The Grading Podcast

131 – why now

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Boz: A big part of the misunderstanding of a lot of educators when it comes to these grading reforms is inefficient or incomplete training on those grading reforms, the reasons behind them, the philosophies behind them. So yeah, it’s easy to oversimplify, see and take, oh, you want me to give something for nothing? I’m not supposed to give zero, I’m supposed to, so you’re just lowering the standard. That’s an easy conclusion to come to if I am not properly trained.

Sharona: Well, and I think it begins with the fact that grading, traditionally, is an afterthought.

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 Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Boz: I’m doing well. Yeah, looking, beginning of the year, new starts. Always interesting time for some reflections.

Sharona: And speaking of the new year. We have some cool news.

Sharona: Woo woo, yay.

Boz: Yeah. We haven’t made a big official push yet, but it is open. Registration can be found on the Center for Grading Reform website. But beyond just that, we also have our three keynotes.

Sharona: And the keynote announcements are always so much fun for us. I get a little starstruck sometimes when we get to talk to people who are giants in our field. Because sometimes I feel like, who the heck am I right? And then I’m like, oh, I’m going to just randomly email the author of a book who does these things. And so I’m really excited to get to highlight, and then sometimes our keynotes are people that nobody knows, but they’re doing fantastic work. So. I’m really, really excited to announce our keynotes this year.

Sharona: Well, and one thing to tease a little bit is all the keynotes that we’re gonna talk about have actually already been guests on the podcast. Yes. Whereas last year, we. Added people to the podcast after they’d been introduced as keynotes. So that’s kind of fun. Sarah Silverman’s episode talking about neurodivergent students with Emily Donahoe was really interesting to me because there’s been some debates about alt grading in Neurodivergence.

Boz: And, and they brought up some really interesting questions. Questions, not just for our listeners, but for you and I personally with some of how we’ve dealt with classes

and

Boz: improving our neurodivergent awareness when we are designing our classes. So it, that was a really, not just fun episode, but an educational episode for us, which. I really enjoy. ‘Cause that’s when we do an episode and get to learn that much. It’s really fun. So I’m really looking forward to her keynote.

Sharona: We’ve joked about this podcast being nothing but personal professional development for us, that we’re handcrafting our own training. So looking forward to, Dr. Sarah Silverman’s keynote. The second one that I’m gonna introduce is another favorite of mine, Dr. Brie Tripp. We had her and her research partner, Rob Furrow, on the podcast in episode 41. And then you and I referenced the research that they talked about in episode 41, which then came out when we did our episode on retakes in episode 82.

Boz: That’s right, we did. But man, 41. That. It’s been a while since we’ve had Brie on.

Sharona: Oh yeah. It’s been a while. What about our third keynote?

Boz: Our third keynote is Dr. Jesse Stommel, who is an author. He, he’s done so many incredible things, but you’re right, we’ve had him on the podcast as well, but what episode was he on?

Sharona: He was on episode 14. It is time to get him back on the pod.

Boz: It’s definitely time to get him back on. He was one of our early interviewees. I mean, outside of our personal connections through the grading conference with people like Dr. David Clark and Robert Tabard. He was one of our really early interviewees.

Sharona: And I am really excited that he’s gonna be there. He is one of the people that wrote very, very early on his book is titled Undoing the Grade. So he is very much in that un grading, collaborative grading, deconstructing, grading space. And, episode 14 was two years ago. The space has changed so fast in that time.

Boz: And so much. I mean, not, not just so fast, but there’s been so much change and I, I think we’re gonna end up talking about some of that change in this episode. But yeah, I am really excited to get him back into the grading conference. He’s presented before. He’s been there before. But yeah, to have him on as a keynote, and you’re right, I would love to get him back on the podcast. It has been over two years. God. Over two years, years. I know how hard we’ve been doing it that long. That’s crazy.

Sharona: Now there is a third thing I wanted to mention about the conference that everybody should be keeping an eye on the website because in the next few weeks we will be opening up the abstract submission portal. So we encourage every single person who listens to the podcast to consider submitting something for the conference. Because one of the special things about this conference, it is community built. It’s completely community built. There’s no guiding force, so to speak. We have an organizing committee that does all the hard lifting and shout out to our amazing organizers and a couple new organizers this year. But really, this conference doesn’t exist without people being willing to share of their time and their expertise and to make these connections.

Boz: Yeah, we were just talking about this podcast. We’ve been doing this now for over two years. The grading conference has been going on for, this will be the seventh year. That’s incredible. And, to think that really started with you and a couple other people wanting an excuse to get together.

Sharona: Right. The excuse was Kate, Robert. Dave and I, well, Kate, Robert and David wanted to get together and have some craft brew and I just wanted to get together with them ’cause I don’t drink beer. That’s kind of how the whole thing started. So there you go.

Boz: I was just gonna say a couple other kind of key dates. ’cause like you said, the abstract submission will be opening. On the fifth after the new year, and right now that abstract submission deadline is February 13th. There are some other deadlines posted on the center’s site, so would encourage you to go and look at that.

Sharona: I have a correction.

Boz: What’s that?

Sharona: I think we got the abstract submission site open, and certainly by the time that this episode comes out. It’s actually available. Okay, so I’m gonna scratch that, reverse it. Abstract submissions are open and you need to go and submit now because the deadline is February 13th, like you said.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: So the time travel magic of podcasting, plus the fact that I just checked the site and I think it’s actually open right now.

Boz: Well, yeah, like I said the registration is already open.

Sharona: The abstract submissions are open. Okay. So go, go now. Go now. But yeah, February 13th is the abstract submission deadline. I wanted to make one more comment about submitting to the conference. We have really tried to make this accessible to all different kinds of submissions, so you can do anything from a poster to a short talk, to a workshop, to a panel discussion. There’s a lot of opportunities for people at all stages, whether you identify as a researcher or not. If you have something in your world that you think is worth sharing, please consider submitting it.

Boz: Absolutely. Or if you’ve just done something cool in your classroom and you wanna talk about it and show other people, bring it on. We wanna see it.

Sharona: We used to have a session called, I did a thing. I think that was Kate Owen is in one of the early conferences. So yes, if you did a thing, please submit. But I think we need to get into the topic of this podcast at this point.

Boz: More than that.

Sharona: Right? So I’m thinking I’m in it for the long haul. I am kind of shocked that I feel like the timeline has accelerated. So the topic that I think we’re gonna try to talk today about is the urgency of grading reform in this moment.

Boz: Okay. So that’s interesting ’cause you’re right, and we’ve both talked, in fact, quite a bit about why it takes so long and the expectation should be that it’s gonna take a while. And, and you’re right, we’ve talked to people like Dr. Guskey, and his episode, he brought up the fact that over 20 years there were three books. And then it just this exponential acceleration. But it still feels like a new idea, even though he personally has been writing about it, for 50 years and we’ve had research that goes back over a hundred years. Why do you think the urgency, the timeline is shifting that we have this moment of urgency now?

Sharona: So I think there’s a number of factors coming together. One of them. That I know that I am seeing on the ground persistently is student disengagement and distrust of grades. Like I am seeing a collapse in real time of people believing the grades that students are given are reflective of literally anything.

Boz: I think part of that goes back to pandemic. I think that’s where a lot of this started. I think this is where some of this urgency in this changing. Has started and did start, and we saw that in our own personal lives with how many PDs we were doing on grading reform.

Sharona: Absolutely.

Boz: That’s where this kind of really started for us working through College Bridge, doing these different types of PDs that really was spurred on by the pandemic. And I think that’s where also a lot of this mistrust in grades from the student’s side that you were just talking about, also started or stems from.

Sharona: I definitely think it started there, but I think we had about a year or two in between what I would call the quote unquote end of the pandemic, and today where there was a sense of, whew, we survived that, now we can go back to normal. Like people were starting to revert back to what they had done before, and then we got hit by this bombshell that is ai.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: And AI is not leaving, AI is not like a pandemic that you think is gonna end at some point. If anything, AI is a storm that is never going to go back in its bottle. Yeah. And so students are disengaging now, not just because they’re at home, they’re distracted, they’re finding like nothing’s meaningful. But now AI is so good at what they’re trying to learn and learning it for them is so hard ’cause learning’s a struggle that there’s this real disengagement and they see what their peers are doing. So now they don’t even have the self-advocacy to feel like they can compete if their peers are using AI inappropriately or just have better skills than they do. So I think it’s getting really bad. It’s been massively accelerated by AI adoption.

Sharona: And I don’t want to ignore the world in general actually. I wanna make one more specific comment. We try really hard not to get political on this podcast, and I don’t intend to go political, but there is some pressure from both state and federal governments right now where they’re starting to hold higher institutions accountable for things like graduate earnings and they’re putting warnings on different forms like the fafsa. If you apply to certain schools that say this school doesn’t have a good return on investment in terms of job growth and job accountability. So there’s a pressure on institutions to show value.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And I think that is also translating directly into do your grades mean anything? Now I wanna clarify one thing. This episode we’re not gonna talk about how to do grading reform. We do that a lot. And we’re not also gonna talk quite yet ’cause we don’t have enough time in one episode about how to lead the conversations. But we’re gonna talk about the urgency, the need for these facilitated conversations, and then hopefully get to a point where we can. Open it up to all of our listeners to really do some intentional pushing towards this timeframe and meeting the need.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Okay. So the question is that we just answered is why does it feel more urgent right now? And I guess I would start by asking you why you think this window is specifically open? Because, we articulate the challenge of why we think this is accelerating, but why is grading reform the answer and why do we have an opportunity to talk about this? Let’s see what you think.

Boz: Well for one, and we’ve talked about this quite a bit, is I do think grading is kind of that linchpin on a lot of these things when we’re talking about actual learning and accountability. A lot of those things, if not done through grading, grading ends up being either a barrier or a linchpin to making a lot of the other things work. You’ve talked about it several times that you have been in education for a while and you’ve tried a lot of different things. You’ve tried the act of learning, you’ve tried flip classrooms, and all of it works to a degree, but only to a degree. And it wasn’t until you also threw in the grading reform that made everything else work so much better. So that’s one of the things that I think why we need to look at grading. ’cause we have so many of these huge changes and urgency to change. All of that will be stymied and will be limited. If we don’t also look at grading, in fact, like I think the grading, obviously we’ve been doing this podcast for a while. Both of us think the grading should have been changed 30 years ago. But right now with all the other things that are going on and all the other reform, none of it’s going to make a huge difference if we don’t also look at grading.

Sharona: I agree with you, and I think it, the episode coming out that just came out before this one, we saw grading break down very publicly in plain sight of the world. Right. Grading is breaking because of not only ai, but because of the political awareness and looking at grades. So I think that it’s just so visible. So I agree with everything you said, and I think it’s visible now.

Boz: Was there anything else that you would add to the answer of your own question that I didn’t include?

Sharona: So you and I were talking about this a little bit before we pressed record, and I’m seeing a shift inside our community that I think should now happen outside our community, which is before AI we talked about the fact that grading reform tended to reduce cheating because of its emphasis on the ability to show multiple times, and that it was what learning that mattered, it wasn’t all these behaviors. But now, for me personally, AI has shifted beyond just the cheating conversation to be the, what’s the purpose of teaching what I’m teaching? If an AI can do so much of what I am teaching better than I can even do it, or what my students can do it, why do they even have to do it at all? And so AI is shifting the purpose of what I do, which means my grading has to shift. Because again, if they’re gonna learn what I grade, then what I grade has to matter and has to be meaningful. But this conversation that shift is, has not happened outside our grading reform community.

Boz: Oh, no, absolutely. The majority of the conversation when it comes to AI from most educators that I’m around is still around cheating. Around, how do you prevent the use of, how do we completely wall our students off from this technology and guarantee that all of their work is exclusively non AI.

Sharona: And some of the answers that we had in the alt grading world before AI don’t work anymore because we used to really focus on the authenticity of the learning that the students were doing. But because AI is removing the struggle for learning in ways that the students really like, so it’s not enough to just use the grading reform principles because there was enough friction in cheating before it was hard enough in certain circumstances that we could sort of rely on it just being easier to do your own work and get the feedback and try again. But AI has just made it so frictionless and so good that that’s no longer the case.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But there’s another thing that I’m not sure I agree with, but I’m kind of thinking about a little bit, is there’s grading reform being a reflection of your individual values as a teacher, and that’s a place where we’ve sort of struggled because some teachers’ values don’t align with grading reform. Right. And then there’s those of us for who’s it does. But what about at the institutional level? What do the values of grading reform, where the grades accurately represent learning, do those align with the institution’s needs? So that’s another way we should be framing this, because if your instructors as an institution allows students to completely skate by on AI generated material, because you don’t have the right types of grading and the right accountability. Then what does that do to your institution?

Boz: You saw this firsthand as your role as a coordinator at Cal State LA the pressures of looking at the DFW rates, the fail rates and drop rates of the courses you were coordinating. So the push and that kind of struggle between wanting grades to accurately show students learning. And being told pass rates of 86% weren’t high enough. Right? So yeah, there is some, some conflict there, some competing forces of when you’re looking at, and this isn’t just on grading, I mean. This is on a lot of things, but grading is definitely one of the things that it shows up very clearly in

Sharona: Right. But the point is that, because it shows up, there’s an opportunity here.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: Because we have an opportunity to say to different stakeholder groups, what’s the purpose that grades are supposed to satisfy, and can we be more sophisticated? Do we have to worry about DFW rates? Can we be more sophisticated? Well, if a C means this, or if a D means this, is this good enough for general education, but this is what’s good enough to go on as a prerequisite? Which we have some of that, we have always had some of that, but do we need to be using it in a more sophisticated way where the stuff that allows the student to go on is actually the specific skills that they need? Instead of just a general set of skills that might meet a general education requirement, things like that. So I think there’s opportunities there. So, if there’s these opportunities and if now is the time, what are we facing? What are we dealing with here? Yeah. Why are these conversations so hard to have? What gets in our way?

Sharona: Unlimited.

Boz: There you go.

Sharona: You have unlimited chances to resubmit and revise. Oh, and there’s no deadline on that.

Boz: Yes. That’s one of the other misconceptions that I, I think educators and non-educators also have is no deadlines. That when we talk about separating behavior from learning, people hear, oh that means students have no deadlines. They can turn things in anytime they want.

Sharona: Well, and it’s interesting because not only that, but the one I’m hearing a lot right now is that well, and therefore students have no incentive to get it right the first time because there’s no penalty for failing. And I’m thinking there are always penalties for failing. The number one penalty is time. Yeah.

Boz: The, which is probably the most valuable commodity a student or an educator has.

Sharona: Because it’s controlled by the laws of physics. Yeah. Like you literally can’t make more of it. You can create more money, you can create more grades, you can create more classes. You can’t create more time. We’re not Hermione Granger, so time. I feel like I don’t understand why instructors say this, because if you asked an instructor if you have a deadline for your work or something, are you just gonna slop something together if you know that you can do it again later? Not usually, because most of us understand that our time is our most precious commodity. So I don’t understand this idea that, well, if you don’t put an F on a paper or a zero that they’re not gonna take it seriously. That’s not been my experience.

Boz: Yeah. And also, and we’ve talked about this, so I don’t wanna beat a dead horse, but look it at almost anything outside of grades and academia. Tell me one thing that one and done is the expectation. I mean, driver’s license test, bar exams, even the teaching credentialing tests that I had to do. I had to take one of those tests twice. They didn’t average my score. If I don’t tell you that you would, no way that you would ever know that I had to take, because of my writing, I had to take the general ed test twice.

Sharona: But, here’s the thing is in the context of it’s now urgent, grading reform is now urgent. Like, we, we didn’t think it, we thought it was important. I don’t know that we thought it was urgent. But if it’s urgent and we know we’re gonna get this argument. What is this argument really about? I can’t believe that instructors don’t know this. So I think the thing for me is there’s something underneath “the students won’t do the work”. There’s something about it’s not fair. There’s something about, it’s not legitimate. Somehow there’s, there’s some belief system there.

Boz: It’s, it’s reducing the rigor, it’s reducing the standards of the.

Sharona: Right, but even those arguments, there is something that people believe. And one of the things I think we can do as grading reformers is to ask questions to help get to whatever the person we’re talking to or the institution, what do they actually believe that’s underpinning this? Why do they think that only the first try is legitimate? Yeah, there’s a value system there, and I think that’s really the barrier. The barrier, the oversimplification isn’t, is unconsciously intentional because people are protecting some sort of a value that they have. We’ve gotta get to that value so that we can unpack it.

Boz: Yeah, and, and I think that goes back to the point that I’ve brought up dozens of times, is that education is run by those of us that at sub level had to have had success at the game of education. So why do peoples have this deep belief? I think part of it is we were successful at it. That’s why it continues. But I also think that beyond just the oversimplification and that beliefs, barrier is also some misunderstanding of these things. And yes, some of that can go back to our beliefs and to , our core belief system and our identities. But some of that is also what Joe Feldman talks about in this article as the second barrier. And that is oftentimes, we try to fix grading too quickly and or through top down policies. A big part of the misunderstanding of a lot of educators when it comes to these grading reforms is inefficient or incomplete training on those grading reforms, the reasons behind them the philosophies behind them. So, yeah, it’s easy to oversimplify and take, oh, you want me to give something for nothing? I’m not supposed to give zero. I’m supposed to. So you’re just lowering the standard. Like that’s an easy conclusion to come to if I am not properly trained.

Sharona: Well, and I think it begins with. The fact that grading traditionally is an afterthought.

Boz: Yes, yes.

Sharona: That it’s this thing we have to do, but it’s not important. It’s not relevant. None of us get classes in it. Up until recently, there’ve been no big policies about it except some math. And how often you have to report grades, but there’s not been a deep philosophical conversation around grades, and those of us in the reform movement are like, oh, holy cow. Like grading is 95% of education. Like it’s humongous.

Boz: Yeah. Whether you want it to be or not. Grading is a huge part of a educator’s professional life. Between the time we spend on it, between the roles that it plays to students after our class and during our class , and yet we have little to no training on it.

Sharona: Well, and even bigger than that, that line that we read a couple weeks ago, and I think we mentioned on the pod, in physics there’s a whole bunch of concepts around observation. And there’s some types of observation that actually change the state of what is being observed. And there’s other types of observations you can do without changing whatever it is you’re observing. Right? And they differ in physics and they vary distinctly, carefully articulate which kinds of things can be observed and are changed and which aren’t. Assessment it changes our students. It actually actively changes them as people. It changes their learning. It changes their identity. It is so far beyond a number on a paper. That not only is a huge part of our jobs, but it actually is a huge part of our relationships with our students.

Boz: Absolutely, absolutely. And you’ve talked about that a lot on this podcast, is how your relationships with your students changed when you started using alternative grading practices. I’ve talked about how my conversations with my students drastically changed, and those conversations is also a reflection of the relationships. So. But going back to this idea of top down district policies, I remember I was probably five or six years into my career as an educator when the first time I experienced. Change in grading policy. I’ll call it. I, I don’t wanna call it a grading reform ’cause I think that’s giving it too much complimenting. But it was a top down policy. It was as a math teacher in L-A-U-S-D, I was no longer allowed to give more than 10% of my total grade towards homework. There was no training on this. There was no explanation as to the policy as to why there was a memo. And I remember, ’cause I was department chair at Santee at the time, the outrage it caused in my department, in me. ‘Cause I didn’t like the policy either. But no understanding and it was. I can see how any kind of grading reform policy that gets done at a district level without proper training can completely be a barrier to actually doing grading reform.

Sharona: Absolutely. That’s what Joe says in this article exactly, is when leaders treat grading reform as a technical fix. It produces inflammatory sound bites and backlash, not just from teachers, but parents and students.

Boz: Yep. And that, that goes back to your afterthought comment about it, this grading being this technical afterthought.

Sharona: So I think there’s an opportunity here for those of us that are reform minded to ask a lot of questions of our fellow educators because one of the things. That works with reform is when there are a response to shared problems. Problems that we agree on. And I think a lot of the problems that we agree on in education can be facilitated and helped by grading reform. So I think that’s kind of exciting, to be honest.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: I also like Joe’s third thing, and I think this is probably one of the most controversial and yet very true statements, is he says, defenders of traditional grading allow students and teachers to avoid accountability for real learning. I mean, we’ve gone through this a lot. We’ve talked about how bad the math is, but that’s oof. That hit home. That hits home.

Boz: Yeah. How so? What do you mean?

Sharona: I just looked at the experience that I had this past semester where I was coordinating a traditionally graded class and the institutional self-deception that went on. To think that these grades mean anything, even though it was supposedly coordinated and we had discussed a bunch of policies at the beginning of the semester when I started trying to implement the end of semester policies. People like, oh, I didn’t do that. I did this other math thing. I didn’t do that. I did this other math thing. So for example, we had agreed at the beginning of the semester to basically scale the homework grade based on 80% of the available points so that students didn’t have to get everything. Rather than do that, some people did that, but then other people like, oh, I just dropped the lowest five scores, or I dropped this, or I dropped that. The mathematical shenanigans that went on inside a coordinator was shocking. And so we have this belief system now in my institution that there’s some sort of coherence to the grades that they mean the same thing from section to section. But the math is completely different.

Boz: Oh, yeah. That’s something that, you know, Joe has talked a lot about both in his books and in this article about how you could take the same student grades and put ’em in two different classes and come up with very different actual final grades. And we do this in our, what’s wrong with traditional grading. We demonstrate this, how the same two students that are very different students, but we can put them in different situations of grading and their grades shift three letters.

Sharona: Then the question becomes to me though. Where do we have these conversations? It seems like there’s all these levels, right? There’s a individual instructor level, there’s a department level, there’s an institutional level, and in K 12 you have district level, right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So one of the things we came across as we were preparing for today’s article is something called the California Collaborative, and there’s an article that came out December 12th, which is just a few weeks before we are recording this. How to improve California’s flawed course grading system. So what’d you think of this article?

Boz: I really love this article. I hope we can try to get the person that wrote this Joel and I’m afraid to pronounce his last name.

Sharona: Knudson, Joel Knudson..

Boz: Yeah. But I’d love to get him or s really anyone from this collaboration on to talk about what they do and what efforts and what they’re seeing.

Sharona: A couple of quotes in this article really stood out. One thing said. Districts nationwide are joining the growing ranks of school systems pursuing, or at least investigating changes to longstanding grading practices. So again, this is the now moment. This is the urgency.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Robert Talbert was recently interviewed and asked if we are on the cusp of a change in grading. He said, no. He said, we have passed the cusp. We are now in the turbulence of this is happening. So I do think the urgency is now because it’s happening. It’s happening like a runaway freight train. Because these districts are moving forward, but they need good advocates available who can almost, we need to almost slow the conversation down.

Boz: I actually think there’s also possibly another pathway that the conversation needs to have. You were talking about this earlier. It’s Joe brings it up in this article that we were referencing, but it’s more than just pd, which is absolutely needed. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of pd. Like Joe brings out in this article, these top down district policies, especially the change, this now does not work at all. We have to have extensive training on not just the how, which I joke about every time I do K 12 training. That’s all they want is the how, but the why. But I also think there’s another form, another part, and this is what you were bringing up about. Identities and core beliefs, and we really almost need to take like a Elena Aguilar approach a transformational coaching approach to really diving into those personal beliefs. And anyone that doesn’t know who that is, she is a author dozens o of books on transformational coaching. Arise being probably her best known one. I’ve been exploring this with my new role as a coach at L-A-U-S-D in the ETO office. This is one of the things that we do a, a lot of our work around. I’m starting to really see how PLC, transformational Coaching and grading reform, all, all parts of a great gourmet meal. Like they’re all there. They come together in such a beautiful way. But I, I do, I think that’s maybe part of the conversation and part of the things that we not might need to be looking more at that we haven’t been.

Sharona: And that’s I think what I meant by slowing the conversation down. I don’t wanna slow down. The reform process. I want to accelerate the reform process, but I wanna slow the conversation down so that the people in the conversation can make meaning of what we’re talking about. Like getting past, like what you said about districts always want the how. It’s like, no, no, no. Why? Why? What are we all facing? Start there. Let’s take some time there. Because sustainable reform starts when people realize that the current system. Is already violating what they believe. I think that that is one of the biggest powerful pieces of grading reform that we can do is people think the system does things it does not do.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: And that’s why we’re still out there giving our grading is the misuse of math talk. I’m shocked by how often I walk into a room full of reformers, grading reformers, and I’m like, no, no, no. I’m gonna take you back to the math. And they’re like, we got it. I’m like, oh, you think you got it? And we give this talk and people are like, oh my God, I had no idea it was this. I mean, I knew it was bad and it was this bad

Boz: that that was really the first lesson that you and I took away from when we were doing our big work with the Cal State Engineering Department, taking a group of people that were ready and willing. And us skipping the why, and we found out real quickly. No, no, no, no. It doesn’t matter how ready and willing someone is, you still need to look at that why.

Sharona: And not just the why, but the details of what’s wrong. ’cause if you don’t, you’re gonna recreate ’em. Yep. So at this point in the episode today . There is two ways we can go and I, I know which way we’re gonna go ’cause we talked about it, but we could leave you with some reflective prompts or we could go, oh, and so what do we do now? So we decided that there’s a whole episode to be had about what are some critical steps we can take. But I think, and correct me if I’m wrong. We’re gonna actually make that another episode, right?

Boz: Yeah. I, I think there’s absolutely another episode that we can do on this. So instead of trying to do that instead, what was that first option? What are some of those reflective questions that we kind of wanna leave our listeners with?

Sharona: So we’re giving our listeners some homework and that homework includes, I very much wanna hear from people, so you can actually send your homework in to info at center for grading reform.org. Because what we wanna know is what are some of the places and how you think you can help facilitate this change? What are what? And you don’t have to be like, oh, signing up for anything. But you can be like, for example, well I am a English teacher to high school, so I think one place people could have these conversations is in departmental meetings or whatever. I would very much like people to think about. How you can help facilitate the change. What are some of the questions you think people should be asking? And we’re gonna assemble all of these ideas of steps. We’re gonna have our own, but I want people to actually email it in. To info at center for grading reform.org so that we can incorporate that into a future episode y. Y’all are teachers, many of you are good at writing reflections, so write a reflection or maybe even write, give us some, I don’t know, worksheets send in some things. Like seriously. I want to crowdsource this episode of what are concrete steps that we can take as a community. To advocate, but then to start facilitating these conversations and this change. ’cause it’s starting, the train is moving and I think we need to be guiding that train. ’cause we need to build the track in front of the train to direct where it’s gonna go.

Boz: Well, yeah, either , we control the train and we drive the train or we ran over by the train.

Sharona: Right. And the train does not have a specified set of tracks yet, so I wanna build the tracks.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: So if you could please by, I don’t know, when do we think we want these? Do we wanna give a date or just have people send it in?

Boz: Just have people sit in. Let’s not put a date on it just yet.

Sharona: Okay. But send it in and. Let us know what you think because we wanna do an episode where we can give a lot of concrete steps to address the urgency of this moment.

Boz: All right, well that is bringing us up on time. So it’s been an interesting conversation. I want to thank everyone for listening, and thank you ahead of time. For those of you that are going to submit your homework, that positive mindset right there. But yeah, you’ve been listed to the Grading podcast with Boz and Sharona, and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram if you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show. Please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.