The Grading Podcast

Ashleigh: Really reconsider what we’re doing from an equity standpoint and a language standpoint, but I didn’t realize how widespread that was. So to your point about the benefits of being with folks from other disciplines, I think that really highlighted that this is a universal kind of conversation and that we have a lot of resources in each other.

I would not have thought that there was that much crossover with someone teaching calculus, for example. And, really, people from all kinds of disciplines were talking about equity, and were talking about student mental health, motivation, self efficacy. Like, all these themes that I’m finding in my research is some of the problems with traditional grading and some of the elements that we can hope to do better with in an alt grading approach, I really found that that was what was happening across disciplines.

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

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

Bosley: I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts with me, as always, Sharona Krinsky, our other co host. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing well. It’s been quite a week. It’s been quite a semester. We’re about halfway through when we’re recording this, but we’re still here. We’re still doing it. So I’m pretty excited about that.

This is one of the highlights of my week. And I’m also very glad to introduce our guest this week. So we have Ashleigh Fox with us. Hi, Ashleigh.

Ashleigh: Hi, Boz. Hey, Sharona.

Sharona: So just to tell everybody a little bit about Ashleigh. Ashleigh is an associate professor of English and first year experience coordinator at the Community College of Allegheny County, where she oversees the honors program at her campus.

Well, here you go. She’s exploring it particularly within the context of student motivation, equity, mental health, and self advocacy. She recently presented at the two year College Association and National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development Conferences. on revising the Community College Development English Sequence.

She has her Master’s in Ed in English Education at the University of Pittsburgh and her Bachelor’s Degree in English and Psychology at Allegheny College. So let’s see, what else do we know? Oh, she lives with her husband George and their two cats, Phoebe and Pasha. So welcome, Ashleigh.

Ashleigh: Thank you so much, Sharona.

Sharona: Glad to have you here. So we often kick these off with asking our guests, what’s your origin story? How did you get started with this crazy thing called alternative grading?

Ashleigh: Sure. So I actually had one of those like epiphany moments that you see in the cartoons where a light bulb goes off above someone’s head.

And it had just never occurred to me that my grading practice, which I thought was so rooted in helping students learn and prosper, could actually be doing harm. So after that kind of realization, I was able to go to some sessions that were particularly structured around how to conduct, at that time it was more so labor based grading, and then that was the very first thing that I tried. I was teaching in a really neat alternative program that upcoming summer. It was a bridge program for high school students who were going to be taking several college english classes. So they were coming in, people who had just finished ninth grade, people who had graduated all different kinds of literacy levels.

So an alternative grading approach was just absolutely perfect for this group. It was kind of experimental anyway. And even though I was adjunct faculty at the time, I had complete support and free reign to design this assessment that I thought would really work well.

It did. I was then hired full time at that institution, and I started my first semester doing alternative grading in four different sections of English 101 and 102.

So like everybody else who talks about alternative grading, I can say it’s looked different for me every single time it’s unrolled. But it’s been a steady four years for me, and I don’t think I’m going back at this point.

Bosley: That’s interesting that the type of class that you were doing, because Sharona and I actually met in a dual enrollment program that was meant to bridge high school students into college math. So I just found that interesting that that’s exactly how Sharona and I started our journey together. God, how long ago was that?

Ashleigh: Oh, that is funny.

Sharona: And now you can’t pry us apart, we’re in this grading world so much together. It’s interesting. So could you explain a couple of the ways that you do Alternative grading. Maybe some of the things you used to do and what you do today.

Ashleigh: Yes. Okay, so when I started out, this was really a contract grading model, right? So something that was designed in collaboration with students.

We talked about what would it look like to earn an A in this class, especially through the lenses of engagement, participation, attendance, late work, right? So we designed those policies together, but in a pretty strict contract that said, Look, if you do this, this is the letter grade that you get. And I’ll tell you what, that worked pretty well until the pandemic hit.

I know that’s when a lot of folks started dipping their toes into the alt grading world. So that was really perfect timing to just kind of remove that contract and instead shift the focus to some of these key components of ungrading, right? Giving students a chance to resubmit work. Offering feedback in lieu of points or letter grades. And then especially having a collaborative approach to determining both the midterm and final grade.

So what I ended up doing, that I still am applying largely in my practice now, is distinguishing between low stakes assignments and high stakes assignments. So I just listened to the pod, Sharona, where you said you’re not crazy about the term formative assessment and summative assessment and all that, and I agree.

And I think students don’t tend to love that phraseology either. So just explaining low stakes assignments, as these are your practice. If you played a sport, this is your after school practice, right? And the summative assignments, the high stakes ones, this is the game. This is where you, in that more high stakes capacity, show what you’ve learned.

But as a teacher of writing, nothing is really high stakes until the very end. So there’s that opportunity to revise, to rework the entire semester. So what I generally do with those low stakes practice assignments, I wish I knew to whom to give credit for this term, but I saw it somewhere. It was called flash feedback.

I think a lot of people do something similar. The way that I was setting it up, students could earn a two if just like they did what they needed to do. Looks great. No concerns. A three indicated you have gone above and beyond in some fundamental way and a one was a signal, please resubmit. This isn’t there yet, right?

That emphasis on yet and the growth mindset versus fixed mindset and all of that. And then of course, the zero to indicate a total absence of an attempt. So those really did sometimes confuse students because they would think, well these are mathematical scores.

Like I got a two out of three, that’s a 66%. So I had to do a lot of encouraging them around just please remove the mathematical component. We’re taking this more holistic approach and that’s really what I did with their grade proposals. We didn’t have anything set in stone about like you can only get an A if you’ve done this, this, and this.

I just would give them a series of guided questions and ask them to tell me like how they thought all of their behaviors had really contributed to learning. So not assessing the behaviors, not grading based on compliance, which is, of course, one of the main complaints about traditional grading, right?

But instead just asking them to really focus on growth, on labor, on how hard they worked. And really emphasizing too, you can’t get to some kind of perfect mastery in a 16 week class. I cannot possibly teach you everything there is to know about research and writing, but I want you to have the confidence and the self efficacy to keep learning, so that when you are continuing to do research, you know that there’s that room for growth.

So that’s kind of the spirit in which we’ve approached it and it’s largely been really joyful for me and for the students.

Bosley: So you were talking about that students almost need to do math once they see numbers. It is so strong that Sharona and I have even taken the numbers out.

Like we don’t even have four, three. In fact I use terms like meets, revise. Sharona, we use in our in our stats class that she coordinates, emojis.

Ashleigh: I love that.

Sharona: I couldn’t even find words that didn’t have so much value laid in.

Ashleigh: They’re loaded.

Sharona: They’re loaded.

So I use a check to mean you’ve completed this thing. I use a pencil with a hand that says you need to revise this thing. I use a, one of those yellow emojis with the thinking face to be you need to retake or do this again. And the red X is you didn’t turn it in. So, and I still have to describe those with words, but it seems like at least for now, the emoji has a lot less morality attached to it.

It’s a lot less good or bad or success or unsuccess to it. So what you’re experiencing, and it’s really fun to me to talk to a writing teacher who’s having the same problem. Sometimes in mathematics, it’s really hard to get people off of the math, but then sometimes it’s easier because I can actually get a mathematician to see why the math doesn’t work.

Ashleigh: Right.

Sharona: So it’s, it’s fun and interesting that way. I wanted to pivot now to ask you about your PhD. Because you are in the process of getting your PhD, specifically on alternative grading. What inspired you to actually go get a PhD in this stuff?

Ashleigh: Well, this was probably another offshoot of the pandemic. Thinking, I’m not getting to do as many fun things as I used to, I have some extra time. My institution will fund part of this.

So maybe this is really a good time to do it. And I was, at that point, two years into my own alternative grading journey. And I was just seeing so much energy in that community. And I thought this would probably be quite an appropriately timed dissertation topic. And it really has been, I think. The number of people who want to talk about this and want to learn.

And I had already, even right from the beginning at my institution, kind of taken on that role to teach other faculty about alternative grading with varying degrees of acceptance, as I’m sure you can imagine. My very first presentation that I did on it I was, I think, three months into this full time faculty role, and I was so excited to to do like my first formal training with colleagues and someone in the audience said "this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of."

So that was humbling, and I had to get quite a backbone in terms of, accepting that that skepticism is going to always be there. It’s always there with students at the beginning, right? So that has been a big part of the PhD experience too. Like gathering this evidence that there is an issue that merits at least like really deep questioning of why we are continuing to do what we do with traditional grading.

And of course I would say it might need to be burned all down at this point to try something new.

Sharona: So what direction is your dissertation taking? Can you explain a little bit more about what exactly you’re researching and how that’s going?

Ashleigh: Yeah, so I’m interested in kind of two key areas.

First of all, I want to find out what are instructors lived experiences of conducting, I’m calling it ungrading, but it’s really just more so under that umbrella of alternative grading. Like any kind of assessment practice that differs from what we call traditional grading with the assignment of points, letter grades, percentages to all assignments.

And then my other area of interest is the impact on student learning. What are the benefits to learning, in a system of ungrading? And what are the barriers to learning? So I’m trying to just take a really honest approach to what is currently working and what is not, so that I can outline a series of best practices for instructors who would like to implement alternative grading.

Bosley: So how are you collecting that data, especially on the instructor side?

Ashleigh: Yeah, so I am doing in depth, semi structured interviews with faculty from all over the country. I initially envisioned talking only to teachers of composition because there’s so much energy in that field of writing with contract grading and labor based grading, but after attending the grading conference in the summer and just seeing so many amazing STEM initiatives, I decided to change the direction and talk to faculty across disciplines, across institution types.

And really just hear their stories. So I am so grateful that I made that change. It’s been phenomenal to just hear across disciplines what people are doing.

Bosley: Have you had any difficulty finding people willing to be part of this, of your research for this dissertation?

Ashleigh: Not a single person said no. Not a single person. And I did email people one on one, I didn’t do kind of a massive call because I’m doing phenomenological research, so I needed a smaller number. I was endeavoring to talk to 10 to 12 people. I think I had 12 interviews booked by early October. And I never thought it would be that simple and obtainable to get participants.

People are so busy. So asking for their time, everyone was just incredibly generous. So this is a community who is so invested in helping their students, but they’re super invested in helping each other. And that’s really one of my favorite things about the alt grading movement is that kind of support.

Bosley: Yeah. And that’s why I was kind of asking that is that’s one of the things that I’ve been amazed, especially since starting this podcast, is just how willing, because we’re all, I mean, we’re educators, we’re all extremely busy. We’re recording this in the middle of a semester, we’re not doing these in our spring and winter breaks or anything like that. We know how much time is a commodity and a high value. But yet when we’re asking people to join us here, they’re always so willing. And it really is because this community is so passionate about this. And we want to share it, we want to get it out there.

If for nothing else, to get a real critical conversation going. We had an interview with Jesse Stommel that hasn’t come out yet, but we’ve already done the recording at the time we’re recording this, and that was one of his big messages was just, let’s just have a serious conversation and in depth, really look at these practices that we’ve been doing for a long time, for no other reason, it was what was done to us.

Ashleigh: Right, and as part of my literature review, I had to write about the benefits of traditional grading, right? We’re supposed to be taking that very objective view of what’s out there. And really, you can guess what emerged. The benefit of traditional grading is that we’ve always done it this way.

Sharona: There is actually one other benefit. If you want to call it a benefit, it does do what it was supposed to do. It was supposed to rank students against each other.

Ashleigh: Absolutely. Yeah. So look at that history of it.

Sharona: So the challenge is, we’re using a system that was designed to do something that we no longer believe is a good thing. But at the time it was designed, that is what they wanted.

So it actually works pretty well to do what it was designed to do. And I don’t want to be pollyanna about that. There may be times and places that ranking students against each other is the right thing to do. And I do think we need to not ignore that as alternative graders.

Ashleigh: Yeah, I agree. And I, this is part of why, too, I want to examine some of the potential problems that can emerge with alternative grading.

If we’re really looking to dig into best practices, I love that phrasing, like, we can’t be pollyanna about it. And just say, well, this solves all the problems. It solves some problems and it creates some new ones as well. So of course it does because anything as nuanced and complex as grading, it’s going to be really tricky.

Sharona: And that’s one of the things that I appreciate about having a podcast is how many times and places are there where we can sit down with three people and have an hour long conversation that includes nuance. Right? That we get to say, hey, traditional grading, as much as we’re out there, I’m out there calling it the misuse of mathematics in the measurement of student learning, and it does do something that there may be places that need it. I personally am not thrilled with most of the places where it’s currently needed because most of the places that you need to rank students are because there’s a limitation on the next step, like going to grad school.

There’s only so many spaces, so many places. I personally want to increase the public funding of all education so that anyone who wants to go can, but I get it. There’s some reality there that I’m not trying to ignore.

Bosley: Yeah. Let’s fight one hill at a time there.

Sharona: Exactly. But I do want to acknowledge it. And right now today, for example, there are only so many spots in med school.

And do you want students who have been ranked against each other? You might, but I would argue then, even though traditional grading may be good at that, it may be bad at it when you take into account a lot of other things. So I’m not trying to say it does what it’s supposed to do, but does it do it based on the criteria that we want it to do it? And that would be a whole different debate.

I wanted to ask you to go into maybe a little more specificity about doing this in writing. Because we have had a lot of mathematicians and STEM folks on, we come from a mathematical world, so the grading conference is highly in that area. And we tend to get a lot of, when we’re out there talking the world, "well, that obviously works in math, but it won’t work in English."

And then we talked to a mathematician "that obviously works in English, but not in math", "that obviously works in art, but not in English." Like every discipline has the reason that it works everywhere else. So could you get a little bit more specific about what this looks like in your writing class? Like, what do you want the students to do to be successful in your class.

Ashleigh: Sure. So, in, for example, a first year composition class, the learning outcomes are essentially divided, I would say, between process and product. And I think traditionally, in writing instruction, there has been a tremendous amount of emphasis on just product, right?

Like, what kind of a paper can students produce in that really high stakes capacity? But when we think about where and how people learn to write, it’s in the process, and it’s in the struggle. So what I love about alternative grading for the teaching of writing is that you create a safe space for students to take some intellectual risks, to fail, and not have a penalty.

So for example, if I’m asking students to practice a really complicated syntactical pattern, maybe they’ve never used a semicolon in their lives, but nothing bad is going to happen to them. If they mess it up, right, I’m going to sit with them and say, "Oh, look, like you want to actually have two independent clauses here. And do you see why this bit is not a full sentence? Read it out loud." Right? And then of course, too, we want them to take intellectual risks with their thinking. So when students in a writing class are looking at a rubric, like you might have in traditional grading, they’re just thinking, how can I get all these points?

They’re not really thinking about taking risks. And they’re knowing that any kind of shortcoming will result in that punitive loss of points. So when you take the points away, and then suddenly it looks a lot more to like real world writing if we’re writing an article for a journal in our field, we may have a rubric or a set of standards, but we’re largely just going to get feedback on it and then we’re going to get the chance to revise it. So that is really the the emphasis in a composition class that uses alternative grading. Students write, they get feedback, they have conversations with me, but they also have conversations with each other.

This really decentralizes the instructor as the sole arbiter of good and bad, just opening up that notion of writing as being a social process. So that can’t happen as easily when students feel like they’re in competition with each other. But when you can have a grading method that really encourages that spirit of community and the idea that part of your responsibility is to one another to give feedback on each other’s work.

That really does seem to help their confidence, their risk taking, and then ultimately, of course, how strong of a product they can design. But I also do want to take that focus away from product only. Students like to say, "well, I’m done with this writing" and traditional grading might really encourage that. Even for strong writers it could be harmful because they might say, well, I got an A. This rating is as good as it gets. Well, rating can always be improved, right?

So even my super strong writers, I can give them a revision suggestion. There’s something they can do to make their piece more cohesive or coherent or solidly argued. So really what this looks like is a lot of dialogue, right?

Like actually sitting down and talking about writing without the stress of having to say this is 10. But really just framing it, this is what you’re already doing really well. Please keep doing this thing. And here are some things I want you to work on. And not everything. Not every flaw with the writing.

But giving students a manageable number of focal points for revision. And then saying, I want to see it again. And I also always have students write letters to me about their process. I ask them, how hard did you work on this? What area do you most want feedback in? What are you most proud of? I love to start my reading of student writing with that kind of meta analysis from them because I get such a good sense of that process and then that helps me give them the feedback that is most meaningful.

Sharona: And how many students do you have in a semester?

Ashleigh: It can really vary, Sharona. Our load is 5 – 5, and our cap for English classes is 26. So I could have over 100 students, but I also do a lot of non teaching responsibilities with coordinating our first year experience program and our honors program. So some semesters I might have as few as three classes, but I’m usually hovering right around a hundred total. And I do only use ungrading in my in person or Zoom classes. I have not found a way to make this work really well in an online class when I don’t get the chance organically to have those conversations. But I feel like I can still do an ungrading approach there, where, look, if they’re doing the work, they’re going to get the points.

If the effort’s there, if the labor is there, and then if they turn something in that really isn’t meeting expectations, I just email them and say, "Give this another try." So it’s not time consuming to the extent that it becomes unmanageable, I don’t think. But I do have a pretty heavy student load typically.

Bosley: Sharona, can you imagine having a English dual enrollment class like our math class with her and Joe?

Sharona: Oh, it would be insane. It would be fabulous.

Ashleigh: I have listened to all your episodes with Joe. I would love to collaborate with Joe on anything. He’s awesome.

Sharona: He’s amazing. He is amazing. So the next question coming up for me as I’m listening to you, so you mentioned that you coordinate the first year experience program. Have you been able to sneak this into that? Have you been able to get your other instructors on board?

Ashleigh: Well, I did sneak it in myself, but it didn’t go as well in that class. So that was what I am labeling an ungrading fail. And it was really fascinating…

Sharona: No, an ungrading not yet. Not a fail. Not yet.

Ashleigh: Not yet. Exactly. Exactly.

Sharona: So, what do you think didn’t go well?

Ashleigh: I do have a theory on this. So in a system of traditional grading, students see that running percentage, right? They know exactly where they stand in terms of the letter grade. So I always say that in an ungrading system, we’ve seen this come up before where the number one criticism from students is, "I don’t know how I’m doing."

So I thought, well, that’s my responsibility to let people know. I happen to have a class of students who had been through their last several years of high school during the height of the pandemic. They had largely been doing school online and then they got to college and they were all still working full time and not really prioritizing their coursework.

So I had a lot of students not turning things in. I had said to them on the first night of class, and I think they really heard me, I don’t want this class to be a source of anxiety for you. I’ll get you through this. Like, we’re not going to do penalties for late work. I want you to do your best. But if you just do what you need to do in this class, you’ll not only pass, you’ll get an A.

This isn’t a gatekeeping kind of course. Like, this is a how to college. Let’s get you set up for your career and your academic planning and introduce you to the resources at our institution. That’s it. But because I had students not submitting work, I was in constant communication with them. Like, "Hey Sharona, you can still turn this in. Like, I saw you didn’t turn this in."

I was way more anxious about it than they were. And I think they got the message that I would just worry about it. And I kept those, I had deadlines, but because I was trying to really pull everybody through. And that’s part of my work in coordinating this program.

I had told faculty, "Hey, let’s give students multiple chances. Let’s not, we really don’t want to see students failing college seminar, right?" Like, this is supposed to be something that everyone can succeed at and build that confidence and that sense of belonging that they can be in college and do this work.

What I ended up with was a majority of the class who was behind the entire semester. At no point did I say, that’s it, it’s too late. Like, you’ve missed the chance to do this work from week two. I kept everything open right until the very end, and it We all limped to the finish line. It was not good.

Bosley: When was this class?

Bosley: Yeah, I think Sharona and you would agree with me on our experience since going back.

Sharona: The worst semester in 35 years of teaching for me.

Ashleigh: It wasn’t just me.

Sharona: It was not just you. It was not just your institution. It was universal. It was actually worse than any of the pandemic semesters, in my opinion.

Ashleigh: Exactly, that was my experience as well.

Bosley: Yeah. It’s been quite a bit of a difference because I only teach at the college levels during the fall. Like I don’t teach during the spring term. So I get a bigger jump of time. So it’s, I can kind of see the differences, whereas someone who’s always teaching might not see the change cause it’s a little bit more gradual from semester to semester. But the difference between my students this semester and my students the last two fall semesters, is been shockingly different. I mean the willingness to actually verbally talk again, instead of just chatting through zoom or the engagement and everything else.

Yeah. This semester has been so much better. I’m hoping this is an indication that we’re finally getting through the kind of hangover from the pandemic that we seemed to have been seeing the first couple of semesters back, but..

Sharona: What you’re saying though about the deadlines has been very interesting to me because one of the conversations that comes up a lot when I’m training on this is they’re like, well, if you accept late work, then what’s to prevent them from just doing everything late.

And I definitely think that I have seen mistakes in messaging, very similar to what you’re describing. And we actually have, in the statistics course, our flexibility is very baked in, like the system is so intentionally designed that we have a component of the course where there’s no late work. And that is our preparation material.

If you’re supposed to prepare something before you go to class, in our opinion it’s mostly useless after class happens. So that part of it, we don’t accept late work. It’s a shock to the student system. Now, the way that we avoid that being a penalty is in that same group, there’s also participation work and practice work, and those can be done late.

And so you could actually not do any of the prep work and it won’t hurt your grade if you do a bunch of other stuff. But the prep work is the easiest stuff to do. So it’s kind of like, well, do you want to do it on time and easier or do you want to do it late and harder? That’s your choice. But even more important than that is one of the conversations that we’ve discovered we have to have with students is that it’s not that you can do stuff late, it’s that when you do it poorly early, you’re not hurt. So we encourage students to understand that the feedback loops are critical. And if they don’t participate in the feedback loops, then that’s when they’re going to have a problem.

So instead of saying you can turn your work in late, even though in many times you can, what we are saying is your early mistakes are not going to hurt you. But you have to engage in the feedback loops. And so now I encourage faculty that I work with to start assessing way earlier than all of the other classes. So we’re starting to assess week three. Like, we’re just right out of the gate, starting to say, okay, here’s how the feedback loop works, do it, because nobody else is assessing that early.

So, we’re actually coming out early and getting them engaged in the feedback loop, and if they don’t get it, that’s fine, but you have to participate. So, even though we don’t require compliance in an arbitrary sense, we do tell them that if you don’t participate in the feedback loop, you’re really going to struggle.

Like, this will work really well if you engage. But if you don’t engage, that’s when we’re going to have a problem.

Ashleigh: Right, and really, I love what you’re saying about framing it that way, because we’re shifting away from just compliance. You were bad, you didn’t do something. But making it really transparent.

This assignment impacts your learning. Like this may be a low stakes assignment, but it’s the building block of something much harder that you’re going to have to do. So if you don’t do this, you’re not able to get here as easily. Not to say that you can’t get there, but to your point, it’s going to be harder without that really early engagement.

Sharona: Right. And so we’ve had to do quite a bit of work. We also work with some engineering faculty and we’ve had to build videos about the system and say, this is what it’s like. And we don’t want you to get the message that you can put this off. If anything, you need to engage earlier because we know that you’re probably not going to succeed the first time out.

That’s why this is designed this way. It’s not that we’re suddenly being nice and you can de prioritize us versus other courses. No, it’s that this course is actually hard, but we have a better way to help you be successful at it. So that’s been a very interesting conversation.

Bosley: Right, so I wanted to kind of take us back a little bit to something you had said earlier. You mentioned the grading conference. And I actually was the host of your session that you were presenting in, I believe the session was something like "what we’ve learned while converting our class to alternative grading" or something like that. I kind of want to hear your experience because this conference, the grading conference, and again, we’re not directly associated with the, or there’s no direct connection between the podcast and that,

Sharona: Bosley and I are.

Bosley: Yeah, the podcast isn’t, but the podcast really came from the grading conference, but the grading conference really did start off as a math and then a STEM focus. You’re neither. Right? You’re an English professor. So I kind of wanted to hear a little bit about your experience and, and just some maybe highlights of what that round table talk was about.

Ashleigh: Sure. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I loved this conference. I truly appreciated that it was remote so that we could have access for people all over the country without having to travel anywhere. I think that was really effective in terms of, of connecting folks. And yes, I was, I was working with largely, in my group, teachers of math, right?

So I was getting to hear about completely different disciplines, and interestingly too a discipline that I’ve been told at my institution could never work with any kind of alternative grading. Because I am always trying to recruit people and I have wonderful colleagues in math and I think they do a phenomenal job, but they’ve been some of my biggest skeptics in terms of if this will work.

So I was finding it really satisfying to hear from the folks in our roundtable session who largely outlined their origin story, right? And especially their architecture, their grading architecture, what this looks like in their courses with a ton of specific detail. So usually people too have a story such as I just shared, where it didn’t go perfectly, and then what we learned.

It’s so in the spirit of how we’re all trying to teach to say you can make mistakes and learn from them. So I just love that cohesiveness with it. But yeah, I thought every single session I went to was really enlightening. People connect so beautifully at conferences of this nature.

We had so many conversations going in the chat at every moment. And I will say, I think, gosh, I want to say that the majority of the participants in my dissertation study are folks that I met at the grading conference. And a really fun thing, I had an email over the summer from someone I hadn’t gotten a chance to actually connect with during that conference, but she emailed me as another PhD student doing a study on alternative grading, and she had gotten my contact information from the conference. And we have had just a phenomenal time connecting. We’ve been sharing resources and contacts, and we both interviewed each other for our studies, and we’re gonna do a work session together on Friday. We would never have connected if it weren’t for that conference, and I think this is someone I would love to publish with her in the future.

Like, she is so fantastic. She’s at Oklahoma State. I never would have met her. We wouldn’t have crossed paths.

Sharona: Those darn Okies.

Ashleigh: Oh, awesome!

Bosley: Yeah, I meant Oklahoma Sooner, not an Aggie, but it’s still, yeah, Sooner State.

Ashleigh: Nice. Yeah, she’s been just fantastic to work with. So, yeah, I’m super grateful for the grading conference. It was a wonderful experience.

Bosley: That’s really cool that you guys, not only did you get a lot of your participants for your study, but it sounds like you’ve found a real collaborator that you might be able to do work with for a extended amount of time.

Ashleigh: Oh, I hope so. She is fantastic.

Sharona: I’m finding it fascinating and critical that the more I do this work, the more I see that of the biggest challenges in my opinion, in higher ed academia, is almost a loneliness pandemic around teaching. Because it’s so de emphasized in so many places and institutions and it’s very hard. I don’t know really of other conferences that are so cross disciplinary about teaching in higher ed. I know that there are more in K 12 because K 12, the primary job is to teach, but in higher ed, even though quite frankly, our primary job is to teach, that’s not how it’s perceived in the institutions. And so it’s been incredibly gratifying to have been part of this conference that, I mean, we’ve told the origin story of the conference, I think a little bit. I don’t know if we’ve told it on the podcast, but

Bosley: Yeah, no, I think we talked a little bit about it with Robert Talbert. Telling how I got roped into the conference.

Sharona: But it was supposed to be, essentially, almost an excuse to spend travel money to go hang out with a bunch of friends in Grand Valley State and talk about this stuff. And it turned into this massive multi year online forever conference.

And we’re going into the fifth year and creating a community and I went to, I’ve been presenting now live at a couple conferences since we reopened, and I get to present to, there might be a conference of thousands of people and in my session, there’s 12. Whereas when we go to the grading conference, you might have 30, 50, 100 people.

And even this podcast, some of our episodes are over a hundred listens now, a hundred downloads, 130. So I feel like we’re creating a space where these conversations can happen. So I’m really excited about that.

If you wanted to share with somebody some takeaways from the grading conference, like what did you, other than community, what did you take away from the conference?

Ashleigh: I think a major theme that’s also being reinforced in my conversations with faculty is just that need, I’m going to paraphrase Jesse Stommel now, to raise an eyebrow at these systemic practices. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have necessarily thought that that need was quite so salient in STEM.

I thought in, oh, in my discipline we needed to really reconsider what we’re doing from an equity standpoint and a language standpoint. But I didn’t realize how widespread that was. So to your point about the benefits of being with folks from other disciplines, I think that really highlighted that this is a universal kind of conversation.

And that we have a lot of resources in each other. I would not have thought that there was that much crossover with someone teaching calculus, for example. And, really, people from all kinds of disciplines were talking about equity and were talking about student mental health, motivation, self efficacy.

Like, all these themes that I’m finding in my research is some of the problems with traditional grading and some of the elements that we can hope to do better with in an alt grading approach. I really found that that was what was happening across disciplines.

Sharona: Food for thought, right? So what’s next? When do you finish your PhD and where do you want to take it from here?

Ashleigh: Yes. So I am really just finishing up my last several faculty interviews and I am so excited to code this data. I am already just noticing so many similar threads.

Just what I said that I heard such consistent messaging from folks presenting at the grading conference, and I’m finding that too in talking to someone who teaches sociology, biology, math, composition, right? Like, people are really saying the same kinds of things in terms of student reception, student learning, motivation, equity, all of those things.

So, I will, as soon as these interviews are done, really need to start figuring out what are the patterns, what are people identifying, and how are those best practices emerging. So, I’m going to try and write those chapters over the holiday break, two more chapters and then I do need to defend by the end of March.

I should graduate in May and I don’t know what’s next after this because I always say like I already have my dream job getting to teach English at a community college. I love it, but something else I’m noticing just with the faculty that I’m interviewing. So many of them are working in centers for teaching and learning and their ungrading or alternative grading journey has taken them there.

We have a fantastic center for teaching and learning at my school and they have really taken me under their wing and let me present even like I mentioned earlier, when I was brand new faculty. So I really love the mission of a CTL. I could see myself being happy in that role. But it would be hard to picture leaving the classroom as I’m experiencing it now because it really is such a joyful space.

So the bottom line is nothing may change in my professional life with this credential. But it’s what I always say to students, education gives you options. So I just want to see what may open up, but I’m loving the work I’m getting to do right now.

Sharona: We have developed a one week intensive course for faculty to redesign a course. And so far it’s been run in engineering and math, but if you ever wanted to run it. You know, it’s NSF funded, so we can hand it off and if you wanted to run a one week, it’s intense. It’s about 30 hours. But if you wanted to run it through your Center for Teaching and Learning we’d be happy to work together and hand it off.

And that’s a goal that Bosley and I have this year, is we actually have to write the teaching manual for that course. Because we’re in year three of our grant, and that’s the deliverable.

Ashleigh: Oh, so I would love to talk more about that. Yes.

Sharona: Absolutely. I would love to see this workshop that we developed start to proliferate through our community so that people who’ve been doing this can translate into teaching this to other faculty. Because there is something very powerful in my experience of being able to get up and say, this is my lived experience. Like you’re going through a curated version. And it’s also been really interesting to see what we can help people avoid in the initial mistakes in their journey and what is unavoidable.

Ashleigh: Right, right.

Sharona: And so far, one of the things that is unavoidable, it seems, is screwing it up really badly the first time. Our first attempt at this in statistics, I’d already been doing it for several years in calculus, but our first attempt in statistics was atrociously bad. And we never stopped. Like we didn’t go back. We just spent Several years iterating, but that first semester, oh, it was not good.

Bosley: And it’s funny you were saying that, Sharona, because the session that you did, Ashleigh, in the grading conference, was a lot about mistakes and what was learned from those mistakes of those early attempts at converting a class.

So I would be really interested to, if we get a chance for you to look over this course that Sharona and I have developed, and kind of get your in your input and your feedback from a writing in a non STEM person to see what you would think of how that would translate into trying to help other people outside of STEM, converting their classes to non traditional grading.

Ashleigh: Yeah, absolutely.

Sharona: I think we’re coming almost to the end of our conversation here. Are there any key takeaways that you’d like to share from your journey, from your PhD final thoughts that you want to share with people who are. dipping their toe in the water, maybe?

Ashleigh: Yeah, I think one final takeaway that I have is just that we talk so much about how to motivate students and how we can get them to do the things that are going to contribute to their learning.

But really, like, all the research on motivation says that students need to be intrinsically motivated to do things, right? So I think we don’t need to be asking how do we motivate students? But a better question is, how do we create the conditions under which students can motivate themselves? And I feel really strongly that alternative grading can help to build those conditions.

Bosley: I have never thought of it that way. That is a really interesting point about the motivation. I really like that.

Sharona: I like it as well, and I completely agree. One of my big takeaways from this journey is that I was very unaware of the ways in which traditional grading was damaging that motivation and damaging that sense of belonging. And that removing that barrier and creating a system in which their internal state is celebrated.

We’re talking also about things like asset based framing instead of deficit thinking. And I definitely feel like getting them to recognize the assets they’re bringing to the table and allowing them to bring them to the table, which the grading system is just pervasive. It’s way more pervasive than we think it is.

Right. So I love that. And I love that thought. Ashleigh, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. You were one of the first people we talked to when we were going to launch it and we just had to find the right time and moment to bring you on. And I’m really glad that time is finally here. Where can people find you online if they are looking to find you?

Ashleigh: Yeah, so I am available on LinkedIn. Just my first name, last name is searchable there. My email address is afox2@ccac.edu.

I would love to connect with people who have questions, especially about how to get started. I really love to support other faculty who are just, as you said, wanting to dip their toes in the water and get started. So.

Sharona: Bosley, any final thoughts.

Bosley: I just wanted to thank you, Ashleigh, your, your passion and your energy.

It’s always just a joy to spend some time and talk to you with about this stuff. You know, I loved our time together on the conference and ..

Ashleigh: I was so looking forward to this. So I’m really appreciative that we could have this conversation. It’s also very fun because I’ve had to be so quiet during my interviews to faculty, I’ve had to just bite my tongue and let them talk.

So the fact that I got to talk today was really exciting. Thank you.

Sharona: Well, we really appreciate it. We appreciate the contribution that you’re making to the work. And we also appreciate all of you who are listening. This has been another great conversation, and we look forward to seeing everyone next week.

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.

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