The Grading Podcast

Jesse: I love the notion of the one room schoolhouse, where different students are learning different things at different grades and helping and influencing one another. And I think what we try and do is we not only break students into grades, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, but we break them into groups within those grades.

This is what we can expect from this small segment of our first grade students. This is what we can expect from this small segment of our second grade students. And then it presumes that they’ll probably follow that trajectory throughout the entirety of their k through 12 experience. But that’s not the way that happens. People explode in their brains at different points in their education. And like what i want is i want a system that honors that and recognizing that sometimes education, teaching, learning is a lot of waiting and watching.

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

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

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

Sharona: I’m doing really well. I’m really excited to be back in the studio and getting back in people’s ears. And I’m really looking forward to the conversation today because we have a guest today that is someone I’ve been following for a long time through social media.

We have Dr. Jesse Stommel. Jesse is currently a faculty member in the writing program at the University of Denver. He’s also a co founder of Hybrid Pedagogy, the Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy and the Digital Pedagogy Lab. He has a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder. He’s a co author of a couple of books.

The first one, An Urgency of Teachers, the work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. But recently, very recently, like a couple months ago, he just published a new book, which is the premise that we’re here today, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop. So Jesse is also a documentary filmmaker. He teaches courses about pedagogy, film, digital studies, and composition.

Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, a clever cat, Loki, and a badass daughter, Hazel. And one of the things I love about podcasting is we can say badass on the air.

So welcome, Jesse.

Jesse: Great to be with you, I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I actually put that word badass in my bios and send them to people. And it’s always interesting to me to watch if a person like pauses just before they say it. I’ve had only a couple of people take the word bad ass out, but the truth is my daughter is a bad ass.

So I have to keep that in.

Sharona: Well, and you don’t say it here, but one of the things I also love is I know that you have a game store and since I spent most of my math graduate work gaming, that was really exciting too. We’ll have to talk about that a little more offline.

Bosley: Yeah. People actually get to read a little bit about your daughter in your book. And she definitely does sound like a badass.

Sharona: Yeah, bosley’s got a couple of badass daughters too. So there you go. I just have badass sons. So they’re a lot in common. So I wanted to start today, Jesse, just by asking you your origin story as it relates to grading.

And I am using the word grading and not assessment. And we can talk about that later, but let’s talk about grading. How’d you get started with this work?

Jesse: Yeah, I think it’s definitely worth pushing on the distinction between grading and assessment and all of these words mean different things to different people at different times.

And I think their meanings are in flux. My origin story, it goes back pretty far, probably to the point when I was a kid and I remember first being graded in, I think the first time I received letter grades was in sixth grade and I didn’t respond very well to letter grades. I loved school, but I had a rebellious streak in me even then and found that grades did not help me thrive throughout school. But I actually became really good at grades.

And I actually remember having a stack of papers that I was grading for a film class. I had something like a Pomodoro timer, and I had set it for something like 90 seconds, and I spent 90 seconds commenting on each paper and then had to put a grade. And I remember how long it took to make that decision between here’s my comment and here’s the grade that I’m going to put on there.

And I really felt from early on, like my comments felt like they were driven by the grade. I started to already think about the grade I was going to give the student as I was writing the comments. So I found that those grades really drove the comments. When I started teaching as instructor of record, I actually decided from the very beginning not to grade.

So, I had been teaching for 16 years before I started really coming out about the way that I approached grading and assessment. Before I felt, it was partly about bravery, partly about kind of wanting to fly under the radar. But I hit a certain point where I felt grades were the elephant in the room of every conversation that we were having in education.

And I felt like they were an impediment to all of the work that I wanted to do around equity, around thinking critically about the way that we use tools in our classroom, about how we build relationships in classrooms. And so really I kind of opened a sort of dam inside of myself that then started gushing out onto my blog.

Sharona: Well, that’s really interesting. And I kind of want to go ahead and take a moment and let’s jump into that difference between grading and assessment because there’s a couple things going on here for me. One is, this is the grading podcast. I mean, this is like, you came on the grading podcast.

And the reason, for me, that it’s called the grading podcast and the reason we call the conference the grading conference is twofold. Number one, I’m trying to recapture the word. I’m trying to make grading not mean letter grades or points and percentages like the traditional forms. Also, when I use the word assessment in my university context, all my administrators go to program assessment.

Like, they don’t think of reviewing student work and handing back exams as assessment. They call it grading. So, like, there’s this really weird juxtaposition. For me, I "grade" a quiz by putting feedback on it, in my world. I put feedback on it and I say either you’re done with this or you’ve got to do it again.

That’s grading in my world now. But it sounds like those are not the same for you. So can you distinguish what you mean by grading versus assessment?

Jesse: Yeah, and I think I’ll also say that the word assessment doesn’t translate that well overseas because if you go to the United Kingdom, for example, the word assessment actually means something closer to our use of the word assignment in North America.

And so that word means different things in different contexts. I actually like that you just call this the grading podcast and that that’s what you call the conversation. And in part I like it because the word grading has so many emotions attached to it, that if we just take that word head on we can start to dismantle it and start to detach it from those emotional associations that so many people have with it. Because I don’t think that the word grading means a sophisticated conversation or thinking or engagement with grades as a thing, but I certainly think it can mean that And so I think it’s an awesome use of the term here.

For me, I don’t know that there is a neat and tidy distinction. I use the two different words in different ways at different times. For me, grading is more the mechanical act of putting grades into a Scantron or onto a piece of paper, attaching arbitrary, usually arbitrary signifiers to human beings and their work. Whereas I think of the word assessment as something that’s more, it’s something that happens outside of education as well.

So when my daughter was learning to walk when she was one and a half, two years old. Each time that she’s taking a step, she’s doing the work of assessment. She’s assessing, is the ground going to hold me under my feet? Is my foot angled the right way?

And so it’s a constant process. We’re constantly assessing ourselves, we’re constantly assessing each other. The thing that we do in education is some sort of formalized version of assessment. So I think that the words have, they can overlap, but I think ultimately thinking of them as functioning differently in different places at different times is useful to me.

Sharona: So I guess what I’m hearing, because when I start talking about this out in the world, people are like, well, what do you mean you don’t grade? I have to grade. I have to give a letter grade. And I’m like, okay, let me be clear. My institutional context requires that I give a final letter grade to a student at the end of the term. And I, currently, am not one of those working to dismantle that system. I’m in favor of dismantling it. I’m in favor of what we call the burn it all down folks. But my personal goal is what happens between day one of the semester and last day of the semester when I have to turn in that final letter.

When I’m talking about grading, I’m talking about everything in between. So for me, I don’t put any letters. In fact, I don’t even put words anymore. I am of the "emojis are the least emotionally laden and most communicative way I can give a mark to a student" and we can explain that later. But what are we talking about here then?

What is your book? Let’s go to your book for a minute. Undoing the grade. Is it talking about what happens in the term? Is it talking about what happens at the end? Is it all of the above?

Jesse: I like your way of describing grading is everything that happens leading up to that point of giving a grade.

One of the reasons I resist the sort of move towards either conflating what I call ungrading with something like alternative assessment is that we’re not getting rid of grades. This isn’t, we’re not talking about not grading. Because ultimately most of us in our context still have to put a final grade that ends up on a student’s transcript.

And that grade has a huge amount of impact on students. So to imagine that we can just snap our fingers and not grade is to deny the reality that the student actually experiences. That not only do they end up getting graded, and not only is it me who puts that grade, but that grade also has a huge impact on them and their futures.

Grades end up being a kind of currency for students. And so I think talking about them really frankly and directly, is what we need to do. If I think about, like, what is my book about, what is it trying to do? It’s not necessarily trying to advocate, although I do describe a bunch of alternative modes of assessment. I do talk about the failures and problems of grades. But if I think of anything that the book is trying to do in the whole, it’s trying to create critical conversations about grades. So that in between the meeting of the student and the putting of a grade onto a Scantron or into a drop down menu in Canvas that ends up on their transcript, there’s lots of conversations.

And there’s lots of processing around what grades are, how they work, how they make meaning, who they’re for, and that those conversations happen within the students, since I do a lot of self reflection, but also they ideally happen between students and teachers. So that when you’re talking about everything that happens leading up to that grade, ideally, what I’m advocating for is that a lot of that work happens in conversation with students.

Sharona: So Bosley, I know that Jesse and I are both coming from the higher ed perspective and you crossover. Do you think those conversations that Jesse’s talking about between students occurred differently in the high school setting versus the college, or what are you thinking?

Bosley: I don’t know if it has to be different. I do think that there might be an age or a maturity that might be necessary, but I know this is something that I don’t do well in my own practice. The student to student or student to self evaluation. I know a few people and we’ve even had one on the podcast, Joe Zeccola, that does do this more with his high school students than I do.

So I don’t think it has to be different. I don’t think it is nearly as common in the K 12 world, especially in the K to 8, as it might be in high school or especially in college. So I don’t think it’s a difference of purpose, but maybe a difference of amount that’s being done, at least in my experience.

I don’t know. There might be people out there that will completely disagree with me, but in my experience that’s what I’ve seen.

Sharona: So again, as we were talking, Jesse, before we started. When I first started reading the book, I went in a little defensively to be honest. I am not an ungrader the way I would define ungrading before reading your book.

Sort of that in the classroom practice of never giving marks is sort of one of the ways I look at that. I definitely live in the what I would call standards based grading or specifications grading worlds. Your book was definitely eye opening. So I guess I wanted to ask you to give the short form elevator speech summary of your book and why did you decide to write it now?

Jesse: Yeah, so I start by, in one of the earliest chapters, defining ungrading and it’s a definition that I’ve been working on and tweaking and rethinking as I’ve written this book and as I’ve revised my own practice over the years. I define ungrading as raising an eyebrow at grades as a system.

And so it isn’t just about having a conversation about grades, but thinking about the way that grades, quantitative assessment, standardized assessment has influenced and shaped the work of education, the work for students and also the work for teachers. And then ultimately with the goal of starting to knock down some of the barriers that we face to doing the work that we want to do.

For me, teaching is about asking deep questions. What do we think education is for? What kinds of relationships do we want to build with students? What kinds of relationships do we want to build with other teachers? How do we want to collaborate with other teachers? And I think a lot of times grades frustrate a lot of those conversations. Or if not frustrate, they drive a lot of those conversations and shape those conversations.

So what I want to do across the course of the book is dismantle some of the myths that we have about grades. Show the way that grades do harm to those relationships. Show the way that some of the assumptions that we make about grades don’t actually hold true. Talk about the ways that grades fail to communicate adequately to students.

And propose different ways, different points of entry for teachers that want to experiment with alternatives to grading.

Bosley: You’ve talked a couple of times, you’ve mentioned about relationships between students and teachers and how grading can hinder that and even be harmful to that relationship.

And I know that’s something that Sharona, you and I have talked about a lot on this podcast is, especially with traditional grading, how the instructor becomes this like point monger, where, oh, all the, the students are worried about is how do I get more points, where can I get extra credit?

And it really does become this kind of confrontational relationship. And that’s one of the things that you and I, Sharona, have both seen since we’ve changed and gone away from traditional point based and average grades, that our relationships with our students have drastically changed. That that relationship isn’t a confrontational point mongering, now point gaming type of relationship.

And you talk about that, I think it’s in chapter seven in your book, a little bit about the relationship nature of grades. And I’m curious of your opinion, Jesse, if all grading systems have this kind of confrontational relationship or can grades be done in a way that that relationship is more of a mentor or more of a partnership than kind of a confrontational type of relationship.

Jesse: I think it goes back to what we mean by grades. I think grades as they are conventionally, traditionally, popularly used necessarily have that effect on the relationship. The degree to which they have that effect is different for different teachers, and it’s different in different disciplines. And it also is different for different students.

Some of our highest performing students who have grown up in systems of grades, they actually perform really well under a system of grades. And taking grades away can end up causing rifts in the relationship if you’re not talking to those students and talking to them about why you’re not grading or why you’re grading differently.

And so ultimately I think that the piece about grades that causes the biggest problem is their fundamental arbitrary nature. Is the ways in which a nine comes to stand in for something and an eight comes to stand in for something and if we look at some of our more elaborate systems, like the hundred percentile system. Where you have a 97 versus a 96, if you give one student a 97 and you give a 96 to another student, what’s the difference between those two grades?

What is that communicating to those students? It’s really only communicating that the student who got a 97 did better than the student who got a 96. So the second we start using grading systems that privilege ranking over evaluating, or ranking over clear communication to students, I think we run into that problem of creating a competitive environment where students are working only for the grade as opposed to working in a way that feels organic or intentional to them.

When we talk about the A, B, C, D, F system, it also has that problem because we end up with A, A minus, B plus, B, B minus. Too many gradations for it actually to make meaning in any sufficient way. So, I think I’m really influenced by the work of Peter Elbow who argues for what he calls minimal grading, which means reducing the number of gradations that we use in order to make grading clearer to students, in order to make grades communicate something. He also advocates, and I really love for this, for using non arbitrary signifiers. So instead of giving students a three a two or a one or a check plus a check and a check minus, you use actual words that signify something to the student. Like accepted. Or needs revision. Or begin again.

Those words end up conveying something very clear, very direct, very assertively to students. So the second, if we’re talking about that kind of grading, that kind of grading ends up being really useful in creating trusting relationships between students and teachers. Challenging relationships, and also trusting ones.

Bosley: That’s interesting, you talk about the difference between a 96 and a 97. Some of the things that, Sharona and I do a lot of different workshops and stuff together, and one of the things that we always try to really point out with what’s wrong with traditional grading, is the fact that the human brain just cannot really discern a hundred different gradations of something.

So it’s interesting that so many people think that this a hundred point scale is just this holy grail of grading that has to be done. When the human brain just, a machine does it well, a human brain just does not. And I don’t think I’ve ever had a student that’s come up to me and asked me to explain why they got a 97 and someone else got a 96 and I can really give a really good explanation as to one point distinction.

Jesse: And I think we take it even further than that, where the number of courses that I’ve revised or seen or helped people work through or seen stock courses that are given to 50 different teachers at an institution that are using a thousand point scale. I think it was the learning management system that made the thousand point scale a thing. Where you had a thousand points over the course of the term and you had ten, a hundred point assignments that built to this thousand points.

And I just look at that and I go why? Why did we decide to do a thousand? Why don’t we just divide that by ten and end up with a hundred points for the whole class and then ten points for each individual assignment? That would work absolutely fine. When I was teaching those kind of stock courses, when I was teaching online at a community college, and I’d be given this syllabus and have only like a day in order to revise it, I actually decided that that made no sense at all.

And I actually took the thousand point scale and turned it into a 10 point scale. So the students got 10 points over the course of the term. And the reason I did this is because the learning management system required me to put a number into a little box before I could add comments. And so I decided, "Oh, well, I’ll just have it be a one or a zero."

And it adds up to 10 by the end. And then the interesting thing I discovered was that if the student didn’t turn it in, I didn’t even have to put a zero. I just left it blank. So for me, it was either they got a one or I just left it blank. And so really I was only giving one possible score, which was the 1 I had to put in there.

Luckily, most of our learning management systems have moved away from this, having to quantify everything in a box in order to give a comment. But the absurdity of that thousand point scale has never been lost on me.

Sharona: So, it’s interesting that you say that because one of the things that Bosley and I have going for us is we’re mathematicians.

So we actually now give a talk called Grading as the Misuse of Mathematics in the Measurement of Student Learning. And we have some gravitas, we have some authority because we’re mathematics instructors. And that’s really fun. Like I said, I went a little bit further because you said let’s go to words that mean something. And we’ve had all kinds of discussions, and I think you’ve been part of them. Because when we started the conference, it was the mastery grading conference and we got a lot of pushback on the word mastery. Because it was who decides when something’s mastered and when is it really mastered and you know the joke is when do you master something? The first time you teach it, and then there were concerns about different communities and how they would respond.

So we tried all kinds of words, we finally settled on alternative and that’s when I said, "you know what? I just want to call this grading because this is what grading should be". But I’ve gone to those emojis for the same thing. I do want a shorthand mark. And that’s the other word that I’m wondering if we should try to popularize, is in England they use the word mark on an individual assessment. And that feels a little bit less value laden in the US than grade, where the mark that you’re given is indicating your progress.

And so check means you’re complete with that thing. I use the hand with the pencil, meaning I want you to revise it. And I give the students the word too, where check equals complete, the little hand with the pencil wants a revision. I use a thinking, smiley face guy for "I’m going to want you to retake this". And I use a red X to say "you didn’t turn it in or what you turned in was so blank that I can’t even give you meaningful feedback."

What do you think of that word mark? Is it something worth trying to do or can we call those things grades because we’re recapturing the word.

Jesse: I think ultimately we should fumble towards what we mean by using all the possible words. There are only a handful of words that I think are so damaged that we shouldn’t use them anymore.

For example, and I talk about this in the book, the phrase grade grubbing. To me, that is such a problematic phrase and that we’ve popularized that phrase to the point where you see it in news articles written about education, grade grubbing supposedly being, something we talked about earlier, students asking for particular grades. Or wondering at and desiring and circling around a particular grade. But ultimately, if you just do a quick Google search for the word grub or the word grubber, you end up finding all the reasons that you possibly can find in order to never use the phrase grade grubber again. A super problematic phrase. Mark, on the other hand, doesn’t have that same, but it’s still interesting for me to start to unpack it.

I do like the way that it doesn’t feel hierarchical, it doesn’t feel like something one person does to another person. The other thing I like about it is it seems like something you do, you put a mark on the work. I think the danger is, with that word, and with any of these words, honestly, is if we think about the mark as going on the person themselves.

And too often, when you talk to students, that’s what happens for them. I often have conversations with students where I start with a question like, why do we grade? But I also ask the question, how does it feel to be graded? And I ask teachers, how does it feel to be graded? Or I ask teachers, how does it feel to grade?

And immediately the things that students talk about, and the way that they talk about it, and teachers, who have been students, is that we talk about grade as something that happens to us, not something that happens to our work. So I think the same risk is possible with the word mark, that it’s a mark on me.

And not a mark on the work itself. So we have to find ways to talk about the work that we do as something that’s in process, rather than thinking about grading and ranking people. And that’s the reason why 96, 97 doesn’t work. It isn’t that this piece of paper is a 97 and this other one is a 96. And so this piece of paper is a better exemplar of the assignment than this other piece.

It’s that the student feels like they are less of a human. And that isn’t emotional on their part. It actually is reality. Because those grades end up having so much to do with their futures. They affect so much about who they can be and who they will become.

Bosley: So that’s interesting then.

If we don’t want grades and scores like that to be about the student, instead to be about the work, how do we switch that with our students? How do we get them to start seeing marks or grades, whatever you call them, on an assignment or assessment as grades on that assignment not on them.

Jesse: I think we can’t meet and tidally distinguish between the work and the person. I think we try and do that when we put grades on the work, but then it necessarily reflects on the person. I don’t know that we can make that happen any other way. When we put hours and hours of our time into something, it is us. If we even think about how teachers so often respond to cheating as a thing. The reason that teachers have such a hard time with cheating, even though I would argue that cheating is much less prevalent than the media makes it out to be, than the sort of moral panic around cheating makes it seem to be. I think that that ultimately is there as a profit engine for companies like Turnitin or Proctorio that profit off of making us feel, by creating a culture of suspicion, and make us feel like cheating is running rampant.

I think the reason why teachers respond so negatively to cheating is we put so much of ourself into our work. And so, if even one student cheats, it feels like a personal affront. So I don’t think we can coach teachers and say, don’t take this personally. Because the truth is teaching is personal work, because of how much we put of ourselves into it.

I think the same is true for students. Learning is something deeply personal. If you discover something that you didn’t know, or you change your mind about something, or you have an epiphany. Those are all things that happen at a deep core level of who that human being is. So I don’t think we can separate those things out and I think that’s the reason why having conversations with students and having them do self reflection, metacognitive work, having them write things like process letters has them meditating on, writing about, thinking through what their learning looks like and how that learning is fundamentally attached to who they are as human beings. And so that’s why when we start to grade students, we also need to have conversations with those students that recognize the full humanity of those students being attached to that work of grading, attached to that work of assessment.

Sharona: I really am enjoying these conversations about the fact that students are human beings. Because as I’ve made this pivot to alternative grading, one of the things I talk to faculty about is grades are so much more pervasive in your classroom than we realize before you start to do this work. They literally color every conversation, every day, every everything.

They are 90 percent or 95 percent of what students think about as opposed to the content. And switching to the forms of alternative grading that I have tried has completely flipped that in the sense that grades are still all pervasive, but the way to get the grade Is to focus on the content. And so all the conversations have changed. And I hope it’s bringing space for students to begin, because I get students freshman, sophomore year, so I am one of the first persons that is able to try to deprogram them from this toxic grade environment often. And it takes me weeks into the semester to work on that. But I get to get there, and I’m hoping they take that into the future with them.

But it’s definitely been eye opening for me, especially coming from a field, a STEM field where depersonalization is a little bit of a job risk. The field tends to deemphasize, it shouldn’t because it is still highly personal, but it does. So that’s been really interesting. And I’d like to use that to pivot to another question for you, if I may, which is this issue of outcomes. So in chapter three, you actually, and I’m going to quote you here because this hit home because I don’t understand it.

"I find it strange that teachers and institutions would predetermine outcomes before actual students enroll." However, I have a course that is, content wise, definitely a post- to other skills and a pre- to other some skills.

So I live in a world where, at least at this point in time, the content is very hierarchical and linear at certain times, and it’s not until you get to other points in your mathematical journey that you have the room to explore because you know enough, essentially. There is some room for exploration. But I don’t understand in my discipline how I don’t have those content outcomes.

Can you. Share your thoughts on that one?

Jesse: In some ways I would say that, again, you can’t just snap your fingers and have them go away because they’re so built into how the discipline is structured and they’re so built Into how course sequencing is structured. And so ultimately when you think about, well, if I’m going to do away with outcomes, or at least do away with what I distinguish as predetermined outcomes, as opposed to what I describe as emergent outcomes. If we’re going to do away with predetermined outcomes, we’d have to look at course sequencing as a thing. And not just at your institution or in your discipline, but probably at 40 percent of the disciplines within your institutions where course sequencing is the fabric of how the discipline, the degree, the curriculum is structured. And so I don’t really imagine that by tomorrow we’re all going to completely turn on its head the structure of the curriculum in your discipline.

So there’s a way in which we can talk about what we hope for and also what’s possible. And then we can move towards what’s possible. So to go back to your question for me, the key problem for me is the way that we predetermine outcomes before meeting students. And we do this so often, and in so many different places, we expect that students will come in at one level, and we expect that they will leave at another level.

That has never been my experience of students, and I don’t think that’s anyone’s experience of students. Students come in at all manner of places, and they end up at all manner of places. So the key is, how do we, so for me when I’m talking about doing away with predetermined outcomes, well what does that look like?

In some ways, it looks like figuring out who your students are at the point that they arrive, and then figuring out what point you can get them to. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have something like trajectories, directions that we’re pointing the students. If I think about something like course sequencing, we don’t have to completely dismantle course sequencing in order to accommodate something like de emphasizing predetermined outcomes and replacing them with emergent outcomes or trajectories.

Because If I think about how the dynamic way that learning happens, students discover things at different rates and at different points. I so often hear about Bloom’s Taxonomy, about how I have to essentially, the traditional approach to Bloom’s Taxonomy, where I’m supposed to memorize a bunch of stuff, and then later I get to apply, analyze, do creative things with that stuff.

I know how my brain works. I don’t remember any of that stuff if I remember it at that point. Forget it almost instantly. I’m great at remembering it for the test, then I forget it. It’s only when I do the creative application and analytical work that I actually internalize any of that. So, if we have a 101 class that’s all about memorization, I might do a whole bunch of that memorization.

I don’t remember it in the 201. I don’t re remember it until the 401. And so my learning path through that sequence is just different. And so ultimately, it’s not about doing away with the sequence. It’s about making sure that the sequence can accommodate different learners who learn at different paces and in different ways.

Bosley: That’s, that’s really interesting that you’re saying that. Because one of the arguments that I have, especially in my field of mathematics is this idea of students have to know how to do A, B, and C before they can do D. And Sharona, you and I have these conversations and these arguments with people in our workshops all the time about, but do they really? I mean, I’ve given examples of, I had a group of students a few years back in one of my algebra two classes in high school, where they just did not understand linearity, until we got to exponents. Even though, in the sequence of topics, linearity comes long before exponential. This idea that learning has to be linear is at least in my experience, so incredibly false that it blows me away that we still think it has to be this kind of linear progression.

And that sounds kind of like what you were saying at a more general standpoint.

Jesse: Yeah, well, and so we might expose students to something at the 101 level, but we don’t necessarily expect them to completely grasp it by the end of the 101 level. So it isn’t an outcome.

It’s not something we expect by the end of that course, but it is nevertheless something that we decide to expose them to and let them experiment with and let them play with and let them think through at that level.

Bosley: So I kind of had a follow up question to this because, I know you’re solely in the higher ed world, and I’m not sure if most of your theories in your books are geared just for higher ed or if it’s for the entire education system.

But I’m curious of this predetermined outcomes not being so prevalent. Would that work in the K 12 world? Especially in some of the K through five or K through eight? Do you think we could ever get to a point where didn’t have these predetermined outcomes?

Jesse: I think that absolutely. I mean, I think that my book, if what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to speak to people at all levels of education. My context is primarily higher education. However, I do lots of workshops. I do lots of trainings with K 12 teachers. And usually it’s a conversation between me and them, because same thing, I can’t come in as someone who primarily has background and experience teaching in higher ed and come in with a set of predetermined outcomes.

I have to sit with the K 12 teachers and figure out what’s going on for you at your institution and your discipline. And how can I help you? How can I bring my expertise to that conversation and help you? And ideally that’s the conversation that we have with students as well. The other thing is I would say is that I have a six year old.

She’s in first grade now, so I’m experiencing the K 12 system very, very directly through her. And one of the things that I think most upsets me, as I watch her education, is I watch how much she loves school, and how excited she is for school, and how open she is to doing and experimenting and trying almost everything.

And I think the thing that most upsets me about our school system, and this is to a lesser degree at the school that she’s at, because we very carefully chose the school that she’s at, and she really loves it there, but I see even evidence of this there because it’s so baked into our systems, which is this expectation that by the end of kindergarten you will have done these things in order to get into first grade.

Or, when she starts first grade, there is a and there aren’t traditional standardized tests for her, and I would probably opt out if there were traditional standardized tests, but there’s still a sort of testing to figure out what reading group she’s going to be in, what math group she’s going to be in, what science group that she’s going to be in.

And what’s interesting is that the notion is that we’ll figure out what reading group she’s going to be in, and then she’ll be with other readers who are at her level. I think that’s easier for the teacher. I don’t think it’s necessarily better for the students to be at people who are up there with their same level. I love the notion of the one room schoolhouse, where different students are learning different things at different grades and helping and influencing one another. And I think what we try and do is we not only break students into grades, Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, but we break them into groups within those grades. This is what we can expect from this small segment of our first grade students. This is what we can expect from this small segment of our second grade students.

And then it presumes that they’ll probably follow that trajectory throughout the entirety of their K through 12 experience. But that’s not the way that happens. People explode in their brains at different points in their education. And like, what I want is I want a system that honors that and recognizing that sometimes education, teaching, learning is a lot of waiting and watching until something clicks for that student. And not about ranking students, not about putting them into buckets.

Bosley: All right. And I’ve got to ask, because I often joke that teachers make the worst parents. I’ve actually been banned from one of my daughter’s school without a admin escort, and I’m probably about to get it again. Because I’m about to go to war with one of her math teachers. But have you ever gotten kind of in trouble with some of your daughter’s schools? Because we have these kinds of radical ideas about grading and…

Jesse: Not so far. And I don’t know that I expect to. So one of the theses of my book, and it also appears in almost every presentation and in tons of the pieces of writing that I’ve done over the years, is this notion of start by trusting students. But the corollary to that is also start by trusting teachers. So I’ve worked with so many teachers over the course of my life, and teachers are deeply idiosyncratic, and I often say I don’t proselytize about pedagogy.

The reason I don’t is because I don’t think we should all teach the same way. I think students need different kinds of influences. They don’t need me to turn everyone else into a carbon copy of me. What they need is lots of different teachers teaching in different ways. And so when I talk to her teachers, I approach it from that perspective.

That I actually want, and I even tell them this directly because they know I’m a teacher. I tell them I trust you to do your work in your classroom. The only point at which I feel like I feel like there is potential for friction, is if they try and interfere with my parenting. And the thing is that there’s all kinds of ways that they might do that.

For example, the way that, I have a daughter, she’s six, the way that they start to police what, especially young girls, wear. Ultimately for me, what Hazel wears to school is up to her, with certain guidelines. And the second that I see things like that starting to happen, that’s where I start to have issues.

Or things like language. For me, language is deeply complex. And so I don’t have a list of curse words that Hazel can’t say at home. And so the one thing I’m nervous about, so far I haven’t gotten it, I’m nervous that I’ll get called in at some point or get a note or get a little message that says Hazel’s using these words in the classroom, and that somehow I’m supposed to reinforce her not using those words.

And I’ve rehearsed what my response to that would be, and my response is, well, I will teach Hazel to respect you and the space of your classroom. But I’m not going to tell her that these are words that she shouldn’t say or can’t say at home. I will tell her that these are things that she might not say at school.

Because for me, there’s a distinction between a bad word and a word that’s used in a derogatory way. And I want to teach Hazel that distinction.

Sharona: So Bosley and I have different approaches to dealing with math instructors with our children as they grew. I have a almost 21 year old and an 18 year old. And I ended up pulling my 18 year old out of mathematics in the high school.

Just pulled him, I kept him in the high school, pulled him out of math. My 18 year old who’s a sophomore in college and a math major, to be more specific. It was horribly painful to see the damage traditional grading was doing as they got older.

I was very grateful, I had a elementary school that used standards based report cards and really worked with me to differentiate the instruction for my child who needed it.

But middle school and high school, I would love to trust teachers. So many of them don’t understand the damage this is doing that I felt the need to remove my child from that experience in specific classes. Unfortunately, that’s also true at the college level still, although they have more capacity to handle it because they’ve been listening to me for the last five years.

So, definitely a challenge and I wish you the best in your journey of trusting teachers.

Jesse: Well, for me it’s also, to be clear, the phrase is "start" by trusting teachers. But the key is being aware and talking to my daughter, and this is the same talking to our students, and recognizing when the institution, when their teacher, when any part of their education starts to do harm.

At the point that I see her stop loving school, that’s the point at which I step in and I say what’s going wrong here? Because the most important thing is that she keeps loving school. That, to me, is like number one priority. It’s the number one outcome, if you will, of school for me, is that she keeps loving it.

And so at the point that that starts to get fractured, then it’s me stepping in and saying, what’s going on here? Why is this happening? And to me, grades are probably the things that thing that are most likely to do that and to do it the most frequently.

Bosley: Yeah, I’m at that situation with my eldest daughter, who is a junior in high school.

A couple of weeks ago, we had to have a very long conversation about, not about learning math, but about how the grade in grading was working in her math class. And it just devastated her. And that’s why I’m like, yeah, I’m about to have a long conversation with this math teacher, and it was completely the grading system, but just took someone who is recently started to find her love of math again, and it’s completely destroyed it.

And it just, it’s heartbreaking being someone who has been a math instructor for 19 years of his life to see his oldest daughter absolutely despising math even though she likes learning it.

Jesse: Yeah, I have an interesting little detail. I don’t teach math. I enjoy math, although interestingly in my college math classes I had to not go to class in order to do well in the class because the way that they were approaching the teaching of math was actually making it more difficult for me. So I would teach myself the math on my own using the instructor’s notes and then I would take the tests.

And I did extraordinarily well in the tests. And I actually, there was some animosity among the students because I would never show up for class, and then I would do really well on the tests. And then of course the tests were curved. So that how well I did was affecting other students, which was just disturbing.

So the small little detail is that the first pedagogy book that I ever read as I was preparing to teach my first time was the book "How Children Fail" by John Holt, which is a book about exactly the things that we’re talking about. So in some ways, my pedagogy is really influenced by this book that’s about elementary math pedagogy. And I still go back to that book because it was so formative for me.

I was up late at night. Writing a syllabus, planning my first class, reading this book into the 2 a. m. hours and just being sort of shocked and ultimately what is that book about? It’s about math as a space of play and education as a space of play and as a space of wonder and as a space of joy. And all of the ways that our systems curb that joy, that wonder, that play, that experimentation.

Bosley: Yeah, that is an excellent book. I’ve read that book, too. And Sharona, that’s something we should put in our show notes that anyone that has not, it’s a little bit older of a book. I think it came, actually, I’m not even sure when it came out?

Jesse: Early 80s or late 70s, I think.

Bosley: Yeah, I was about to say, I think it’s at least It’s 30, maybe even 30 years or more, but it is an excellent book and way ahead of its time.

Sharona: So I want to make two more pivots in the time that we have remaining. One is you said start by trusting teachers and I want to use that to loop back around to start by trusting students because I run a coordinated class. So I have a thousand students, give or take across 20 plus sections. No, it must be 40 sections. Sorry.

And so I’m working with multiple instructors and things like that. And we are a quantitative reasoning with statistics course. So we’re not a typical intro stats, but we’re a very word based, word heavy introduction to quantitative reasoning using statistics. Chat GPT is becoming a much more prevalent challenge for us. Now, in mathematics, we’ve been dealing with the so called cheating conversation for quite some time because there have been a lot of computer algebra systems that have come out. One of the things that I’ve worked with my faculty on is natural consequences, which you mentioned. So our natural consequence for the use of ChatGPT is no feedback. Because our point is we want to invest ourselves in you the student and not ChatGPT and we are not interested in making ChatGPT better. That’s not our job. So what other types of sort of natural consequences can you encourage for students who, because of the pressures, I think the cheating thing is all about the power differential of grades and the pressures, what do you encourage for that?

Jesse: Yeah, I think you make a really good point there that, when I find myself in conversations about cheating, I want to turn it around and say, what is this conversation’s really about? What are we talking about when we’re talking about cheating? And I think most of the time we’re talking about grades as a system.

And that grades as a system are the driver, for the cheating itself in some cases, but also for the way that we think about and talk about cheating. I think that natural consequences for me the most, obvious natural consequence is built into the act of cheating itself. And so the great thing about this natural consequence is we don’t have to do anything at all, which is that if a student cheats, they lose a learning opportunity.

And if we keep the emphasis on education as a space of creating opportunities for learning, and if we’re thinking about students intrinsic motivation, and not to imagine that there’s a world where we’ll get to pure intrinsic motivation without any extrinsic motivation, but if our focus is on intrinsic motivation and supporting students who want to be there and want to learn, then the punishment for cheating is actually built into the act itself.

I think ChatGPT is interesting because it forces us to ask, well, what is cheating? What constitutes cheating? What kinds of tools should we be using in our work? And so these are conversations that we have with students. I hate the comparison that gets made between ChatGPT and the calculator, as though "well, we had this conversation 60 years ago when we talked about using calculators in mathematics."

Again, not a mathematician, but when I’m asked to pontificate or comment about chat GPT, I often get asked some question, "well, isn’t this just like a calculator?" And my first thought is, no, it’s nothing like a calculator. It’s something completely different. I don’t think there’s a neat and tidy corollary or comparison between the two.

Let’s have conversations about calculators. When are they useful? How are they useful? For which students are they useful? How do we teach students to use them effectively? In what situations is it useful to learn without a tool like a calculator? I think we can have similar conversations about ChatGPT, so we can ask similar questions.

I think our answers are going to be quite, quite different. And our answers are also emergent. We’re watching this technology emerge. Not to say that the technology is new, because I don’t know if you remember Clippy and Microsoft Word. We’ve had versions of ChatGPT for a long time. And yes, this is different and it’s an evolution of that kind of technology because it’s not like the technology itself is new.

And so there’s a series of conversations that we need to be having actively with other teachers and with other students. When we turn to something like chat GPT, I hope that what we’re thinking is, "What is this technology? Why is it here? How will it change the work that we do? What kinds of conversations should I have with students about it?"

Not, "Are my students going to use this to cheat?" And then when we’re thinking about something like cheating, I think so often the narrative and the conversation at our institution, we have the conversation about, "Who is doing the cheating? When is it happening? How is it happening?" Instead of the most fundamental question that we should be having, which is "Why would students choose to cheat? What about our systems? What about our structures might be encouraging this?"

So I think there’s a natural consequence for students when they cheat, which is they miss a learning opportunity, but there’s also a natural consequence for us as teachers and for our institutions. Which is we’re forced to reckon with why is this happening? I think we’re scared to have that conversation again because we put so much of ourselves into our work .

Sharona: And we are definitely having that conversation, and have had as part of the structural creation of our course. We talk about how the opportunity for retakes and revisions removes a tremendous amount of the pressure to cheat from the grading system and things like that.

So those conversations are definitely happening and I appreciate that. I do have one last pivot that I definitely have to ask you because this is based on experience that I just had. Which is, this statistics course has been built over the last five years to really incorporate all of the good stuff.

So not only does it have an alternatively graded system, but it has faculty learning community around it. It has robust discussions on proper assessment. It has everything that everyone’s asking for in the higher ed world. Equity conversations, everything. And I presented this course to my dean’s office. And the reason I had to present it was number one, they weren’t familiar with it, but number two, the course is essentially perceived to be a failure.

And the reason it’s perceived to be a failure is because it is being measured by its DFW rate against another course. How do we have the conversation, with now administration, to say, look, you are asking these great questions. You’re asking about assessment. You’re asking about student learning outcomes.

You’re asking us to do belonging. You’re asking us to do all these things. We are doing this in this course. This course is like so far ahead of the vast majority of other courses in this area. And yet you’re turning around and telling us it’s a failure because we’re not getting 90 percent of the students through it, in one semester.

Even though I’m asking for the data on long term completion, on retention, on all these metrics, I’m being told because your course has a higher fail rate, a higher non completion rate, we’re going to continue giving more students the other course. What do we say?

Jesse: Well, for me, I think this is the reason why I often talk about my pushback, not on grades, but my pushback on grades as a system.

Because you can see, just in the way that you’ve described this, how grades, quantitative assessment, standardized assessment, are baked into both how we evaluate students, but how institutions evaluate teachers, and how institutions evaluate programs. So, if we go back and we look at the problem of grades and the problem of quantitative assessment, and I don’t want to demonize quantitative assessment.

I love statistics. I love quantifying things. The problem is when we use quantitative assessment at the expense of everything else. When we use quantitative assessment of a program like the one you’re describing without just sitting down and talking to the teachers and saying, when is this working? How is it working?

How do we expect it to grow and change over time? And also asking just basic questions like, why are the students dropping the course? Why are the students not succeeding over the course of the term? As opposed to just presuming that that "failure" is a failure of the students or a failure of the teachers. For me, it points to some sort of systemic failure.

For example, why wouldn’t we create institutions and opportunities to take courses where a student could take a course multiple times until they were successful? Why do we create so many systemic barriers to that being something joyful or pleasurable? We make it seem like it’s a deficit.

Like I go to yoga. I’ve been doing yoga for 15 years. Well actually 25 years, something like that, maybe even longer. But I go to a yoga class and sometimes I like to go to the basic class. Just to kind of touch back in. And so something we do in school, one is we make it so that it feels like a deficit. If you have to take something again, you did something wrong, you’re a failure.

We also make it so that you don’t get credit for it. So it replaces credit but that credit isn’t useful. So you get the three credits, or you fail to get the three credits, and then you take it again, and you only end up getting three credits for six credits worth of work. Even when the student didn’t finish, that doesn’t mean they didn’t do three credits worth of work.

So honoring the process and the work that students do rather than purely the outcome, rather than just getting to the end. So to me, I look at something like that, and I think, well, why don’t we have a system where a student can take a class like this multiple times? Why don’t we have a class like that being taught in multiple ways, and if a student takes it the first way, then they say, well, that didn’t really get it for me, and then they’re able to take the course again.

So hopefully that kind of helps a little bit. But to me it’s about looking, it’s, I talk a lot about self assessment and getting students to do metacognitive work. I think we as teachers need to do that as well. And we need to ask our institutions to do that, to ask bigger questions of itself, rather than, well, what’s the DFW rate? Oh, it’s 90%? Well, that’s no good. That’s a failure of a class.

Sharona: So we’re coming up on the end here, I think, although I have like, at least five more questions I could ask. Bosley, do you have anything?

Bosley: I just wanted to say thank you, Jesse. I know one of your themes in, in at least this Undoing the Grading book is just really developing a space to talk critically about grades and grading.

So I wanted to thank you for coming on and helping us trying to have that conversation. And yeah, I agree with Sharona. I looked at the time and I’m like, wow, I can go for another hour easily. So I would love to have you back on some other time to continue this conversation and go a few more directions that we just unfortunately aren’t having time to do today.

Jesse: I’d love to be back. We’ve talked about my daughter. We’ve talked about statistics. We’ve talked about early math education. We’ve talked about programmatic assessment. There’s so much here. Any one of those topics could be a whole hour.

Sharona: Absolutely. And what I really appreciate and, I guess, what I would like to, as a closing, to ask you, this is one space that we’re creating, that I and Bosley, and all the guests that are coming on, we’re creating this space. What can other people do? How can people contribute to making this change happen?

Jesse: If you had asked me that five, seven years ago, I would have pontificated and talked and had really happy things to say about Twitter and social media as a space where educators are having these kind of dynamic conversations.

I think that I’m here having this conversation with you all because we crossed path on social media. I wish I could say that social media felt like that kind of productive space right now. I think the thing formerly known as Twitter changed so fundamentally that I don’t know if that’s the space. I’ll tell you what I’m starting to do, and I’m starting to think about how we move these sort of global conversations, these national conversations, how we move to a kind of hyper local approach to these conversations. How do we make sure that at every single one of our institutions? There’s a space for us to sit down and talk about these things together. So if I’m in rooms with administrators, I immediately find myself advocating for a couple things. If I’m talking to higher education administrators I talk about the failure to adequately prepare and support teachers in higher education.

When less than 50 percent of teachers have essentially any training at all for the work of teaching, that is a systemic failure. And so what can we do? We can create more rooms like this one. Where teachers are able to talk about the work of teaching in thoughtful ways and not just instrumental ways. Not just about how do we get it done, but about what is it, what is the work of teaching?

And so funding that work, the institution, rather than paying for another learning management system, rather than paying for a remote proctoring tool or a plagiarism detection software, or heaven forbid an AI detection tool, which don’t work, and institutions are nevertheless throwing money at them.

Instead of investing in that, invest in teachers. And invest in creating spaces like this at every single institution. K 12 as well as higher ed. Problem in K 12 is often that K 12 teachers are so overworked that they don’t have time and space in their day to have these kinds of conversations. Making sure that institutions are clearing the deck and creating space for those conversations.

Bosley: I think that is the best idea I’ve ever heard.

Sharona: Well, and the good news is LA Unified is starting to make some of those spaces. They have a whole Equitable Grading and Learning Instruction Initiative. Bosley’s a big part of that. And I’m very happy to announce the grading conference has now been formally organized as a 501c3 nonprofit.

So we’re going to be going after additional funding. And it is an independent organization from this podcast. But that’s really exciting. And I appreciate your support for teachers. I don’t know if you know this, but Bosley and I are both adjuncts. I do not have my PhD and I, at this point, have a little bit of formal resistance to the idea of getting it because it feels very elitist and to require me to do it when I’m already doing this work, so.

I definitely resonated with the precarity conversation in your book as well. So thank you so much for coming and having this conversation. Are there any last words that you want to share about how people can reach you, hire you, anything like that?

Jesse: People can hire me for lots of different things. Feel free to hire me for things.

No actually, yes, well, you can reach me for that, but you can also reach me just to talk to me. For me, this work only happens in conversation. Podcasts like this, but I also appreciate when teachers just tell me how things are going in their classroom. I talk to so many folks and I often don’t hear back on the other end. Like, how did how did this actually resonate what’s happening in people’s classrooms?

So feel free to reach out even if you don’t have a question. I am @jessifer on Twitter and on Bluesky, which I’m trying out. It’s currently the one that I feel like is the most hospitable, but I’m also increasingly just giving out my email address. Because to me, that’s the version of hyper local, talking directly to me.

We don’t necessarily need a corporate platform in order to do it. So email, I’m jessie @ hybridpedagogy dot org. And I love to chat with folks.

Sharona: And I believe you also have a website, jessiestommel.com, we’ll link all of that in the show notes. So thank you very much for coming on the pod. And with that, I think we will see everyone next time.

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.