The Grading Podcast

151 – Dan’s Book

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Dan Guberman: To me, I think in most of our classes, and this is why I say we wanted to write a book that would be practically useful for a lot of people, like assessment is in the form of grades for the most part. We wanted to be explicit because a lot of other books I’ve read about course design have these grand narratives about assessment and then either don’t say anything about how you turn that into a grade or there’s a very brief, paragraph or two of yeah, turn this into a calculation for a grade, right? But for students, that’s like when you talk to them about your assessment, their first question is, like, how does this work to a grade?

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 back to The Grading Podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am having a good week. Last time we recorded I, had turned in my grades or whatever, but I have a few last little things to finish for the semester, and now it is really done, except I have some reimbursements I have to turn in before my grant money runs out. So that’s next on my list. And I’m getting ready to do this perambulation around moving, i’m going to New York to help one son, and then I’m going to North Carolina to help another son, although I’m starting in Missouri with him, so I got some travel coming up. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: Yeah, you get travel, but I don’t know if it’s fun travel, if it’s helping move.

Sharona: Yeah. It’ll be fun seeing my kids, and there’s moments of fun. My older son and I, since we have to go from St. Robert, Missouri to Fayetteville, North Carolina, we’re going through Nashville, so we bought really nice tickets to CMA Fest. Nice. So we’re gonna see Blake Shelton, Shaboozey, Luke Bryan, and a bunch of other people at Nissan Stadium one night.

Boz: That does sound like fun.

Sharona: So if you’re at Nissan Stadium and you’re listening to this on Friday night, June 5th, come find me.

Boz: That… Okay, that does sound like fun.

Sharona: Yeah. I’m looking forward to that. The rest of it, not so much. And what about you? What are you up to?

Boz: Not much trying to just, as we wind down our semester it- it’s weird. I’ve talked about this before on the podcast about how testing season for much of my career has been this really busy season, and now in my new role, it’s not. But after testing in my, previous positions, a lot of my other stuff would start to wind down. In this new position, that’s when a lot of it starts to wind back up. We’re doing a lot of things for summer programs, summer PDs. We’re doing a lot of things for next year already. So it’s this weird flip between when I am really busy and when I am not that I am still getting used to.

Sharona: So it’s almost like your year ended the minute testing started, and you’re starting next year now.

Boz: Yeah, although some of that is starting this summer. But yeah a lot of what I’m doing is work going into the ’26, ’27 school year. All right, but a- as we’re sitting here and recording, this is always one of our favorite times of the week, but we are not alone. So who else do we have in our virtual studio with us today?

Sharona: So I wanna welcome back Dan Guberman. Dan was actually on the pod relatively recently talking about the joy that came from redoing grading systems, but we had to have him back on because he has a new book out. So I’m gonna give a brief bio and intro, and then we’re gonna be grilling Dan on this book that I am so excited about.

Dan Guberman: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s great to be here. And I will say I co-wrote it with two of my colleagues, but we collectively wrote the whole thing,

Sharona: Okay. Yes. Always worth calling out the co-writers, but at least it’s a step up from you wrote a chapter.

Dan Guberman: Yeah. It’s a very different process, and I got to experience the whole what does it mean to propose a book and write a book and then get that book turned into a physical object. So that was really cool.

Boz: And we do wanna talk about that. But before we really get into this, ’cause we did have you on recently with one of our other new organizers, Kim, but we didn’t really get into your origin story, ’cause we knew we were gonna have you back. So we really kinda wanna take a minute, find out just how did you get into this crazy world of alternative grading?

Dan Guberman: Yeah. So great question, and I appreciate the opportunity. So I transitioned from being a professor, a teaching professor of music history and theory, to working in a teaching center almost 10 years ago now. And when I came to the teaching center it was an overwhelming amount of material and stuff to engage with, which was really fun. I really enjoy reading and especially reading books. And I was really drawn to critical pedagogy, which is something that, I had engaged with lightly in the past, but mostly in the context of music history teaching. And I really struggled initially to try to understand what it means to put that in practice. And then probably pretty much soon after it came out probably from Twitter, I would guess, I came across Jesse Stommel’s essays, and I bought the book “An Urgency of Teachers.” And as I was reading that, there’s the chapter that’s the essay in the middle about how Jesse grades, which is this un- ungrading as it’s commonly called. I know now I’ve started to call it collaborative grading following some others. And that just struck me as, wow, this is really cool.

The challenge was that moving to a teaching center and at Purdue, I didn’t actually have any classes to teach. So I was there like now I need to find a class to teach,” which was something I’d always wanted to do. And actually, the first class I got to teach here was we have a requirement for every student to take an oral communications class, which I had very little experience with, but they needed people to teach this. It was essentially, “Oh, he works at a teaching center. I do the director of the program.” She assumed I could do it. And this is 100-plus sections at the time, so highly coordinated. They had to give… The main assignments are, like, five big presentations with detailed rubrics. And I was like I need to follow the structure of the class. I don’t want to, get fired the first time I’m teaching a class at this school.” But what I did was I– and I ran it by the director. I was like what if I…” All the presentations are recorded, so I said, “What if I, instead of filling out this rubric myself, I invite the students to come meet with me, and we watch the video, and we fill it out together?” And then I came up with some other options too because I realized they’d probably be scared of that. So they could also fill it out themselves, and then we could– I could follow up. Basically, that was my initial “Okay let’s try to implement some of what I read.”

And then I got to teach a history of rock music course in the summers online through the history department, which I had taught that course before, and that was my real opportunity to fully put it into practice. And that course I totally redid from, it, when I taught it at East Carolina, it was, 1,000 points, tests, journals, reflections, all this stuff. And I actually now know that I did some alternative grading practices. At the end I would take all the zeros and replace them with 50s, or like experiment with numbers, Joe Feldman talks about in his book. I didn’t know anyone else was doing this. I hid it. I was like, “I probably shouldn’t do this- … because my colleagues would be mad,” so I never told anyone I did it. But it made me feel better about how things mathed out. So then, yeah, I totally redid this history of rock music course to follow this ungrading structure, where students would reflect and they’d share their perspectives, and I’d give them the grade that they said. And it was really a transformative experience for me, I would say. So I quickly became a convert and was like , Obviously, not every class can do that kind of grading, it led me down the path of what are other options. So I was also leading a teaching and learning reading group at Purdue. I found the Specs grading book around that time, and we read that in the reading group. So you know, it’s basically been a progression from then, and then I became the go-to person in the teaching center when anyone wanted to talk about grades and grading, so I became the, consultant and, advocate.

Sharona: Evangelist. That’s how I identify- Yeah … as an evangelist.

Dan Guberman: Yeah.

Boz: So I’ve gotta ask, ’cause you said when you were still doing the history of rock and doing the traditional, 1,000 points that you replaced zeros, but you- Yeah … you hadn’t read Feldman yet.

Dan Guberman: No. No, I didn’t know about this.

Boz: So what made you what made you do that? ‘Cause that’s, I mean- Yeah I know when I first read Feldman’s Grading for Equity, ’cause it, I’ve talked about this before. I did lots of little Band-Aid things before I went, to what I would really consider alternative grading, that being one of those Band-Aids. But I did that after, reading The Case Against the Zero and reading about halfway through Feldman’s book. So I’m really curious, like why, what made you do that if you hadn’t done any of the readings yet?

Dan Guberman: Yeah. So the class was structured that every week there’d be like a journal assignment and a discussion board assignment, and I think one was worth 20 points, one was worth 10. And basically like you do anything the minimum grade you would get was like a 70 or an 80, right? Like even if you did like pretty … If you spent three minutes and wrote “This was interesting,” you’d get s- 14 out of 20 or something. So then I’d get to the end of the semester, and I’d be looking at total grades, and there’s 100 students in the class, so there’s, lots of stuff. And I’d see this student I feel like was doing pretty well, right? And there’s 100 students, and I’m teaching four of four, so I don’t really have a sense of it, but like it doesn’t feel like that student should be getting a B, right? So then I go through, and I’d be like, “Oh, like they just missed two of these things entirely,” and that doesn’t feel right. So then I’d just like experiment. Be like what if I like replace all the zeros with 20s? What if I do it with 40?” And I think eventually it turned out that replacing them with 50 just like felt good when I like looked at the numbers at the end. It was mostly just the like something doesn’t feel right here.

Let me try this.

Sharona: I love it. It’s a musician’s intuition about mathematics. Because you hit on the symmetry of the 50 to the 100. That’s fascinating. I love that.

Dan Guberman: I always say like my music research was in contemporary music, which is very rooted in mathematics, so I always like math. And actually another thing I did, which, now I know is one of these practices, when I taught the first semester music theory, I started with a repeatable quiz on fundamentals that like they had to just do until they got 100, and there was no penalty for taking longer. And this was, this one I felt as like more practical that at East Carolina, some students were prepared to come to a music school, right? But a lot of students, were not. Like they were interested in music, but they never had private teachers. Their high schools didn’t have great music programs. They learned to sing in something like a church choir, right? So they don’t know these things.

And then I have this structure where either they need to be a whole year behind, which doesn’t feel fair, or I need to just get them caught up, and why should they suffer? And I really wanted to emphasize if you are not perfect on your ability to read music, the rest of your eight, six, eight semesters here often six semesters, five semesters of music theory, are just gonna be miserable. Let’s make sure you at least get these basics perfectly down pat and fast too. They had to… I had a quiz sheet that they had to do within 10 minutes. ‘Cause if you’re spending, five minutes just “Okay, this is bass clef, so that means I need to do this calculation and whatnot to transform from…” You’re just gonna have such a miserable time for the next few years. It just seemed appropriate.

Boz: The students needed that automaticity with those basics. Yeah.

Sharona: And it’s fascinating to me- Yeah … ’cause I’ve realized recently that I have lost my ability to read bass clef. I, I played piano and I played piccolo for 13 years, culminating in a, recital performance of Flight of the Bumblebees, and I can no longer read bass clef. I would have to go refresh. I can still read treble because of the additional piccolo work but I actually cannot easily read bass clef, and I’m like, “How did I lose this?” But I did. It’s been 30, 40 years that I haven’t had to read it, and I’ve lost it. So I can understand why that is important. And I love the fact that it shows a skill that although technically you don’t need it to play music or to sing I’m concerned that one of my children does not read music and one does, and you would be surprised which one it is based on their jobs that they’re planning to do. But it could be a real handicap, but yet not critical. So how do you do this skill and get the students to understand how important it is? I’m like, my mind is blown right now as I relate to that image.

Dan Guberman: Yeah. I’m not complaining I’m not in a music school now because I feel like everything is… the whole world with AI is changing, but I feel like music in particular is radically shifting in ways that, that a lot of us aren’t ready for. So I’m glad. And especially just the ability to create music without technical knowledge. But, I think that’s good. I want to encourage that. But, then we get to the question of, like, how much we need to bring in these traditional skills and how much to emphasize them versus, teaching computer skills, which, have lots of value today.

Sharona: So you did all this, you taught the grading class, got to teach some music. What happened to take you to a book? It it’s amazing and yet you’re doing all these other things. You’re in a center for teaching. Why a book and why this book?

Dan Guberman: Yeah. So one thing that I am really grateful for in coming to Purdue our teaching center, not unique, but I think relatively unusual in that we ground all of our work in self-determination theory. And, a lot of teaching work doesn’t really have a clear grounding in theory, and this became really valuable and influential for me when I arrived at Purdue, and I fully bought into self-determination theory as a thing. It just resonated with me in a way that, really not much else has and became really invested. And we have a one of the longest and most successful course design programs at Purdue, which is based on this. It’s called IMPACT, which is why we have impactful courses in the title of the book. And it’s been running before I got there, so now we’re at 15 years, and we’ve had 600 plus faculty redesign their courses a semester long through this program. And what we found was we really wanted to be able … we have more demand actually than we can create spots for. So we really wanted to be able to share what we’ve learned from doing this with other people because honestly, I feel like the– there’s a lot of great books on teaching right now, but there’s not a lot on designing a course, right? There’s a lot about, approaches to teaching. But, to me, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of value in something about, like, how do you go actually design a course, right? And, we work with grad students as well and a lot of them will say “Now I’m transitioning to be a faculty member in the future, and no one’s ever talked to me about what it means to design a course even.”

So we wanted to take these lessons that we’ve learned from running this program for 15 years and put it into a book that we could share with others. My two co-authors, Chantal Levesque Bristol and Emily Bonham, are both psychologists so they’re the ones who really know the theory, and I’m just someone who glommed onto it. But, I found it meaningful. And I’ve published work My first alternate grading paper was about that history of rock class using materials from self-determination theory to argue for its effectiveness

Boz: So self-determination theory is something that’s come up in a few of our past interviews as, one of the theoretical bases for some of the research about grading. Can you give us just like a really layman’s explanation of, what is self-determination theory?

Dan Guberman: Yeah. So self-determination theory has been around since the ’80s, so it’s a really long-running theory, and it’s fundamentally a theory about human motivation. So at its root, it’s an attempt to get away from what we call behaviorism, right? Which is the traditional idea of motivation that I think a lot of people still have. That’s motivation is I do something because of this other thing, right? So I want a reward or I want to avoid a punishment, and that’s why I’m gonna do something. And then that’s extrinsic motivation, and then there’s intrinsic motivation, which I do something for fun, right? And ultimately, while it’s true we do those things for those reasons, what self-determination theory brings is what you’d call like a more humanistic perspective, which is the idea that humans are driven. We do things without, external motivation all the time, right? And it’s because we have goals and desires, so it tries to understand how that works, and there are two core principles that I think are really important.

So one is differentiating different types of motivation, and specifically external motivation. Because really that intrinsic motivation, it can happen in a class, but not that often, right? Like, how often are we like, “Yes, I’m in X class, and it’s just really fun”? And this is even coming from teaching music classes, which people are like, “Oh, I’m taking this for fun.” But when it comes down to now I need to write a paper, probably not as much fun, right? And you imagine, you both teach math, so you can imagine the number of students who are like, “I’m here for fun,” is not that high. And the ones who are, like the fun only appears in certain places, right? So we really rely a lot on external motivation. But what self-determination theory says is there’s different types. There’s those types that we feel are external which is that reward and punishment, or introjection, which is more about feelings but still external. So things like guilt or pride or shame, right? And then there’s the external motivation that we feel more internalized and we feel more control over. So these are integration, which is the ideal, which is like I feel this is part of who I am, right? Oh I’m a mathematician, so like it’s important for me to learn, whatever thing it is, whether or not it like makes sense in the moment, that it’s important for me to engage with this. And identification is the maybe transitional one towards that, which is like I can see, people I trust have communicated why this will be important for my future career or to achieve my goals, and I believe them and I buy into that, so I understand why. And those are the types of motivation that I think are really powerful when we’re talking about an educational setting, right? So we want students to be able to identify what it is they’re learning and how that can help them achieve any number of individual goals or objectives.

So then the other side of self-determination theory that’s really important is how do we create an environment that fosters that? ‘Cause fundamentally we’re saying I can’t do something that will motivate a student in this way, but I can create an environment that’s more likely to help them internalize motivation.” And they say there are three basic psychological needs, so needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When we’re in an environment where those needs are met, we’re more likely to internalize motivation, is the fundamental premise of self-determination theory.

Boz: And I really like that last part you just said. When we’ve fulfilled all three of those, it makes it more likely. It’s not that self-determination theory is saying, “Yeah, if you do these things, all of your students are gonna be incredibly intrinsically motivated and everything’s gonna be rainbow and unicorns.” But as an educator, if we can provide those three things, then we’re at least making it more likely that our students can feel that intrinsic motivation, right?

Dan Guberman: Yeah, and I think the other part is people feel those needs for autonomy, relatedness, and confidence in different ways, right?

Relatedness, we all know the person who needs to be in a big group of people and talk to everyone. That is not me. I, I- … I wanna have some meaningful relationships, but do I wanna show up to a party with 20 people? I don’t know. Absolutely not, right? That need is met in different ways. And even autonomy, you … Someone says “Oh, let’s go to lunch today,” if they say “Oh, where do you wanna go?” I’m like overwhelmed, too much choice. I don’t wanna deal with it. But if they say, “I was thinking of these two places,” then I make a choice pretty easily, and I feel choiceful about it, right? So I think the other key is to realize, and I think this is where a lot of instructors get hung up on this, is they’re like, “Oh I gave them autonomy because I gave them a choice here.” And it’s was that choice meaningful to your students in this context, right? And that’s a much harder question to answer. And it might vary from one student to another.

Sharona: When we first ran across self-determination theory and we heard some of this, it definitely did resonate. But what was interesting the first time I heard about it was when we spoke to Brie Tripp and Rob Ferro, and they came to it, they had already done their focus groups and research and coding and they were trying to figure out what were they seeing. And they found out they were seeing self-determination theory in practice. It’s not like they set out to say, “Oh, here’s my framework and I’m going to test it.” So it arose somewhat naturally, which I think is fascinating.

So I’m looking at this book that you wrote, and I think you basically gave us the synopsis of the first chapter with that little explanation. But what I’m fascinated by, ’cause you had said before we came on, “Oh, hey, there’s a chapter about grades.” What you didn’t say is the second chapter is learning outcome and the third chapter is grades. So they’re right at the front. So what have you found about self-determination theory and why learning outcomes and grading are the next two chapters? What’s that connection look like?

Dan Guberman: Yeah. And part of this is, that traditional backwards design approach, which I’ve never fully bought into backwards. I always tell people I view it as like a spiral that you circle around and you eventually ideally get to the center where everything converges, right? But I do think it’s useful to start thinking about what are the outcomes. And, traditionally, you then go to assessment and, I don’t wanna get into grades assessment debate of grades are not assessment. But to me, I think in most of our classes, and this is why I say we wanted to write a book that would be practically useful for a lot of people, like assessment is in the form of grades for the most part. We wanted to be explicit because a lot of other books I’ve read about course design have these grand narratives about assessment and then either don’t say anything about how you turn that into a grade or there’s a very brief, paragraph or two of “Yeah, turn this into a calculation for a grade,” right? But for students, that’s like when you talk to them about your assessment, their first question is like, “How does this work to a grade?” And I think what I’ve learned being part of, alternative grading communities is that it really helps to think about, like, how is the grade constructed, and how does the assessment tie into that, right?

We know students, if it’s not connected to a grade in some way, students are less likely to do it. So when we’re talking about motivation, that’s important. But also we don’t want, from a self-determination theory perspective, to use grades as a way to control student behavior, right? And this is where alternative grading is really valuable ’cause I think a lot of it, and especially when you talk about something like collaborative or ungrading, like the whole purpose is to remove grades from behavioral controls, and whether that actually happens or what goes through a student’s mind, we can’t fully know, right? But I think to me, that’s a really important frame. And as I read all the alternative grading literature, and obviously, a lot more has dealt with self-determination theory lately, but even going back, as someone who now thinks about self-determination theory all the time, like I see it embedded throughout. And even Alfie Kohn, when he was writing about it in the ’90s, he’s drawing on self-determination theory explicitly too. So there’s this very long history here.

Sharona: So one thing you said that I so resonated with is you said that you don’t identify so much with the backwards design. And I think the issue for me is it appears linear. So we actually redid it, and we have something that we made called the course redesign cycle, and it’s similar to the cycle of scientific inquiry that they use now as opposed to the scientific process. Our center is all the questions that come up through the process, and we have all these arrows that go in and out to all the parts, and you just go around and around until you get to the point where you have a course. So I love that.

Boz: One of the things that, that you were talking about that I really resonated with is I’ve talked to a lot of people with designing courses and how you run courses and how you do assessment. And if they haven’t really done kind of any of the work on grading and how- you ask them about it, and it’s just you just, yeah, you just take an average. It– When you ask someone that hasn’t thought about it the It’s almost what do you mean how do you turn it into a grade? You just do. And if you can get those same people and start talking to them about, okay, and this is where, Sharona, yours and our misuse of math comes in. But, start talking to them about, okay how are you gonna weight this? How are you gonna do this? How are you gonna do this? That they start to realize, oh, maybe it’s not just so obvious, but you have to make them think about it first. Otherwise, it does … When you first ask them, it’s just what do you mean? You just do. It just … That’s h- how embedded traditional grading is in a lot of us.

Dan Guberman: And even, when I was … I’ve been part of this course design program now for 10 years, and before I really had an understanding of alternative grading practices, we would do that. We’d talk about what are your assessments? But we never say how is this w-” we’d say, “What’s high stakes and what’s low stakes?” But we never defined high or low stakes. It would just be like at the end they’d put together this new plan, and then be like, “So what feels right? Like 30% for the final, 20% for the final-” That’s just like a five-minute discussion. And I was guilty of this as well back when I was doing my thousand point classes. I’d put the syllabus together, and I’d be like, okay, there’s three papers and two tests and a final. And then I’d be like if I do all the papers at 10%, then the final needs to be this. So what if they’re 15%? It was just like, how do I get the numbers to work out in a fairly clean way, right? And I wasn’t really thinking what does it mean if I devote 5 or 10% more of the class to this type of assignment than this one?

Boz: Yeah, ’cause that’s one of the things that we show in that misuse talk that Sharona and I do is how big of a difference those decisions make on someone’s grade. Not their learning, not their work, but how you as the educator decided to weigh those. The same student doing the exact same quality of work can end up in one of three different final letter grades. That’s a huge change based not on anything other than what the teacher decided those weights were. And a lot of times, yeah, it’s … it can be fairly arbitrary. When I was , first starting off as an educator and was definitely still doing traditional grading for the first half of my career Yeah, I kinda just based it on where my student teacher, my master teacher in my student teaching program had done it, and then okay if I’m doing algebra, I’m gonna give a little bit more on the homework, a little bit more on the stuff that, maybe isn’t, doesn’t have to be correct ’cause I’ve never graded homework on correctness. And then pre-calc, okay by the time they’re in pre-calc, they gotta do it a little bit more on the test. But yeah, it was completely arbitrary. It was just what I felt. No, no research-based, no nothing But yeah, those changes, those differences makes a huge impact on the students’ final grades.

Sharona: And as it relates to that, going back to the self-determination theory, one thing that I recognize is even though we didn’t want grades to be the center of the class, the reality is the grades are 90% of the class in a traditionally graded setting. Because there’s very little autonomy, there’s very little relatedness, at least in my experience in mathematics, unless I get that unicorn of a student who’s just, “Ah, I just love mathematics,” and is pushing me, and is so far ahead of where the class is going that I actually have to shut them down because everybody else is getting lost. That was just horrible. And now that I’ve been in this world so long and I see the mess, like I had to skate my way through this semester, a course that everyone thought administratively, I was teaching it with traditional grading. My students thought I was teaching it with alternative grading, and I was doing both just to make sure it was in line and I could justify the two. But midway through the semester, after the entire class, 70 or 80% of the class, not just mine, but all the sections failed the first midterm. And they’re like, “Okay we’re coming up to the final, so you can use the final to replace at least one midterm. And oh, take this midterm, and instead of making it out of 100, make it out of 80.” And then the final exam didn’t cover all the learning outcomes because you can’t in a single final, I was like, “This doesn’t mean anything except games to make the math work.” And it was just, it was wild. It was absolutely wild.

Dan Guberman: Yeah, and I’ll say the thing that I since really engaging with self-determination theory that I come across is people really are viewing grades as a mechanism to control students’ behavior, right?

Sharona: Yes.

Dan Guberman: So it’s “Oh, I want students to do,” right as I said it, “I want students to do the homework with more intention, so I raise the amount of that grade,” right? “I want them to study more for this big test, so I raise that grade.” And then, we go back and make these adjustments after to make it fit. But it’s “Okay, I need students to do something, grade.” And this is where, Joe Feldman, who we talked about, like he talks about that quite a bit. He doesn’t use self-determination theory, it fits really well to say, the goal And the thing about self-determination theory is they’ll tell you yes, it works. We can use rewards and punishments to get someone to do something, but we can’t get them to do something in a way that it matters to them, right? And this is the key, is if we want students to care about learning and we want them to take something from our class, then we need to try to internally motivate them, right? We can get them to do a lot… obviously, as I said, we can’t do action, you must do this. But we can use the mechanisms like grades to get students to behave in a lot of different ways. But that will never get them to care, and in fact, it can harm their caring. The example that often comes up is when I was young, they had the you read a book and you get a free pizza thing, right? And the thing is, me and a lot of others we read books before the pizzas, right? And we really enjoyed reading books. And then suddenly… So it was internally motivated in some way. Suddenly you’re getting a pizza every time you read a book, right? And then that overwrites that internal motivation with external motivation. And then if the pizzas go away, which they did, a whole generation of kids mostly stopped reading, right? Because suddenly it was like I’m not getting the reward anymore. Why would I read?” When before the reward was there, we read for fun, right? So there’s this weird way that when we start using things like grades or rewards or punishments to fundamentally motivate action, we actually undermine internal motivation and we can get rid of students’ internal motivation that may be there because students want to learn. Human nature is we really like to learn. We like to challenge ourselves. But we can undermine that human nature through things like grades that, say, “Oh, okay. Instead of doing this challenging problem because it’s fun and interesting, you’re doing it because, you’ll get some extra credit points.” That’s a very different experience

Sharona: And I say this a lot when I see all the educational settings I’m in that are outside of a formalized schooling environment, both for myself and for my kids. Some of the things that my kids learned through school were not because school had them do it. I often tell the story of my k- my younger son who asked his teacher if he could do his mission project. So in California fourth grade social studies curriculum, we do the missions ’cause we’ve got 23 of them. And he asked if he could do his mission model in Minecraft, and she said yes. And so he not only had to build the thing, but then because you couldn’t show it off at school because Minecraft was blocked on the internet, he had to learn how to screen record and write a script and do this whole thing that he then took in and make a video so the video got played in school. He’s now a video editor. That’s his job, in part because she allowed him to take something he loved and had learned entirely on his own and bring it into school, and I just think that was one of the most powerful wake-up calls I had as to how learning really happens. So I, I– And then the question becomes: how do we bring more of those opportunities into the classroom, right?

Boz: I know both of your worlds are in the higher ed, but my main world lives in the K-12 world. And the amount of times I’ve had conversations, whether it’s one-on-one conversations or department or school-wides, talking about some of this stuff and just some of our practices, the amount of times, “Oh I can’t, I can’t not punish late work ’cause then it’ll all be late,” or, “I can’t not grade the homework because then they won’t do it.” And then at the same time talking about their goals of their class is to have students become self-intrinsically motivated learners. The amount of okay, that might be your goal, but all your practices are absolutely hindering that, which is exactly what you were just talking about, that when you do the external motivation, whether it’s, punishment or reward, even if the student did have the self intrinsic motivation to begin with, all those external ones end up destroying the internal

Dan Guberman: Yeah, and this is a real challenge that I think we face, I can say from my experience, but I’ve heard from others who are doing alternative grading, that, like, when we try to change this motivational structure and be more kind to students, some students unfortunately read that as, “Oh, this isn’t as important because I’m not being punished for late work, so I’ll just get late.” And it’s a small subset, but I think for a lot of people those few students tend to stick out, and then that can be a reason for instructors to not continue or not follow through because they feel like, oh, now my class is being devalued which, you know, and I try not to rely on my own ego, right?

Sharona: But I’ll be honest, that might be what the student needs to learn from the class. Yeah. Because if they’ve only ever been in a structured environment with externally imposed deadlines, they’re not learning how to do internally imposed deadlines. So, now that being said, as we’ve talked about in some other podcasts with the fact that we have a wide variety of students with a wide variety of needs, I do not have no structure. I do not have no deadlines. I absolutely still have structure. I absolutely have deadlines, and some of my deadlines are very firm. The flexibility comes in how those deadlines are counted towards the grade. So there’s a difference between I need you to turn this thing in because I need you to do it by a certain time or its value is decreased to you, versus I’m going to bake that failure into the grade So I think there’s ways to get creative about that kind of stuff.

Dan Guberman: Yeah, I totally agree, and that’s how I do it even in the collaborative grading class. I’ll say “Hey if you’re behind, this is the thing you should do first, and then catch up on these other pieces later.” And the main thing they’ll get is they get an email from me if they stop turning things in. Once they’re, three days late, I start sending emails of “Hey, I…” And it’s not a, “Your work is late. How dare you?” It’s, “Hey, I’m writing to check in. Is everything okay?” And it’s amazing how often that actually works. The… And especially teaching online summer classes where everyone loses some students in an online summer class, just the nature of those classes. But there are a lot of students who I’m pretty convinced if I had not just sent that email would have just disappeared and, it would have been a… Basically, eventually they would have had to go back and fill out paperwork to say, “I never did the class and I should withdraw.” But just getting that email and getting a sense that, I care and it’s not too late gives them the opportunity to actually do really good work, and I think in the long run, that’s way better than them needing to go retake this class during the fall because they signed up in the summer for a reason.

Sharona: How can someone use this book? What’s the- . thought process between the use of the book for a faculty member?

Dan Guberman: Yeah. So how we tried to set it up is that the first few chapters, right? So the first one is on theory and, people have their different levels of wanting to engage with the theory, but we hopefully wrote it in a way that’s engaging enough. And then the second one and third, which are on learning outcomes and grading we think everyone hopefully benefit from reading through those. And then we’ve designed it around different structures of classes. There’s a chapter on lectures, there’s a chapter on class discussions, there’s a chapter- on lab classes. So we tried to approach it in ways that would be relevant for people to skip around if that’s appropriate.

We certainly think there are meaningful things, even if you don’t lecture regularly, that one might gain in the lecturing chapter. So we hope people will find value in all of them, but really we tried to design it to be effective for one situation, to be able to pick and choose what someone’s interested in. The other thing I will highlight that was really one of the most fun parts of writing this book was in each chapter we have two case studies from faculty who we got… when you work with faculty on a course design program, you have a sense of what they plan to do, and then some of them follow up, so you know, we have some sense of what they do. But we never really have the opportunity to sit down for, an hour or more and talk about, like, how it’s actually worked and how they approached it and delve into the specifics. Some of these are, they went through this program 10 years ago. Some they went through, one year before. But I, I think the case studies are hopefully really engaging. And in each of the case studies and each of the chapters, we’ve designed them around the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So the idea is trying to be consistent in thinking about how you can meet these needs in a variety of different places and formats and structures, so we have a chapter on exams, even though, I’m not one to give exams. I’ve told people I hope I never need to give another exam the rest of my life. Because I mostly get to pick what I teach now, that might be true.

Sharona: Yeah. I’m… If I c- if I stay in the classroom, I’m almost certainly gonna mostly… it depends which ones, but I do a lot of exams unfortunately. There’s just so many specific skills, mechanical skills at the level that I teach that I don’t know how else to do it, honestly

Boz: But honestly, there is a time and place for a assessment. Yeah, in a gen ed math class or really most in most math classes up to a certain level, I might not be the biggest fan of that type of assessing students’ knowledge, but it’s never gonna be completely out of my classroom. Even if I’m bringing in alternative assessments the traditional quiz or test is never gonna completely go away. And I-

Sharona: Yeah, although I’m actually hoping to get rid of– I have a new prep for the fall, and it is really it’s a GE course, and it is math for life. It’s a little bit of finance, a little bit of statistics, little bit of voting, gerrymandering. I might go my history and math route on that one and do projects

Dan Guberman: And if I were to teach music theory again, I would probably have some exam, right? That it would de- yeah, I agree, it depends on the course. I’ve fortunately been in a position where I could teach, courses that are smaller and, more, more flexible for students.

Boz: So, I did have a question for you Dan, and if you’re uncomfortable answering it, it’s fine. But your experience and your background is in the higher ed world, and when you and your team or your co-authors wrote this, I’m assuming you had in mind the designing of college courses.

Dan Guberman: Yeah.

Boz: As a K-12 educator, would I also if I, looked at this book, purchased this book, is there things in here that would still benefit me in how I run my K-12 classrooms? Or le- let’s actually narrow it down from K-12 to middle school and high school, so 6 to 12.

Dan Guberman: Yeah. So hard for me to read from the perspective designing those classes, but I can definitely say there’s been a lot of work in self-determination theory in K-12 learning, even more than higher education, and in a variety of different cultures. So there’s a lot of research actually on Korean higher K-12 education, building in self-determination theory, which, I think from the outside, a lot of people perceive, and my understanding is Korean K-12 schools are very rigid and structured. So this was a, lots of experiments to get teachers to, provide more autonomy, and they’ve been very successful. So I can promise you that self-determination theory as a framework has been very successfully implemented in K-12. So certainly, thinking about things like the theory chapter, I think definitely applies. But I would also think, the premise of things like class discussion, the different assessment types, whether it’s papers or exams, I think those still would apply. I would trust that someone teaching in a K-12 world is able to, adapt those ideas to that environment. Obviously my experience is this thick, so I don’t wanna make promises that won’t hold up. But I’m pretty … I can promise that the theory works. And I think that there will probably be meaningful elements in the book that would apply pretty well.

Boz: Now, i- if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Wow, this sounds like a great book. Why have I not come across this before?” This is just now coming out, right? What was the actual publication date for this?

Sharona: Are you going?

Dan Guberman: Yeah, we’re all going.

Sharona: Oh, I’m so jealous.

Dan Guberman: Yeah.

Sharona: Switzerland is gorgeous.

Dan Guberman: Yeah. I’m very excited. Yeah. I did my dissertation research in Basel but I never got to Geneva so I’m excited to go back.

Dan Guberman: Yeah, I am very excited, but yeah, so it came out May 1st and just in time for the conference a- and other things this summer.

Boz: So yeah, this one is literally hot off the press we will make sure to have some links in the show notes about where you can find it. But where are a few places that our listeners can find this book, Dan?

Dan Guberman: Yeah, so it’s published through Routledge, and I’ll make sure there’s a coupon code in the show notes if you wanna buy it from them. So I would recommend that, but, it should be sold anywhere, books are sold. If you-

Sharona: Yeah, we do tend to use Amazon affiliate links because, at some point we might make two cents on it doing that. Why not?

Dan Guberman: Actually, this is a struggle I have, though. I wanna give people the coupon code so they get a discount, but I know the Amazon sales rake is probably important. But, I’d rather people get a discount over…

Sharona: yeah, so we’ll put both. We’ll put the Amazon affiliate link in there. We’ll put the link to Routledge with the coupon code in there. It’s always good to support the publishers, but yeah.

Boz: And I have to just make a comment about this book ’cause I’ve… which was funny, growing up, I was not a big reader. I was never… Both of my daughters, in fact, my youngest daughter, just promoted from elementary to middle school, and she won several awards all around reading or writing. She actually got a future author’s award from her school. But- All right … I was never a big reader. I have read more in the last, 15 years of my life than I read probably in the previous 35, but all of them are work-related. They’re all related to pedagogy or grading or assessing or… I have to say, though, this book has probably got one of the just beautiful and aesthetically appeasing cover that I’ve, like it doesn’t look like a traditional pedagogy or grading book. You’ve got this really nice, beautiful design on the cover of it. So yeah, go, if you’re listening go check it out just for the cover art.

Dan Guberman: Thank you. We spent a lot of time talking about the cover art and, trying to get the sense of autonomy and different pathways to creating, as, and also we really wanted nature. And I really like the purple colors. So yeah, you, we probably spent more time on the cover than the many other aspects of the book which was fun.

Boz: It was worth it. It is, like I said, it does not look like when y- if you were to see this book before you read the title, grading or course design is not what you would, imagine, or at least it’s not what I imagined, but it is absolutely beautiful. I love the nature of the artwork on it.

Sharona: So where do you go from here? You have this book out. What are you thinking as far as what you wanna do with it, where you wanna go with it?

Dan Guberman: So actually I’ve been working, I- the book took a lot of my time over the past year and a half. But the other thing I’ve really wanted to do, and I’m hopefully gonna submit this soon, is I’ve been working on a paper about the intersections of self-determination theory and alternative grading. And as we’ve talked about here, I think they become pretty obvious. But I’ll say the other side, and this is in, as covered in the book, is the benefit of using something like self-determination theory is that there’s a lot of measures you can use to gauge the effectiveness of what you’re doing, right? So if you wanna understand, are my students experiencing this learning environment in an autonomy supportive way, there’s lots of great surveys already out there that, are freely available. And this is one thing I really like about self-determination theory is that they basically make everything free on their website.

You just, share your email, and you get to download all the tools and measures.

Sharona: Yeah. Is that the Center for Self-Determination Theory?

Dan Guberman: Yes.

Sharona: We’ll put a link to that, but I found that. I’m gonna put a link to that in the show notes.

Boz: Yeah.

Dan Guberman: I think if we can show that students are finding these learning environments more internally motivating, and there’s lots of other studies that show when students are more internally motivated, they learn more, right? So it’s not that hard to make those connections if you want. But I think that there’s a lot of promise in thinking about how we measure whether what we’re doing is effective through self-determination theory as well.

Boz: All right. We are coming up on time already, so

Sharona: I do wanna mention, at the grading conference, Brie Tripp, I think, is talking, and she does self-determination start at three. And Jesse Sammel is talking, who we mentioned earlier. So I just kinda wanted to throw that in before we close up. Sorry.

Dan Guberman: There are a few other self-determination theory presentations, too. So yeah, I’m very excited.

Boz: Yeah. There there’s quite a few sprinkled out through the conference. Is there any other last minute things, Dan, that you wanted to say before we wrap this up?

Dan Guberman: Not off the top of my mind. Just thank you for having me. It’s always such a pleasure to chat with both of you and, I appreciate what you’ve been doing on this podcast. I enjoy listening to it. It’s great to be able to bring the book and share it.

Boz: All right. Thank you so much for for taking time out and coming and being on the podcast with us. And for our listeners, 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