The Grading Podcast

136 – Chris Sarkonak

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Chris: Normally the Canadian Physics Olympia team, like here in Canada, we have the top 10 list for each province. And usually it’s dominated by a couple of, , private schools that have pretty high tuition and stuff like that. And here we were all of a sudden one student managed to crack the top 10 from my group, and there was three more that were one point out Wow. On this absolutely horrific exam that, it’s generally thought of that if you hit 30%, you’re doing great. And here we are.

Sharona: I think they might’ve buried the lead here.

Boz: Yeah.

Chris: So then then we did it again the following year and I had two kids that went ahead and cracked the top 10 and a handful more that were 1 point out. And here we are competing with these private school, these elite private schools out of outta the big city here in Manitoba. It’s a couple hours away, and, we’re just the public vocational school and we’re getting right in there.

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

Sharona: And I’m Sharon 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 to the grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m doing okay. It’s finishing week three, going to week four of the semester. And all of a sudden today I realized that I’m so out of touch, that I didn’t even think about the fact that we’re recording on Super Bowl Sunday. So I was just like, wow. I’d rather record a podcast than watch the Super Bowl. But I will admit that I actually know who’s playing in it and I do have a favorite, but nonetheless, I don’t wanna offend anybody by saying that. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: It’s funny ’cause I am such a huge football fan, but it’s really college football that I get so excited about. So last couple of days I’ve not been thinking about football ’cause I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics. I absolutely love the Olympics both winter and summer. So yeah, I’ve been more focused on the Olympics than anything else.

Boz: That’s both funny. Funny, sad, and also very cool ’cause that I, like I said ever since I can remember been a huge Olympic fan, I love the stories that come out of ’em. Both the uplifting and some of the unfortunate tragedy ones, which team us has already had one. I don’t know if you had seen this, but Lindsay Vonn, one of our downhill skiers who came out of retirement for this Olympics, unfortunately had a really bad accident earlier today.

Sharona: And we don’t have an update on her yet. So hopefully. Best wishes going out to her and her family and her friends. And we hope that she is well.

Boz: Although I did see a really cool story about her that when she is being airlifted by helicopter and is in the helicopter ride, she was watching and cheering her teammate who happened to win gold in that very event.

Sharona: Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. I am glad to hear that. Oh, man. Craziness. And I guess airlifting someone off the side of a mountain, like if they’re hurt, you have to airlift them. It’s not necessarily a question of the significance, it’s just literally the only way to get them off. Yeah. So I was worried that the airlift meant it was really serious, but now that I think about it, she’s in the middle of a huge downhill run. You can’t get to her without airlifting. So best wishes to her and her family and the entire team, USA.

Boz: And then we’re also not here alone today in the virtual studio. So who do we have with us Sharona?

Sharona: So we’re very excited to welcome Chris Sarkonak, who, I hope I got that I was practicing it. Chris reached out to us through the contact us form on our website. And those of you that have reached out to us, you’ve probably gotten an email recently. We had a little hiccup, so we were a little slow in responding but we’re really excited to talk to him. He’s a high school physics and math teacher at Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. I love the fact that we’re getting so many Canadians. He’s currently the Perimeter Institute’s regional coordinator for the province of Manitoba, and he is also a PhD student at the University of Manitoba in educational assessment. Chris lives with a 5-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son, and both he and his wife have been teachers for 15 years and 17 years respectively. And one interesting piece about Chris is he actually teaches at the same school that he attended as a student, a high school, correct?

Chris: Yep.

Sharona: So welcome Chris. We’re so excited to have you on.

Chris: Thank you for having me.

Boz: So, you’ve been doing some writing about, learning and about what grading is about or what it, what a lot of times people mistake it about. Alright. But before we get into that, one of the first things we always like to ask a new guest is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Chris: Not quite a short story. It’s been quite quite a journey over the years. When I first started teaching, I I think I was like a lot of teachers where I just I taught how I was taught. And, that’s, that was just the thing that happened. You inherit a course load from somebody else or you get coached along by the department that you’re entering, things like that. And so I just did what everyone else was doing and what my experiences through school were and which was very traditional. And starting off with math physics, it, those are two disciplines that typically get a bit of a bad rap for the whole assignments, quizzes, tests, idea, and traditional plug everything in. There’s no second chances. Everything is set in stone. And I quickly realized that there was something drastically wrong with that when I was on the other side of things.

And I tried a few things over the years. Started to dip my toes into standards-based grading, I think in my third year of teaching. And I liked what I was seeing from students. I saw a huge improvement. But I also could see that there was a lot of kids who saw it as a different system to game. It was like targeted attacks on different outcomes to try and focus on the grade which students ended up performing better, but they still couldn’t have those conversations with me about what was actually going on behind the scenes. So I was quite skeptical as to how much they’re, they were actually learning versus how much they were memorizing just to go ahead and get through a reassessment or a or whatever they had to do to boost their grade. I also found that in a, in that world of endless reassessments and marking and everything else, I felt like I was starting to drown. So I went back and went back to traditional again. And then a couple years later, I tried gamification. I read Lee Sheldon’s book on the multiplayer classroom, which kind of spoke to me a bit because of my background in computer science.

And so I started to do that and I ended up with so much pushback from my strongest students that I was still early in my career and I just abandoned ship. I didn’t feel I had the confidence for it yet. And that’s something that I wish I had seen through further to actually have that experience and see, give it a fair shake as to whether or not it was the right thing for me or not. So then I went back to traditional again, and then I tried standards based grading again, a couple diff a couple years later with different groups and things like that. Again, still was seeing like that really targeted piece very performance based. And the conversations weren’t on the learning. They were still surrounding the grade. And so I still wasn’t happy with that. And then all of a sudden, COVID hit and I think COVID hit for me the same way that it did for a lot of teachers, where it made me look at what was going on and pulled me back. And what I did was I didn’t want to just put my tests and assignments online. I didn’t know if. If students were really getting what I was hoping that they would get just by doing that. So I moved to a system where I started to have conversations with them and we started to do conferencing they had to search out, look out for their hot wheels from when they were little and try and crash ’em together and see what physics they could do with them. I tried to focus on how physics is all around you and get students to see that even in, in that time where we’re isolating and everything else that you can still learn really interesting and really engaging things, you just have to put your mind out there and have those fun conversations.

And so that became the dawn of it, is I started to realize that the kids who were getting a 95 in my very traditional physics class couldn’t hold a basic conversation with me about physics. But I had a kid who had around a, I think a 60 or so, and he absolutely loved graphic design and he was incorporating that into his physics projects at home. And when we had these conferences, we had these amazing conversations and he absolutely, you could tell he knew what he was doing and he was such a fascinating kid. And when he had the time to really put his passion into it and connect the two things he was producing absolutely amazing work, some of the best in the class. And I asked him how are you only sitting at a 60 or 65 coming into COVID? And he said I just don’t test. I’m like, but you actually know everything. Like you, you get it on a level that’s far deeper than most of the students that I was working with at the time. And he just shrugged and that was it. And I, it hit me like a ton of bricks that something was really wrong. And what I was doing at that time was probably one of the best things I could do for my students.

Boz: For all the horror and tragedy that COVID brought it did highlight a lot of things with education and with grading, and it really is a catalyst to a lot of the changes we’re starting to see now. Of course, that’s all also helped by ai, but I love the fact that you went into COVID and you really were looking at, okay, I’ve gotta do this weird thing. Try to figure out the best way to do it for my students.

Sharona: I’m also intrigued by the process of going to it and then going back to traditional because one of the things that we say a lot to people who are trying this is we say it’s going to be a disaster. We’ve all had a disaster like the very first time is just. In some way, it’s horrible. And yet almost nobody goes back to traditional because of whatever’s better. You did go back, but then you kept trying again. So what was it like when you went back to traditional after having tried it? Was it just like you were defaulting or did it feel icky? I just wanna know what was the experience?

Chris: Honestly it was that icky feeling. I didn’t it made a lot of the issues stand out, even more glaringly. I just, it kept becoming so apparent that there were so many issues there to try and overcome that I just knew I had to find something different, but didn’t know everything that was out there, so it was just this back and forth between basically standards based and traditional. But I didn’t feel good about either one. And so it wasn’t until COVID and, okay we’re all forced to stay home and in, in the midst of teaching and trying to figure out what to teach, I just started devouring different PD and checking out different websites and things like that. And I came across AAPT, the American Association of Physics Teachers, their summer online camp at the time. And I am meeting a physics teacher named Scott Bruner, who has a website talks about skills-based grading. And that became one of the key pieces for me because then I start to look at what if, instead of standards based grading this focus on content outcomes, what if it was as focus on skills or global competencies? And that became part of that shift. I started to see a huge improvement with students when we started to focus on how they solve problems, how they think about the world around them and those nature of science pieces. And so that went ahead and acted as breaking endpoint.

Then I discovered the Grow Beyond Grades website with that the organization that Arthur Chiaravelli has put together. And I started pouring through a lot of the articles on there and seeing what other teachers have done. And then that started to cement those pathways a little bit. And then I, I got Susan Bloom’s ungrading book, which kind of pushed me over the edge. And then star sax, Dean’s Hacking Assessment almost became like my introductory how to model for my first go around. And so all those pieces fell into place at the right time. Like those books were released, not too far from then. So they were coming out at just the right time all those things gave me the support that I needed to really feel like I could break through. There was still a bit of a mental block for me, ’cause coming from, a computer science, math, physics background, that highly logical, this is the way we’ve always done things. All those pieces. I had to find a way to break down the grade ’cause it’s often seen as this sacrosanct thing that you can’t, dare touch or talk about and all this sort of stuff. And yeah. So I, I had to break that down to open up the doors fully so that I could see, okay let’s give this a real try and let’s stick to it and see how it goes for a while.

Boz: no. I had not.

Sharona: There’s a proliferation of terms that, that’s why we all lump it under the alternative grading umbrella. So I do want to transition now. So you started this conferencing thing in COVID, but let’s jump to today. Could you describe a little bit about your practices today, and then I wanna ask you about some of the things that you’ve written about those practices.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So coming off of COVID, I had this framework of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how well it was gonna go with students back in front of me. I started off with something that was still very driven by me. And I think that was my early mistake is it was still, I was the sole arbiter of how that classroom was gonna run. I was the sole decision maker, and so that first time was a little bit rough. I had a, powerSchool set up, which our division uses for the grade book that had a whole bunch of skills in it. And so I had that kind of going for me, but it was still up to me. And I was trying to assign grades to everything and trying to judge people based on where they’re at. And that first time around was a little bit shaky. But I realized quickly that I need to lean more on my students. So I started to bring them into the whole process. We start off the course like I, I start off my grade 11 physics I’m fortunate ’cause I’m the only physics teacher in our building right now, so I know that they gotta go through me no matter what. I did, go ahead. The first thing I did was I went to our provincial universities and I talked to the first year physics departments and said okay, here’s our physics curriculum. What do you need to see me produce? So that way I still felt good about the understandings that students were coming outta my program with, and that I was still setting them up to be successful, long run. So I made sure to talk to them and before I started to move forward, but in the classroom, focused on nature of science to start with.

So taking a look at how we approach science and our understanding of it and getting students to develop a a better appreciation for that, that there’s these huge misconceptions around science quite often, that it’s this hard, rigid thing that, is unchanging. You discover something and that’s how it is. But it’s it’s more about this idea of this never ending quest for getting closer and closer the truth. Almost everything we have in science is wrong to some degrees. It’s just the next thing is less wrong than the previous thing. So trying to get students to really understand that and that it, it’s this growing and evolving process that never really ends. And I, spend the first week and a half introducing students to that idea and running through them through a bunch of activities. Perimeter Institute they, that I do some work with they have these wonderful free resources that they, the way that they’re scaffolded takes you through that process almost every time.

So I really started to latch onto some of that stuff on the pedagogy side. And so developing an assessment model that kind of flowed with that. I decide to say, okay, we’ve done these activities, you start to understand what science is. I’m trying to communicate to students that, this classroom is about doing science and understanding science, and it’s not just memorize a definition and spit it out on a test. It’s gonna be something more than that. And so I put it to the students, okay, we have these global competencies here in Manitoba, we call ’em cluster zero outcomes that are all based on these skills. And then we have all this content that’s part of the course as well. And so I put them up on the board side by side and I say, okay, what here is more important? You’re the learners, you’re the ones in the seats. What’s gonna be more important to your life? Figuring out how to be a good problem solver. Figuring out how to understand that nature of science. Or is it gonna be memorizing that forces mass times acceleration for the rest of your life? And, it comes back to having those skills to be good problem solvers.

And so students identified that, and then we start to build off that what’s it mean to be a good scientist? And, they talk about curiosity and passion and engagement, they’re so spot on with those ideas and they understand what it’s all supposed to be about. And then we talk about what have you done in the school system from K to 10? And it comes out as almost the exact polar opposite. We all collectively have this realization of, oh wait, something’s not right here. We need to build something different. And so that first time around was really groundbreaking and enlightening for me. Students even would tell me like how they cheated on different things over the years and why they felt like they had to and that feeling of their back being against the wall. Went through that whole process and started to figure out, okay, what should a classroom look like that does follow this whole nature of science idea that does promote your curiosity and your passion, and how do we build from that? And so we start to develop, okay kids would talk about, okay, most tests are about memorization or you get feedback, what, once a month or once every three weeks that’s too late. How do you fix anything? Or if it’s one and done, then how do you actually grow? If it’s just, okay Johnny had a bad test the teacher goes up and says, okay, it’s okay, Johnny. You’ll do better next time. The kid’s perception is they understand that their teacher’s well-meaning and things like that. But if there is no next time, their teacher at best is a kind and compassionate hypocrite. And if you don’t give ’em that chance for growth, how do you actually build from that? How do you learn? How do you develop? And so that introductory part is also about giving per permission to students to not know everything all at once. And that it’s okay if I’m giving you a good, solid, challenging physics course, you should suck at it to begin with. You should be terrible. The idea is that you challenge yourself, you push yourself and you grow into it.

Sharona: I love so much of that kind and compassionate hypocrite that hit home.

Boz: Okay, so I’ve gotta ask you, you said it was your students that were coming up with these ideas of what makes a good scientist and coming up with Yeah. Curiosity. Okay. See. And I, I know one of the many pushbacks that I get, especially when we’re talking about going as far over as ungrading or collaborative grading, is that the students don’t know what they need to know yet. And yeah, it sounds like, yeah, give them, you gave them a chance and they absolutely. ‘Cause everything they said, that’s exactly what it takes to be a good scientist. You were mentioning things and all I could hear in the back of my head were, all the crosscutting concepts in the next gen science standards that we have here in the states. I don’t know if you guys are familiar or if you use them at all, but all of that was directly from there. So

Chris: yeah,

Boz: your students are coming up with exactly what it is that we’re wanting. To produce. So

Chris: Yeah, and I think that’s the thing I is Yeah. Like tho those people who say that they don’t know what they need to know yet are right in the idea of content.

Boz: Yeah.

Chris: But in terms of overall direction, the kids get it and they’ve gotten it for a long time. Like that they know what they need to actually be successful. But, it’s up to me to try and find ways to facilitate different things and to get things in place so that they can get the most out of it. They already know the pathway. They just need to feel like their backs aren’t against the wall and that they, have that freedom to explore and try things out and see how it feels and what’s right for them.

Sharona: So I’m curious how that operationalizes in the classroom on a day-to-day basis, because a lot of people will hear that and think that your classroom is just this chaotic, free flowing. Students are going off in 17 million directions, but that’s not what really happens. I’m confident. So how do you translate that conversation with your students into day-to-day work in the classroom? What does that look like?

Chris: Okay. So yeah, like one of the other books that I read during COVID that really helped shape this on the classroom side and my pedagogical approaches were, was building thinking classrooms. And so I went through his book and I love the ideas of collaboration. I couldn’t do some of his stuff. I’ve got a traditional physics lab with six lab benches bolted to the floor. The free flowing furniture wasn’t exactly an option for me. But I went ahead and I started to implement like the random groupings, the vertical whiteboard stuff, the in some cases the thin slicing as well. One of the things that I realized was at this time when we came back is I was about halftime physics, halftime math. And so in math, I implemented the thinking classrooms ideas almost exactly as the book has him prescribed. But in physics, because I was the only physics teacher I felt like I had this freedom to do a little more exploring. So that’s where I changed the assessment in physics. So in math, I was still doing standards based grading. ’cause that’s what he’s got in the book. And that’s where I could really see running side by side with thinking classrooms in both rooms and things of that nature that okay, we had more collaboration, we had more students getting to know each other and work together in different ways.

But in the math classes with that standards based piece, students were still resistant to the collaborative nature. ’cause there was still a grade on everything. They still fought against it a little bit because it was, okay, are we doing this work at the whiteboards for a grade? Or if we are, okay, how can I get my grade? And even if somebody else wants theirs it’s almost like this battle for it. How can I prove to you that I understand this concept? So you check off the box in your little spreadsheet. But in the physics it was, they realized pretty quickly that okay, if there isn’t any grades on anything our focus is how do we learn from each other? How do we build something together? How do we how do we fill in each other’s gaps so that we can be stronger as groups? So it was much more open and much more accepting of those changes. And so now what I’ve done is I’ve built it to a point where a lot of my physics topics I introduce with a lab so that students go ahead and actually live that experience first and they have something to think back on. One of the problems I’ve had in the past is sometimes what better way to kill the curiosity of the lab experience than to, Hey, let’s go on for about this topic for three or four days. And then that’s, do a lab that you already know what’s supposed to happen and what your result’s supposed to be, and you don’t actually get to discover anything. You don’t get that joy of that piece.

And so I’ve put the labs at the front end and it’s more about me facilitating it and just triggering that thinking at the beginning. And then from there, usually the following day, I re randomize the groups so that students have these different experiences that they’re coming off of, and we go out to the whiteboards and develop a class group of notes where we engage in note making as opposed to, note taking. Another idea that Liljedahl talked about more recently with some of his more recent research. And so getting away from, turning students into human photocopiers effectively and into getting ’em to actually think about what they’re writing down and the patterns that they recognize from those experiences. And then collaborating as a class and saying, okay, if we look across all these different whiteboards, what’s really important here? What are we getting out of all this? And so the students build that understanding together.

The next piece is once they have that note making in place and they’ve talked about the understanding and the, and their lived experiences, then I start to move into, okay what sort of other problems can we solve? How do we abstract these ideas and start diving into a different layer of problem solving? And the issue that I ran into with my math classes is that’s the direction that the book takes you with the thin slicing idea is let’s go ahead and carry you through a sequence of scaffolded questions to try and build up that understanding. But the problem that I went ahead and ran into on the math side is. I was doing that, and I still remember vividly like I was teaching trig and the kids were getting it, and they were getting it, and like every question I threw at them was great. And they were knocking outta the park. And then I went ahead and I gave them their trig test and the class average was like 40%. And I’m like, that was a train wreck. I realized that I had them working really well collaboratively, but I’d never taught them that scaffolding to go to independent thinking. And so in my physics classes, I started to realize, okay, let’s go ahead and let’s scaffold it from this group think to, okay, let’s move to more independent and then let’s synthesize things together and then let’s do these individual check-ins and see how students do on these individual assessment pieces.

And so the other piece that I made sure to include was that these weekly check-ins or these individual topic assessments. They’re assessed against those skills that I was talking about earlier, like what makes good problem solving, how do we engage in that scientific thinking piece? So the content changes from week to week. The key there is how do I get students thinking about that process, regardless of what content we’re talking about, and see that’s really what that learning is all about. It’s not about memorizing a formula for the week, it’s about understanding where it comes from and how to work with completely new scenarios. So I make sure to leave a couple days between the end of the topic and that assessment piece. So it gives students an opportunity to finish things up, to discover what they need to do to improve their understanding to investigate their own approaches. And it also creates a little bit of a spaced retrieval as well, where they step away from it for a couple days potentially and then come back to it and kinda reinforce those neural pathways that are there. So a lot of students by the end of the course, will do final conferences while they’re doing kind of an exam review, and students will say, yeah I, this review’s weird. And I’m like why is that? I don’t have to look anything up. It’s all still there. And I’m like, okay, that was part of the plan.

Boz: All right, so there, there are a couple things that. I wanna ask about first, ’cause Sharona and I just did an episode and we’ve done a couple of them about the potential harm of competition in grades or feeling that you’ve gotta compete for these. And one of the things that we’ve talked about is how a lot of the alternative grading systems can help with that. But you were still finding that issue with, because you were still having some, when you were doing the standards base, some standards collaboration or on class participation or something, and your students were competing to get that recognition. I had never thought of that way. It makes complete sense when you said it, but that was still causing an issue with your standard. That was one of the things that. Was causing you issues with standards based grading?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It created that resistance to the whole collaborative piece. And the thing that I didn’t recognize it in previous times that I’d done standards based grading because a lot of stuff was still independent. But I also think part of it was I didn’t have that direct compare and contrast with my physics classes that were that skills-based collaborative grading with portfolio conferences. And so getting rid of that itemized piece by piece, outcome by outcome stuff was, that was the only real difference between those two segments. It was still me at the front of the room, so that variable was the same. And how I approached stuff in general, but that assessment piece became the standout.

Boz: Don’t have a question about it. I just wanted to point this out. I love that note. What did you call it? Instead of note taking note. Note making. Yeah. Note making.

Chris: Note making.

Boz: Idea, and you’re right, that is, if you read any of the building thinking classrooms, that’s one of the key things in it. And I know in my coaching at my K 12 level, trying to get the student voice and getting the students to take on that cognitive load and it’s not always natural to do. So to, to hear that, this idea of let’s do note making instead of note taking. I love that. But because you brought this up and you were doing some comparisons looking at when you’re in a math class compared to a physics class, like. Are there major differences in the way you grade one class compared to the other? Or are there other difference in the approaches that you take?

Chris: At the time I, I still felt very beholden to the rest of my department that we’re assessing traditionally. And I, I worried about, what was I doing to these kids if I deviated too far. So I knew I was already deviating a whole bunch by doing the thinking classroom stuff and being the first in our building to do that. But I don’t know, like with the physics I felt like I had. I was the only physics teacher and I’d already talked to the university year one profs. And so I felt like I had this carte blanche to go ahead and push it as far as I wanted to. If I made a mistake with grade elevens one year, I’ll fix it the next year with my grade twelves once they’re in there. And so I just, I felt like I had more control in the physics to experiment with that. Since then, my physics program has almost tripled in size and so I don’t teach math anymore. If I have an extra course, it’s now a junior science, like a grade nine or 10. I haven’t gotten to go back to the math side. The year that I was going to flip my math programs to this ungrading piece or the brand of it that I use, I was gonna go ahead and flip over, and then I got my schedule. I’m like, oh, I am, I’m not teaching math anymore. So yeah and so I never got to experiment with that, I’ve seen so many kids change and grow and the success levels have been incredible. And what I see has success has changed too, where, my, my physics classes aren’t your stereotypical physics class.

When I took over the program, physics was seen as being a very mathematical course with not a lot of interaction or labs or things like that, it was very much like a textbook course. And here’s your 30 questions tonight. Off you go. And here’s a grueling test and a or exam, right? So in our building, like a lot of the kids who would take it at the time were basically those who were all clawing tooth and nail to get those top scholarships or awards. In the years since I’ve taken over the program and started to do this sort of stuff, the program is roughly about tripled in size. We’ve gotten much more equality between male and female enrollment, but that’s also gone along with, I’ve started up a STEM for girls week with one of my students a number of years back and tried to promote women’s roles in STEM and tried to get more girls interested. And so that’s helped with that aspect. But I, I have students who are in there who are just trying it and we’re a public vocational school I’ve got kids coming in from welding and auto body who are giving physics a try and who are taking trades, maths as opposed to your algebra based math and they’re finding ways to be successful and it’s been so much fun.

Boz: So when you say your physics program has triple in size, so your school hasn’t tripled in size, right? Like your entire school en enrollment’s not going, so

Chris: No.

Boz: It is tripled in size because more, people that were already there and in the system are wanting to take the physics class.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not just your stereotypical class anymore. Like I said, like it, it’s kids from every walk of life every socioeconomic background, every demographic. They seem to want to be part of it more. And they seem to hear from peers that, no, like you can be successful. You can find a way. And, I hope that they see that they’ll get that opportunity in my classroom and that that those possibilities are there.

Sharona: Has that translated to anyone else in your building? Is anyone else, any of the science or math folks like curious or has it been pushback or what’s the,

Chris: Early on there was pushback. I think I got, a few sideways glances when I was first doing all this and people wondering okay, is he just doing a watered down physics program now or what is this? And I, if I’m completely honest, like with my really traditional background and background in the sciences there was times I wondered that about myself. So I went ahead and felt like I had to figure that out and where whether I was doing students a service or somehow there was this underlying disservice that I was doing to them and not setting them up to be successful down the road. I went ahead and I kinda went against the grain a little bit and I brought back a final exam to my classes. ‘Cause this was after COVID and during COVID we’d scrapped finals and stuff for a couple years and I, I braced myself. ’cause it’s been, I think it was three or four years since I’d last done a final exam that was just before COVID. And, my classroom demographics changed. I don’t have just the scholarship kids or the award-winning kids. It’s everyone. We had COVID in between the talk of learning loss and all that sort of stuff. And then, just class sizes are bigger and, I had more sections of physics and things like that. There was a ton of different reasons why students should have done worse as a whole. But when I gave them that same final exam that I’d given years earlier, the class averages actually ended up being the same or slightly better.

And so the thing that I was thinking in my head at the time was, I know a lot of people in alternative assessment are, we need to get rid of fine of exams and stuff like that. And I, I agree. I, I don’t think I think that system needs to evolve to some degree. Maybe it needs to look different, that, that final summative piece, , maybe a traditional type exam isn’t the way to go. But I also was thinking if the kids really know it and if I’ve found a way to help them learn about themselves and learn about their own learning, then should the way that those questions come at them, should it really matter anymore if it’s just about their understanding. I never taught throughout the entire course. I never taught them how to answer a multiple choice question in physics. I’d never given them a short answer question. Everything we’re like, the weekly check-ins are these long, deeply involved problems that quite often take anywhere from half a class to a full class just to answer one really deep problem. But my final exam was still that traditional, Hey, here’s 25 multiple choice and a handful of short answer, and here’s some long answer for good measure. The kids still did better.

I went ahead and I took that further and a couple years ago, students advocated they actually got a petition together to offer AP physics in our building. They wanted to go ahead and have that next level of challenge. So when we started to go through AP physics, I wanted students to have different experiences and I wanted to challenge ’em as much as I could. So I still kept this grade list model the same as my 11 and 12, but I also incorporated other things like a couple of national physics contests. So we did the Sir Isaac Newton contest from University of Waterloo, which is an international physics contest. We did the Canadian Association of Physicists, they put on a high school prize exam, which leads to the Canadian Physics Olympiad and deciding the team for that to go compete internationally. In the end normally the Canadian Physics Olympia team, like here in Canada, we have the top 10 list for each province. And usually it’s dominated by a couple of private schools that have pretty high tuition and stuff like that. And here we were. All of a sudden, one student managed to crack the top 10 from my group, and there was three more that were one point out Wow. On this absolutely horrific exam that, it’s generally thought of that if you hit 30%, you’re doing great. And here we are sort.

Sharona: I think you might have buried the lead here.

Boz: Yeah.

Chris: So then then we did it again the following year and I had two kids that went ahead and cracked the top 10 and a handful more that were one point out. Here we are competing with these elite private schools out of out of the big city here in Manitoba that’s a couple hours away. And, we’re just the public vocational school and we’re getting right in there. And then the AP physics exam itself, which is notoriously horrific. I’m continuing the same model and we have a classroom structure where, you know I don’t think this is typical in AP physics classrooms for assessment to look like this. At least not from what I’ve read from the Facebook groups. And we do physics in those classes for interest. We say, okay we’re supposed to learn about this topic. Like what equipment do we have in the room? How should we approach it? Let’s develop some stuff. Let’s dive into it and actually learn through doing.

And, we went ahead in the last two years we had AP physics exam results that were in line with the international average. And so there was no nothing holding us back from that. So now I’m starting to see some of my colleagues who are starting to say. Hey, some of the kids outta your class, like they think a little differently. What could I do to maybe start making my classroom look a little more like that? And so I’m getting a little more curiosity. And then as I’ve as I’ve published with Grow Beyond Grades there I’ve started to get some people reaching out from across North America and starting to talk to them about it. And it’s been a lot of fun and trying to share what I do and to help other teachers in any way I can has been hugely rewarding.

Boz: So do you guys take the when you’re talking about the ap, is it the same ap classes and tests that we have here in the states?

Chris: Yep. Exactly.

Boz: Outta curiosity about what is your AP physics pass rate on that test?

Chris: Like in my classroom?

Boz: Yeah.

Chris: Oh, what is it? I think 70 or 80% of the kids went ahead and passed it.

Sharona: So how many took it of, did your whole class take it?

Chris: Yep. Yep. Class of 15.

Boz: Okay, so you are not doing traditional testing prep. You are, you’re doing this very ungrading model. Very student driven experimental hands-on physics. You’re producing students that are competing at the national levels for these science competitions. Like you said, you’ve had a few break in that top 10, several. Just a few behind it. You are producing classes that are about 10% higher than national averages for ap physics pass rates. ’cause the actual AP physics pass rate is 67%. So if you’re at 80 and above, and again, you’re doing this without any of the traditional test prep, which I find amazing ’cause one of the things that I was doing this last week was we have our standardized tests that our students have to take in certain grades. One of them being 11th grade. And we were, I’m working with a couple schools and we’re trying to come up with, the schedules of when we’re gonna do these tests and half the people that were on this committee are also AP teachers and they’re all just freaking out because the testing window is so close, it’s actually overlaps and butts up to the AP testing window, and they’re all freaking out about, oh, I, you’re gonna tank my scores ’cause you’re gonna take all my test prep time and review away from me for this 11th grade standardized test. But yeah I, the fact that, and I’ll admit it, I did it when I was teaching AP stats, I stopped teaching, basically two weeks before the test. And all we did, was those FAQs, those, doing some of the practice test. So I did the test prep, but.

Chris: Yeah, we still do a little bit of that. Like we still go ahead and I still give ’em like some old questions, but we look at them a bit differently. Sometimes. We look at, okay, here’s an old question. Do we have the equipment in the room for it? Let’s actually do it, or let’s tackle it collaboratively at the big whiteboards or, so there’s still a little bit of that here and there, but it’s

Boz: but you’re, you,

Chris: yeah, it’s a little bit different.

Boz: Your assessments throughout the year up to that point. Don’t sound like they were assessments that look like the AP test.

Chris: No in fact, like when I taught AP Physics last year I didn’t have any formal assessments of any kind during the class. We went ahead and it was a lot of conversation. It was a lot of just working together. Like we had 15 kids in the room and feedback would come in the form of, okay, the, this group was tackling this question at the whiteboards and Okay, we just go around and see where we’re at. Or I would interject with a little piece here and there, like a little snippet, just a little pointer and but there was nothing formally written or even anything to really go into a portfolio last year.

Sharona: So people are gonna ask then, how did you assign an end of term grade? ’cause you have to give them a grade at the end of the term, correct?

Chris: Yep. Yeah. We went ahead and we did a self-assessment process where students had already been through my 11 and 12 and like I said, I have the benefit of being the only physics teacher in the building. So they know what my expectations are already and they. We just sat down and had an open and honest conversation. And then the final summative piece was students did an interest project. They did a what aspect of physics over the past couple years has gotten you passionate and interest and engaged and, investigate that for a couple weeks and present it to the class. Let the whole class see what you’ve learned to love about physics. So that became our final pieces to determine the grade.

Sharona: And you make it sound all fluffy to be honest, but I was I may have gone and looked at some of the things you’ve linked on your writing and you actually do have a, what does a grade look like? Sheet from, I guess 11 or 12 that you’ve worked out with the students, but that does actually lay out specific criteria.

Chris: Yeah.

Sharona: About being able to do things. So I wanna just caution people that it sounds like, oh, we’re just having these conversations and we’re magically pulling something out. No, there’s a lot of structure underneath the thing.

Chris: Oh, for sure. And we develop that in grade 11 physics, and that’s based on students’ input, that what does a grade look like? She, and so we develop it collaboratively where after that couple weeks of nature of science discussion and what school should look like. I sit down with students and I say, okay, if we’re gonna build a portfolio of work that gives you that freedom to fail safely within it, then what should grades look like at different points of time when we have these conferences? So what should a portfolio look like that’s just passing? What should a portfolio look like that’s worth 60 to 70? So if these grades can really be manipulated just by, say how a teacher puts the grades into their grade book and you can get wide amounts of variation, then we still have to produce ’em according to the education act in our province. So how do we actually give them some meaning? So we develop that, what does a grade look like sheet together. So we have that common language to speak to. By the time students have been through that in 11 and 12, and when some of them go into AP with me, that same sort of structure doesn’t really hold with the AP at least the way that I’ve taught it the last couple years. We actually abandoned that piece in the AP class. It’s purely based on these conferences and that self-assessment piece and getting students to recognize where they’re at and where they believe that their learning should be. So it’s an evolving process has it moves through too.

Sharona: So when you say we develop this each year, so I have one of them that you posted how much does it change from year to year almost? Do you, like almost basically, almost pretend, almost. I was like, do you pretend that it doesn’t exist and let them go from scratch? Or do you, and you end up at the same spot?

Chris: Yeah, that’s exactly it. One of the big things that I found is that students really need to feel that ownership and they need to feel like the classroom reflects them and their values and their thoughts towards things. And what I’ve found is that. The first couple times I was like, wow, this is amazing. And this is so enlightening to see what students actually think grades should represent or what level they should be at to earn a certain grade. And then after a few more times, I was struck because I was like, they’re different classes and they come up with the same answers almost every year. But part of getting them to buy in and feel that ownership and to feel agency over the program, I still go through the whole process every time. ’cause they need to own it. It needs to be something that they’ve developed together, even if it is the same as previous years. That’s become a huge piece too is, you can’t shortcut that just because it happens to be the same as last year. It, they need to own it. So I still do it every time. I’m getting geared up.

We just had semester turnaround here last week, so I’m getting ready for, okay. This coming week, it’s gonna be introduction of what’s this new class look like after doing a whole bunch of nature of science stuff. I’ll be introducing that with my grade elevens right away, and I’m expecting the same, what does a grade look like? Sheet to develop with them too. But if something different does develop, then I tell students we can always revisit it if grade twelves decide, okay, I didn’t like how this went in grade 11. Okay let’s talk about it as a class and if we all agree that it should be changed, let’s change it. So

Boz: I love that piece. That’s one of the things that I know Sharona you were talking about. ’cause she’s going into a more collaborative grading with one of her classes than she’s ever really tried before. But I love that. This is a living document mentality of, Hey, if this isn’t working, we can talk about it at some point. And if it’s really not working, we can change it. ’cause that’s what real scientists do,

Chris: And that’s the thing is if I want to, if I wanna model real science and what it looks like, then that’s what students need to see. And I’ve had the very fortunate privilege that over the last number of years I’ve gotten to see some of the biggest science experiments in the world and talk to experimenters there. And I got to go to CERN and see the large hydrant Collider and talk to the physicists. And I got to go to li GOA couple years ago and talk to the experimental physicists there. And then through my work with Perimeter Institute, I’ve gotten to talk to theoretical physicists there at the top of their game there. And, like it, it’s, that’s what real science looks like. That’s what students need to see. Not that it’s how much can you memorize or re you know, can you commit the first 60 elements of the periodic table to memory or things like that. That doesn’t matter. What matters is you understand where they’re coming from or how to interpret it or how to think about it. I’m pretty sure any real science lab is gonna have a periodic table of elements on the wall that you’re allowed to look at. It’s, it’s not this thing where, okay, like you, you’re never allowed to look. I’m gonna put out tape over the whole poster when you guys write your test. It’s, no it’s right there.

What does it mean? What does it tell you? How do you interpret it? That’s what science is.

Boz: Yeah. And they turn off the internet when you go into a science lab. So you couldn’t look it up either if you needed to.

Chris: Exactly.

Boz: I can’t believe this, but we are already coming up on time. We’re gonna have to have you back because there is so much more I want to get into with you., I really wanna get into this. I, I don’t know if this is yours or if you got this from someone else, but I see this ungrading spectrum in one of your articles that kind of goes Yeah. On a spectrum from traditional to all the way to gradeless. Yeah. I wanna dive in into that, but we are running up on time. This has been an incredibly short hour.

Sharona: It’s amazing how time changes when you’re having fun. We should do a physics experiment on that.

Chris: I would love to be back.

Boz: All right. Sharona, any last minute things before we sign off?

Sharona: Just thank you so much for writing in and being willing to respond when it took us six months to get back because we never would’ve had this conversation if you had not submitted on our contact us form. So please, we do actually eventually get to them and we really wanna have people submit and come on and tell their stories. ’cause that’s how this grows. That’s it for me.

Boz: All right. Again, Chris, thank you so much for coming on and responding after it took us so long. And I’m serious. I wanna get you back on ’cause there is so much more I want to dive into with you, but

Chris: Sounds great.

Boz: Until then, everyone, you’ve been listening 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.