are they going to learn it? Other than in our classes, what’s, what’s your feeling on that?

Matt: Yeah. Great questions there, Sharona. So pillar three is remove non academic factors from the academic grade and report them separately. And so if you can imagine, no, the very like stereotypical, but positive elementary standards based report card, right, where we’re reporting out Johnny’s ability to add Johnny’s ability to subtract. And there’s a separate place on the report card for like, you know, how well does Johnny work with others? How responsible is Johnny? And so I think that’s maybe the purest way of doing this is to report out, you know, the, the math learning goals separate from what I would call like the employability learning goals or the learning enabling behaviors. I think there are some people out there that call them learning enablers. So I think that’s the purest way of doing it.

But to your point, Sharona, and probably some of our listeners out there, right? That works awesome in elementary where maybe you don’t have to determine a final grade, but what’s that look like for us in higher education? What’s that look like for us in, at the, you know, the high school level, for example, where we have to determine a letter grade. I don’t think there’s necessarily like let’s not think that there’s a, a terribly wrong way to do it, but I think there are some cautionary things to think about.

All right, now let me just take a step back and say, what has happened traditionally with these learning enabling behaviors or these employability skills, right? What have we done? We have punished students when they don’t have them, right? You didn’t turn this thing in on time, so I’m going to punish you. You didn’t, you know, organize your three ring binders ,so I’m going to punish you. Right? So what we’ve done is we’ve punished people in absence of doing that. Okay. What do those students actually need? They need some level of guidance, explicit instruction on how to be organized, how to be timely, how to work well with others. My perspective is what I I’m a big fan of like employability skills and to get not too far in the weeds here, like. You know, like the state of Iowa in all of its, you know, standards, for example, they say, here’s the math standards. Here’s the science standards. Here’s what they call the 21st century skills. And within the 21st century skills, a subset of them is the employability things, all the things we’re talking about right now. Okay.

Here’s the kicker though. I think we’d probably all agree. We shouldn’t just punish students for not having them. That doesn’t make sense. I mean, that’d be like showing up to teach math class, not teaching anyone about fractions, not teaching anyone about, you know, derivatives. You don’t understand that. There goes your grade. That’s silly, right? That’s a huge disconnect between teaching and assessment. Okay. So from my perspective, if we are going to report out those learning enablers, if we are going to report out those employability skills, we owe it to our students to teach them and to provide checks for understanding or whatever you want to call them on those things, right? Like I was actually recently at a school board meeting and doing a presentation to the school board about some grading things and so one of the school board members was like, hey, I actually think that you know kids being responsible is a good thing. Why aren’t we doing that? I’m, like we should be we should be teaching them that right? Just like the biology teacher can tell you the exact days they taught mitosis to their kids. The biology teacher if they’re going to report out you know responsibility. They should be able to teach you these specific days they taught responsibility.

So I think it goes back to the teaching assessment nexus, Sharona. So if you can feel confident yet, you’ve taught those skills to your students. I think that there’s maybe a case for that. And honestly, we just have to admit that we’re compromising, right? Cause we got to determine a final grade. And like the analogy I give is if we go to the doctor, right. And we say, all right, here’s what you weigh. Here’s how tall you are, and here’s your blood pressure. And you know, those are three totally separate things, but the doctor like averages all those together and gives us some index. What the heck does that mean? Right. And that’s so like we live in this world of like the pureness of reporting out. At the level of learning goals at the elementary level. And then we have to like, you know, not let perfect in the way of progress and compromise, maybe at the secondary and higher education level.

Sharona: Well, and and to be clear, I measure these things on a points accumulation basis, sort of like it’s essentially my one standard that’s been completely gamified. You have all semester to accumulate enough evidence that you’ve done these things that it you can get to success at the end. And if you don’t get to success, by the way, you just have to show me more content learning. Like, I’m okay with either one. Pick your poison. Do you want to do more of these things that you could just accumulate points on for this one thing? Or would you rather just, you know, show me you can differentiate? Like, I’m good with either one.

Boz: I think that’s the other thing with, especially At least middle school and high school settings. I don’t want to speak of elementary, but a lot of those behaviors, not just are they in the academic grade, a lot of times they can be a one of, if not the largest proportion of those academic grades, you know, all those, Oh, you’re, you’re a day late. I’m taking off, you know, 10, 15 percent or I’m not taking it. So now it’s a zero. So even though you have, you know, eight perfect scores, you out of nine, that’s, that’s not good enough. That’s now a B because you got this one zero that was really not a zero. You just didn’t get it turned in, you know, on the day I said I wanted it and had this made up deadline.

Matt: So that’s your point, boss. I think it’s good. And again, there, I feel like there’s always like this compromise that has to happen, right? Whenever we’re determining letter grades. Although I do think that there are a few places that are trying to figure this out up school supporting once in Wisconsin said, Hey, we, and they call them working people skills. And, and like, they, they were, they were not folded into the eventual, you know, like algebra one letter grade that was based solely on the algebra learning targets that students were taught and assessed. But if you were not doing very well on these work and people skills you could agree or disagree with this, but like it impacted their extracurricular eligibility. It impacted some other kind of things they had going on at the school level to kind of add a little bit more meat to it. But I think that what this school did is they did a nice job of saying, here’s the like, you know, three important work and people skills we’re committed to teaching our students and also, you know assessing them on. It wasn’t just a gotcha. But also, you know, it also adds a little bit of credence to the kid who’s like, I understand all the math stuff, but I’m an absolute jerk to everybody else and Matthew is like, what the heck? I don’t like that. You’re like, right. Like what the heck’s going on here? And it’s obviously grades are a communication tool. And so we feel like that would’ve been a great way for parents to know your kid’s really good at algebra too, but doesn’t work very well with others.

Boz: Yeah. And that’s bringing that up, you know, my district in LAUSD, we actually do have three separate grades when we report grades. We have our academic, you know, we have our work habits. We so we have these two non Academic reporting grades that we all have to give but the amount of times I’ve heard teachers, when I bring this up about taking these non academic factors out, going, you know, we have these, these grades already, we can place them in work habits. If they’re turning stuff in late, okay, that’s, that’s a work habit. Let’s ding them there. That’s, that’s legit. But they’re like, Yeah, we have these grades, but they have no bite to them. They’re not reported on the transcripts that go to college. They don’t have any kind of, you know, accountability for the student, like what you were just saying, eligibility for sports, but so they still like, we have to put it in the academic cause that’s the only one that counts. So even though we have these non academic reporting grades, because, and I don’t know why we as educators just have this fixation of having to punish, you know,

Sharona: Well, and there’s another piece to that. When we say, for example, one of the pillars that we have in the, in the four grading, the four pillars of alternative grading you have in yours as well, is reassessments without penalty. I wish we said it a little more specifically. I don’t think we can, but without a grade penalty, because there is a very significant penalty that comes up in your fire number 13. If I offer reassessment, my kids won’t take the first test seriously. We get that a lot. And there’s a humongous penalty to not taking the first test, which is you don’t get authentic feedback. So you’ve now shortened because, you know, we teach. First level, GE level math, which historically has been one of the biggest barriers to success in higher education. We’ve designed this system because we know students are going to struggle on that first test. And so when they don’t take it seriously, then the second test becomes the one they struggle on. And at some point you run out of time. So how do we start to communicate that there are penalties? That are not grade penalties, but are very, very real and consequential.

Matt: Yeah, in one of my previous books, we reframed the idea of reassessment policies as like an insurance policy, right? So like, we all have insurance like, you know, homeowners or rental insurance, we have, you know, insurance on our vehicles. We hope that we never have to cash in, right, on that insurance. But if you’re driving in a car and you get an accident or you know, a tornado happens or a flood happens or whatever it might be that, you know damages our home or our, our belongings, like we, then we have to, you know, call up the insurance company and make a claim. Right. So that’s how we, that’s how we. How we in our in our book, Making Grades Matter, we reframe that as an insurance policy. In Fire 14 here. We reframe it as like a retake ticket. Okay? And here’s the thing, right? Students who are not used to this system, they will try to game it right away. Okay?

My empirical research is, I’ve, you know, studied school leaders and teachers that are getting started or a part of this. They will tell me about the implementation depth. Kids will try to game it. Why? Because like they’re teenagers or they’re whatever. Right. And they, they, they, they make these decisions that they think are best. And honestly, why were they doing stuff before? Because they thought there was some carrot and stick. Okay. So they have to learn what the new carrot and stick is. It’s going to sound counterintuitive, but hang out right. In my former school district, like there were kids who would game it, game it, game it, and they’re like, you know, three tests in they’re like, Oh my gosh. Like I’m not doing very well. And I keep trying to, you know, just. Game the first one and and I find myself not going through the redos and retakes and so or something like How do I get my grade up and then all of a sudden they’re hungry now for the reassessment process, not every kid but for those that are we we walk them through that right? And so as the as this new retake reassessment thing becomes the norm kids start to figure out how they can game the system and it sounds weird, but we have to help them figure out how they can gain the system to their benefit

And you know what? The best way we help them game the system is we help them see the benefit of trying hard the first time not arbitrarily penalizing them But we help them see how much time and effort it is to go through the reassessment that most kids are scratching their head. They’re like yeah actually the path of least resistance is for me to try hard the first time and not to do all of that work, not making it arbitrarily hard, but we have to help them see what the work is they have to go through. Okay, and so that’s what, you know, Fire 13 is partially about but in schools where they don’t yet understand this, it’s because those insurance policies, those reassessment policies, those retake tickets are not very well communicated or articulate is what we found. The, like I’ll ask a teacher, like, okay, what’s your reassessment policy? Like, what do you mean? I just give kids a form B. Well like you’re making it so easy metaphorically to go in and fail the driver’s license test, walk out the back door and come in the front door again. That’s just not the way it’s supposed to work. If you fail the driver’s license test, you’re supposed to go home, study the driver’s license manual and come back the next week. Like that’s the way it works. That makes sense.

And so we have to help our students see this as well. Right. And so there is a, a penalty it’s in their time, right? And it’s their mental, like, I got to do this now. And so we have to help them see that there is a penalty. It’s just not an academic penalty. Now, actually there is an academic penalty if they don’t do well, right? Like they’re just not going to have the. The the standard or target score that they want to have on it because they haven’t Demonstrated understanding of it yet and for the kids who used to chase the grade for the extra credit points now what are they going to do? They’re going to chase the grade on how do I show you what I understand in relation to these learning goals. And that’s actually a whole nother fire. Like, like one of our other fires in here is like, why are we making this change? If we’re still going to determine a letter grade, I have literally had teachers tell me. Well, I’ve got kids now that all they want to do to reassess is to get their grade up and I’m like

So why is that bad? like you used to not really but you used to complain that all they want to do is the homework to get more points and they’re already always asking you for extra credit Now they’re asking you how to get their grade up but what’s the way they do that to show you that they’ve learned the stuff. Don’t you want them to learn the stuff? celebrate that high five and for some teachers are like Oh Yeah And others are just like like like they really want students to have this purely Intrinsic, you know motivation. I think we all do but let’s be honest I’m, not so sure I would show up for my day job if they weren’t paying me a paycheck, right? So like let’s not assume that 14 year olds and 21 year olds are going to magically just be always intrinsically motivated in particular

I’m sure you guys are familiar with Dan Meyer, the former math teacher turned, you know math educator, social media person. He had a TED talk once on what it means to teach high school math, for example. He’s like, Hey, you know what? Like I’m trying to sell something to people that they definitely don’t want to sell. Like, welcome to teaching high school math, right? Welcome to being a teacher. Sometimes is we’re trying to help convince people to learn stuff that It’s because the state says they have to learn it. So let’s just be real here and let’s help students play the new game of school. All right.

Boz: Yeah, like I said, I’m only through fire nine and I’m absolutely loving it. But. It’s funny that you brought up that one you know, if we’re, if we’re still giving grades, why, you know, why are we making these changes if we’re still giving grades? That’s one of the two I have not experienced, but you were talking about, you know, the students wanting to gamify and changing that. And I’ve never thought of it this way of changing the game that’s played, but, you know, we bring this up in a lot of our trainings about why do students gamify grades? Because that’s what we’ve taught them to do. That’s what traditional grade, when it’s all about points and not about learning, that’s what we’ve, so of course they’re going to continue to try that. And I love the way, because again, I’ve never thought of it this way, of taking those students that are used to trying to gamify this and get their grades into changing it to understanding, okay, this is how you now gamify. You do really well on the first time so you don’t have to do, you know, assessment 2, 3, 4 and 5. You save yourself that time and I love that change of focus. I’m going to have to try that.

Matt: I think it’s really again, not for every kid, but for many kids who like they want to learn, they have a positive disposition towards it, like it is a possible game changer for them. And honestly, again, this maybe wasn’t as much of a fire that we put out in this book, but we’re also here the opposite, right? Oh my gosh, we’ve made these changes to our grading practices, and let me tell you about these three kids I have in my third period class, and they just don’t want to do anything. And so, how do we reframe that one, right? Well, let’s just be honest, before we even changed our grading practices, what were these kids dispositions towards learning? Even before we changed these grading practices. Probably not ideal towards school. I don’t like that. A grading system itself is not necessarily going to be the motivator, right? For every single kid. We just haven’t figured out how to connect yet with those three kids that you’re talking about right now. Like the grading system is neither the problem nor the solution for them. And I guess we do elaborate on that a little bit in one of our fires.

Boz: Yeah, no. And, and you know, that’s a great point, especially for us in the PK 12 world is unlike college where students are at least choosing to be in college. They might not be choosing to be in that particular class. They’re there because they have to have a gen ed math class or whatever. But in the K 12 world, we have students that are by law required to be there and have no interest whatsoever. That’s always been the case. That’s always going to be the case. No grading system, nothing changes that other than personal connections with someone at the school. So, and I, we’ve said it several times on this podcast, any kind of grading reform is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to fix everything. Nothing will the business of education has too many variables for one thing to be the solution to all of it. So stop trying to use that as a reason not to do something that’s still going to help a lot of people because it’s not going to help everybody.

Matt: Well said, Boz.

Sharona: So,

Boz: No, go ahead.

Sharona: I was saying, so looking, switching a little bit to some of your preventing the fire examples, you, like, we do live in both worlds. You live in a K 12 world and you live in a higher ed world. What do you see, if anything, distinguishing between preventing the fires in a K 12 world where teachers are used to working together and the idea of convening a leadership team makes sense. Versus perhaps in the higher ed world, because this podcast really tries to bridge the two.

Matt: Yeah, I think that some of the fires in this book are a bit more K 12 centric, and there’s others that maybe transcend both K 12 and higher education. You know, for example you know, these changes won’t prepare students for college or the real world, as one that often happens, like, in middle school and high school settings. And so we get parents, right? So parents push back on that. Sometimes teachers do as well and they say, oh my gosh, like you’re not preparing my kid for the next level. And so we kind of dig into that, right? We don’t get that maybe as much at the higher education level, although we might get it from instructors. We’re not going to get it from parents because parents play a different role in their higher education student settings. So I think that some of the fires kind of have a, a parent stakeholder taste to them. And it’s very smoky at times. If I can continue the metaphor. All right. But there’s also some things in here that I think transcend all you know, the higher education world as well. Like this won’t work in my content area, right? Like, I think there’s a growing movement, right? Like you all probably know this better than I do, right? There are some subject areas where it just seems like people are rock and rolling it in, in higher education and others I’m sure you’re like, well, that’s, that works in, you know, pre calculus or that works in calculus, that works in this, but it’s not going to work in my humanities course or something along those lines. Sharona, you sound like you’re ready to have you talk about this one?

Sharona: I can’t name a field that has not been told to me as I understand where it works over there, but not over here. So I’ve had math teachers say, I understand why it works in English, but not in math. And I’ve had English teachers say, I understand why it works in math, not in English. I’ve had people tell me it doesn’t work in dental hygienic areas but that they can understand how it works in all the core academic set subjects. I’ve had people tell me, I get why it works in the arts, but it doesn’t work in biology. I mean, like literally I can’t name a subject and I don’t know if you say this in your book about the, I, cause I haven’t read the preventing part, but one of my number one answers to some of the specialty fields is, do you have a licensure exam? How many times do you get to take it and what’s the penalty if you don’t pass? And there is a penalty. It’s called money, time, delaying your career. Very, very real world penalties that we do not want to ever take away. Like we don’t want to compromise on the bar or the boards. Okay. Oh my God. Yeah. This doesn’t work in my content area. My number one way of preventing that is having hundreds of examples in so many different fields. Be like, really? Cause this person in your field is doing it.

Matt: Yeah, no, I think, you know, books like grading for growth the grading conference are all examples of where people come together and really share those ideas. I’ve, this is made for a future podcast, but I’ve got a vision of trying to curate an, like an anthology at the K 12 level. Or at least the secondary level of what this kind of looks like in all content areas. I think that that’s a need out there in the field is to see that. And again, kudos to you, Sharona and others for helping to make that happen in higher education

Sharona: And just real quick about elementary school. You know, this only occurred to me. I’m very ashamed to see this only occurred to me a few weeks ago, I think, but my kids had standards based report cards in elementary school. My kids are now in college. Okay. So my actual first exposure to this. When my kids were in elementary school, I wasn’t even back in higher ed at the time. And I was one of those parents that was so frustrated with standards based reporting. And it was because they didn’t communicate it. They had this five level rubric. I had these very bright kids and I’m like, and I could kind of understand the ones that said that they were beginning. The way the report card worked is they had the individual standards were at beginning, developing, proficient. Excellent, but then they rolled it up into like a grade level. Where four was grade level five was exceeding grade level three And so, you know, I have this vision of my kids. They’re all above grade level. And so I was so frustrated by those report cards and I didn’t even realize.

So leading to my question, how are elementary level schools doing with the standards based report cards? Because again, this has been around so long. I mean, my high performing district that my kids went to. That has pushed back against this horrendously at the high school. I mean, I can’t even get them to talk to me about how you do exam corrections and yet their elementary schools were doing standards based report cards. So what are you seeing at the elementary level? And then would that help us?

Matt: Yeah, I think, I think I wish I had some like empirical data to back up this statement, but I unfortunately don’t. But I do think that there, that the idea of a standards based report card is much more prevalent at the elementary level. And I think it comes down to two, well, at least two things. One is that you know, there’s really not a need to have final grades in elementary based upon anybody’s real reason, right? Except for maybe like to get them ready for middle school and to get them ready for high school, but most places can kind of work through that. And so they’re able to more easily have a you know, a more detailed report card where we’re reporting out based upon the standards or learning goals. Secondly, I think that just in general you know, there just isn’t a parent sense of urgency. Yes, parents do care about how other kids are doing, but it’s not like, Oh my gosh, my kid’s not doing whatever and they’re not going to get a scholarship or something along those lines.

Like we might have in a high school setting where parents Parent involvement in some schools is different than others, but parents that are involved at the high school level, for example, are often like, how’s my kid get the grades I want them to get so they can get into the university or college or the job or the scholarship that they want them to get. So that same level of, you know, stakeholder pressure, parent pressure isn’t there as well at the elementary. Now, again, I, I feel like I’ve got all kinds of projects to pitch, but one of the other ideas I’d like to do is I’d like to really Do some type of resource or research project to really interview elementary principals or perhaps those that support teachers elementary to understand, even though it may seem easier philosophically to make happen at the elementary, I still think that there are some potential like technical things that may or may not be as clean as maybe we want them to be. Here’s an example, right? It can be really easy to say, Oh, my gosh, we’ve got, you know okay beginning developing, almost there and proficient. Okay. Well, what’s this proficient mean? Oh, it means they got 80 percent or better. And we just kind of like quantify those levels when that’s you and all of us know that’s really not the intent but I’ve anecdotally seen that in some elementary schools.

And so, you know, instead of putting a percent down for a standard, they’re just, you know, quantifying it based upon, you know, point accumulation on a test. And then they, you know, transfer that to a one, two, three or four. That’s just to get an anecdotal observation. I like to dig in more to like, what are the technical. training needs that elementary teachers desire or need to really have a more pure ability to report out students learning based upon the standards on a standards based report card. I also think that the length of a standards based report card can also get in the way, right? Like if we put every single, you know, state of California standard on an elementary report card in California, like that report card would be monstrous, right? Right. So what has to happen is that somebody has to just say, all right, here’s the specific music, physical education, math, science, standards. And honestly like P E often gets the short end of the stick and then we get like three standards on there, right. Whereas math gets like 12 or something. Right. So I think that’s also like a conversation. How do we determine those?

Also, I think that there might be, you know, to your question earlier, Sharona, even though we have a more pure sense of reporting out those employability skills at the elementary level, I would like to know more like, how are those ones, twos, threes, and fours and proficient in developing, determined from the employability skills perspective? Is it just kinda like a, eh, this kid, I like them. I give them a four or a proficient, or is there some, you know, agreed upon rubric or data collection or instruction that goes along with that? I just don’t know. I’m not condemning anyone. These are just more questions that I have in mind that I’d like to investigate at some point in time, maybe for episode 140 here on the podcast.

Sharona: That’s awesome.

Boz: Well, you know, I was going to say Sharona that the issue that your elementary school had or your school had with your children when they were elementary is they just hadn’t read the Parent’s Guide to Grading Reform yet.

Matt: Hey, yeah, I wasn’t going to do the self promotion again, Boz. That was that was on episode 18, of course, but here’s a really cool thing, triad of communication, parents, Students and teachers, right? Like, so I have a sick, my, my oldest is in sixth grade just yesterday. He emailed me like a little thing that says, Hey dad, I got a four on this standard and here’s why that was teacher prompted him to email. My wife and I and say here’s the score I got in the standard and why but like that’s a great example of the student owning and understanding my son understanding why he got this specific thing. Right now getting a kindergartner to do that It’s different than a sixth grader, but I still think we can have A bit more understanding for our students to Sharona’s point earlier, right? If you got a fourth grade kid and the fourth grade kid’s like I don’t know how I got these ones twos threes and fours Or proficiency or whatever good luck for the parent knowing what the heck’s going on, right? So, you know read the Parent’s Guide to Grading Reporting and think about how to create more of a triad at a communication between parents, students and teachers

Boz: Well, we are coming up on time. I wanted to thank you for coming back on. And I also really wanted to thank you for these books cause you’re taking such a practical standpoint. Like I said, with that parent’s guidebook, you know, that fits such a specific need that I don’t see a lot of books on or resources on this new Fire book, not just as a you know, theoretical standpoint, but as from someone who is in these roles is someone who’s doing this kind of work. This is such a big need. So, I mean, I love the, I love the big philosophy books. I love the big grading for equity books and, and all of those on selling people on why, but these books that have these very specific needs please keep doing them. I love them. Your writing and stuff it’s great. So please keep doing them. Thank you so much for coming on. Shrona, did you want to.

Sharona: I just wanted to thank you for writing books in general so I don’t have to you know, clearly we like to talk as opposed to write, which is why we have a podcast although I do, I do a lot of writing, I just really am being resistant about writing a book but, I love the ideas, I look forward to working with you, you know, we’ve now formed the Grading Conference into a non profit that’s actually bigger than just the conference we’re hoping to support, so a wide variety of things such as influencing public policy, doing research, and really being that PK to 16 bridge, right? Really, I don’t know if too many other people working in both the PK 12 and the higher ed worlds from an educator standpoint, we’re trying to bring those worlds together. So thank you for the work you’re doing. And I think that’s going to be it for today. We’ll see you all next week.

Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website. 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.