The Grading Podcast

141 – Chris_Sarkonak_2

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Chris Sarkonak: And so we talk about building models and observation and what science is really all about. And you know that’s often a misconception that students have is that science is this concrete thing, but it’s actually, taking observations of the world around us and building models that are slightly less wrong every step of the way, but every model we have is wrong to some degree. And that’s, as we keep getting closer and closer to that universal or theoretical objective truth, we’re able to make new breakthroughs that give us new things to technologies and things like that. So I want students to see that science isn’t this often misconceived idea of that it’s right or it’s wrong, and there’s no in-between. It’s different patterns of thought and old models that are more wrong can still have tremendous value and tremendous application.

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

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

Boz: Hello and welcome to the Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of two hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today? Sharona?

Sharona: So I am incredibly grateful for a couple of things, the two things are sleep and air conditioning. And the reason I’m so grateful is that my air conditioning got fixed yesterday and we are going into a heat wave in California this weekend. So I am rested and I am not overheated. So this is a very good day. How about you Boz?

Boz: Good time to get your AC fixed ’cause yeah, it’s gonna get hot, but I can barely move right now, so.

Sharona: That’s your own fault.

Boz: So my oldest daughter who’s graduated high school last year, she is 18. Her and a couple of her friends have been going and working out, my daughter’s done judo for a very long time. She hadn’t been on the mat in a while, so she’s really gotten into just going in and lifting and working out to have something to do. But she’s been bugging me about going with her, to show her some of the lifts and things and to educate her a little bit. So yeah, I’ve gone the last two days like the first time in probably five or six years, and I’ve gone the last two days and I, even though I’m 52, have not figured out how to take it easy so I can barely move my arms and back right now. Other than that though, I’m doing good.

Sharona: So you went back last night after hurting after the first day.

Boz: Yeah. Absolute. We went back and we did arms last night, so my arms hurt now.

Sharona: I have zero sympathy. Absolutely zero. But we also had a really good week last week because we got to go out to dinner with the person who is sitting in our virtual studio right now. Welcome back in the virtual studio, Chris Sarkonak. So welcome back.

Chris Sarkonak: Good morning. It’s great to be back. It’s wonderful to see you two again.

Boz: For those that heard this name and thought it maybe sounding familiar, we did just have you on not too long ago, on episode 136. But definitely wanted to welcome you back. And just how was your trip to LA?

Chris Sarkonak: It was amazing. This is the, I came down for a conference Mike Nicholson of Learning Inspired he’s absolutely amazing and he is on a tear trying to change education. He put together the Student Power Summit. This I think was the sixth year, if I remember right. And he invited me down to Ohio for it last year and to come back for it in LA this year. And it, it was just such an incredible trip. The program is amazing. There’s a huge K to 12 focus in it. Which is, it was up my alley and and a lot of pieces about student agency and how assessment and putting power in students’ hands comes into play through all that.

Boz: You said he invited you. Does that mean you came as , a presenter or a keynote or.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah, so I came down as one of the presenters in the program. And that was the same case last year. He he came across an article that I’d written for Grow Beyond Grades a few years back and just love the work that I do, and wanted me to be part of this.

Boz: So what was, your topic or your presentation, this year about?

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. So what we’re looking at is I did a presentation on my un grading development that I’ve done. So the collaborative grading piece with student portfolios and conferencing, and going into what that looks like in practice. I think there’s a lot of research that kind of goes along with that sort of stuff, but I don’t know, in scouring the internet, there’s not a lot of here’s what it looks like implemented or things like that. Like a lot of that stuff is still coming to fruition in some ways. So yeah so I got to. Present, what my classroom looks like how to implement it in your own sort of thing or what it could li look like. I guess one of the big things I always go ahead and say is thi this is what worked for me and I hope that there’s lots that people can learn from it, but if you try and carbon copy me, it’s almost inevitably gonna blow up in your face. You’ve gotta find something that, that speaks to you, speaks to your students, that’s, that comes together for everyone. And everyone needs to be truly bought into it and believe that’s the best way to do things. And so I don’t look for anyone to do exactly what I do. I hope that I inspire them to follow a similar path and find their own

Sharona: and I was looking at a little bit about that conference, and I am a little bit in awe that you spoke at the same conference as Father Boyle. Yeah. Father Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries. Yeah. That’s pretty Talk about empowerment.

Chris Sarkonak: Homeboy Industries is a huge supporter of Mike and the student Power Summit. And having them as part of it is just such an amazing experience. And we got to hear Father Boyle speak at the end and it was definitely a highlight of the conference. He’s such an incredible person. I, I. I think everyone walked away just awe inspired.

Boz: Yeah, i’ve heard him speak once. He is an incredible speaker and just, the levels of inspiration you leave one of his presentations from. It’s, it is quite amazing. If you ever get a chance, if you’re listening to this and you ever get a chance to listen to anything he does, please take advantage of it. You’ll be thankful.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah, absolutely. He’s just such a true and genuine person who deeply cares. And that’s the amazing thing about the conference is that’s the profile of so many people and that’s why I’m happy to be part of it is, I feel like I’m with people who just wanna make change, who wanna make a difference in, in education and there’s nothing more special to be part of, I think.

Sharona: And I hadn’t heard about learning inspired, I think in part because it is more K 12 focused Yeah. At some level. But the idea that there’s an entire organization dedicated to student agency and educational context is pretty cool. And we might have to get some context from you to invite to come on and talk about how that plays in with grades. So

Chris Sarkonak: Absolutely.

Sharona: I think that’s amazing. But that’s not why we wanted you to come back, because we just talked to you a few weeks ago on the pod. Yeah. Boz, do you wanna share why it was, why did we had to cut off the previous episode and we said, okay, we gotta immediately reschedule. So you wanna share a little bit about that?

Boz: Yeah, last time we were talking and you just brought up that you were invited to that conference partly based on something that you’d written for Grow Beyond Grades. I’m wondering if that was the same. ’cause that was part of the reason we wanted you to come back on, was I had come across this un grading spectrum that you had written for Grow Beyond Grades. Was it the same thing?

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

Boz: That’s interesting. That was not planned, but yeah, we came across this that you wrote for the Grow Beyond Grades.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: And we really wanted to talk, bring you back and talk to you some about where this came from and just looking at this actual un grading spectrum that you have in this. And kind of talk about, ’cause I’ve never seen this put together like this. And I think it’s really interesting. We link this on your last podcast, Sharona. I’m sure we’ll link it on this one as, as well. Correct?

Sharona: Yep.

Boz: So first can you just tell us a little bit about like where this idea or where, this kind of came from?

And so I started to do some research and do some digging about, what else was out there. And, I’m sure on that chart there, there’s probably more that I’ve missed. I don’t claim it to be perfect or anything, but it came to be how I thought about assessment models that were out there and was able to put ’em onto a progression, being a physics teacher, I immediately thought the rainbow spectrum and how you go from one end to the other and, it’s differentiations in energy. And that’s how I ended up conceiving of that idea. And it became a powerful thing to see all that in one place and to think about the mindset that I’ve been in, in different points in my career. ’cause. At different points in my career. I’ve been through all those mindsets and I’ve grown into the one that I am at now. And that took time. And it took experience. And sometimes it took taking a hard look at what I was doing and whether it was working or not and things of that nature. And yeah, I, I decided that, okay, this is part of my process. So I, that initial article was describing how I came to do what I do and and what it actually looks like, like in my classroom. And so I, I wanted that, that graphic to be part of it. I thought it was important.

Sharona: So you just said something really important. You said your mindset. Yeah. Is that where the little, so there’s some descriptions right under the horizontal line

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah

Sharona: about what your perception of grading is, and those were your mindsets as you progressed through this? Yeah. Because I love those descriptions.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. And it’s honest, like I, when I first became a teacher, I think like a lot of teachers we start by assessing how we were assessed. And quite often teacher training programs kinda reinforce that they often don’t dive into the variety of assessment models that are actually out there. And so when they perpetuate that it means that a lot of teachers come into the practice or even if they inherit what their predecessors had done for assessment, previous teacher says, Hey, here’s how you set up your grade book, and off you go. And at the beginning it was very much that mindset of, okay, I need to continue perpetuating that because that’s just how it’s done everywhere. Kids need to get used to it. And then I started to come across okay, something’s not right. Like I’m looking at my students, I’m talking to my students and I’m seeing from the other side what this is doing to them. And okay, so then my mindset started to evolve a bit and it kept progressing. And I think now if I worked in a place that didn’t have written into law that I have to produce a grade twice a year, I’d probably be all the way to the pass fail side. But we work within the system that we’re working in so

Boz: That’s interesting that you brought up the teacher programs. ‘Cause that’s one of the things that I bring up and talk a lot about is I do not understand why and how if grading is as big of a part of an educator’s career . Why there’s no education on it. We have talked to literally thousands of educators and the number of people that have said that they had any kind of training whatsoever on the art and skill of grading. It’s a handful, and most of them it was, a lesson or a unit maybe in a course. But and talking about those descriptions that you were talking about Sharona, I love this. I want to read what’s under the traditional grading. There’s nothing wrong. This is what we’ve always done and it’s fine. Anything else only works at unrealistic schools. If that’s not the mindset that I have come across so many times with people that just don’t even want to think about grading reform and I. I do, I think this is because this is what we had done to us. This is what’s been done and just never question it. And quite honestly, if I come to an educator and they really seriously question and think about and really reflect on the grading practices and decide traditionals for them. Hey all the more power to you. But I’ve not met many people that have done that. It is the unexamined way we do it because it’s what was done to us.

Chris Sarkonak: One of the things that I always noticed with that is, when I started to do professional development sessions and working with groups of teachers, like you were saying like with teacher training programs, like a lot of it is focused on perpetuating a lot of that, right? I still think back to my teacher training program and we learned, here’s how you enter it into the grade book, but nothing about the calculation. Here’s how you make a good multiple choice. Here’s how you make a good short answer. Here’s how you make a good long answer and combine ’em all to make it into a test. So you have a variety of things. There was nothing there about how much just simply entering into a grade book can alter things or the psychology behind it all and how it affects students as a whole. And their approaches to learning and things like that. And one of the things that I started to do at the start of professional development sessions was I put up a mock student with, a chapter stuff broken into chapters with assignments, quizzes, and tests. And, here’s a scattering of grades that they get and what each one was out of. And we play a game called Make the Grade. And, I had the privilege of being part of our school division’s leadership team when we brought in a different grade book system a few years back. So I also got to see what a lot of teachers did for grading and how they entered grades.

So with my math background, I was like, okay, how big of a difference can we actually make with what I’ve seen teachers do? And so I was able to take this mock student and create about a 30% spread just based on how the teacher enters the grade into the grade book. Since then I, I’ve also done the same thing with standards based grading and created a mock student in that environment and can create, again, about a 30% spread. It, it tightens the range a little bit for sure. But you can still get quite the spread depending on if you’re stuck in a system where standards based grading still needs to lead to a singular number and there needs to be a calculation involved. You can still create quite the spread depending on how you develop that, and from what I’ve seen from different avenues.

Boz: That’s really interesting ’cause Sharona and I do something similar in our trainings grading is the misuse of mathematics. Yeah. We’ll tear down, a single assessment. But we end up going all the way up to okay’s, assume we’ve done all this. Here’s to mock students. We have the Sharona student that is the compliant follows all the rules, does all the, compliance stuff.

Sharona: Except I was a better test taker than our sample student.

Boz: We do, we put the names on because it’s funny. It’s, yeah. And the Bosley student really is very similar to the kind of student I was the Sharona student, not as much. We have that student and then we have the Bosley student who didn’t do any of the homework,

Chris Sarkonak: yeah.

Boz: But does really well on the test and stuff. And we do the same thing. We show how, depending on where you put your weights, both students could get anywhere from a D to a B.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: And the, when the Bosley student is getting the D, the Sharona student was getting the B and when I, when the Bosley student was getting the B, the Sharona student was getting the D. Yeah. And that’s assuming all the other things that, that we spent the 15, 20 minutes before tearing down and showing how inconsistent those can be from person to person.

Chris Sarkonak: Yep.

Boz: That, yeah, just that weight. But I’ve never seen it done with standards based grading.

Sharona: Question about that. Is it because the standards that you’re talking about have groups and there’s a still a weighted average in there or something like that?

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. ’cause there’s different variations depending on like some people that I’ve talked to have said. Just treat every standard as equal. And so do a calculation based off that. But then other people have said if this standard takes, say, three days to work through and a lesser standard takes maybe a half a day to work through, then should they be we weighted equal or should there actually be some sort of a weighting to them? So then if you take that point of view, then you create another different calculation, or, you can do it based on time spent. You could do it based on, perceived importance, you could do it based on I think Liljedahl has, in Building Thinking Classrooms, another approach as well where they look at, okay, is it done in regards to what level of depth of thinking or depth of knowledge? And so then there’s waiting in that system as well. So some outcomes end up being out of four, some outcomes are only out of two. But as you keep adding these different ways of doing some sort of calculation, it creates the inconsistency again in the same way.

Boz: Yeah. So we, when we do our beginning training, the one after the grading is the misuse of math. We look at what we call the grading architecture of a course, and there’s really four decisions that you need to make to set up a grading system, a fully thought out grading system. And that last choice is how do you take all these individual skills or learning targets that have, that a student has or has not shown proficiency on and wrap that up into a final grade. Yeah. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. And you’re right, the more mathy it gets, the more inconsistency that can be introduced. But, and that, that kind of decision, that fourth decision is one of those decisions in traditional grading, you don’t have to think about.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: Like it, it’s, if I do all the other three decisions and the student ends in an 87. I don’t have to do a lot of thinking about that. It’s, in fact, school systems usually will tell that for us.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: 90 to a hundred or 92 to a hundred, that’s your A. So a lot of people don’t understand that. Sharona, you and I have seen this a lot when we’ve working with people that have tried to redo and restructure their grading. That decision is often the one that kind of gets people into this spin out or this rut, or just creates some problems that were completely unintentional problems. But it was because that decision wasn’t fully thought out.

Sharona: But I think it goes, what we’ve discovered is it goes back to that decision, the problems with that decision. Goes back to they haven’t thought as deeply as they need to about what it means to succeed in the course.

Boz: Oh yeah.

Sharona: And even though we tell them to do that, they skate over it. They’re like, oh, I have my learning out coach account. I really wanna get to all these mechanics. And then we get to the end and I’m like what’s the purpose of your course? And then we’re back to rolling it back to square one. So yeah, I can totally see that. And I also see how in my own system I have, this is why I am uncomfortable with a proficiency scale that is anything other than. Good enough and a couple gradations of you’re not quite good enough. But let me tell you a little bit more, right? So like I have two levels of below good enough, meaning usually either you need to revise this ’cause it’s close enough to revise or you have to retake it or you didn’t give me enough to even tell you. So there’s maybe three levels and then there’s only one that’s and you’re good. Because I really struggle with good to great in my context. So I don’t do that. I did do it when we started. We did do it, we had two levels and decaying average and all that stuff. And then the other thing I do is I just set a bar and then I do a count. I really do I’ve tried to do buckets and it just doesn’t work for me. But it’s interesting. I wanted to move though on this spectrum if I could ask you. So that was the first one. There’s nothing wrong.

Chris Sarkonak: Yep.

Sharona: But this is the one, this one kind of hit a little bit dagger to the heart. ’cause I’m struggling between phase two and phase three. Phase two on your spectrum here is grading needs to be improved, but it is the professional responsibility of the teacher. Students have no place in the process. Versus, grading lacks validity without student input. Students must be part of the process. Equity can only come from involving the student. Can you explain how that distinction came about?

So when we came back, I was like. I’m just gonna talk to my students. They’re in the learner’s seat. They’re the ones who are experiencing this. I’m years outta the learner’s seat at this point, right? So talk to them about what their thoughts are and what they’ve experienced. If I want them to engage, then they need to own it. And so I started to bring them into the conversation and I realized I really needed to do this earlier. And I realized how much importance there was in that student agency piece. But again, like I, I was also at that point where for part of my career, like one of my mindsets was, okay, like I’m the professional. I’ve been told by my teacher training program many times over. I’ve been told by my administration many times over that I’m the professional. It’s my job, it’s my duty to go ahead and develop this system and effectively subject students to it. I’m the one with the professionalism and the training, they’re not. And so I lived in that mindset for a while, and that’s where I dipped in and out of the standards based and the gamification and pieces like that. And then coming outta COVID, that’s where I stepped into the whole, no students need to be part of this. I’ve tried these different things over the years and. I know that they work for many people and I’m never trying to discount that or things like that.

But I came to realize that kind of the most powerful thing that I could do would be to make sure that they’re part of that process and then they’ll own it. They’ll take more responsibility that, I, I hear so many teachers talking, in staff rooms about if students can get away with it they will. Or, that sort of mentality or oh, they didn’t do well on this test. It’s their fault not mine. And, all these self-defense mechanisms that come into place. And that’s what I saw too with that initial statement was. I don’t think anyone goes into teaching with an evil laugh and, bringing their fingertips together like Montgomery Burns from the Simpsons saying okay, I’m going to try and do as much damage as I can. I think we all come into it with wanting to do the best for our students and trying to do what we believe is right by them and to prepare them as much as we can for what’s in the world next. But I think when we start to be confronted by some of these things like that spread in the grade where, like I said when I was talking about 30% spread, like I was talking like the one that I did took a student from a 45% to a 75%.

Boz: So from a failing score to a C.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. Which is a huge difference. That’s, that impacts their life quite significantly.

Boz: Now, real quickly, because of what I just read, that anything else only works in unrealistic schools.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: For anyone that maybe hasn’t already listened to episode 136, when we talked a little bit more about kind of some of your origin and stuff. Yeah. Can you give a real quick detail our rundown about the environment and the school that you’re teaching in right now? So if people are listening to this, they’re not going, oh yeah, I’m sure he’s at some, unreal, unrealistic ivy in the, school in the sky thing.

Boz: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause when you started your physics program at your school, you took over a program that had typically how many students in a class?

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. I think the grade 11 program the school had to offer the bare minimum which is one course per semester and usually it’d be about 15, 20 students tops. And then for the grade 12 side, again, same thing, just because of opportunity and stuff like that, we, they had to offer one per semester. And so that was usually anywhere from about eight to 12.

Boz: And no ap? No AP physics.

Chris Sarkonak: Nope. Didn’t ex exist back.

Sharona: And the physics were one semester classes the not a full year?

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah, no. So just single semester. So in our system we’ve got five blocks per day. And or five periods per day. They’re 65 minute periods. And generally that gives us about 85 school days per year to work with or per semester to work with.

Boz: And then, what’s your program looking like right now?

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah so now like I said with the changes that I’ve made and making it a very hands-on program and having it be led by student student direction and giving ’em say, and things like that it’s become one of the more popular sciences in our building. And so now I’ve got, like this year I had three sections of grade 11 that were all maxed out at 28. And there was a wait list.

Sharona: Per semester?

Chris Sarkonak: No total . And then so I mean going from about 30 to 35 when I first started, now I’m upwards of just 85 ish or so. So fairly big bump there. And then grade 12 this year I’ve. Last year I had three sections that were all in twenties due to staffing. This year they made two sections of it, but I had a, again, a wait list for a third section that had, we had room in our scheduling, should have been another 20 ish or so. So the two that did run this year were about 25 each, so 50 students in probably another 20 had there been a third section made, so about 70 in grade 12. And students went ahead and petitioned to go ahead and have our school starter offering AP physics as well. With the environment that, that I’ve created it, it’s also become a safe space for students. And so I’ve, I had a lot of students who took AP physics, so last year when it ran, I had 15 students in the program. And that was only the second year of it. And most students actually were not intending to continue with physics. There was a couple that were business majors. There was a couple that did go into physics. But a lot of ’em chose different paths, but they had such a great time through the 11 and 12 courses that they really wanted to keep being in that room. I even had some students that over the previous couple years, had high anxiety issues and things like that, and they came to see that room as their safe space. And so they, they didn’t necessarily have the highest achieving or highest performing academics, but they wanted to be there and they wanted to give it a shot. And for them success was, being able to simply sit through that three hour exam. That’s as grueling as AP physics is. And I couldn’t be prouder of ’em. And seeing that’s what my classrooms become. I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.

Boz: So I wanna get back to the, to the spectrum. I wanted to bring that up though because of that kind of last line. If anyone’s listening and they haven’t already listened to episode 136, we do get in a little bit more into it there with some of the, how this was done and some of the details. But I, I do wanna get back to this. And Sharona, I wanted to ask you, you had brought those kind of next one up, and then you also made the comment about it being a dagger to the heart. So do you wanna explain why you said that?

Sharona: What I struggle, what I’ve been struggling with is I have had trouble understanding for myself how to bring the student input in. And I’m still struggling with it, even though I’m actually doing it for the first time this semester. I still struggle with it, not because I don’t think their input is valid. I’m having a lot of trouble getting them to give me input. And I think it’s the context I’m in. I am in a first year college course with students, most of whom are not coming from environments where college is a traditional thing. So I’ve got a lot of first generation students. I have a lot of students that are lower on the socioeconomic status. And a lot of students for whom family is not particularly supportive. And when I ask them to contribute I don’t feel like I have the skills yet to properly get their contributions. So I. I’m like, okay, yeah, it probably does lack validity, but I don’t know how to not do that.

Boz: And I’m in a kind of similar but yet different because most of my alternative gradings have I think most people would classify it as Mastery base or a kind of a combination between mastery and specs. And I’m reading this and I do have lots of student inputs in my class. I’ve talked about it before. There was a training I went to, 15 years ago called Capturing Kids’ Hearts that talked a lot about student agency. And they do have, my students have a lot of say in how the class is set up, but you’re right, I’ve never extended that too much into the grading aspect of it. That’s there, there’s a few things that we’ll talk about and, we’ll agree about some of the expectations of reassessments and it’s not something that I’m saying necessarily saying with pride or not, or saying with guilt. It’s just, it’s the reality I’m in right now. But yeah, would, when you said that Sharona, I was like, yeah you wouldn me both.

Sharona: But I also wonder, I know of people who do this at the university level. I don’t know of too many who do it in a STEM field at the university level. And one of the challenges I have is just quantity of time with my students. So normally I would only have three 50 minute periods for 15 weeks. So I would have 45 class days that are under an hour for a whole semester. And so just the time it takes to build those relationships. Now, this semester I have double that because I have a workshop. But I don’t feel like it’s as easy for me to build the student relationships as I have seen in a high school setting. I don’t know if it’s the students’ mindsets that are different. I know that college students, we saw this a lot in our dual enrollment program. I come across as way more intimidating than Bosley does, and I think he’s scarier than me in real life. But they’re like, I’m the professor, so there’s like a hierarchy thing that’s frightening to them. So I’m struggling to get them. To engage. So I don’t know what’s your sense of when they come in as grade elevens, although now they’ve heard about you, but back in the day Yeah. How long did it take you to get them to truly, were they willing to engage from day one when you brought this to them?

Chris Sarkonak: For what I was doing, there was a bit of a progression there and nowadays, like a lot of kids have already heard about what I do coming in and so that’s affected things a little bit. So it steals my punchline a little bit, but I still go through the whole process ’cause it’s it’s absolutely worth it for students to go ahead and see where it’s coming from. But I, I do have to dedicate a fairly substantial amount of time. So when they’re first coming into that grade 11 class for their first experience with me, day one, there’s no course outline, there’s no, here, let’s start into the notes or things like that. I start putting some nature of science puzzles in front of them. And so we do things like inquiry cubes where, there’s different patterns on five outta six sides. And you gotta figure out what should go on to the missing side. And so we talk about building models and observation and what science is really all about. And that’s often a misconception that students have is that science is this concrete thing, but it’s actually, taking observations of the world around us and building models that are slightly less wrong every step of the way, but every model we have is wrong to some degree. And that’s as we keep getting closer and closer to that universal or theoretical objective truth. We’re able to make new breakthroughs that give us new things, new technologies and things like that. So I want students to see that science isn’t this often misconceived idea of that it’s right or it’s wrong, and there’s no in-between. It’s different patterns of thought and old models that are more wrong can still have tremendous value and tremendous application. And so I try to build that with students for about a week and a half or so, and get them experiencing that. And we work in collaborative groups that are all random. So they work with different people every single day for that week and a half. They get to know the students around them even if they’ve never met them before and how other people think and how to interact together.

And once we’ve established that, then I say, let’s take that scientific lens that we’ve just developed and let’s turn it on the education system. You all have over a decade of experience as learners. What’s worked, what hasn’t worked and how do we build something new together based on those experiences? And the really interesting part is it’s quite often the students who have typically struggled performance-wise in school, that end up being the most vocal because they, they know that experience of struggle. And you know how, if you go ahead and you start slipping into that hole of, okay, I had a bad test. Now I’ve gotta do impossibly good to recover. And so all of a sudden this pressure mounts and then when that pressure mounts, the anxiety builds and then all of a sudden you walk into the next test and you blank. And then instead of doing better, you do even worse. Even if you have prepared better and all these pieces start to, to slip away and, those students end up being the most vocal because they know what it’s like to have lived that experience.

Boz: The, yeah. They’ve learned the problems of the current system. We, yeah. We ensure as mathematicians and you as a scientists, we know we learn more from our failures than our successes, which is part of the reason why it’s so hard to do most any kind of educational reform or change, but especially I think when it comes to something as fundamental as grading

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: Is because at some degree, everyone that’s now currently in the role of an educator had to have had some level of success at the game of grading. We don’t get to where we’re at without some level of success. So yeah, the fact that the students that have struggled the most and have had the most bad experience with traditional grading being the loudest contributors and the voices does not surprise me one bit.

Chris Sarkonak: No, and that’s the thing. It, and that goes back to that first mindset on that un grading spectrum is, the, this is fine part. It has educators who all have Yeah. Like we have multiple degrees and it worked for us.

Boz: Yeah.

Chris Sarkonak: And then if we’re removed from that learner seat for too long, it’s almost like we, we forget that, what about our neighbor who is beside us growing up, or things like that. And. And there’s not just that one path to success.

Sharona: So I’m gonna be a little bit of a devil’s advocate for a second. Okay. Because I wanna talk about there’s the grade, right? Which I, the three of us absolutely agree distinctions are almost meaningless in any of these systems. But there is one distinction that I feel compelled to make, which is, are you ready to go on? Are you really, ’cause I can’t have a student who does absolutely nothing, get a passing grade and let them go on to the next class. Like that just, that’s, it’s not fair to the student and it’s not fair to anyone else. Yeah. So how do we balance, and that’s the fourth level here. Which in your mindset is grading of any sort is the antithesis of learning and does irreparable harm to students, it must be completely removed, pass fail. You’re not counting that as grading, in that con context. Are you?

Chris Sarkonak: I think that, like you said, devil’s advocate, but I agree with you entirely.

Sharona: What, I guess what I mean is that’s the pushback on letting students do it is no,

Chris Sarkonak: The thing

Sharona: is somebody has to decide what path looks like.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. And so that’s the thing is like when we’re developing this system with students we not only develop criteria has to, what outcomes are important. Like for example we look at both the standards that are in our curriculum document and we also look at the global competencies that are part of it as well. And students immediately realize okay, it’s the global competencies that’ll actually prepare them for the rest of their lives. Learning some random physics formula and how to utilize it, great. That can be a way of developing those competencies, but it’s the competencies that are the most important piece. Now, I also go ahead and have students develop if you’re building portfolios of your work and looking at different ways to demonstrate your understanding what should be the threshold for a pass? What should that look like? And so students come to that sort of agreement. Quite often students are a little bit harsher than I am in, in what that threshold should be. And so , we focus more on the ranges. What should a 50 to a 60 look like? What should a 60 to a 70, 70 to 80, and so on, right? And if a student comes in for the portfolio conferences is really, I’m expecting those nice even numbers or maybe in the middle sort of thing. But I often end up with students who are like, I think I’m at a 72. I’m like, that’s really interesting how you got to that exact of a number. You’re in the right range. So I’m not gonna argue too much, but what was the mindset there? But I also get student conversations where, you know, over the years I’ve had students come up to me and say okay, Mr. Sarkonak, like I, you know what? I made some mistakes. Life took over. I was dealing with some stuff this semester, put me down for a 40. I haven’t done enough to earn the grade. I don’t deserve the credit in the course. I’d really like to try it again next semester if you’ll have me. And, my, my reply is always, yes, we’d love to have you back. Life happens. It’s okay. And quite often they do give it another go. But, I’ve seen since doing this that students do still fail, but they take ownership and responsibility for it. It’s not this thing that was done to them. It’s not this battle. It’s. They own it and recognize it.

Boz: It’s not that I failed ’cause the teacher doesn’t like me, which is right. Regardless of if there’s any truth to it or not. That’s the student opinion and student voice that I have heard so many times from students that have failed. It’s oh yeah, I’m failing ’cause the teacher doesn’t like me. Yeah. I love the fact that your students, like you said, you, you do still have students that failed. The difference between that failing student and traditional failing students is your students take ownership of it. They’re like, yeah I failed. Things happen.

Chris Sarkonak: Absolutely. And so that’s where, we still set standards for what not earning the credit should look like. And that’s a hugely important piece. I don’t think that students get through has often with the credit. Not understanding what’s going on or met a certain learning requirement as they did when I had a traditional system, and they could find ways to game it and to exploit it. I’m not gonna pretend that this system is perfect by any means. Every system, no matter what you do, has its flaws. But I think the big difference here is that instead of, a small percentage in traditional systems getting, of students getting what they truly need and truly sets ’em up for success in life, I think with this system I’m seeing a lot larger percentage and nothing we ever do is gonna be perfect. The whole thing of education is it’s really a game of percentages. But if I can go ahead and appeal to 10% with an old system versus I can see 70 to 80% truly be successful with a new system I’ve gotta go with it. And that’s the best I can do with what I’ve got to work with. And if we were to one day get to a pass fail I would see the conversation as the same where it’s, okay, let’s get rid of the number grades. Let’s just look at it as a holistic thing. Where are we at by the end of the course? Let’s just open the floodgate so to speak. You figure stuff out when you figure it out. And let’s have a conversation about what the threshold should look like and how we demonstrate it.

Boz: Yeah and you even talk about that in this article, that at the time that you wrote this, and I think it’s still the case, you are limited to where and what you would like to do with your grading by the structures in the systems that you’re in. Not only does your context require a final grade, it’s not just a letter grade, like you actually have to give a percentage. So where Sharona, you and I have five different, options. You’ve got a hundred, you technically have you could give students a 3%, or a 97%, or like you recommended a 72% for himself.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah, you know what, it’s even worse than that because we use PowerSchool in our division and they just did an a upgrade that it now goes to three decimal places. So we’re talking accuracy now on a hundred thousand,

Sharona: 10,000.

Chris Sarkonak: Hundred thousand point scale. That’s new this year.

Before that, it was only two decimal places, so it was only a 10,000 point scale. I’ve been on scholarship committees before where here in Canada we have every high school for grads has a what they call a governor general’s medal. And it’s just a blind calculation of average of all your courses has your graduating, and so you just take ’em, add ’em together, see what the average is. Whoever in the building is graduating with the highest average gets that award and it’s seen as one of the most prestigious awards to graduate from high school with. And being on the scholarship committee before, I’ve seen students that have been 0.02% different, and that’s what’s decided who gets the Governor Generals and who doesn’t like that could be how it was entered into a grade book. That could be a bonus question on a random test. It could be one kid had exactly the same performance and in their pre-calc class or even their AP calc class, they might’ve gone ahead and gotten one rounding error that the other one didn’t. And that’s somehow decided this level of prestige for graduation and and.

Sharona: There is an example, I don’t usually use it, but if you have a student who takes, so we sometimes have a five point GPA scale if you have an honors or ap. And so if someone takes six honors or AP classes, ’cause we can, and then someone else takes the same six but adds orchestra. An orchestra is not on a five level scale, it’s on a four ’cause it’s not an honors. That student with Straight A’s has a lower GPA than the student who took just the six classes. Yeah. So this other student took an extra class Got it. Perfect. And has a lower GPA than the student who only took six.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah. And over

Sharona: my, if that doesn’t prove to you the ridiculousness of this.

Chris Sarkonak: Yep. And that’s the thing, like it’s. When you start looking at what grades lead to and I still remember those two kids who were 0.02% off from each other, and all year they were battling it out tooth and nail. Like there, there was such an unhealthy level of competition and anxiety that created between them. And if they had actually been able to work together and see themselves as collaborators, like the amazing things that they could have done would’ve been spectacular. And instead this system pit them against each other and made them adversaries.

Boz: The traditional system that they were working in didn’t create leadership and social influence.

Chris Sarkonak: You almost said that with a straight face all the way through. No I mean that, that’s one of the biggest pitfalls, right? Is. I did coming off of COVID, I also did thinking classroom stuff from Peter Liljedahl’s work. And, I, I absolutely love like so many of the different things that I’ve been able to implement from that and that I’ve learned from it. But I did the grading piece was at the time I was halftime physics, halftime math. And so I did the thinking classrooms standards-based grading model with my math classes. But then I did this ungraded collaborative portfolio based model with my physics classes and being able to compare them side by side at the same time and seeing that in my physics classes, there was no competition anymore. It was all collaborative. The students were learning from each other. They needed me less and less has I coached ’em more and more in how to be able to rely on each other and that the thoughts and opinions and ideas of those around them are so tremendously valuable. But in my math classes, with the standards-based grading route, there was still that underlying how do we game this? How do we exploit it? And that re resulted in more resistance to the collaborative nature and more competition by the end of the day. And so I was able to compare ’em side by side and see what a vast difference it creates.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: And that you’re right, that kind of competition, especially the competition you were talking about with those two students, that sounded like it got to such an unhealthy level. ‘Cause I, hey, I’ve talked about it before. I love competition. I think, steel can sharpen steel.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Boz: To a point there is a level of healthy competition and then there is a lot past it. And it sounds like the system definitely put these two students against each other to a level that was well beyond healthy competition.

Chris Sarkonak: Oh, absolutely. And you throw into it like the battles for all the scholarship money and everything else, that’s at stake as well. And it just becomes such an adverse thing in the education system. I did a little bit of consulting with one rural school that’s not too far away from here. They decide to bring me in to talk to their staff and, I started talking about this and talking about grades and doing the whole make the grade piece at the beginning of it all. And so many teachers didn’t realize that things were that drastically off. And the principal looked at me and said, okay I’ve gotta stop you right there. She said, we need to have a brief staff meeting for two minutes. We’ve got our awards night coming up. And she said, seeing all this, I’m proposing we stop awards night. She asked the staff, she said, do you know how many grade sevens we have that are not going to be invited to awards night because we effectively have an award for everything now. And, things like that. And it’s, and seeing the invalidity of grades as it is, she said there was two kids who were not gonna get the invite and in grade eight there was one.

Sharona: Ow. Oh no, you don’t do that ever.

Chris Sarkonak: In, in a rural school. She said, they all know each other. They’re all gonna be there on Tuesday at school after Monday’s awards night. And talking about, Hey where were you? And she said, what level of damage is that going to do to those kids? Like they’re struggling a little bit already. This is gonna push ’em over the edge. So she just said, let’s sack the entire awards program and let’s focus on just being more collaborative and trying to support each other.

Boz: Hey, props, props to that admin to be not really expecting that in inviting you in to speak and then listening to it and going, okay, time out. We’ve got this thing in two days, we’re gonna adjust like props to that admin and that kind of leadership. That’s amazing.

Chris Sarkonak: And the wonderful thing was that seeing that and hearing that the entire staff was on board and it was just. It was unanimous. There was no resistance. Everyone was just like, yep. Totally agree.

Sharona: I’m the person at my theater company. We have an educational theater company that I run. And most of the time we are an all admit program. Anyone who signs up gets to be in it. But every once in a while we do a by audition only program.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Sharona: And I’m like, and I have a threshold. If it is below about somewhere around 10% of the people who audition, if less than 10% of the people who audition are gonna get excluded, it is no longer audition only you will find spots for those people. Because I will not take 40 people into a cast and not allow three.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Sharona: If it’s five or six or seven to me that’s enough. But if it’s three, I’m like, Nope. Either you’re finding spots for those three or you’re cutting more people. ’cause I will not do that. And it’s the same thing. Wow. Yeah. Perhaps the admin.

Chris Sarkonak: Yeah.

Sharona: So we are running a little bit long, but we had an entire topic that we didn’t get to. So do we wanna take a few minutes and just

Chris Sarkonak: talk about, you’re gonna have to invite me back again.

Sharona: We need a part three.

Boz: No. And that’s it because the last thing we wanted to talk about was some of the research I know from personal conversations that we had at dinner the other night, that you are in the middle of some right now that isn’t quite finished. Yeah I think we wait and when you do have that and are able to discuss that more, we can come in and talk about that with some of the other research that you’ve already done that we were going to maybe talk about today.

Chris Sarkonak: We got so close again.

Boz: But you know what? Hey I’m good with that. It’s a great, fun conversation. Like I said that we’ve had you on twice now, recently we had a whole dinner with you that you’re just it’s so much fun hanging around with you having these great thought provoking conversations, but we are up on time, so Sharona, any last minute things.

Sharona: Just thank you. Thank you for making the time in your busy schedule to have dinner with us here in Los Angeles. And thank you for coming back on the pod, so appreciate everything that you’re doing.

Chris Sarkonak: Awesome. And I just wanna say thank you both as well. Like this is wonderful and I’ve absolutely loved being able to talk with both of you.

Boz: So thank you for coming on and for everyone else, you’ve been listening to the Grading Pod with Boz and Sharona, and we’ll see you next week.

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

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