The Grading Podcast

132 – New Semester New Grading

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Sharona: I also intend to really focus on some core content for pre-calculus that I think is gonna be really useful. So I’m sort of modeling some of the harder stuff, so I have an opportunity to then also, because we built this trust, because we built this grading system, I can then layer on these more complex modeling problems that I wanna do, these real world things because my students have trust that even if it’s hard, we’re gonna work together and I’m gonna get the evidence. So I’m really excited about working through such a tough thing at the beginning of designing a grading system, which is such a practical skill, that my students are gonna have learned all this stuff and take it into the actual math.

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-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: Well, it’s been a year already.

Boz: Yes, it has.

Boz: Yes, you did. I often help when you do these with, things like load in and load out and sometimes ticketing. But yes, this was the first time you had me backstage on the flight crew team. So.

Sharona: Yeah. And by flight crew we literally mean flying, as in we put people on wires in the air, including my own son.

Boz: Multiple people. And for someone that’s never seen how this works or how it’s done, think of it kind of like an etch sketch. So it takes two people, at least in the setup that we were using. I’m sure there’s other setups. One that controls the left to right movement called the travel and one that controls the up and down movement called the lift. Well I was on the lift one, which the travel one, like, it’s more technical I think, but it’s not as physically demanding ’cause there’s no weight on the rope. And I mean, it’s literally a rope that you’re pulling up and down and the lift one has some, has a little bit of weight on it. So yes by the time Tech Week and all four shows were done, my hands and arms were trash for a couple of days. So yeah, anyone that’s ever done that, like I had no idea how much went on backstage. I’m not a theater person. I was never a theater person. I had no idea how much went on backstage. So I have a much deeper appreciation for everything that goes into, putting on live theater, whether it’s plays or musicals, but yeah, it’s impressive how much goes on backstage.

Sharona: Yeah, well, we had a cast of 73 and we had a crew of almost 60 and I manage that whole thing several times a year. Although the main stage is really only once a year. So now I can whine with more understanding on your part and maybe a little bit more sympathy, maybe a little less. I don’t know. So it was definitely a lot. And so there’ve been a lot of changes in my life. Also, my son, my older son graduated and commissioned in the Army and is going into military police and he’s getting ready to do his first training. And my younger son is graduating this semester, so it’s gonna be a year of a lot of change for me. So I’m kind of grateful that we’re sitting down to do something we’ve been doing for a couple years now, which is record this podcast.

Boz: But I, I did want to take a second to give you a little bit of an opportunity to talk some about your dad. We’ve talked quite a bit about your mom on this podcast and how much of an influence she was being a longtime educator. Your dad wasn’t an educator, but he was a scientist.

Boz: Yeah, definitely not the norm in the seventies and eighties when this was going on.

Sharona: Not at all. And my mom worked. My mom worked. She gave a final the night before I was born, which might explain something about me in mathematics, but she gave a final exam in math the night before I was born. She went back to academia when I was 12. She was getting her PhD, got a job at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and then my dad supported her all the way through that. Now, a lot of people did actually think of my dad as an educator. He did help my sister and several of my cousins get through physics in college. I did not connect with him as a teacher because he liked to go back to quote unquote basics. So if you asked him something about physics, he would almost always start with something about the Big Bang and like take it back to the foundations of the universe.

And so I found it difficult to get him to get to an appropriate level, but he was always very thorough and everything. But he, for his time, like didn’t really see gender, he didn’t judge people, whether they were a woman or a man on their capabilities. He really looked at them as a person and said, can you do what you’re trying to do or not? Are you skilled? Are you smart or not? And it didn’t matter to him if they were a man or a woman.

Boz: Yeah, I, I remember one of the first conversations, years and years ago when we were first starting working together through College Bridge. You were talking about your parents and you described your dad as an accidental feminist,

Sharona: actually. Unconscious feminist.

Boz: Unconscious feminist.

And then at home, even, again, this is the seventies, he and my mom sat down and intentionally divided up the household labor. Now some of that divided on traditional gender lines, but it’s because they chose it. So my mom preferred to do the laundry, so she did the laundry. My dad preferred to work on the cars until they became too difficult. So they did that. But then my dad cooked breakfasts on the weekends. My dad was the king of breakfast pancakes, french toast waffles, you name it.

He did it.

Boz: Yes. I’ve heard you talk many times about his famous pancakes and how you’ve never been able to quite duplicate it.

Sharona: I could, I know how. I just don’t have the patience. My dad actually had OCPD and so he had a level of precision and my sister told something at his funeral. Even towards the very end of his life, his humor and his OCPD kept on. And she told a funny story. So at the very end of his life, he needed oxygen and so they unwrapped the coiled oxygen tube that had been sitting by him for a while to put it in his nose and give him oxygen. He got so mad he pulled it out because he needed to recoil it into a pretty coil. My dad loved to coil wires. And so when the EMTs came to transport him to my sister’s house, which is where he eventually passed away, they looked at him and they just put a brand new oxygen on him so that he could keep coiling the one he was trying to coil.

So he had that precision to him, and that was the physicist and the scientist and the OCPD. But yeah, he was really an extraordinary supporter of women in general, and my sister and me and my mom in particular. And then all of the grandchildren, the nieces and nephews. But again, such a supporter of the women in our family. It was really an amazing thing to have been able to experience and to understand now it’s part of the reason I am who I am. So thank you for giving me that opportunity.

Boz: I had the pleasure of meeting him once or twice, nothing more than just a hello. I am, usually at one of the shows that one of your two boys were performing in and I was working the front ticket office and stuff. But yeah, I am deeply sorry for your loss. Also with all this stuff going on, you failed to mention what’s right around the corner.

Sharona: Oh gosh. So as of the time of this recording, my semester starts in, well, the semester starts in three days. My first class is in four days between now and them, I’m flying to Green Bay and back ’cause you know, of course you do. But yeah, I am teaching, as I mentioned on the pod, pre-calculus for the first time in about 10 years. So.

Boz: Which is also, you have never taught, correct me if I’m wrong, but you have never actually taught this class with alternative grading, right?

Boz: Oh, that’s right. When you were just kind of starting?

Sharona: I was just starting and so my practices were very, very different than they are today. Yeah. And even with that, and even with all of my experience, I’m still gonna try something new in addition to that.

Boz: I wanted to make the main part of this episode really about that beginning of the semester. And what are some of the things that we need to do and how do we do those things now? I am not starting I, I think we’ve said this a few times, although I do teach at Cal State LA I traditionally only get classes in the fall because of how unbalanced our numbers are for spring and fall semesters. So I am not having a new semester right around the corner, but you are. All right. So what are some of those things that we do try to accomplish at the beginning of the semester?

Sharona: So for my classes, there’s four big buckets that I wanna list, and then through the course of this episode, let’s go through them. Okay. Okay. So the four big buckets are, first of all, you need to build your classroom culture, particularly in the areas of trust and collaboration. Because in order to do some of the things that we wanna do with our courses. We’ve discovered through our research that personal relationship between the teachers and students is so important, and without trust it’s gonna be difficult to accomplish some of these other things. And you and I do a lot of active learning, so we need collaboration.

The second thing that I need to do is I have to lay the groundwork for the grading system. Alternative grading is such a mind shift from traditional grading that laying the groundwork that this grading is gonna be based on learning of some kind. I need time for that. The third thing that I’m adding for this semester, and again, I wanna talk about this, is I’m going to add a layer of collaborative grading. So I have to start that process. Within this first two weeks. And then the fourth is giving them the actual structure of the day-to-day class because I am using active learning. Okay, so all of these things are new.

Sharona: So I do a community norming activity, and what’s been really interesting for me, I’ve done this in my class, and I’ll explain it in just a moment, for probably 10 years before I ever did alternative grading. I actually now use this at the theater. On first rehearsals, because I work with such a wide age range of people from so many different places, and theater is a place where you really need trust too. This activity actually translates very, very well to wide group of people. Basically what I do is I have essentially, and they change a little bit, but five questions that I ask students to answer, and I put them in groups and I hand out little sticky notes and literally they come up, they assign people to write on these sticky notes, and they come up and stick ’em under the questions often on the board.

And the first question is, how would you like to be treated by the instructor? I’m starting right off, I’m going right there. What do you want to hold me accountable to? What do you the students wanna hold me accountable to? And then the second question is, how do you wanna be treated by each other? Because again, if we’re gonna do active learning, if we’re gonna be in groups, we need to set some expectations of what appropriate behavior looks like. This goes a long way to addressing issues like microaggressions and things like that. The third question I ask is, what are you excited about in this class? Because I need to start to get to know these students, and I wanna give a little bit of context as I’m thinking about this course. I do this in all my courses, but this course in specific that I’m about to teach is for students who come in having been identified as being the least prepared to do collegiate level mathematics. And because it’s the spring. They likely either avoided taking it in the fall because they were so afraid of it, or more likely they’ve already failed it at least once.

Boz: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that kind of mis balance between the fall and the spring. The reason we have that is our institute encourages, highly, encourages students to try to get their B four, their gen ed math class done in the fall. So therefore most people that are taking it in the spring are either, like you said either they ignored their counselors, they might be slightly untraditional with either their age or they’ve taken some classes here and there, but not at a traditional setting. Or the more likely is they’ve already taken it in the fall and failed it and are now retaking it in the spring.

Sharona: So, but that’s an assumption. I don’t wanna act on that assumption. Yeah. So I ask this question, what are you most excited about? And then I ask, what are you most afraid of? Now these notes are anonymous, so they’re writing on these sticky notes. The sticky notes are coming out of groups, so they might be sharing a little bit in their little tiny little group of four, but they don’t know each other yet. There’s a little bit of safety and anonymity, and so they’re able to be more honest. Then I ask a fifth question. It tends to vary something about either personal goal setting or different kinds of things. But those are the questions that I ask. We put ’em up on the board, and then I literally spend probably 40 minutes going through each question, every sticky note and discussing it with the whole class. So like a lot of times students will say things like in the first question, and we spend most of the time on the first question, which is how they want me to treat them. I’ll get the word respect and I’ll say, okay, obviously we wanna be respectful. But what does that mean specifically?

Boz: Define it. Define it.

Sharona: Yeah. Can you give me some examples? And this is where we start to get to the point where they’re able to say please don’t talk down to me. I’m able to say, yes, I will not only commit to this, but I will ask you as a class to hold me accountable to that. And so we’ll go through all of these questions and we’re starting to get to know each other without it being personal. And coming to some sort of consensus and agreement. And you can see the walls start to go down. Because I’m not hitting ’em with the syllabus and how strict I’m gonna be about things. And if you don’t do your homework, you’re gonna fail. That’s not, I’m sitting here talking about kindness and respect. We talk about fairness. What is fair? What does it mean? We sometimes talk about equity, and so we’re starting off, in a math class, creating human relationships.

Boz: And I mentioned that training I did, now a decade and a half ago called Capturing Kids Hearts. This is a big part of it. And I would say this is one of the most important things to do, regardless of if you do traditional grading or alternative grading. This is incredibly important. I think it’s even more important for us in the alternative grading world. Because we’re doing something that is so unfamiliar with the grading that we need an extra level of trust. But, if you know you play this to someone that does traditional grading, and they’re like, yeah, I do this too. Yes, you’re right. This should is something that is done or should be done in every class, every setting.

Sharona: And like I said, I do it in the theater stuff that I do and there’s no grades. It’s not a class. Yeah. And it’s still incredibly impactful. But I agree with one thing that you said that it’s even more important. So even though those of us that are in alternative grading feel that it is a kinder, more student-centric type of grading because of the trauma our students are coming to us with, it breaks my heart at some of the questions I get. Things like, are you really going to replace my grade with this revision? Do I really get, and I’m like, yes, but if we haven’t built this culture of trust, they sometimes get more defensive because they think that I’m gonna do a Gotcha.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So this is super important. The other thing this does, although I think you and I talk about this a little bit differently. I’ve already started the active learning process in my classroom with this activity. I just get them into random groups and I just say, do this in groups. I don’t talk about why, but it is very intentional. ’cause my whole course is based on active learning groups in the classroom.

Boz: Yeah. And you’re right we do this slightly different, especially if we’re comparing it to like the quantitative reasoning with statistics class that you coordinated, that I’ve taught for so long. Usually there is a typical makeup of the class that I want to address very quickly, and that is, this is a class that really was designed for non-STEM majors. It’s designed for people that typically math is not their favorite subject. And that’s something that I bring bring to light on day one and just, I don’t do the group activities on day one. I actually do a few other things to build some of that trust before we go into the group activities, which is really usually my second class period. If I’m teaching one of the longer ones with the workshop I’ll get to it the first day. But otherwise it’s the second. And that is because I do want to build some of that trust and make them understand that. If they struggle in this class, they’re not alone. And make them understand most of the class, their colleagues hate math just as much as they do.

Sharona: And that’s the distinction. Because my class in theory is STEM majors. Yeah. And yet it is STEM majors who are coming from a deficit background. I, we try not to be deficit minded. But we are aware that these students are coming with math skill deficits. And so I’m trying to build this baseline of we’re gonna help each other, we’re gonna lift up everybody together.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I would do the same thing as you. If I have a class that’s just an hour introducing my name, a little bit of my background and this activity, that’s it.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But I am gonna have a workshop this year, I will have an hour and 40 minutes of instruction every time I meet this class. So I will then go into laying the groundwork for the grading based on learning. And we have two activities that I absolutely love. I use an activity called the Three Gamers, which is a, it’s considered an asset-based activity. What I love about it, even though it was not designed to be for alternative grading, I think it’s perfect because it uses a story of three video game people and the three different ways that they go through a game and they all end up at the same place in the same amount of time.

Boz: So I just wanna interrupt and back up real quickly. Okay. Because you kind of flew into that kind of quickly, so I wanna make sure that. We are looking at the second of those big goals that you had. The first one was building the classroom culture of trust and collaboration. This one is now getting into that, laying the groundwork for how we’re going to base our grading on actual learning. And it also works with the collaboration, right? Because you’re having your students do this. In groups, correct?

Sharona: Yes. But I wanna be clear, this is laying the groundwork. I am not yet talking about the grading. I haven’t gotten to the grading yet. So these activities also actually could be used in any active learning classroom, traditional or alternative grading. But I am doing it very intentionally to get to alt-grading. So going back to this three gamers. It’s a really interesting asset-based activity. It’s really getting them to focus on the things they are bringing to the classroom instead of the things that they are not bringing to the classroom. But it just so happens that because of the way the activity is written, it demonstrates to the students that there are multiple pathways to success. And this is one of the things I love about using it for alt grading is because I’m going to get to this idea that there’s multiple pathways to success, but at the same time. I’m building up students’ confidence because the whole activity lets them identify with these gamers. And then on the backside of the activity it says, what are you bringing to the table? And it’s things like compassion and empathy and organizational skills and all of these things. So I love that. And then the one that you love, which you actually really took, do you want me to stop and do the gamers refer?

Boz: I was just gonna mention something about the. Gamers, and we’ll include this in some of the show notes, right? With some of the, yes. We’ll share this activity because I don’t use this activity as often in my Cal State classes. I do in my high school, partly because I have more time with my K 12 students. But yeah I do use the three gamer in my high school classes. I think it’s even more impactful there.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: But you’re right, there’s also another activity that we both, we, I think we both do, but I do it to a much more extensive level than you do. And again, I’m using this for two reasons, to build some collaboration in the students, but also as a way to introduce my grading ’cause we haven’t talked anything about grading at this point. And it, yeah, it’s this game called How much Can You win? Imagine like tic-tac toe on steroids, but it’s non-competitive. What students end up doing is making it competitive and it makes them lose. So I end up doing this. We played this game several times. Until all of the groups not only have got gotten proficient, but most of them have hitten a level of mastery.

Sharona: And that’s what you do that I didn’t know you did. That I love, is after each one you go around and mark their papers, right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So explain what you’re doing by marking that their papers.

Boz: So when I and it depends on how much time I have to do this ’cause it. When I do this in my high school classes, I have to be a little bit quicker. ‘Cause I have less time even though I do it multiple days. Yeah. I just go through real quickly and Mark, did they pass? Did they hit proficient? Did they not? Did they get mastery? And then give some feedback and then we have some classroom discussion where they’re giving feedback to each other or they’re interpreting feedback. And then we do another round and then we do it again, and then we do another round. Usually three to four rounds is all I need before every group is at least proficient and most are at mastery level. But then we have this huge discussion about, ’cause I’m marking on the board, groups and when they got like each round, what score they got? Did they get non mastery or non proficient? Did they get proficient? Did they get mastery? And our marketing, we have this huge discussion at the end of it about which groups deserve what grades. So I use this to also introduce my grading practice. But it’s funny the conversations I the students have and just showing. How much they have bought in and really is unusual for them to hear that everyone would get the same grade ’cause they all got to the same level regardless if it took ’em the two times or four times.

Sharona: And I feel like that’s gonna be really important to me this semester and I’m planning on making the time to have that conversation. I’m gonna need them to buy in for themselves and for each other that this time based of who gets it first, is not really where we wanna take the classroom.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So

Boz: that’s one of our pillars.

Sharona: Of any eventual mastery matters.

Boz: Yeah. I don’t care if you did it the first time or the fifth time, I just care that you eventually were able to do it.

Sharona: Exactly.

So that’s all typical for me. I typically do, if I can, all three of those things. Sometimes I can only do two, but I do three.

Boz: All right, so that’s how we set up some of the, laying the groundwork for grading based on learning. What was one of the other goals for you in this timeframe?

Sharona: So I need to introduce them to how the course is gonna work on a daily basis, because this, I use active learning and I specifically use team-based inquiry learning, which is a very specific structure of doing active learning involving multiple choice questions. There’s specifically scaffolded and things like that. So I do wanna get them introduced to that so that they understand that being in class is going to be a super valuable part of this process. And I’ve done this. I’m a co-author on the linear algebra textbook for the TBIL materials. This is the first time I’m going to use the pre-calculus in class. It’s a new one. But I’m really excited to get to use that material in class as well.

Boz: Yeah. And again, I do the same thing. Our statistics class is a pseudo flip class. So that’s, one of those structures that I’m getting into and explaining. But yeah, making students at least aware, if not completely understanding yet, but aware of what the day-to-day class structure is gonna look like. What’s the expectation, what should their expectations be of me during the time of class? And yeah this is something, and we’ve talked a lot about this in recent episodes, this is, I think, us showing the importance to the student of why their valuable time is worth spending in our class. And I know that’s something you’ve been discussing a lot with a lot of our AI episodes and stuff is just students aren’t seeing the value as much as they used to because there’s so many other ways of, learning and delivering instruction regardless of what the structure is, whether it’s the active learning from TBIL, whether it’s flipped, whether it’s lecturing, quiz, whatever that structure is that’s one of those things that this first couple of weeks should be. Use to spend, make sure people understand. So those are the normal things we do. We do these in everyone. You’ve got something new this year?

Sharona: It’s partially new and partially not. Okay. So let me distinguish. I also spend this first couple weeks starting to build buy-in for the grading system, regardless of which grading system I’m doing, because they need to know early what those expectations are. So typically I would just introduce it at some level and then jump into the content and then really go back to it once they start to experience the grading system.

Boz: Okay, so I don’t want you to skate over that. ’cause I think that’s an important thing when it comes to alternative graders because I, the first couple of classes that I did this. I spent an extensive amount of time trying to explain and have the students understand the grading architecture of my class. What did we both discover through experience is that was a huge waste of time to a large part. So instead what you and I both do and I think talking to other alternative graders, in fact, if you. If you read I think it was the last post January 12th on the Grading for Growth. It was a guest writer and they talk about it partway through their article about the communicating the mechanics of alt grading. But yeah, I do a basic introduction. It’s usually after the how much can you win game. But that’s it. I’ll answer questions, but I do a very basic, and then I come back to it like two or three times throughout the semester.

Sharona: So yeah, so I made the same mistakes where I did too much and now I’ve gone to this thing. However, because I’m making another huge change or I’m gonna try it. I’m essentially gonna go back to the over communication in a way about the grading system early, but in a very different way. We’re gonna spend time together, the students and I building the grading system.

Boz: Yeah, so instead of explaining the grading architecture, you guys are going to build it together. So you’re going to be doing what is often referred to as collaborative grading.

Sharona: Now, for me, the collaborative grading is gonna be an overlay because there’s still parts of the course that I already know that I’m gonna grade based on standards. So I know what my rubrics are, I know I’m gonna use revisions, things like that, but I’m gonna give the students choices within these structures. For example and before I get there though, what I’m gonna approach this with the students as a goal setting process. So what I’m thinking of doing, and I want you to pick this apart, live on air for me, please, Boz.

Okay.

I’m going to be doing a goal setting activity with the students using SMART goals, trying to really get them to dig into their goal for this class. I’m then gonna share my personal instructional goals for them. Things like, I really want you to come out of this class with fluency in the mathematical practices, and I might explain what some of those are, and I want you to have some procedural fluency that’s gonna set you up for success in the next class. So I’m gonna take their personal goals, whether it’s I’m trying to get a biology degree or whatever those are, and take mine and try to bring them together. And then I’m gonna share with them some of the structural stuff. I’m gonna say something to the effect of, okay, I have these six or seven content buckets, and within these buckets, there’s so many things that I need you to learn. How do we wanna take this set of content? What are some options we could choose for what different grade levels look like? And we’re gonna talk about this, we’re gonna massage it. What are we gonna do with things like attendance? What are we gonna do with things like the stuff that’s practicing? And try to have a collaborative process about how we’re gonna do this and how we’re gonna come up with these final grades. I’m a little scared. I don’t want it to be chaos. So I am gonna put some thought in, some more thought into the structure, but I also need to communicate to the students why. So I’m gonna be talking about, as it comes up very naturally, why are we talking about this? Why do we grade? What is an A versus a B versus a C? What does it mean for you personally, for your goals? What does it mean for the institution? I wanna have these conversations with the students.

Boz: Yeah. And I think you hit one of the key ones. One of the ones that’s come up, I wanna say with Becky Peppler. I’m not a hundred percent if I’m right about that, but explaining the why is so important and is so often skipped. But yeah, making the students understand why , why you’re going through this process, and really getting them involved. This is part of the appeal of collaborative grading is. Getting students involved in the way the class is gonna run is, shown to be one of the best ways to get student buy-in. And that goes back even to that training I keep referring to that, capturing kids’ hearts. It wasn’t talking about doing that with grading, but it was talking, about having students help come up with the actual rules of the classes and the consequences. And so having students voice and choice builds trust in the class and it builds that buy-in. You’re gonna be taking it a step even further for the first time. So I’m really curious to hear how it goes. We probably will. End up making at least part of an episode, if not a whole episode on how wonderful and how horrible this goes.

Sharona: No, I wanna be clear. I’m still the instructor. So at the end of the day, I have to sign off on the grading system as much as the students do, and I will tell them that’s the thing that I have to be careful of. There are gonna be some non-negotiables for me. There’s gonna be some things, like there will be opportunities for revision. I’m not gonna let them decide we’re going to traditional grading. That’s. That’s not an option that is off the table. So there’s certain things that are non-negotiables, but I’m going to tell them upfront what is non-negotiable. Because if I do it after they’ve come to a decision, then it feels like a betrayal.

Boz: Yeah. It feels like a bait and switch. And I gotcha. And it’s a great way to actually destroy that trust. So you’re right. And again, going back to that, capturing kids’ hearts, that was one of the things that they also said was. If you have non-negotiables, if you have things that you are not willing to budge on, just be upfront and honest with it. It’s not that you can’t have ’em, it’s not that the students have to have complete decision making or, voice in every single decision. Just be upfront and honest okay. These are the things that we’re gonna do. Here are the things that I want you your input on. And as long, yeah, as long as you like you were saying, don’t do that bait and switch ’cause that will destroy the trust. But there’s nothing wrong with saying upfront, Hey, I am not going to do points, percentages, and averages. That’s not how this is gonna work. Here’s how it’s gonna work. Here’s where your decision making comes in and helping what we’re going to do.

Sharona: And one of the areas that I really think that this whole process is gonna help with is we talk a lot about simplifying your grading system because we love to make these things too complicated. And so you and I were discussing as we were planning this course, ’cause you’re my mentor and my sounding board for a lot of this, I have these six or seven content buckets and within the buckets there’s anywhere from three to eight learning outcomes. And I was going back and forth on should I do an A or a B or a C based on outcomes out of the total or outcomes within buckets. And in my ideal world, I would do both. But that sounds really complicated to me. But if I have a conversation with the students, I say, Hey, here’s a couple ways we could do this. Which one do you want? And some students are like I want this. And some students are, I want this other one. And I’m like how would you guys feel if I gave you both options? Then that’s a level of complexity. But they have already gone through a whole discussion process and thought process about the options and I feel like they would understand more which one to pick. ’cause I can track both of those pretty easily.

Boz: Yeah. And I love that you brought up the complexity. ’cause that is one of our biggest things that we’ve said on the podcast several times. It’s been a huge part of several of the, workshops and stuff at the grading conferences over the years. In fact, when we do most of our trainings, when we give our last bits of advice, that is always one of them is simplify simplify. I think that was Kate Owen’s first quote is, yeah simplify.

Sharona: Now, I do wanna bring out one other thing that people who are listening might be going, I don’t have time for this, right? Because I might spend up to two weeks on this.

Boz: Oh yeah. I will, even in my high school class. Where I meet all five days will likely spend seven to eight class periods doing this.

Sharona: I’m gonna argue that even though I’m not quote unquote starting the content, I actually am teaching mathematical skills because this entire process is problem solving. It’s making sense of the problem of grading. It’s perseverance. It’s looking at patterns and structure. It’s constructing arguments and critiquing. I’m hitting all of the mathematical practices in a very real world context and improving their skills through this process. So I actually think I’m doing a lot of the content. I may not be doing functions and algebra. But I’m doing a lot of the mathematical practices and I’m doing career relevant skills because one of the things they’re gonna be able to do or have to do is build a portfolio through the semester that will be their final set of evidence to give to me at the end, and I’m gonna talk to them about, that’s how you get ready for a promotion. We do that with our RTP binders, where you’re building a body of work to then show your boss or whoever. So we’re gonna be learning about that. We’re gonna be learning to work together as a team and come to consensus in difficult conversations. So I feel like the things that I really want out of the class, the career skills, the cultural relevance skills, the mathematical practices, that’s what we’re doing. And then we’ll get to some of the algebra.

Boz: Yeah and I would completely agree with you. Yes. When I set up my pacing for a semester or for a year, I’m doing it and working it into where I have this time to do it. But yeah, I’ve had admins before that have come in, especially in my K 12 world, that have come in and question me about when am I gonna get to content? And you’re absolutely right. This is the eight mathematical practices that might not be technically content in higher ed. You and I both put that as part of our learning targets, at least some of them or versions of them. But in my K 12 world, it absolutely is like we are expected to teach those eight mathematical practices all the way up through high school. You’re right you wanna talk about those portfolios. Both of the schools I work with right now are getting ready for WSAC accreditation, where the organization has to put this kind of like portfolio and evidence and stuff. So yeah, career readiness. Absolutely.

Sharona: And the other thing with all of this is, as we’ve talked about, I also intend to really focus on some core content for pre-calculus that I think is gonna be really useful. So I’m modeling some of the harder stuff, so I have an opportunity to. Then also, because we’ve built this trust, because we built this grading system, I can then layer on these more complex modeling problems that I wanna do, these real world things because my students have trust that even if it’s hard, we’re gonna work together and I’m gonna get the evidence. So I’m really excited about working through such a tough thing at the beginning of designing a grading system, which is such a practical skill that my students are gonna have learned all this stuff and take it into the actual math.

Boz: And I really am curious to hear how this goes. This is not something that I have ever done with my students. I said, me either. Yes. Some of the classroom expectations and rules, like I said, I’ve been doing that for 15 years. But actually making it part of my grading architecture I have not, so I am really curious to see how this goes. And I really think out of the two of us, you being the first one to try it is funny because we’ve talked about this even on air when we’ve had some of our un graders or our collaborative graders, how you just as a math teacher did not see how you could do this. So I think it’s hilarious that out of the two of us, you are ended up being the first one to try it.

Sharona: Especially ’cause I’ve been very reluctant.

Boz: Yeah. And hats off to you for doing it.

Sharona: And we’re gonna talk about it live on air so that talk about a vulnerable place to be. I’m really excited to go on this journey this semester. We’re gonna share a lot of links and resources in the show notes for the stuff that we found. I do wanna shout out to the Grading for Growth article of back in October, students as Partners in Learning Assessment. It gave me the courage to try this collaborative grading. We did an episode on that article.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And had the professor on as well yeah. Deep breath.

Boz: Yeah,

Sharona: here we go. On that.

Boz: We can have Grading for Growth. If you guys haven’t been reading some of their blogs, they’ve had some great ones recently. I mentioned, this, communicating effectively with students about alternative grading, which just came out January 12th. Dave Clark has recently posted, so if you haven’t checked it out recently. Go check it out. They’ve had a lot of great ones recent.

Sharona: And then if you’re still with us and listening, we probably should mention that the call for abstracts for the grading conference is open. Probably should have done that at the top as well. And registration’s open. So we are starting our full buildup for this year’s grading conference.

Boz: How exciting. Yep. Registration’s open. Abstracts are open.

Sharona: Volunteer forms open.

Boz: Oh, yes. That’s so important. We had a much larger volunteer group last year. We asked for volunteers and we got ’em by the truckloads. Thank you so much for all the people that did that, but oh my gosh, we were able to accomplish so much more because of those volunteers they’re so important and we organizers did not leave the conference completely drained of all energy because we had done so much of it for so long, really by ourselves. You have no idea if you volunteered last year. Thank you. If you’re thinking about volunteering this year please. It is an unbelievable amount of help that is just done out of the kindness of people’s hearts. So thank you so much. And with that, I think we’re gonna wrap this up. So we wanna thank you for listening. This has been 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 featured 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.