The Grading Podcast

139 – Lindsay_Masland

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Lindsay Masland: Yeah, absolutely. So although I don’t see myself as a poster child for alt grading, I will happily claim being a poster child for like intentional decision making about your teaching. Or, context and values driven decision making. Because I have found that when you activate that stuff for people, both the people who are maybe considering shifting their grading approach and the people you have to sell a alternative grading approach to, if you can activate their value systems and then show them how maybe the traditional approach does not align with that, then it’s really productive, ’cause we’re creating cognitive dissonance. Now I’m putting my psychologist hat on, and that is a really productive motivator of behavior.

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 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 you two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today sharona?

Sharona: I am trying to figure out what day of the week it is because we have actually done a number of recordings in rapid succession, just because that’s when our guests have been available, and some of my normal structures that tell me what day of the week it is, like rehearsals, don’t exist right now ’cause I don’t have any rehearsals. And I was speaking to a friend of mine today who’s wait, what day is it? So I’m feeling a little out of it in terms of day and time. But other than that, I think I’m doing pretty well. How about you?

Boz: Actually about the same. It’s been for a short week ’cause we are recording this right after President’s Day for a short week. This has been a really long week already. And I know part of that is because we actually have a couple of really big projects coming up that I think we wanna take a minute to talk a little bit about before we get started with this episode.

Sharona: Yes. And honestly, I’m a little bit in shock about how many, because all the projects we’re about to mention are grading related and we actually had a meeting with our board at the Center of Grading Reform and we’re like, Hey, and we’ve got this project and this project, they’re. Wow. But of course one of the biggest one that we really is on our radar right now is the grading conference.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: So what do you wanna share about the grading conference, boz?

Boz: So just making sure everyone knows that registration is open. We’ve recently closed the abstract window so we will be getting schedules out as soon as we can, but registration’s open. I think you’ve already had quite a few inquiries about institutional registrations.

Sharona: Yes. So we actually already have five or six that are up and running, and we’ve probably got another five or six that have inquired. But, if you think you can get at least eight people together from your institution, it’ll be less expensive for you to go. Eight. Eight is the break even on the institutional registration, but it’s a lot easier because you just have your center for teaching and learning or something pay the $600 and then that includes eight to 16 anywhere in there. Registration’s actually just anything up to 16. And it’s a very cost effective way to, to build community on your campus. So we’d love to have that.

Boz: Yeah. And we’ve talked about this one the last several kind of episodes, but we’ve got a few others too that are coming up. So what’s one of the other one that’s most immediate?

Sharona: So speaking of communities of practice this is a discipline specific one, but there is a community of practice for teaching focused faculty in mathematics, and it is run in conjunction with the transforming post-secondary education and mathematics TPSE organization as well as Project Ember. So if you’re interested in joining a community of practice and just, which basically means getting on a one hour zoom once a month or so, and just talking about alternative grading, we’d love to have you go ahead and send us a message on our Contact us form on our website, and we’ll put you on a little mailing list to give you the information about joining that community of practice. But this is really a way to bring together people who might feel a little isolated. This particular community of practice is for math. We do have the bio grading for growth community of practice that’s going on ongoing. And if anyone else wants to launch a community of practice, you’re welcome to reach out and say, I had to host it, and we can do that under the Center’s umbrella. So I’m really excited about that one. I think we’re gonna have some guests potentially coming to speak to this group. It’s once a month and the next one’s coming up in March. So just let us know everyone and then we have another one coming up. Do you wanna talk about that one or do you want me to talk about that one?

Boz: No this one’s a little bit more under yours. So.

Sharona: It is. Okay. More math. But in the fall we are gonna be testing a new training program that’s a different structure. So we’ve done the one week intensive ones. We’re gonna talk about the two day intensive that we just ran, but this is one that’s going to meet over the course of essentially a year. It’s a faculty learning community. It’s virtual and it’ll be for a very nominal charge. It is also for math, although I think you could probably get away with math affiliated in some way.

This is through the Math Association of America’s Open Math program, and it is gonna be hosted by the Center and we will probably meet on Saturday mornings periodically and do a full course redesign. So it’s another opportunity if you’re thinking about doing a full course redesign that is going to be starting in the fall. So again, send us a message through the contact us form on the grading pod.com and we will get you hooked up. Or we also actually have a form for the center for granting reforms mailing list. You can go directly there as well. So that’s that’s all the ones I think that are open to the public. Boz.

Boz: Well you say that as if it’s only a couple of things there. But we wanted to talk a little bit about that. We don’t wanna spend too much time because we are not alone today in the virtual studio. So who else do we have with us Sharona?

Lindsay Masland: Absolutely. I’m so pleased to be here with y’all and I feel like disobedient ideas is like my comfort space, so I’m happy for us to talk about those today. For sure.

Boz: We definitely wanna get into several of that and some of your experiences both with the conference and with the very recent, back in December alternative institute. But before we do that, something we always like to ask our new guests is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading? Sharona kind of gave us a little bit, but.

Lindsay Masland: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, she gave the cliff notes version. But I think an important thing to say is I never set out to become an alternative grader. There was never a point where I was like, oh, I’m gonna do this thing. And I know that some people in their stories, that is exactly what happened, or they were like, I’m gonna do this thing. I need to read these books. I’m gonna make these choices. And that isn’t my story. I feel like our pedagogies are so like. I don’t think this is a real word, but like a cumulative, not cumulative ’cause I don’t mean mathematically cumulative, but I mean accumulating on top of each other. And so it’s hard to separate out, like what is the actual origin story? But as Sharona did mention, I probably started dabbling with some ideas when I was in a faculty learning community for universal design.

And I just have to be completely honest, the only reason that I signed up to be in that community and it was my first experience receiving faculty development. ‘Cause I didn’t even know that faculty development was a thing that happened in higher education. And the only reason I signed up to be in it was because, one of the people in my department who was senior to me was ranting about the fact that they didn’t have a psychologist in this group that was gonna explore this thing called Universal design. And so I was like we can’t have that. I didn’t even know what we were talking about. So I just wanna bring that up to show that like we can end up in really great places with our grading from very non gracious starting points.

Boz: Yeah, so sometimes we can plan to get somewhere and get to our destination, but sometimes the best destinations are the ones that we had no idea we were going to.

Lindsay Masland: A hundred percent. So I was in that group and it, obviously if you, if it’s the first time you’ve ever learned anything about universal design, it becomes an invitation to be critical of your teaching choices, which I hadn’t been invited to do that yet. And then shortly after having that experience I participated in a course design institute a redesign institute for the first time. And so that was another experience of just an invitation to think about, like, why are you doing the things you’re doing? And honestly, the reason I signed up, this is another like ungracious thing, but the reason I signed up for that course redesign institute is I was teaching a course that I hated teaching. I, and it I didn’t wanna teach it. And so I was just like, and that was at the beginning of my career.

So I’m like looking down the barrel of a long career and like, how am I gonna teach this class for 30 years when I hate it in year like two? That just invited me to think about teaching in a way I’d never thought about it before. And to think about the intentionality behind your choices. And so I think it was through a combination of the UDL and just a regular old backward design focused course design institute that I started questioning my choices. And then that’s when I probably started adding things like retakes because I was thinking about like mastery and what do we want people to walk away with? And if they only have one chance to show what they know, is that what I’m here for? And just starting to have those kind, that kind of dialogue with myself and starting to add things like that and starting to think about what grades meant.

So I’d say that’s where it started. And over time I just little tweaks here and there, little tweaks here and there, and, just ’cause of thinking deeply about my choices. And so I think I got to a point where I was maybe like a minimal grader. I definitely had a point space system. But it was a balanced assessment system. So there were lots of ways for you to show mastery and lots of ways to get the points and stuff like that. So students had never complained about my grading at all. And so when I first learned about alternative grading, it was through. The artist formally known as Twitter. And I think that’s probably where I met Sharona too.

Sharona: Probably.

Lindsay Masland: Yeah. And so I was just observing the commentary about all of the different approaches and thinking like, that’s interesting, but I didn’t have a problem at that time in my grade, so I was like, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Nobody’s complaining about this, so I’m just gonna observe. But I just didn’t have the personal motivation to overhaul my whole grading system, even though it sounded cool, just to be honest. And then as Sharona had mentioned in my little bio there though, that I did have this experience and it was in the middle of the pandemic and I was teaching in the summertime, I was teaching an elective course, between you and me and I guess all of your listeners. I was not putting a ton of effort into that course because it was like, we had been through it. ’cause it was like already a year or so into the pandemic. It’s summer, it’s an elective course, it’s an online course also. And so I was just like minimum viable product here in terms of what I was doing.

But one of the students who was taking that class ended up in a personal crisis. They were dealing with not being able to pay rent, a mental health crisis, questioning aspects of their identity, their family relationships were a little funky. So all this stuff was going on, which didn’t have anything to do with the course per se, but the student was way behind on work. And so when I was trying to talk to ’em and come up with a plan, how are you gonna show a mastery in this course, essentially then I realized, okay, that’s not actually what this person needs. And then it became clear to me that they were failing all their classes. And we figured out a plan with this student, both for my class and then recommendations I had for the other classes, which I couldn’t promise would work, but I said, here’s what I would do.

And it just was really shocking to me because the person said, I know this is an all online course and we’ve never even interacted synchronously. It was an asynchronous course. And they said, but this is the most supported I’ve ever felt in my college career. And this was somebody who was a senior, so they had, they had pre COVID experiences and stuff, and that was not inspirational to me. That made me very mad. You might think oh, thank you.

Boz: Yeah, it’s a gut punch.

Lindsay Masland: It made me so sad. I think I felt such grief on their behalf. And then also grief on the parts of all the professors, because certainly the other professors didn’t intend for that to be the experience a student had. It is the experience they had. But and so I just, I think I was feeling sad about it and I at that moment, it was like, you know what? Grades aren’t a problem in my class, but they’re causing all of these problems in other people’s classes. So simply by me having them, it’s a tacit endorsement on my part of saying it’s okay. And so in that moment, I was like, we’re not doing grades anymore except for to the way that I have to in terms of giving one to the registrar at the end. But I was like, I was seeing them as weapons and even though I was not using any weapons or using them as weapons, the fact that I had them became an endorsement.

So from that moment on, I was convicted, I guess you could say, like attribute of this one student, who I could, I can’t even remember what this person’s name is now. But I was like, you know what, we’re going to, we’re gonna do this experiment. And then, so the next semester that fall, I took the grades away and then I’ve never put them back on.

Sharona: I relate to so much of that because I’m back in the classroom with a class that I haven’t taught in a very long time, in a very strange situation where I’m making these grading choices in a context where they’re not welcome in a larger institutional context. And I’m really running up against that even with all of my grading practices, there’s still some things that I’m like, I need to make my students feel cared for more. Like that is something that is coming out to me. And so this weekend I sent individual emails. I only have one class, so I only have 29 students, and I got at least two of them back in the classroom today for the first time in several weeks. And we’re in week five, right? And one of them I was able to say, he’s yeah, I know I’m failing. I’m like, no, you’re not. And he just looks at me like, what are you talking about? How am I not failing? Like you’re not, let’s talk about it. So I really relate to what you’re saying. It’s almost like allowing the grades to be different and not being shoehorned in lets you bring out what you believe.

Lindsay Masland: Absolutely. And it’s always interesting to me when people ask me questions about alternative grading because I don’t see myself as like a poster child for that, but it’s, I think it’s because of how I got there, right? I got there because I realized that’s a decision I can make that’s gonna feel better to me as an instructor. And when I say feel better, I don’t mean easier or anything like that, but I just mean like more aligned. With what I care about. And so for me, those choices led me down an alternative grading path. Just like the choice led you, Sharona, to send emails to all these people. And mentioned that your context allows you to do that. ‘Cause there’s 29 of them.

And so I would never come on hear anywhere else and say oh yeah, be an evangelist for any of these kinds of things, because if I’m an evangelist or enthusiast for anything, it’s about making authentic, intentional choices in your teaching in ways that feel right to whoever you are. And so sometimes the alternative grading choice isn’t the right choice for somebody’s context or somebody’s value system as a teacher.

Boz: Yeah. But even if it’s not I think you hit on that, just taking the time to really question what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. That, and I think and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this was something that, Jeff Shinske is also was talking about regardless of what the decision you end up making, having the time and space to just really look at what we’re doing and why we’re doing ’cause so much in education, we are doing it because that’s what was done to us. That’s what we saw as a student. So that’s what I, perpetuate as an educator that, anyone just take that time and that’s, my real job, my nine to five job is I am an instructional coach with L-A-U-S-D and we were actually meeting today this whole department and that’s a lot of what we were talking about today. Was just stopping and looking at what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and is it doing what we meant it to do.

Sharona: I think one of the things that I’ve been discovering lately with the grades, and I think that’s what you’re hitting on, is talking about grades, gives us the space to talk about everything. I recently had a conversation with a bunch of educators and I gave them the following task. I said, tell me the 30 second elevator pitch about what your course is about. And most people couldn’t do it. They just couldn’t do it. And so I think that’s a problem. I think you should be able to say in a couple of sentences the point of what you want a student to get outta your class.

Lindsay Masland: Because all the choices should follow from there. Exactly. Yeah.

Sharona: But the thing is, because grades are so pervasive. When you ask the grading question, you get to everything else. So I’m just having a lot of fun with it. But I wanna ask you though, so you came on, you agreed, you’re like, I’m not a poster child, and yet you agreed to facilitate the Alternative Grading Institute. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what, in your, from your perspective, what was the Alternative Grading Institute? What was, what’s, its 32nd elevator pitch, right? What’s it supposed to do and why did you decide to do it?

Lindsay Masland: Okay. So I’d say the kind of quick pitch about it is that it, it does for you what a course design Institute would do, but it does it for your grading approach. Because I think a lot of times when people design or redesign a course, they actually might not get all the way to the grading scale part of it, or the feedback approach the feedback strategy. They don’t get down to the level of policies, especially policies around retakes and late work and all the things where, you would have to figure that stuff out to actually implement the thing you’ve designed. And and we do offer those things at my university. I mentioned attending one as a faculty member myself, and then now I get to run them, which is pretty cool, full circle. But a lot of times it doesn’t go all the way to that point. Like it might just be that like grading is introduced as like almost an elective topic. So that’s why I really liked the idea of it’s something hyper. It’s not just about design anymore. It’s really about where’s the rubber gonna meet the road when you try to do the thing you’ve designed. So that’s why I like the idea of it. And it just gives the space to do the, do that thinking and to do the thinking in community. In terms of why I agreed to do it it was a pretty cool group of people to work with, who I all had worked with before or knew of before. Again, a lot of the relationships came from Twitter. And the team out of UV Academic, oh, go ahead.

Sharona: RIP Academic Twitter.

Lindsay Masland: Yeah, I know. So sad. But the team out of UVA that was involved Michael Palmer and Adriana Refeer, they they reached out and said, we’re gonna do this thing. We need two people per the three types of alternative grading we’re going to address. Of course, we did not address every approach to alternative grading, so we did not talk about contract grading or labor-based grading, for example as its own, as our own things. And he just said, will you be on the collaborative grading team? And it is true that, me alongside Jamie Dwyer are like, cited as the person the people who came up with that label. So I think that’s why I got asked, even though I don’t personally have an identity as the alt grading poster shop. And but I also to the points that Sharona was saying, it’s once you figure out the grading that lets you talk about everything. And I think that’s true too. So that’s why it was an easy yes to participate in the December Institute.

Boz: Now this alternative grading institute did happen last December. Can we give just a real quick, I know we’ve talked a little bit about Sharona on the podcast, but just a real quick kind of breakdown of what that institute looks like. And the reason I’m asking you is because if people listening to this are interested. It is looking possible, like this might run again for a second year this December. So can we, a little bit of a breakdown just overall, what did the institute look like?

Lindsay Masland: Absolutely. So it was on Zoom so that we could have people from lots of different time zones and we did have people participating from all the time zones and people who applied that were not in the United States or Canada as well, which was interesting. But two days on Zoom. And the first day was we started from a place of, and I think we’ll continue with this approach of thinking about your teaching values and your grading values and how do you wanna feel and how do you want your students to feel about grading in your class? So before we get to any decision making around do this or do this, and then also helping people get really clear about their context and how it makes it, it hits different for somebody to decide, for example, to collaboratively grade or un grade. If that person is a contingent faculty who is signing a new contract every semester, then somebody who has had tenure for many years and just being like really honest about the reality of context and how those impact our pedagogical and grading decisions. So we start in that place, then we introduce them to all the different kind of the grading anatomy and all the different choices that are made in any kind of grading system, traditional or alternative. And then talked a little bit about how the three that we were focusing on was specifications grading, standard space grading and collaborative grading, which some people in the past have called UN grading. And that was day one, but it’s highly interactive. So it is not like a full day of lecture on Zoom because Wow. Who would wanna do that? So there is some direct instruction but a lot of participation breakout rooms. Bouncing ideas off of.

Then the next day, people divided into the grading scheme that they wanted to actually dig into and build some stuff for. And so before the institute, we did ask people to self-select into which kind of grading scheme do you think you’re gonna be working in? And gave them some information about the different kinds if they were more novice in the world of alt grading. But we also let people change groups because sometimes people were like, oh, wow, now that I’ve thought deeply about my values and my context, I realized that such and such is not a good choice and maybe this other one is a better choice. And we’re like, great, let’s switch a group. And then so that second day, it was all just in a group with everybody who’s working on the same grading scheme that you are working on. And each of our little pairs did it slightly differently, but. The goal is that you would come away with some actually designed stuff. So it might be, if you’re in the specifications group, you might be thinking about what are the bundles in your course. If you’re doing standards-based grading, what are the standards that you’re going to be doing. In collaborative grading, it might be like, how are you gonna explain this in your syllabus? Or how are you gonna literally do the, what does collaborative mean and things like that. So that’s what we did.

And so people did definitely walk away both with contacts of everybody that they met. ’cause there were around 60 people participating. And then a lot of resources ’cause obviously you cannot redesign a whole grading system in two days on Zoom. But we were just really impressed at how engaged everybody was. It was an experiment, right? It was throwing pasta on the wall and I was shocked. I was like, nobody’s gonna sign up for this, you guys, it is right before holiday break for a lot of people who is gonna wanna sit on Zoom for two straight days and designed their grading system, which a lot of us have yucky feelings about anyways. But we got more applicants than we could support in this first one. And I think that was great and we all agreed the six of us that we wanna do it again. And that we might in the future also offer some on location ones. So we wanna, where people might actually physically come to a place. But we of course will always maintain the Zoom approach for accessibility. And so yeah, that’s what it was.

Boz: When we were first discussing this and this idea was pitched to Shona and I. We were both also a little weird about the timing and yeah, not only did you have people sign up, we had so many people sign up. We actually had to turn some away. And the reason for that was because we really did that second day, you guys wanted to keep that small model. So you had the three separate groups trying to keep that to 20 to 25 people with two facilitators. So really being able to, dig down deep work in those small groups. So if you did, if you’re listening to this and you were one of the people that applied and were turned down, apologized, like I said it really was, this was the first time we had no idea how much interest would be there. And you guys the plan, the organizers really felt strongly, and I think you guys were right to do this, about keeping those groups small so you could really give individual attention to the participants and really working, with two experts in the room whether you wanna call yourself a poster child or an expert. The six people that, that you guys got together as the six facilitators of the three different group styles were just absolutely like amazing people. Like you said you the group from Virginia, we had drew Lewis was there, Emily , who you were there. It was amazing group.

Lindsay Masland: And Drew, oh, you, no, you said Drew and Derek Bruff. Sorry, was that was Drew’s partner?

Boz: Yeah.

Lindsay Masland: Yeah.

Sharona: And what I love about this and I don’t think you know this about us, Lindsay, I think the people on our podcast may, but, so Bosley and I do a five day intensive version of this. So we now have the five day one, we have a two day one, we have a one, day one, we have a couple of two hour talks. So we’re trying to really meet people where they are and the amount of time that they can give to it. One of the other projects we have coming up is we’re gonna be working with a specific university within a specific college doing a five day intensive with them, followed by a 16 month FLC. So every month getting on Zoom for a couple of hours and it’s our first time getting to do the five day intensive in person. So it’s really nice to start to see all of these different options.

And one of the things I really like and I would expect as a director of Center for Teaching of Learning is I don’t want every CTL to have to get good at this. There is real synergy by having discipline specific teams available because this plays out very much in those contexts. So if we can provide something where we can go to a university and compliment what their CTL is doing, I think that’s an amazing thing to do. Amazing. And I was looking Sorry, go ahead.

Lindsay Masland: I was gonna say I would agree. I think it’s great and I think it’s kudos to you all to being open to adding, letting us try the two day approach, which ’cause you already do have some things that you offer. But then, think it’s always helpful to get different voices and then we also had a lot of disciplinary difference. So even in like my collaborative grading with Emily, she has a humanities background, she’s in English and I am in a psychology background, but taught a lot of statistics courses and so I think that was probably really helpful to be able to show people. How we would make very different decisions in our two contexts, in our two disciplines, but also our two contexts. And like once, not better or worse, it’s just certain decisions make better sense in certain contexts than others. And I think it’s a, a testament to you all’s work that you’re like thinking broadly about we need lots of different ways to introduce people to this world of alternative grading.

Boz: I think that goes back to something Sharona you said a long time ago when you were talking about your mom and her work that, you know, one of the analogies that she made is if we want to really break this wheel that is the education system right now is you have to break it at as many places as possible.

Sharona: And she was very focused on breaking it both at the university level but also at the teacher. Pre-service in service teacher level. And so that’s where I picked up that. And she did pre-service in service, primarily K eight, almost entirely K 12, but mostly K eight. And I looked at it and said if you’re gonna do K 12, I’ll do college. It’s basically my thinking on that. But then you also said something else just now that’s a great segue into the third thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is, showing people these different ways of doing it. How have you it sounds like you’ve had a variety of different experiences trying to either sell people on grading reform despite not being a poster child or at least talking to them about it. Can you share some of those experiences and how those different contexts play into the ways that you have those conversations?

Lindsay Masland: Yeah, absolutely. So although I don’t see myself as a poster child for grading, I will happily claim being a poster child for like intentional decision making about your teaching or, context and values driven decision making, because I have found that. When you activate that stuff for people, both the people who are maybe considering shifting their grading approach and the people you have to sell a alternative grading approach to, if you can activate their value systems and then show them how maybe the traditional approach does not align with that, then it’s really productive. ‘Cause we’re creating cognitive dissonance now. I’m putting my, psychologist hat on. And that is a really productive motivator of behavior because we don’t like to feel distant, we don’t like to be told, you’re not acting in accordance with what you said, what you just said you value. And we can also use that kind of secret technique when we’re trying to convince higher ups about it. So when I ever introduce any teaching innovations at all to people, I usually just start with some kind of values exercise where I say, envision that. It’s the end of a semester, end of a term, and you get a thank you letter from a student. What do you hope they talk about in that letter? And it’s not probably I thought your purple pants were really cool looking. It’s probably not. And I only say that ’cause I literally got that as a student eval one year and I was like, that is not what I care about.

But what do you hope is in there? What are the adjectives they’re using to describe either your teaching generally or your grading choices in particular? Like we can make it really focused to that. What are the things that are sticking out to them, what they say they’ll always remember, starting there and then designing a class that is more likely to produce that thank you letter, which sounds really, oh, I don’t know. Is that a superficial way to think about your teaching? But I see it as a way to guard against potential burnout and resiliency in your teaching and things like that. But we cannot only do the value side. Because sometimes we hear people talk about what’s your why? And I say that because I, before I was in this, I worked in K 12 as also my background is as a school psychologist. And I was also on superintendent leader. Chip teams in terms of making change happen, educational innovation change. And so like I, I was in that role in the time when the whole what’s your why language came out which I think is important, but that’s half of it because sometimes our context does not allow us to live the fullest expression of our why. And then we feel deep guilt. Because if we say, for example, I care a lot about students feeling empowered, like maybe that’s your value, that’s what you want in your little email from a student. But you are in a situation where you are teaching. I don’t know if. 500 person sections. What it looks like to empower a section of 500 people looks different than what it looks like to empower 10 people or 20 people. And so a lot of times I see people feeling professor feeling such guilt that they cannot do the 10 person version in the 500, but it’s actually no, you have not been dealt that hand. So your job is to live the fullest expression of your values that your context permits. And if you’ve done that, you’ve done the job.

Then there are people like us who might be in leadership positions, and our job is to help expand the context, make it easier for people, build systems where people can live more fully into the values that they bring to it. So that’s the way, introduce it. And that automatically creates a lot of dissonance around oh, maybe I’m not making, if it’s empowerment or if it’s I value critical thinking. I value problem solving. Maybe I’m not making the choices that really focus on that. So that’s one place. But if we also think about how we sell it to other people, so maybe we’re sold on it, we know we wanna do it, but how do we convince other people, this really hits home for me because when I was going up for full professor, so I was associate professor and I was going up for full professor. The approach that we have here is you put together a whole dossier and then all of the tenured professors consider it in the whole department. So we don’t have a separate committee, but it’s all the tenured professors and then you come in and they can ask you any questions they want about the dossier and then you leave and then they vote. And I only received two questions on my dossier. And one of those is what the bleep is un grading. So like I got that question in a very stressful right, because the answer kind of felt like it mattered a lot. I needed them to decide I could be a full professor. And yet yeah, that’s one of the things they asked, and it wasn’t even explain this piece of your scholarship. It was like, what’s this?

So if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of that type of questioning, I think the first tactic is to figure out why the question’s being asked, and essentially what is the misunderstanding that they might be bringing to this interaction we’re having, this exchange we’re having that has made it such that they are having big feelings about it. And so in my case, they didn’t read the materials real carefully, but they saw the word at the time un grading. ’cause that is maybe what I was calling it then. And I had some scholarship with that title and then made an assumption that meant no grades, which I don’t need to sell y’all on It doesn’t mean, or no, not even any feedback. Literally, no, nothing like we do, no assessment, no, no feedback, no evaluation. And so when I diagnosed that oh, that’s what they’re worried about. I was able to be like, no. I just don’t go the extra step of giving them like an a plus sticker. I do let them know, or we collaboratively decide whether or not we’re meeting expectations. I still, and in some of the classes I teach, like statistics classes, sometimes there are right and wrong answers than a stats class. There might not be a right and wrong answer in a pedagogy class. There might be ones that make more sense or less, but sometimes statistics is it’s right or wrong. I will tell them if they did it wrong, because that’s not helpful for them to not know that, I’m like so I think just clarifying what is it that they’re freaked out about and then figuring out if you can explain it away. I also think sometimes people assume that there are no policies in alternative graded courses. There’s no guardrails that the teacher is not the final decider.

And there are, it’s true that there are a couple approaches. So I think sometimes Jesse Stommel has talked about it in this way, and that it’s like whatever grade the student recommends I might give it, and that’s part of the value system. But it’s also true that some of us are like no, I’m the final decider. And so if that’s the thing you’re worried about, just telling ’em, I’m like, I’m the final decider like you are in your traditional class. That I think helps also. There’s when people, they like to say what’s the research, what’s the research on this being good?

And

Sharona: Sharona I’m sorry, I’m so sick of that question because my answer is, have you seen the research about how bad traditional grading is? Like we have the research shows that what you’re doing is destructive.

Lindsay Masland: I know. It makes me think of, there’s that quote that’s and I don’t know who said this, but an unexamined life is not worth living. And to me it’s like an unexamined grading scheme is not worth doing or whatever. It’s like an unexamined pedagogy. It’s not worth teaching. Like that kind of idea. And I think that show me the data thing. It’s like you show me the data about your traditional grading scheme and when you go to look for that, you’re gonna be surprised at what you find. So I think it’s always actually, like the data that I know of is gonna tell a different story than the current like hegemonic belief system and just being like, so yeah, let’s have that conversation. I would love to go out to lunch and I’ll send you some papers. It’s it’s not gonna go how you think, but,

Sharona: so I’m curious based on your experience, because my general entry point when given a platform, so not just a casual conversation, but someone’s Hey, come talk about this. I wanna spend the very first hour, regardless of who’s inviting me, deconstructing and destroying the mathematics of points and percentages. Literally, my talk is grading as the misuse of mathematics in the measurement of student learning, and I feel as a mathematician, when I get up there and I basically prove essentially mathematically, although not quite, that I can prove that your grades mean nothing in an hour, that gives me an opening. It doesn’t always go well, but I don’t know. What do you think about that being the first approach? Again, this is not a one-on-one conversation. This is, you invite me to go talk, I’m gonna ask for two hours and the first hour is gonna be this.

Lindsay Masland: And I think it’s really smart for academics, because I think part of our kind of socialization and something that we actually maybe appreciate, even though we might not appreciate it in a graceful way, is like when ideas are called out, or like when stuff is ripped apart. And so it sounds like you are using that thing that a lot of us are really trained in and come to expect as a part of the norms and flipping it on its head. It’s funny ’cause I, for a long time did a keynote. It was pre alt grading and it was for psychology audiences. But it sounds like exactly like what you were doing which is like psychologists, academic psychologists. Want to make sure that everybody knows we’re scientists, right? Because we use the scientific method and we use the same kinds of habits that the other scientists might use. So the title, the keynote I gave all the time was like, psychology is a science. Shouldn’t your teaching be a science too? And it was the same kind of idea of being like, wait a minute, you are you find all this stuff so precious and amazing about our methodology, but yet the minute we have to think critically about our teaching, it’s teaching is art, not a science. And I’m like kind to some, but yeah. So it sounds that’s what you do. Sharona. And also me as a statistician, like I do a little of that too in terms of ripping apart, like numbers might look sexier, but they are not more informative necessarily. And it’s a cognitive shortcut to have numbers available, but it is, it’s theater, it’s performance.

Sharona: You would love. We have one slide that asks what is an average. And of course the answer is it’s a measure of center. And then we say, and what’s the one thing that an average is always reported with everywhere Except in grades. An error bar.

Boz: Yeah. A some sort of, yeah. Margin of error or some sort of measure of spread, whether it’s a standard deviation or variance. We never give in statistical analysis, we never give just a measure of center. It’s always.

Lindsay Masland: Right.

Boz: With at least. If not a description of shape, at least a measure of spread as well.

Lindsay Masland: And I’m just thinking about if somebody tried to publish an academic paper and they were trying to say this thing is better than this thing. And the reason I know that is because this mean is higher than this mean, like the, like it would be a desk reject from the editor. But yet we do that exact kind of thinking around our grades where we’re like, a 97 means this person is better. As a student than a 96. And I’m like, what happened to like scholarly feelings of humility, right? We talk about like humility. It’s like a value that we have when it comes to scholarship and I’m like, but the minute that you’re like no that person that got a 97, like that’s an A plus, but this person got a 96. That’s an A, right? It’s based on what y’all, where’s Yeah, the error bars. That even shows up too. I know this is slightly different, but when we think about student evaluations of teaching and how people get into these habits around like. Making cutoff scores. And then I love to then be able to actually create the confidence interval for the people. And I say, take this back to your chair. And it shows them that like the confidence interval’s fully overlapping between the people they were saying meets expectations in teaching and the people who don’t. I was like, this is not a met. I know you’re saying it’s numbers, so it’s better to make decisions. I’m like, it’s actually worse. So I appreciate all of this. And this to me, back to when we said I had like disobedient ideas. Like to me, this is like the joyful type of disobedience where we’re using the tools of our disciplines for chaotic good. Yeah.

Sharona: I love it. Yes. I would I could get behind being an agent of chaotic. Good. Yeah. Then something else you, you said, and I saw Bosley react but I wanna go back to it is you said, creating the dissonance. When you look at what you say you value and what you actually value. So you wanna tell the story Boz about what you always said and about math.

Boz: Yeah, so I, I had this poster forever. I have a shirt that says it, but math stands for mistakes Allow Thinking to happen like that is, that has been a fundamental pedagogical belief of mine since before I became an educator. And that was really one of the things that really made me start examining my grades is that I had this core belief, yet when I’m doing averages and I’m punishing, the kid in February or in March for mistakes that they made in August because I’m running, a year long algebra class and I’m doing the average regardless of if that student now knows how to do whatever that skill it was that we were testing in August. Didn’t matter ’cause I was still mathematically punishing them by using the average.

Lindsay Masland: Yeah, I mean I love it when people do that kind of deconstruction. ’cause you have this oh shoot moment of yourself, right? And you’re like, I don’t mean to be doing that. Like for me when I was first, starting to modify my grading scale. I was teaching pre-service teachers you mentioned your mom doing that. And so I was teaching people who are gonna become K 12 teachers, and I also at the time had young children. And so I teach in a state school where like most of the people who are getting their education degrees are then gonna go teach in here in North Carolina, which meant that the people I was teaching could very likely one day teach my own kids. And so that became the thing that I cared about. I was like, I just need you to not mess up when that happens. And I would even tell them, I think my syllabus even said I had a grading scale that was like, C. I think you’re not gonna ruin my children’s life. And then it was like B, like it’s gonna be pretty great. It’s gonna be pretty good. There could be some things that I would maybe write a parent teacher email about, and then like I write, I think I literally had that kind of grading approach. And then I just thought, if that’s true, like I need these people to leave knowing the skills, who cares about the percentages or numbers or any of that? We need to not mess up my children. And so that just helped me to think about it. And then of course, it is true that many of my past students have been my children’s teachers, and I felt solid about that grading scale that I used at the time. But I think that’s the point is once you start to think about the reality of what we’re doing and what are we actually trying to accomplish? It like clarifies a bunch of stuff and a bunch of props and performance things that we used to do, we’re like, I don’t need to do that anymore in order to accomplish.

Sharona: Oh man. You just threw a dagger in my heart and Bosley heart. ’cause we did not get the change done in time for our own children. We tried.

Boz: Not only did we not get the change done in time for our own children, I was banned from my child’s school at one point. I was not allowed on campus without an administrative escort because I was quite open about questioning my daughter’s teachers about some other, their choices.

Sharona: Yeah I had a conversation with an assistant principal once when she was trying to persuade me to put my younger son back into the high school math classes. I had him taking online pre-calculus at the age of 13 through Arizona State , credit bearing, right? And then there was a transcript issue, and we needed more math units on his high school transcript, even though he, at this point was in calculus one as a junior. And she said you could just bring him back in his senior year and he could take like statistics. And I’m like, yeah, no I don’t wanna do that. She’s like, why not? I said, I don’t get along with your math department. She says the whole thing. And I’m like the ones I’ve met. So

Lindsay Masland: I’m sorry. I’m sorry you did not have the opportunity.

Sharona: I’m so glad. I’m actually glad it worked for you though. And that leaves me with one last thing I’d like you to talk about is you could ask everyone like me and Bosley and Drew and Michael Palmer and whoever else is out there training on all grading. Ask us to insert one or two more things that we should be, including our trainings. What are like those one or two things that are like your big hot button items of this has to be in this training?

Lindsay Masland: Ooh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t necessarily know what you do and don’t do, right?

Sharona: But assume that what your most important thing is not there. What would that be?

Lindsay Masland: It’s the values and context thing. So it’s not even about the grading per se, but it’s helping people to get really clear. Maybe even at a, an adjective or jar level. What are your three to five things adjectives that you would wanna see in that student email? Because somebody who really values, let’s say empathy, is gonna make very different alternative grading choices than somebody who values problem solving. I want people to get really good at problem solving. Somebody who’s really interested in collaboration might make different choices than somebody who’s interested in joy, right? And none of those values are better than the other ones. They are all just

Boz: different,

Lindsay Masland: And they probably connect to past experiences that we’ve had and things like that. But I think starting there before we get in the weeds of okay, I’m gonna have to change this in my syllabus, and okay, I’m gonna have to, make these buckets or these bundles or these this, like we can get carried away and we can end up designing things that don’t actually feel better than the thing we had before. ‘Cause they’re may be too far removed from what feels authentic to us. So like for me, when I think about like my values, like authenticity is one of them. And it’s not so much the version of authenticity of this is me deal with it. Like it’s not that. But it’s more like I just want that whatever I produce to make sense coming out of me. And that like I just, I don’t like busy work. I don’t like things that don’t matter. I don’t, I don’t like nonsensical policies and rules, right? And like for me, all my decisions are gonna be around that. But I would never recommend some of the decisions I make to the person who’s in the office next door to me because that’s not their value set. And then the same thing about the context. ‘Cause one thing I did not anticipate about being in a faculty development role since I was in, I was faculty for many more years, exclusively faculty than now that I’m exclusively a staff role.

But, one thing I so surprised by was that so many of the one-on-one consultation conversations that I have are really about faculty feeling guilty that they cannot teach the way they’d like to be teaching. And so what I wouldn’t want is for people to hear things about alternative grading and then create yet another list of shoulds and yet another ideal self that we just can’t live up to. And so to just be like really honest with themselves about what their context will afford. And if they can’t push the context or change it, or if they can’t, if it’s not safe to do that, then don’t do it. And so a lot of times I talk in terms of Venn diagram where if you’ve got three envision, three overlapping circles, and one of the overlapping circles would be, we could maybe call it reasonable grading choices, or you could call it alternative grading choices if you wanted whatever, but like reasonable grading choices maybe ’cause they’re reasonable, ’cause there’s research supporting them or you have lived experience that they work, whatever. And then the other two circles, one is gonna be your personal teaching values and goals. Like why are you even doing this job? Because we could get paid a lot more money to do different jobs. For sure.

And then what is the context that impacts your decision making? And then so you make choices in the very center of that Venn diagram, which automatically makes a lot of totally cool alternative grading choices. Not the right choice for you, just ’cause it doesn’t fall in your values and your context. We don’t need to feel bad about it. We don’t need to say mine’s better than yours or anything. It’s just reality. So that’s what I would say to bring that in there because people almost always exhale when I tell them this. It’s like a, it’s a permission slip to say no to really great teaching ideas because they’re just not for you at this time. So that’s what I’d say.

Boz: I love that. I absolutely love that, Lindsay.

Lindsay Masland: Thanks.

Sharona: And one thing that I like about it is, one of my metaphors for grading, for traditional grading is that it’s a fire blanket smothering the course. So if the only thing I can get you to do is to remove the fire blanket by getting rid of points and percentages, which is a non-trivial only, but I really just want you to get the math out. Then you have the whole panoply of choices to make. And you’re right, it can go any which way. The only one I’m super opposed to is percentages averages specifically. Averages are the bane of my existence. Anything that a student is likely to do math on other than counting, I’m good with counting. But

Lindsay Masland: yeah,

Sharona: count ’em up. You get that.

Lindsay Masland: I would personally like Lindsay as a teacher, would agree with you in that. But then I also am like, I don’t know, I wonder if there’s some person that we could find. It sounds like a fun challenge where like even Sharona would be like, okay, fine, you can have percentages. Who would that be? What would the context be?

Sharona: So a lot of people have tried and there is an answer, and it’s, you need to be ranking and sorting your students instead of grading what they’ve learned. And look, there are contexts in which that is a very strong reality that I do not deny. I just think it doesn’t belong in 95, 98% of the locations that it exists. But if you’re, if you’re ranking and sorting students to put into medical school, grad school, like there are real limits in the system at various points. It’s not in my pre-calculus class. Yeah. It’s not in my senior history of math class. Yeah. It’s someone else’s decision, not mine.

Lindsay Masland: And I think we overestimate the number of courses where ranking would be beneficial. Or like we, we feel pretty precious about our classes and that maybe the person next to me should not be doing ranking, but I should be doing it because this is a service that I’m providing to my discipline. And I’m like, I don’t know, man. Is that really true? Just thinking about I love the idea of that being true. It does make me feel special if that were true for me. Like I feel like the evidence just doesn’t bear that out. None of us are that important.

Sharona: I’m the total opposite. I’m like, I’m the one who’s I can distinguish between good and great. So I’m just going for good. If it’s great, lovely. I’ll give you some lovely verbal feedback, but there is no consistency in my brain distinguishing good and great, so I just like, Nope, not doing a four level scale. Can’t do it. Won’t do it, not me.

Lindsay Masland: That’s why I switched from a yet to a, not yet, because I wanted to stop having to make decisions of that, those kind of gradations and stuff. And I was like, and what does that even correlate to in the real world? And also who cares? Who cares? And that, and I just think about myself as a student and how I was a total grade monster because I was going for like perfects and stuff and that I would keep setting higher bars for myself. I remember I got to grad school and I was like, okay I’ve made it through a course where I’ve lost literally zero points. So now I’m gonna do that in a math class. ’cause I was like, that is next level. So you can get all the way to the end and they don’t take any points away from you like. Why was that good? There is nothing good that came of that for me, for the people in the class. There’s literally no reason I should have been allowed to be that kind of monster. But the system built it, yeah. And encouraged it. Encouraged it. It reinforced it. And so it’s I can see why I was doing that, but it’s I also just think about I cannot be com creating any more mes out there that is not, maybe the version of me, I’m the current version of me is maybe a little better, but like that version nobody needs that.

Boz: This has been a really fun conversation, but we are already coming up on our hour. But , before we start wrapping this up, I do wanna say and if you don’t want me to that’s fine, but I want to steal that intro question about what do you want your kids’ letter to say at the end? Because I, I. I love that. I’m, a lot of the coaching I’m doing is transformational coaching and it’s a lot about the beliefs and stuff, but wording it that way, I love that. So I 100% am gonna steal that unless you just tell me not to.

Lindsay Masland: No, you absolutely may. And in fact, Emily Pits Donahoe, who’s writing literally the book on collaborative grading right now, has borrowed that and put it into, and attributed it to me. So you wouldn’t even be the first person is the point. And so I am happy I’m happy for you to steal it in that way,

Boz: Sharona anything before we wrap up?

Sharona: Attribution steel with attribution?

Lindsay Masland: Yes, and I am like quietly in the background working on a book about that kind of stuff, and how do you figure out your values and how do you figure out your context and then how do you make choices in grading, but in everything. So that it all feels good, it’s all aligned. And so eventually there’ll be something you can cite, but right now it can be personal communication. Sounds,

Sharona: sounds good.

Boz: Alright.

Sharona: Sorry I cut you off, Boz.

Boz: I was asking you anything before we wrap up.

Sharona: Just that one last comment though. You’re in North Carolina. I’m gonna be in North Carolina probably in June or July because my son’s moving to Fort Bragg. I’m gonna, we’re gonna meet for drinks.

Lindsay Masland: I love it. Let’s do it.

Boz: All right. And for everyone else, 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 guests. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.