The Grading Podcast

140 – Adriana Streifer

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Adriana Streifer: One feature of the culture of higher education is, to my mind, erroneous notions of what rigor means, right? And people like Kevin Gannon have written about this. He talks about procedural rigor versus conceptual rigor. And sometimes when people think about rigor, they really are just thinking about the obstacles, like you said, running this gauntlet, right? The obstacles students have to overcome to succeed. And it’s is that actually pursuing intellectual sophistication and development? Or is it just making things hard for people?

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

Sharona: I feel like I’m getting into a pattern ’cause I always wanna say I’m doing well and I am doing well, but it feels a little boring, so I’m like, maybe I’ll say I’m a little bit fearful. Because I’m getting on a plane tomorrow, which will be several weeks passed by the time this episode comes out, but I’m getting on a plane to go back east and I was a little bit concerned because it’s the frozen tundra there right now. But I’m going to fly into DC and I hear that’s okay. So a little bit reassured. So overall pretty well, but a little bit nervous about traveling. Yeah. How about you?

Sharona: I’m conflicted because on the one hand, I live the heart of where some of the activities, I like, literally, I live two blocks from the LA Convention Center. So I’m going to be the heart of it. Which, if I have nothing to do during that time, could be super fun. Lots of people watching, going to events. But if I have to try to accomplish anything, I don’t know.

Boz: Go anywhere.

Boz: And as we’re talking back and forth, we are not the only two in the virtual studio today. So who do we have with us Sharona?

Sharona: Absolutely. We definitely want to welcome Dr. Adriana Streifer to the podcast today. She’s an associate professor and associate director at the University of Virginia’s Center for Teaching Excellence. She leads course design programs that support instructors in developing inclusive and learner-centered courses. She runs a teaching certificate program for graduate students who wish to cultivate reflective, intentional pedagogical practices. So I think that’s pretty cool that we actually have somewhere, sometimes somebody actually teaching graduate students pedagogy. Adriana teaches courses in English literature writing and the theory and practice of teaching in higher education. And so we are super excited to welcome you to the pod.

Adriana Streifer: Thanks so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here.

Boz: Yeah, so we’re really excited. Part of the reason we’re so excited is you are one of the people that we’re part of the six man team for the facilitation of the Alternative Grading Institute that happened a few months ago. Definitely wanna talk about that, but before we do a tradition here when we have a new guest on for the first time, is just to ask them, how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Adriana Streifer: Yeah, I’d be happy to share how I became involved in alternative grading. As Sharona mentioned, my background is in English literature. And prior to becoming an educational developer, I taught courses on English Renaissance drama. And I also worked in a writing program where I was teaching many sections of required first year writing courses for students across all majors. These were not English majors. And, from long before I became an educational developer, my experiences as an instructor and, prior to that as a college student made it so clear to me that traditional rating is just inadequate to capture the complexity of learning that happens, and that’s true in any discipline. But I feel like that’s especially the case with writing. Like, how is it that we reduce writing to this letter or a number? It just made no sense to me. So I saw traditional grading practices distracting my students and causing anxiety. They were really focused on grades and points instead of learning. And I wanted them to love literature. I wanted them to enjoy writing or to feel empowered and capable as writers. I also felt that assigning grades was really meaningless. No matter how much I’d explained to students, what qualities and characteristics I was looking for, I could not explain how that translated into points and percentages. That just meant nothing. And it also, it all struck me as really unfair. Particularly the practice of calculating a weighted average of grades across a semester. It didn’t fully capture students’ progress. And writing is just so process oriented. I felt it was really important to capture that process.

Sharona: Wait, it sounds like the English person is blaming the math.

Adriana Streifer: Hey, no I’m not blaming them actually. There are some. I’m gonna forget exactly when they, a couple years ago Robert Talbert and David Clark on their blog Grading for Growth, and it’s also now in their book, they wrote some posts about why grades are actually not math, why they are numbers, but they are not actually like numerical, if that makes sense. I can’t do it justice because I don’t have that math background. But I read that and I was riveted. I was like, this explains what I don’t have the vocabulary to explain to the faculty I work with. I had this intuition that the math wasn’t mathing. As the students say, it didn’t make sense.

Sharona: And we say it too.

Adriana Streifer: Yeah. And this made me like, appreciate math more. I was like, this is what it can do and this is what it can’t do and we just aren’t able to quantify learning that way. Yeah. So that really it justified my dislike of grades. So I was very appreciative for the math professors who are helping this English professor understand, the difference between like ordinal and, I forget what the other words they were using, but it’s wow, this really clears it up.

Boz: Yeah. So if anyone’s curious, the blog post that she is talking about, ’cause we’ve actually used this quite a bit in our trainings, is, Robert’s When is a Number, Not a Number. So it’s one of their early blog posts on the Grading for growth blog, which anyone that’s listened to this podcast for more than a few episodes is probably heard of stealing something from them. ’cause that’s where we get a lot of our inspiration. But yeah, we, in fact, one of our most common PDs that we do is, called the grading, is the misuse of mathematics, which very much comes from that. When is a number, not a number.

Adriana Streifer: Yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: So you had this epiphany moment, you’re like, yes, this math is not math. Which we as mathematicians a hundred percent agree with.

Adriana Streifer: I would say it was moderately successful. There were definitely some challenges and then some things that went well. One thing I’ll never forget I think it’s important to share stories of failure as well as success. I approached it by based on the advice of other instructors who had done it, saying, students will understand this, but you really have to give them a lot of time to ask questions to understand the specs grading system. And I really wanted to do my due diligence there. So I gave my students so many opportunities to review the grading scheme, to talk about the specs for any assignment and how it relates to the grading scheme. And one day a few weeks into the semester, one of my students said to me I had been pitching it to them as this thing that will de-emphasize grading, right? We’re doing this type of grading because that way you don’t have to think about grades, you can just focus on the learning and the grade will follow. So then the student says to me for a class that is supposed to de-emphasize grading, we sure talk about grades a lot. And I took that to heart. I thought to myself, okay, am I, maybe I’m the one who’s having trouble letting go. Sometimes students are afraid to let go of the traditions that they know and that feel familiar to them, but I think I was having trouble with that. So I, I still give my students lots of opportunities to to grapple with the grading scheme and understand it. And try, I try to make it as transparent as possible. But I’ve shifted my rhetoric a little bit and my approach. And there are some stumbles there. Some of my students really appreciated it from the get-go, and others found it more stressful. That’s individual variability. I can’t control for that. So I would say on the whole, it was moderately successful from the beginning and has become only more so as I’ve continued.

Boz: Then it sounds like it, you did better than us on the first go around.

Adriana Streifer: I can imagine that, for many people. It’s a real challenge at the beginning because there’s so many factors that kind of influence how it turns out. And I have the, I had the benefit also of working as an educational developer. So I already had this awareness of theories of motivation and science of learning and this background these bodies of literature that informed my pedagogy, that helped me make values aligned decisions. And I think for an instructor who is, intuiting something is wrong with grades, but doesn’t have the support or doesn’t have the training, yeah, it’s it may not go well and that’s not totally their fault. It’s a really hard thing to do. It’s a hard transition to make.

Sharona: So I am very curious to learn more about your specifications grading, but we don’t wanna go there just yet because as Bosley said, you just facilitated the Alternative Grading Institute. Yeah. So because of the timeliness of this conversation, I’d like to start there.

Adriana Streifer: Sure.

Sharona: Boz, did you have some specific questions for Adriana on that? So

Boz: We just had Lindsay on, on the last episode who was one of the other facilitators, and she gave us a rundown of the format and how it ended up looking. So just to recap, day one was this, full session that really did some breakdown on what’s wrong with traditional grading on some of the decisions that go into setting this up. But the second day was really where the magic was . You guys broke up into three different groups. And this was just because these were the three that the institute tackled this time, which was standard, specs and collaborative or ungrading. And the facilitators that were brought in for these are rock stars. Dr. Drew Lewis and Derek Bruff who were doing the standards Lindsey that we just had on last week, and Emily Pitts Donahue that were doing the UN grading on the collaborative. But you and Michael Palmer, you two were the ones that were facilitating the specs one, correct?

Adriana Streifer: Correct. Yeah.

Boz: So just from that experience I’m really curious like what were some of your highlights or your surprises, whether it was good or bad, surprises with specifically that breakout day two of the institute.

Adriana Streifer: Sure. Yeah. You asked for highlights or surprises, and I know you said for day two, but I also just wanna say that the highlight for me was really working with the whole team.

Boz: Yeah.

Adriana Streifer: Like just putting the whole thing together. The months we spent designing it is just such a wonderful group of people and I learned a lot from all of them because I don’t have that much expertise in standards-based or collaborative grading. So learning from, Derek, Emily drew and Lindsay was for me the highlight and working with them. But and that’s not to leave Michael out there too. Michael and I have had a very long working relationship and it’s always a highlight for me to work with him. But of course we work together at UVA, I get to work with him every day. So I think one of those highlights then was, doing something that he and I are very familiar with, but doing it for a larger audience and an audience from varying institution types and backgrounds and experience levels and with totally different kinds of students, right?

We had people from large R1 institutions and from small liberal arts colleges and from community colleges and regional institutions. And so it was just a really great diversity of perspectives. And it was also really helpful for, I think me and Michael to hear about the situational factors that impact those instructors experiences. Michael and I are at an R one, and every institution has its own culture. UVA has a very particular culture with its student body that he and I have grown used to, and it was useful to hear about the needs and interests of the students and faculty at other institutions. So one of the things that, I guess maybe it was a surprise about day two is how much time we had ended up having for individual, like miniature one-on-one consultations. I really love working with individual instructors and because this was such a sizable group of people, on day one we had, I think it was 60 to 70 people, and then day two was, divided roughly into third. So I think we had about 20 to 25 people. I didn’t imagine that we’d have enough time to do that.

And during the working periods we ended up with this, wait list of people who wanted to have meetings with us. And that was really fun and rewarding for me to see what they were working on. They would show us their specs, grading schemes, and then I could to me it’s like a puzzle. I like working with these puzzle pieces and helping instructors figure out where the loopholes are. Like maybe, or maybe a game is more an appropriate word, like figure out like where their learning objectives are well aligned with their assignment bundles and where they are not. But I also, it made me wish that I had more time with them. I don’t feel I was able to give everybody the individualized attention they wanted. And it also made me realize, or, led me to think about whether we could have done things in a large group that would have. I guess preempted some of the need for the individual work.

At the beginning of day two, Michael and I were unpacking kind of the the basics of specs grading, how you do it, what the pieces are, what it means. And I think there was a more diverse range of experience and understanding than we had anticipated because we were anticipating that people were going to choose specs grading based on , their applications to the institute. They had selected that they wanted it. We had some of those people, but we also had people who switched into specs grading at the last minute. And calibrating our language around that was an interesting experience. And it’s I need to, I made some mental notes, but clearly I need to write down, so I remember for posterity. What fundamentals need to be explained for someone who’s never done it or tried it before? I think I was operating on the assumption of a baseline level of understanding that was not fair to assume for all participants.

Boz: So that brings up an interesting point because Derek brought that up when we interviewed him back on episode 126, and he also talked about the fact that there were some people, especially between standards and specs that switched both ways.

The UN grading or the collaborative, there wasn’t a lot of changes, but both the standards and the specs had people that were switching. And he thought that was likely because some people were calling one thing, one thing when they actually met it was the other. And it’s not that they went in and were thinking they wanted to do specs and then decided, oh no, I think I wanna do standards. It’s that they went in calling what they were doing specs when it was really closer to standards. So could you give us a real quick, like what are some of those major differences between specs and standards, or how are they different?

Adriana Streifer: Sure. I’m happy to go through the distinction between the two of them. And at the same time, I’m gonna make a plug for I think as I develop my, understanding and knowledge of alternative grading. I’ve become less a fan of labels. I think it matters less what you call something than that you understand why you’re doing it. So incidentally, and Michael and I had collaborated with some colleagues in the world of chemistry education specs, grading has really taken off in chemistry. But from Michael and I’S perspective we reviewed dozens, it could have been close to a hundred, syllabi from chemistry classes around the country that our colleagues collected. And they developed an instrument that looked at students’ perceptions of specifications grading schemes.

As we analyzed these, we came to the conclusion that most of them are not strictly speaking specs grading schemes. So apparently there was a paper a while back that described a specs grading scheme from one course in chemistry. And now all these chemists are modeling their grading schemes on it. And that’s fine. They can do it’s just, but it’s not specs grading or it’s not traditional specs grading. And we were thinking like how important is it to tease out these distinctions? And I think it is and it isn’t, right. The distinction matters if you’re a learner and you’re at the beginning of this process of figuring out what type of grading works for you. But I don’t think that the quality of grading schemes hinges on whether it neatly fits into one category or another.

So that’s my kind of disclaimer before I describe these differences. So specs to my mind, specs grading is a great approach for disciplines and for types of learning in which quality is holistic. So in writing, I can articulate discreet aspects of what I consider high quality writing. So there might be things like the qualities of a thesis statement or how a student engages with evidence. Those are discreet and I can name them. But ultimately, a piece of writing to my mind is only high quality in a holistic way. So every element affects everything else. They can’t be disentangled. I rely a lot here on the distinction between standards and specs that David Clark articulated in the Grading for Growth blog, where specs are detailed descriptions of what a successful submission of an assignment involves. So the focus is on the whole product, not just a single skill. Whereas standards articulate clear and observable descriptions, that’s his words, of an actions that a student can take to demonstrate learning on a specific topic. So this might be a single skill that can be assessed across multiple assignments.

So the question that David Clark asks and I think is really useful when trying to decide what type of grading scheme you might be interested in as an instructor is, am I more focused on individual skills or on big picture integration? So to my mind, I’ve actually, I’d really love to figure out if I could do a standards based version of grading in an English literature course or in a writing course. I think it would be really tricky. I’m not sure it quite, but I’m, I find it appealing, so I’d like to try that sometimes.

Sharona: Okay. So we have to get you back on Yeah with Joe Zeccola. So Joe Zeccola is our, we call him our guest host ’cause he is been on several times, but he is an AP Lit Lang teacher.

Adriana Streifer: Ooh.

Sharona: Who does standards based.

Adriana Streifer: Okay. I wanna learn how he does it.

Sharona: Yes. So it’s very interesting.

Boz: But like three of his standards. I think most people that do specs would look at those and go, those are specky.

Sharona: Yeah. So I wanna tease out a couple things you said and put my spin on it and see what you think. So you said that specifications is more focused on the holistic and standards is more on the discreet skills. I don’t disagree. However, I think you could have standards that the standard is holistic. So for me, the distinction is much more practical. And the distinction is, am I grading an assignment,

Adriana Streifer: Yes,

Sharona: to get it to count for the grade or am I grading pieces of an assignment? And those pieces is what contribute to the overall grade in the course.

Adriana Streifer: And I agree with you a hundred percent on that actually.

Sharona: And I basically, I envision standards as being the rows in a spreadsheet and specs coming from the, so there’s basically rows that are standards, columns that are assignments. And you also could have some rows that are not standards, but there are other things that might go into an assignment. And so it’s are you grading the column at the bottom of the column? Or are you grading at the end of the row? But people don’t seem to like that analogy, but that’s how it lives in my brain.

Adriana Streifer: I think I have a hard time picturing it as a spreadsheet, but I get what you’re saying and it actually, that is, so I think what I was trying to do before was define kind of the types of courses that lend themselves better to specs versus standards. But I think you’re right about the actual distinction. So when I develop a specs grading system I’m thinking holistically at the assignment level, just as you said. So I’m grading the assignment. The assignment, if I were to divide my assignment into standards, there could be multiple standards in there. But the designation I give the assignment is that it either meets specifications or it does not. There’s no, oh, you met six out of 10 of the specs. It’s no, you met all of them or you didn’t, which sounds extremely high stakes. Except that it’s not, because the way that instructors who use specs grading reduce the stakes is by giving opportunities for revision or resubmission and a token system or an economy of tokens in which students can exchange those for further opportunities.

If I were grading instead based on standards in a literature course, I might, or in, in a writing course, let’s say I don’t really teach this way anymore, but if I were to grade a thesis statement, maybe there’s a standard about the quality of a thesis statement. And let’s say there are four or five papers, I might say that a student needs to meet that standard at least three of the four times in a semester. So I’m grading the standard across the assignments rather than a putting a a mark of meets or does not meet expectations on the entire assignment. Yeah.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Yeah. And that’s why I say that I, and I agree with you about the labels because when I did my history of math, I mushed the two together. So I had 10 learning outcomes that I was grading standards. So they had a ” complete, not yet” level, but specifically that said you can do these things. And then my project said it has to have these components. You have to have at least one learning outcome in there. And you have to, you have to get the math right. You have to get English writing things like that. And so they had to complete the project. And if you wanted an A, you had to complete all four projects. And in the course of those four projects, you had to get nine of the 10 learning outcomes. Yeah. So it was like both.

Adriana Streifer: And I think it’s totally fine to hybridize them. I also think it’s possible to have courses where certain assignments are graded on a standards basis and others are on a specs basis. And then the way that you put those together at the end of the semester there’s some creative engineering around that to get a final grade, but you don’t have to fall firmly into one camp or the other.

Boz: And you had brought up science earlier, I actually see that kind of hybrid quite a bit in my K 12 world when it comes to sciences with labs. So it’s like the lecture part is done on standards and the lab part is done on specs and, to get an a you have to have a certain combination of both. But yeah, it’s this, dual part where the lab is specs and the knowledge or the learning or the lecture is the standards.

Adriana Streifer: I see that a lot in the stem syllabi. I see it in higher ed as well. Yeah.

Sharona: So we had all this switching at the Alt Grading Institute. What do you think were the drivers? It was not understanding this distinction or they just got attracted to it once it was described. What do you think? Or give us some examples maybe of some of the switches discipline?

Adriana Streifer: I think it could have been a little bit of both. I think there could have been people, I’m, I don’t have an example offhand to give you, I don’t remember a specific person’s change and like why they made that switch. But I do think that there could have been people who came in thinking, I’m going to do standards. And then when they learned about it, they realized, ah, what I’ve been considering standards-based grading is actually specs grading and that’s what feels more comfortable to me, or vice versa. I also think there were some folks who felt that standards and specs are like. Near to each other, right? Their siblings or cousins, and they were familiar with one, and they felt that this was a great opportunity to learn about the other one. And maybe they were teaching like you Sharona, like they were teaching a course that like history of math, that was your course, right? So it’s a math course, but because of the history element, it might lend itself to a specs grading in a way that Calc one does not, let’s say. So I think that there was just a little bit of flexibility based on people’s interests, based on what they learned on day one.

Sharona: Pivoting just a little bit. You have an article out from a couple years ago, is specifications grading, right? For me? So how has that infiltrated what you do? That question how does someone go about figuring out. Any of this, whether they should do alternative grading, specs specifically whatever direction you wanna take that question.

Adriana Streifer: So after Michael and I published that article. It was reviewed on grading for growth and we came to the realization that rather than saying is specifications grading, right? For me, this was really a readiness assessment for pretty much any grading innovation. It didn’t have to be specs grading specific. Some of the pieces that we put in the readiness assessment around like course factors such as enrollment size might be more specific to specs grading than others, but you can adjust those fields as you see fit. I think depending on the type of grading you want to do specs grading can get a little bit tricky to scale if you have to give lots of written feedback on writing assignments to students. Something like standards-based grading I think can scale a little bit better depending on the nature of the discipline. But anyway yeah, this readiness assessment really developing it, it just came out of my work. As an instructor doing specs grading and also Michael and I working together running workshops and institutes on designing specs, grading schemes. Initially we were very focused on the how to how do you do this? What is specs grading and how is it done?

As we worked with individual faculty it became very clear that the how to is not going to look identical for every instructor in every course. And in addition to how to do this, there’s also the question of why do you want to do it? And is this a good idea right now? And some of those, the answers to those questions are within our control. There are questions like, what are my learning objectives? How do they align with my deeply held pedagogical values? Does this align with the kind of work I want to be doing in my career? We can control those things, but we can’t control things like I was assigned to teach the third course in a sequence, or my course is a prerequisite for something else. Or I’m teaching a coordinated course with five other instructors, and we have to do it the same way. We also don’t have full control over things like our institutional culture and the support of our department or school and administrators.

And of course, we all have our own personal identities and kind of career and professional missions. And identity and status can create different relationships to risk. So as this took off, as by this, as specifications took off and became more popular, I wanted to put the brakes on it a little bit. Not for myself. I’m in a very, I think privileged position as somebody who is an educational developer and also gets to teach, but I’m not going to lose my job over it. Like tenure is not at stake, but there are instructors on semester to semester contracts or people who are going up for tenure. Yeah, exactly. And if you’re not in a culture where people understand and reward the effort that you put into teaching, that might be a risk or a sacrifice that you don’t want to make. And so we wanted to help instructors think about how they articulate the value of what they’re doing and identify why they’re doing it. And there’s, I think there’s nothing wrong with saying. While I am, philosophically aligned with this, I am not at the right institution to do it, or I need to develop more allies, or I need to, connect with my center for teaching and learning before I can do this effectively.

So I am, despite being a fan of alternative grading, I am by no means shaming anyone who sticks with traditional grading because it is what is expected of them and because their career depends on it. So I think that’s what where the readiness assessment came from, and it’s really informed everything I’ve done since then, because I believe that context and identity must always be taken into account when designing grading schemes.

Boz: Oh, yeah. I could not agree with you more. We’ve talked about this, Sharona has talked about her place of privilege when it comes to her institute and what she and I do. But yeah, when we’re doing some of our redesign PDs, whether it’s an individual or group some of the things that you have to consider does include, is my class a standalone or is it in a sequence where in the sequence who are my students? What are some of my, personal beliefs and stuff. But also one of those big ones are the institutional contact that you’re involved in. Where you are, what the school is. And I love, one of your questions on that readiness was, in what ways does your institute evaluate teaching? To what extent are its methods nuanced and flexible? This was one of your questions on that readiness test because it is definitely something that you have to consider, and I know Sharona is famous for being able to work around and hack, whether it’s a LMS system or if it’s requirements from departments. This is something that Kate Owens has also talked about, but a lot of times as an educator you might, even if you know how to do it, how you can hack some of these policies, you might not be in at a place where you really are safe to do and it is a real consideration when you’re looking at doing any of this because this is a really big change and sometimes those that are evaluating us don’t get it, don’t understand it. And you’re not always it’s not, you’re not always rewarded for that kind of pushing the boundaries.

Adriana Streifer: Exactly. Yeah.

Sharona: And it’s not just that it’s a big change, but it is a threatening change.

Boz: Threatening change. Yes.

Sharona: Because, and then we talked about this last week on the episode, or actually we just had an episode come out of the Intentional Teaching podcast that we were guests on. And one of the things we said is, this is attacking our identity as instructors and as professors, because to become a college professor is a gauntlet that you have run. And it is a mark of both pride and in some ways shame in this society because we don’t get paid nearly commensurately with the gauntlet that we have run. And yet. We’re very proud of that gauntlet, me included. I like being able to say, yes, I’m a college math professor. A university math professor that has some cachet and these grading systems and these changes threaten the exclusivity of that gauntlet.

Adriana Streifer: And I think what’s really being threatened is alternative grading is pushing at the boundaries of whether grades should exist at all. To my mind, as much as I like specs grading, it’s not the end game. I would like to get rid of all grades in higher education. And so that’s what’s especially threatening is that one feature of the culture of higher education is, to my mind, erroneous notions of what rigor means. Right? And and people like Kevin Gannon have written about this. He talks about procedural rigor versus conceptual rigor. And sometimes when people think about rigor, they really are just thinking about the obstacles, like you said, running this gauntlet, right? The obstacles students have to overcome to succeed. And it’s is that actually pursuing intellectual sophistication and development? Or is it just making things hard for people? Because we somewhat fetishize things being difficult in higher education. And so I’d really love to achieve a form of evaluation, I guess you could say that really accurately gauges what students have learned without putting some kind of fake number or letter on it. And because that is so threatening, it’s also more dangerous for some people to do than others.

I’m reminded of Leila McLeod’s keeping receipts article about doing alternative grading as a black woman in the academy. And I think Chavela Pittman and Tom Tobin also have an article in The Chronicle from several years ago that Michael and I reference frequently about, the differences in students’ perceptions. The way that student pushback really depends on their perceptions of instructor identity. Part of this also depends on quality of implementation, but when Michael and I both do alternative, specifications grading, he gets zero pushback from his students. I get very little, but I still get more than he does, and I think that partially has to do with identity factors that I don’t control.

Sharona: No, absolutely. Yeah. We had a number of engineering faculty go through a redesign and we had two full professor white males. We had a brand new Latina female professor. We had a brand new white woman professor. We had a male Hispanic professor. Like we had a variety in the discrepancy in the pushback. Like the young Latina had a horrific experience because our institution is over 70% Hispanic. And so she’s young enough that the Hispanic males in her class absolutely went bananas. And the white woman who was with her was like, I can push back on this ’cause they clearly are not giving me this problem. But she didn’t wanna step in and in any way undercut her colleagues. So it was a miserable experience.

Adriana Streifer: Yikes.

Sharona: For this young professor. Absolutely. This is so tied to identity.

Adriana Streifer: Yeah. And so without the support of colleagues or administrators who can say, Hey, we’re able to either collect different sources of information about your success as an instructor, right? Or look at student evaluation data and interpret it through the lens of how doing something different can be shocking to students and can be challenging, right? Like without that kind of support, it might not be a risk everyone wants to take. But I do think that there are opportun, the more people who do it, the more that things are shifting. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, if you’ve noticed this at your institutions, but when I first started doing specs grading, most my students had never heard of it. And now when I do it, there’s almost always a student in my class who has experienced it in another class. Or some form of alternative grading. And so I think that the student culture can shift as well, the more that instructors do it. And so I hope that eventually there’ll be this c change and that instructors won’t face the same level of risk, especially identity-based risk if it’s just widespread and common enough.

Boz: So that does bring up an interesting question, and I don’t know if you and I have ever talked about this Sharona, but we have been doing this for a while. Have you started to see students coming into your class, Sharona, that have already experienced some form of alternative grading?

Sharona: It’s hard for me to say because I teach so many first semester freshmen and first year freshmen that even if they have experienced it in high school, their brains have not caught up. Like the differences between the environments are so big that I don’t think I can get a coherent answer out of them. It’s almost, they’re like, what are you grades? What are those? Even though they know them and they understand 90%, 80%, I don’t know is the answer.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: I think in the upper division classes, like when I taught linear algebra, definitely I was starting to get some more, but that’s partially ’cause we redesigned the sophomore level engineering classes that they were taking at the same time. So some of them were not super thrilled because implementation does vary. But yeah I don’t have a good sense for it in my classes. Yeah. But I think that’s a context problem because I’m hitting them with grading in the first week of their entire college career. I get a lot more of, wow, this is the most unique math class I’ve ever had. But that’s, I think and for me as the instructor, the grading is what’s making space for that. But it’s team-based inquiry learning. It’s just good active learning, it’s good pedagogy. And because the students haven’t experienced me with traditional versus alternative, they don’t know that the success I’m having with my active learning is way in accelerated of what it used to be. So I know that it’s doing this multiplicative effect, but I don’t think they have the frame of reference for it. What level, you said Adriana, that you teach or used to teach in these first year writing courses. Do you still teach in those or what are you teaching now?

Adriana Streifer: It’s been a couple of years. I still have the option to, I just haven’t done it in a while. So I, yeah. The courses I’ve taught. Most recently in the English department it’s actually been, I think almost a year and a half since I’ve done it. But they are, they’re not the first year required writing courses. They’re not composition courses. They are literature seminars that are pitched to first and second year students, but they’re open to everybody and they serve dual purposes. They fulfill UVA’s College of Arts and Sciences second writing requirements. They’re technically a little bit more advanced. There’s two semesters of writing requirements and the second one can be done in the disciplines. So there are. Second writing requirement courses in biology, in anthropology, and in, not just in English, right? Like in every field. So I get a mix of students who they also serve as a prerequisite to declare the English major. So there are some students who want to major in English or are considering it. Some who just want to knock out this second writing requirement. And maybe they, liked literature in high school and figured, Hey, this will be a fun way to do it. I’ll do something that’s different from the other courses I plan to take. And I think the course also fulfills some of the college’s general ed requirements.

So it’s a really diverse group of students, which makes it fun, but also challenging to figure out how to pitch it. So that’s what I’ve been teaching in English most recently. And it’s also tricky because I was meant to introduce them to the study of literature and it’s also writing intensive class. So it’s both of those things at once. , Most recently I’ve had a bit of a break in terms of, the workload which I’ve enjoyed, and it’s also just been a shift in the types of courses I’ve shifted to these courses that are lower stakes. They’re not connected to curricular outcomes of any kind. They’re usually one or two credits and pass fail. So one of these was a one credit elective for graduate students called Philosophies of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. And that’s because in my role at our Center for Teaching Excellence, as you mentioned, Sharona, I run a teaching certificate program for graduate students, and that’s very focused on the practical pedagogy, how to be a good teacher. And I wanted something, there were some students who wanted to talk more about theories and philosophies and sort of history of higher ed. How did it become the way it is today? So that was just for fun, like purely an elective, no requirements of any kind. And then similarly, I’ve most recently taught just last semester, a one credit pedagogy seminar for undergraduate students who wish to design their own courses to teach to their peers. So UVA has a program where students, undergraduates can apply to teach credit bearing courses, but before they get permission to do that, they have to take this pedagogy seminar that we run at our CTE.

So that’s what I’ve been teaching. I’ve actually really enjoyed the opportunity to move my specs grading, in practice, in this direction that is much less connected to any specific curricular outcomes or college or university level requirements. It gives me so much freedom. It’s been really nice. And I’ve it’s taken on some elements of like labor or contract grading maybe a little bit of collaborative grading. So that’s been what I’m teaching these days and I’ve been experimenting with that.

Boz: Okay. So I have to ask. Yeah. With these pedagogy classes, regardless of which one, is the art of grading part of the learning in those classes?

Adriana Streifer: Ooh, yeah. Not well in the graduate student course. No, it wasn’t. I have a friend a colleague who’s since taken that course and redesigned it and made it their own. And I’d have to ask her if she’s including the Art of Grading, but because it’s more, philosophically oriented. We were reading things about like the history of higher ed and different philosophies. We were reading, Dewey, we were reading. I’m trying to think of who else. You

Sharona: should read about the history of grading because it’s fascinating.

Adriana Streifer: Oh, definitely. I have read about the history, but I did not bring that to my students actually. And then for the undergraduate course the pedagogy course, there was an element of it. We certainly focus on assessment. It’s essentially a long, drawn out version of the Course Design Institute that I run. So we’re, we, they, I helped students through this backward design process to design their own courses, which at the end, did include some element of grading, except that, the courses that the undergrads are allowed to teach, these are one credit electives that are likewise pass fail. So there isn’t much grading involved. It’s really just I help them think about how to align. Their standards for the work their students turn in with their learning objectives. And I help them, think about how to articulate learning objectives, clearly thinking about what aligns with their values and also what’s a reasonable workload for a one credit course. There wasn’t much focus on grading because the students really aren’t allowed to grade. They have to have a faculty mentor who signs off on the grades. But there was definitely there were conversations about it. Students thought, they would come to me thinking like, you’ve helped me design these really interesting assignments, and all of a sudden I’m freaking out ’cause I have to grade my peers. Like, how am I going to do that? How do I actually tell them what good or, not good work looks like? So we did have some conversations, but they weren’t, we didn’t go into the weeds. I’ll put it that way. Yeah.

Boz: Because that has still been one of the most. Fascinating and puzzling things to me as big of a role that grading is to an educator’s life, whether we enjoy it or want it to be, until we are able to burn the entire system down and get rid of grades completely. It is a huge part of an educator’s, career.

Adriana Streifer: Absolutely.

Adriana Streifer: Absolutely. It’s amazing to me too. It’s this thing that we all have to do and there’s no, there’s almost no learning around it, right? It’s just, this is how it was done when I was a student and I, and then people stumble their way into better practices. I’m glad that we’re now at a point where there are, people, like Sean, I’m so glad that there is this grading podcast and that Center for grading reform, right? That this idea that we can collectively come together as a profession and talk about and research what makes grading effective. It’s a huge responsibility when you think about it.

Sharona: And I have an analogy I use that traditional grades are the fire blanket that is smothering your course.

Adriana Streifer: Oh.

Sharona: And when I hear about like course design institutes, that’s basically we, what we do, we have a, we do a full five day, 30 plus hour course redesign institute. And we start with the purpose of grades. That’s the beginning of backwards design for us. Because if you don’t know why you’re assigning a grade, then every decision you make, every learning outcome you come up with every structure, every assessment. All of it is for a purpose that is not defined. So that’s our first stop is what is your purpose for your grades? And then the second question we ask people to give and they can’t do it, is what is the 32nd elevator pitch story of your course? That does not rely on content from your course and people can’t do it.

Adriana Streifer: Yeah.

Sharona: I, my pitch like say for calculus two is, I say Calculus two is about three things. It’s the mathematics of accumulation. It’s the mathematics of the infinite, and it’s the mathematics of motion in space. And that’s, those are the three maths we’re gonna learn in calculus two. But, or if I talk about pre-calculus, I’m gonna talk about, it’s the study of T two variables change in relationship to each other, and their average rates have changed so that we can model the world. Most people cannot say those sentences about their course.

Adriana Streifer: Yeah,

Sharona: they cannot.

Adriana Streifer: I love that. Can I steal that? I’m gonna borrow like the

Sharona: Absolutely. Please do. Please steal all of it, because I want these backwards design courses to add these two steps that I think are being skipped before you even go into everything else.

Adriana Streifer: And I run. Our course Design Institute, which is likewise a five day institute. And this is so interesting to me. We don’t start with grading, but we do actually focus for one of the days on partially part of the day on grading. And historically we didn’t, Michael and I didn’t do it because we used to think of grades as an administrative, a bureaucratic thing that we’re required to do that was evaluative, but not related to learning. When we’re talking about learning, we should talk about assessment. If you’re talking about grades, you’re talking about, bureaucracy, putting a number on something. He, Michael and I have totally changed our opinion on that because. Grades reflect your values, right? And the way you reflect your values is going to show up in your pedagogy. And even if you have I love your analogy of the fire blanket, right? If you could have pedagogy that does reflect your values, and then if your grading process does something totally different, it doesn’t matter because students will pay attention to the thing that feels like the ultimate consequence to them, which is what’s going to lead to their grades.

So that’s why, Michael and I are working on this tool that we use during the Alternative grading Institute, and we’re readying it for publication. It’s called the grading Scheme. Anatomy. Yeah. I’ve moved away a lot from, like I mentioned earlier. I’m not so interested in defining different types of alternative greeting. I’m more interested now in describing the entire landscape of choices that are available to instructors when they grade. And I want them to understand that. The choices they make about grading intersect with every other dimension of pedagogy. And then the pedagogical choices they make will influence how they grade. These things are all interrelated, right? It’s the.

Sharona: Grades are way bigger than we think they are.

Adriana Streifer: Right. Things that don’t seem like they’re about grades, such as how much feedback am I giving students, or how many formative assessments am I doing? Who participates in giving feedback? Am I doing peer feedback? Do I give students choices? How flexible I am I in deadlines? All of that relates to grading, even if it’s not directly about grading, right? So all of those things are things that we’re putting in our grading scheme, anatomy. So I’m excited for that to come together. Michael and I are getting really close to submitting it for publication.

Boz: Just to let you know, ’cause Michael did talk about that when he was on the podcast back in episode 118 and he did, I don’t remember if it was on the podcast or if it was off air, but he did promise to come back after that gets publicized to talk in detail about that. And I’d love to have you both on to talk about that work because it sounded

Adriana Streifer: That would be great.

Boz: Fascinating. Like it really,

Adriana Streifer: I’d love to, yeah, I’d be really excited about it. And actually that was one thing the Alt Grading Institute was great, was really good for, was getting participant feedback and also just seeing their experiences with it. We were, it gave us a lot of information about what still needed to change. There were some things that worked well and some things that were unnecessarily complicated and confusing. So we’ve done a lot of revisions since then. So I’m really grateful to the Institute, not only for what it did for the participants, but also what it did for us.

Sharona: And I would just pitch to everyone who teaches a course design Institute, please add, at the beginning, two things. What’s the purpose of your grade, both for you as an instructor and for this particular course? Because you need to know, I’ll give you a quick example. Anatomy and physiology that course is often a gatekeeper for nursing. So you need to think about the purpose of your grade in that class. And we had Jeff Schinske on, I think it was, who said that he’s had students beg him to fail them instead of giving them a C because a C would not let them retake the course, but a C would knock them out of a nursing program option.

Adriana Streifer: Oh, wow. That’s fascinating. Fascinating.

Sharona: So again, what’s the purpose of your course? What’s the purpose of your grades? And then please articulate very succinctly what your course is about. Because it’s gonna give you everything you need to stand on to design this course. So that’s my pitch. And then one other comment about what you said about labels. We completely agree. That’s why number one, this is the grading podcast, not the alternative grading podcast. And the word alternative is planned to be obsolescent. We want these principles to be what we mean by grading. That’s the aspirational goal.

Adriana Streifer: I love that. Yeah.

Sharona: Now, I think I interrupted both of you with that last statement.

Adriana Streifer: No, I apologize. That’s wonderful. I can’t remember what I was about to say. So it doesn’t, it was something about, oh, nevermind. Doesn’t matter. I appreciate that though. I like this idea that yeah, get rid of the alternative. Let’s just make it part of the one of every way of grading is like a menu of options, right? People are just making the choices that align with their goals and their values.

Boz: Yeah. All right. We are coming up on time already. This has been really fun, Adriana and I am serious. I’d love to have you and Michael both back at the same time or even separately, to talk about that research, when it comes out, when it gets publicized. ‘Cause it sounds fascinating to me. But I wanted to thank you for coming on. Is there any last minute thing before we s sign off?

Sharona: No, I’m good. I dunno. Adriana, any last comments? Yeah. Anything we didn’t cover?

Adriana Streifer: No, thank you both so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed it. I’d be happy to, would love to come back to talk about the grading scheme, anatomy. I’m just really passionate about supporting instructors in getting away from that, that feeling we’ve all had when we’re like, oh gosh, it’s time to grade, right? I don’t want that to be a part of any instructor’s life and I don’t want the dread of grades to be a part of students’ experiences either. Really that’s what’s motivating it for me is. The wellbeing and the learning of students and instructors both. Thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed talking to you

Boz: I can’t think of a better note to end on. So thank you for being here. And to our listeners, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

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

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