The Grading Podcast

158 – six year reflection

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Sharona: Where she gave the individual course instructors, which mostly are graduate students it sounds, autonomy to make choices within the structure of the grading system, and particularly how they’re gonna choose to account for participation. And she said that when she did this, it increased the engagement and buy-in of the instructors to the course and the grading system. And I was like, “Huh, autonomy increases engagement. Where have I heard that before?”

Boz: That, that’s funny. Yeah we often bring up the fact that there’s a lot of things either we know is good for adults or that we know are good for our students, and never seem to make the connection that no, that usually what’s good for one is good for the other.

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

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

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

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But other than that, I’m in pretty good shape. How are you doing?

Boz: Not bad, unlike you, even though I am involved at some level with your theater company also, it’s definitely not to the degree. So other than a couple of days of building and helping you do the show and tear down, I’ve had a little bit of off time. This is the kind of two weeks that I get that is a little bit of off time for me, so I’m enjoying it.

Sharona: I’m glad you are enjoying it

Boz: And, with some of this time that I’ve had off, I’ve also really been looking at our podcast numbers, and it’s blowing me away. So we’ve talked a little bit about the last couple of months, how our numbers have gone up.

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: Something in the last few weeks, though, has really been going crazy. So-

Sharona: Okay, share. …

Boz: At the time that we are recording this we are recording this on the 16th of July. The last two months have been our biggest months. The first time that we’ve broken 2,000, and we did it the last two months. At the time of this recording, we’re already several hundred above the highest month we’ve ever had.

Sharona: Wait, so we’re halfway through the month, but we’ve beaten the previous month.

Boz: In fact- That’s amazing … we beat it on the 14th.

Sharona: Wow.

Boz: But what’s really interesting to me, besides these huge jumps in numbers, most of our listeners come from the US, which should be expected. Those numbers haven’t changed that much. This huge spike is coming from countries that typically have very little listenership. Places like Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Bangladesh. Right now Hong Kong, over the last couple of weeks, 20% of our audience, which is just amazing.

Sharona: I agree, and I’m really curious to hear why. So if you are listening from Hong Kong or Vietnam or Singapore let us know how you found out about us. Send us a comment on our website, and let us know what drove you to be listening to this because it’s just really, it’s interesting. Yeah, but- It’s very interesting to me. …

Boz: and it’s not just, like they’re listening to one or two episodes. These groups have been going back and, listening to episodes we did two years ago. It’s really interesting. So yeah- Yes … I would lo- if you’re one of those listeners, please write in. We’d love to know why how this is… But it, regardless of the rationale, regardless of how long it lasts, it’s still just incredibly flattering, to think that anyone actually listens to us.

Sharona: And I wanna thank people for spending their time with us because we do this not just because we wanna hear ourselves talk, which, I have to admit I don’t hate. But I just don’t. I’m just honest. But because it means that people are engaging with this work, and they’re spending the time spreading grading reform to different places, and that just means so much to me, so I would just wanna thank everybody for that.

Boz: Yeah. I do too, and, even if you’re not doing anything in education, even if you’re not doing any kind of grading reform, just being intentional, just thinking about and making intentional decisions is a great, and it’s just an amazing feeling

Sharona: Yes, it really is. And speaking of engaging with this work, we do have our faculty learning community launching shockingly soon.

Boz: Yeah we’ve talked a little bit about that on a couple different episodes. Can you go into a little bit more detail? What exactly is that? When does it start, and how can someone be a part of it?

Sharona: Absolutely. So we have been very grateful to participate for the last several years in a grant through the Math Association of America, so this is math specific that was funded by NSF, so we’re also very grateful to NSF, called MAA’s Open Math Workshops. And this is a series that had been going on for many years, but they’re changing it to respond to the new environment we find ourselves in, which is an online virtual environment, and it’s high quality professional development on all kinds of topics. And we’re coming up on the last year of the grant, so one things that they’ve asked us to do is instead of trying summer intensives, which was what the program was really focused on in the past, we’re gonna be doing academic year programs. And we ourselves, you and me, we are doing a series of sessions, but it’s a single professional learning community called Implementing Alternative Grading to Support Student Learning.

What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna guide participants through a full course redesign over the course of the next year. And it begins August 15th, and it runs for, I think it’s nine Saturdays throughout the year, so from August to April. We’re running it in the afternoons on Saturdays Eastern Time, which is the mornings Pacific Time, so it’s 12 to 3 Eastern, which is 9 to 12 Pacific. And registration is closing, hopefully not before this podcast comes out. Let me check that. The day after this podcast is scheduled to come out, registration closes. So registration closes July 22nd, and it- it’s costs, I think, like $50 or $75. It, for the entire year, it’s $50. So this is a very inexpensive way to come hang out with us for nine Saturdays and we just think that if you have been thinking about it and you have not gotten off, your behind to get moving, or if you just want a little more help and guidance, this is a great place to start. So if you can share with us a few Saturdays for a year, we’d love to have you.

Boz: Yeah, or if even if you have done this and you’ve redesigned a course or two but you’ve got things that you’ve struggled with and you wanna try to reform that or refine that this would be a great way to do this. So we really are taking that, that 30-hour intensive one-week training that we’ve now done both online and in person, and we’re breaking that into nine three-hour sessions spread out. So we’ll have time in between these sessions to actually do some work, come back with our participants, look at the work they’ve done and the progress they’ve made, and more importantly, the speed bumps that they’ve hit, those barriers they’ve ran into, to really try to get a well thought out, well designed course using whichever flavor of alternative grading you end up going with.

Sharona: And these workshops are for higher education math faculty. You do not, I believe you do not need to be a member of the MAA but they are for math faculty. If there’s interest in us doing this not for math faculty, we can’t do it that cheap, but drop us a line and let us know that you might be interested in doing some of that, because I’d be happy to look at scheduling these through the center if we can get the funding lined up. So I think this is gonna be an interesting opportunity to explore if this structure works.

Boz: Now, besides that, there’s also a couple other things that are coming up real soon that you’re gonna be involved with that so if listeners are out and about, where can they possibly sight you in the wild?

Sharona: Yes. So first of all, I am going to be at MathFest, which is in Boston the first week of August, and I am planning for the third year in a row to do a In the Wild podcast recording, which I know you love from an editing perspective. But we will be finding a place to park a microphone and a group of people, so we are gonna record live from MathFest. I am planning to go to the POD Network Conference which is in November, in the week before Thanksgiving in, I believe, Baltimore this year. And so I will be there, and I would love to see anybody who’s coming to POD. And then we will be giving a mini course at the Joint Math Meetings in January in Chicago, ’cause, from California, I love going to Boston- baltimore, and Chicago in the heat of the summer and the dead of winter. It’s absolutely lovely. And then we’re looking at other conferences disciplinary conferences and other things, but those are the three that I have booked so far. So I will be at those places, would love to meet you. And hey, if we need to do more In the Wild podcast recordings, I can always bring my microphone. Have microphone, will travel.

Boz: So sounds good. Lot, lot of different places. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be at many, if any of those, because-

Sharona: You have a day job.

Boz: Yeah, not only that, but my school year starts, like July 28th. Like we, with my new position, we start really early.

Yeah.

All right. But- So

Sharona: You’ll be in people’s ears.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Or if someone comes to LA, if someone comes to LA, reach out to us.

Boz: Oh, yeah.

Sharona: We would do- Maybe we’ll have dinner or something. We’ve had some fun with that.

Boz: Yeah. But we are still in our summer break officially at, at my role at LAUSD, and one of the things that we’ve talked about, in fact, we did this with Dr. David Clark several episodes back, but this is a great opportunity for reflection and for, planning and looking ahead. So as I was trying to, look into what we were gonna talk about this episode, also looking and reflecting back on some of my own practices, we both independently came across the same article, and we got it from one of our favorite places to crib ideas from, the Grading for Growth blog.

But-

Sharona: Which I have now learned they crib ideas from us too. So it’s a great synergy. Thank you, Robert and David.

Boz: Yeah, a couple weeks ago on June 15th Hilary Freeman wrote a blog post called “Standards-Based Grading Six Years Later.” So not just looking at, what happened last year or planning for next year, but actually going a little bit further back. And I thought this would be something that would be really interesting to do, is look at some of what they wrote about and look at some of our own practices, because we’ve talked a lot about, how bad our first couple of attempts of this was. But there’s also been a lot of things that weren’t necessarily bad, but just the evolution of time, we have changed in our own practices that I think we should highlight and talk a little bit about, if that’s all right with you.

Sharona: Yes. And I do wanna, before we actually do that, I wanna set the stage a little bit because Hillary is a non-tenure track instructor with over 20 years of experience, and she took over a coordinated course. So she became a course coordinator six years ago with the first semester calculus course. And that’s interesting to me because we’re both non-tenure track. We both have been involved in course coordination. So this stuff doesn’t require tenure, it doesn’t require any of those things. But it was interesting to me that there was this course that has been paralleling a lot of the work we’ve been doing.

Boz: And really a person that’s paralleled your recent trajectory in your job roles.

Sharona: Yeah, that and her course was written about in the Grading for Growth book, and so was ours. Yeah. So that was fun. It’s like I have this doppelganger I’ve never met. So Hillary, we’ve gotta, we gotta get together.

Boz: Let’s start with the article. What were some of the reflections that she had that kind of stood out to you?

Sharona: So she sets up the, the blog post to say, “I wanna think about the things that I’ve changed and tried,” and the first thing that is in there is the grading structure. And the very first thing out of the gate, simplification, particularly as it relates to the number of standards. So how many times have we heard number of standards being one of those things that changes and iterates?

Boz: Oh, yeah. We’ve talked about… That, that was our first big mistake in our statistics course that we taught together. Although we did the opposite of what most people do. We did too few.

Sharona: But we went from too few to a lot, then to fewer than that.

Boz: Yeah. But I do think in individual courses that you and I both designed, that we didn’t design together, I think that too many was a common thing that we had. I think my first time I tried this with algebra II, I had almost 30 learning targets.

Sharona: Yeah. So that’s a common one, definitely. I will also say, though, that I think it is something that may never get fixed in stone for a given course because the course environment keeps changing. So now we ha- so we had the pandemic, and now we have AI, and so I think this is something that could continue to change over years. We have settled down largely in the stats course, but with AI coming on, we might have needed to change it again if we were gonna be redoing the course again.

Boz: And, but even if the number didn’t change, we did also kinda refine some of the language quite often. So you’re right, our number had been consistent for the last couple of semesters, but even with that consistent number, we had been reflecting and playing around with some of the wording of those, learning targets. But yeah, that- Yeah … this was also something that came up with that interview we did with Dr. David Clark, what, was that about a month or so ago? When he was reflecting back, when he was doing his three by three reflection, that he had actually gotten to the point where he had simplified and reduced too far. So yeah, th- this is one I think it’s really common, but it’s interesting to go more than just one year back. Really kinda go, four or five years back and look at those differences. And remember I think still one of my favorite keynotes ever from the grading conference was Dr. Robert Talbert going back and looking at like his first one and doing a whole keynote on how many mistakes and how bad his stuff was that first time, which first is amazing on its surface that’s a really vulnerable spot to put yourself in, to be that open with the kind of mistakes you made. But I think that gave so many people in the room like, “Oh, wow, yeah, most of us don’t get this perfect the first time,” and there is a lot of reflection and that, that’s still one of my favorite keynotes all time over the conference.

Sharona: I agree. Mine too Now, the second thing that Hillary mentions is how many times students have to demonstrate that they are successful in a standard. She used to require up to five. I think some of those were on different types of assessments. I’ve tried different numbers. I usually do two. That’s a pretty standard thing. But I’ve thought about doing three. I think I did three one semester and thought this– by the third one, students were like, “Okay, come on. This is so repetitious.” So-

Boz: What’s interesting about this one, and we talked a little bit about this before we started recording, is that we’ve done different amounts or talked about doing different amounts with different courses. But within a single course, even going back to the beginning, that’s not something that’s changed a lot for me. There’s been some and definitely during the actual year and a half that us in LAUSD were remote for the pandemic I definitely made some adjustments. But that was not based on what was good for the students academically. That was based on what was good for the students in the condition that we were in.

Sharona: I agree. I do think, though I think before we launched the stats class, one of my calc classes, I did three, and that’s why I’ve been so against three ever since, ’cause it was tedious as heck to do three successes. So she definitely talks about reducing that. She does one to three, depending on the standard. That’s the other thing I liked about what she said is you don’t always have to have the same number of successes on every single standard in a given course. If you don’t, though, that does introduce some complexity of tracking and things like that, but I definitely like that. Do you have a favorite one that she mentions that you wanna-

Boz: There was one that I thought was really interesting because I’ve had some of these same internal discussions, and I’ve gone a different way. So she, at one point, is talking about the progression of rubrics that she’s used over the years. Starting with a three-point, and then going to a four-point, and then going back down to a two-point. So I thought that was really interesting. That is one of the things that, especially over the last few years, I have fallen in love with, is the three-point rubric. The three-point being a met, a revise, and a reassess. So that revise is they could actually correct the errors that they had on that particular one and resubmit it. I usually include some other aspects to that, but that kind of three-point rubric. That’s one of the biggest changes probably overall in my practice over the last, almost nine years that we’ve been doing this now.

Sharona: Yeah.

Boz: So I found that one interesting, that she actually started where I have gone to now, and then adjusted to really the Robert Talber’s EMRN type of four-point rubric But then going almost to a, a specs like two point rubric.

Sharona: But I think in this case, it is specific to the fact that she’s in a coordinated course. So that’s the thing that’s weird about our stats course, is it looks like we’re doing a four-point rubric, but the reality is we’re norming it as if it’s a two-point rubric.

Boz: That’s true.

Sharona: Be-

Boz: That’s

Sharona: true … because we only norm good enough and not yet, and then we allow the instructors the autonomy within the good enough and the not yet. There’s two levels of each, but they don’t affect the grade. So I do think that if you’re looking at a coordinated course situation, let’s set things aside. If you are in a coordinated course that you’re gonna do revisions, your not yet might just be a revise. I see this a lot in lab reports. You get a pass or a revise, so it’s still a single point, but the single point non-success is revise. If you’re in a course that’s not doing revisions, it’s satisfactory and not yet. I don’t know too many people who are able to consistently norm a true three-level rubric. It’s just, it’s really hard to get consistency on two different intermediate points.

Boz: Let’s say I would agree with you on the four point. I, I don’t… The, the three point with one of them being revisable.

Sharona: Like you said, if there’s a revise, I think it’s possible, but a, a three level with either two levels of success or two levels of failure, the two levels of failure, it’s almost not worth norming. It’s do what you want. Two levels of success plus a success not yet, that’s hard in a coordinated situation, in my opinion.

Boz: Yeah. But I will say this, and we’re kinda getting a little off topic, but that’s okay. It’s like we’ve never gone on a- It’s our podcast … tangent before. But if those different levels affect the grade, then hard or not, if you’re doing a coordinated course, you should be trying to norm on it.

Sharona: Oh, absolutely. I just think it’s really hard, and therefore, unless you have a truly compelling reason to have two levels of success, like I just wouldn’t.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And I heard, by the way, one of the best comments of what you could do instead of two levels of success recently. Someone said around me that they give feedback, something to the effect of if you wanna really show someone it’s truly great, you say, “Would it be okay if I use this as an exemplar in a future course?” And that means so much more to the student than an increase in their grade, and that’s a way to acknowledge exceeds expectations without building into the grade. So I loved that.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Okay. So back to our plan here. Did you have a second one that you wanna mention? ‘Cause I mentioned two to start.

Boz: One of the other things that they talk about, trying to assess the competencies on the different standard, the different ways of doing it, you know, looking at whether it’s quizzes, practice quizzes, revision quizzes, reassessments, h- written home- I am all for having multiple measures of, assessments, giving students multiple ways to show success a- and show that they’ve learned the materials. But I do think there’s a point where i- it’s overwhelming, if not to the student, to the instructor, which, yes, we’re here for our students, but we’ve gotta take care of ourselves, too. So that is something I know when I was first trying this– Actually, no, that’s not true. About the second, third year that I was trying this, I wanted to bring in all these different types of assessments, and it really was it had some benefit, but the benefit was not outweighed by the cost to me and the confusion to my students.

Sharona: Yeah. One of the issues with complicating our systems is the increased cognitive load on the students trying to track all that.

Boz: Oh, yeah. So- and on us trying to track all that.

Sharona: Yeah. So I do want to follow up on, on that one that you just mentioned because what she… So she’s tried all these things. She’s pretty much gone to quizzes in-class quizzes. But she ended up doing something fascinating with homework, and this has been something that’s been coming up more and more recently with AI and with the unlimited retakes that are available in online homework systems now in mathematics specifically or STEM classes where the computer can just generate an infinite number of tries at things. I am seeing student behaviors that I think are not conducive to learning. So I’m seeing students spending hours and hours trying to get their percentage score up to a certain level, not just in traditional systems, but even like in a system like hers where there’s a cutoff for homework above which it’s successful. The students still go too far. And so she did something different with her homework packets that I really like and wanna consider, which is turning the homework into essentially an in-class group quiz. So a homework packet is given out. Students are supposed to work on it, but then they come to class, they’re in a group, and they have to do some peer grading of the homework initially. So they pass it around, and there’s a rubric guideline. So one of the things she said is, “Does the answer you are grading include all the notation?” And the students are supposed to check each other’s work on the notation, so there’s these rich, robust mathematical conversations that are happening.

That’s the first half of the class, and then the second half of the class, she hands out a group quiz that is graded individually, so each individual student gets a copy. Sometimes it’s all the questions are the same. Sometimes the questions are slightly different from version to version. But the students work on all their stuff together, and they have access to everything. They can have AI, they can have internet resources, whatever, and it gets turned in, and that goes into a bucket that she uses. And I just thought that was a really interesting way to, change the focus of homework, ’cause you need time to practice, but I love the peer grading, I love the inclusion of group work, but in a way that is individually graded, and there’s a way it’s involved in the grade. I don’t know, what do you think about that section?

Boz: I like the idea. Again, this is not necessarily something that I’ve tried. I, my, especially my K12 world, my classes have always included a lot of group components, even when I was doing traditional grading. But I’ve never tried this specifically. But it did get me thinking about some of the ways that my personal practice and relationship with homework has changed over the years.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: And I don’t know if I have ever actually told this to you and thanked you for this.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: But my biggest change when I look back over not just my last, you know, seven years of doing, any kind of form of alternative grading, but looking back over my 20-plus years as an educator I think one of the biggest changes with how I look at stuff actually comes in homework. And this came from a podcast that you and I did when we were talking about the role of homework, and you brought up the idea of let’s stop looking at assessments and assignments as a function of where we did them and looking at the function of why we’re doing them. Is this, regardless of if it’s done in class or outside of class, individually or in a group, stop looking at all that. Instead, look at the purpose of the assessment or the assignment. Is this something that’s preparing students for a lecture or an activity or, what’s gonna happen in class? Is this something that the students are doing to engage with the instruction when the instruction is going on? Or is this something that the students should be doing to practice to, build that learning to a level of proficiency?

And looking at it through that lens and going, “Yeah, I’m not gonna grade and treat things based on where we did them, but instead of the purpose for doing them,” has been my like I said, my biggest change when it comes to the relationship to homework. And we’ve talked a lot about this when it comes to deadlines. I know there’s been a lot of things, some of the other stuff that we were looking at that we might be doing episodes on later, was again talking about a lot of school districts that looking at rolling back some of the grading reforms they’ve done over the years And that’s one of the things that I keep seeing and hearing, and it’s like, no, you’re you’re misunderstanding this no deadline things. When you look- … at it for the purpose instead of the placement of where it’s done, deadlines make sense in certain ones.

Sharona: Exactly. That’s… I say that a lot. Preparation is useless if you don’t prepare prior to when you need the stuff.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I have hard deadlines on preparation.

Boz: Yeah. But I- that’s something that I took from you from a podcast a very long time ago. I don’t know if I ever actually said thank you for that.

Sharona: I don’t know, but I remember having that epiphany of the way to describe what I had been thinking internally. I remember in the moment going, “Oh, that was cool. I like how I said that.” But you are welcome. And it definitely was a shift in my thinking as well, because … Words matter, and when we say things like homework, that involves a bunch of assumptions that may or may not be correct anymore. And it’s easier to articulate to my students, this is not homework. This is material that is practicing towards competency or practicing towards success or getting, learning to be successful at something, and that’s distinct from demonstrating that you have learned this thing. And those are the two categories for me. You’re either demonstrating you’ve learned something, or you’re trying to learn something. And there’s one situation where the trying counts, is if you’re learning how to learn. So- Yeah … there’s a little overlap there, but Now, I wanted to pivot to one other thing that I really took from this article, if we can.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Which is, it really strikes me the more I do this faculty development stuff and the more I do alternative grading specifically, how much parallels there are between the specific practices of alternative grading and the things that are good for instructors. So in particular, as we delve into alternative grading, we’re starting to see work come out about self-determination theory and autonomy, increasing engagement, and shock of shocks, that works if you’re trying to get instructors to implement alternative grading as well. So in the article, she points out some areas where she gave the individual course instructors, which mostly are graduate students it sounds autonomy to make choices within the structure of the grading system, and particularly how they’re gonna choose to account for participation. And she said that when she did this, it increased the engagement of the, and buy-in of the instructors to the course and the grading system, and I was like, “Huh, autonomy increases engagement. Where have I heard that before?”

Boz: That, that’s funny. Yeah we often bring up the fact that there’s a lot of things either we know is good for adults or that we know are good for our students, and never seem to make the connection , that usually what’s good for one is good for the other.

Sharona: Exactly.

Boz: That, that was interesting that you brought that up because what she was talking about in the article before this was when she personally took out part of that participation in her grading structure, and her student attendance dropping more than she was hoping it would. And we’ve talked about this before, looking at a article and looking at some research where they gave students choices about how they wanted attendance done and the effect that had. This is not something I can do in my K12. The attendance i- is e- even if it is part of the grade, like, a- attendance is mandatory. But in the higher ed, have you yet or are you thinking about including student input in your attendance policies or how that affects the class or the grades?

Sharona: So yes, I have thought about it, and I flirted with it this last semester because I did give my students some say in trying to deal with how we’re gonna do our triple P, which includes attendance. I have a feeling it was not as successful as I had hoped. One of the things that I’m starting to see is how much context matters. Because when I go and talk about the course and some of the successes we’ve had, for example, out in the world, a lot of times I’m focusing on a DFW rate, because that is one of the biggest challenges in the courses that I teach in my institution, is very high fail rates. And then I go to some more privileged institutions, and they also are very upset about grades, but they might have a 3% DFW- Yeah … rate, and I’ve got a 50% DFW rate. So what I found with my students is their attendance challenges are so high that even getting them engaged was not enough. And when I say their challenges are high, my students have heavy commutes. They tend to… hours-long commutes. They’re dependent on public transportation often, and we have public transportation problems in Los Angeles. Yeah. I had so many students who on a rainy day would email me that their grandfather’s car doesn’t start, so they can’t get to college. A lot of them get scheduled for work shifts they can’t say no to.

So my attendance problems are so much bigger than just whether or not I’m requiring it, and when I don’t require it, it drops like a stone. So I have to figure that out. Also, I teach freshmen mostly, and that’s a very different student in my context than a junior/senior. So I’m not quite sure yet, but I do think that I need to figure out how much attendance I’m gonna require because it’s rough. And again, if you miss the required attendance, then there’s other ways to make it up. I don’t– It would be very inequitable for me to really do it, but student engagement is not enough in my context to really deal with the attendance issue.

Boz: I brought that up specifically because I’ve seen it in my classes, although I’ve started to see a bounce back, but I know how many of our colleagues at Cal State have mentioned this, and I know how many colleagues around the country and even outside the country some of our Canadians brothers and sisters in education that I’ve talked to have really brought up attendance since pandemic as- one of these issues that even though we’ve always dealt with seems to have magnified since pandemic.

Sharona: Yeah. I do wanna mention one last section of the blog post though.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So, towards the end she has a section called Looking Back, Looking Forward, which is of course one of the standard reflective practices. But one thing I love is there’s this distrust of the single success being robust enough, right? Yeah. So there’s a lot, a reason that a lot of us require two times, and the reality is going from one time success to two times success has a tremendous impact on the available time you have in class for instruction and for assessing. So she did an analysis after the fact on if she had only required one success instead of two in the final grade. Now, this, she wasn’t looking at it within the course, so there might have been a behavior change. But out of 250 students on this particular standard, only 13 of them would move up a letter grade if she had gone from two successes to one success in this particular standard. And she’s Do I really need– Or maybe it was three to two, three to two. So 13 students got it twice, did not get it three times in such a way that would affect their final letter grade. She was like is that worth it?” 5% would’ve gone up a letter grade, so that’s just something she’s considering.

She also says something that I agree with and I have not yet figured out to do. She says, “I don’t love that most assessments are timed quizzes and exams. It does help the students know what to expect and reduces time needed to train them to meet a variety of different obligations, as they already have to cope with multiple assessment types and online platforms between all their different courses.” So I am struggling with, I know a lot about authentic assessment, and timed exams are not the most authentic thing we can usually do, but this begins to get really challenging for the students.

Boz: Yeah. And I talked a little bit about that earlier, about just how many different types of assessments that I would try to provide to my students. I do think there’s a point where there’s too many, and it becomes overwhelming to the teacher and to the students. On the other hand, I do think there’s also, you can go the other way. You can swing too narrow. A-and I do like still looking for evidence of learning wherever I can get it. One of the things that she talked about that she has taken away, and I think this is more for the coordination, not for her personally, but was the oral exams, which that part I, I actually want to look for ways that I can use that more in my future classes.

Especially with AI and the amount of things that we’ve heard, we all agree that you can learn so much more about what a student knows and doesn’t know through a conversation than you’ll ever get on an actual assessment, regardless of the form. So I actually wanna go the opposite way of what she talked about in her article. Although, like I said, I think the article, she’s talking more about it for the coordination because that can be, in a coordinated part, probably the hardest thing in the world to try to coordinate.

Sharona: Yeah, and to Norm on that. In my courses that are gonna start in a few weeks, yikes, I am hoping to do that- structure that we heard about in a previous episode, and I don’t have it pulled up, where , the teacher on a daily basis was walking around her classroom, this was a K-12 setting, and able to get evidence from listening or from having some a one-question conversation with a student.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And was basically, it’s not that the student was preparing for an assessment, so it didn’t have the cognitive load on the student, but the instructor was gathering the evidence she needed in that moment. And given that I’m gonna be doing a general education class that has no, none at all, even less than our stats class did, subsequent coursework dependent on this, I’m really hoping to get and to mark success by talking to my students. Yeah. So have to figure that out.

Boz: So I have one more question for you if we’ve got time. Okay. Looking over the time that you have been doing alternative grading, what is the one or two biggest things that you think has changed in your own practice?

Sharona: Oh, gosh. I think for me, it’s definitely been the reduction in the quantity of stuff that I need from students to have confidence in what they know because of the alignment of all the stuff we’re doing, knowing exactly what I wanna teach, knowing when I’m gonna teach it, and knowing what I need to see from students has cleared the clutter out of the class. And I now have consistent story for the class and what they’re trying to do, and I really understand my students better. And that has made me be, like, the relational teacher I always wanted to be.

Boz: Bonus question.

Sharona: Okay. All right.

Boz: Instead of this as a teacher, now look at this as a professional developer. What’s been the biggest change in the last four or five years? ‘Cause a- as a professional developer, helping people to go to alternative grading, what’s your biggest change?

Sharona: It’s not just a change. It’s again, it’s being that relational coach. It’s that I always wanted to have these deeper relationships with the people I was working with, and I can have those now. I understand them. I can be that person who convinces people or convinces people to take the risk, and I didn’t have that skill before.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So how about you? Mister has more experience in both of these places than I do.

Boz: Yours was a little bit broader. I’ve got actually two specific things in mind. So, as an educator, I’ve already talked about it, and that is my relationship with homework and looking- … at not the place it’s done, but the purpose that it’s done. So that’s been- … my biggest as an educator. As a professional developer, especially working with people that are trying to redesign their course for alternative grading practices, it’s that practice of having them take a step back and come up with the story of their class. What’s the purpose? What’s that, elevator speech? Because that has put so much more of a focus instead of all the minute little, details. ‘Cause oftentimes people would lose the forest for the trees So that I think has been the one thing that helped people step back and can see the whole forest, which then makes the process much easier.

Sharona: I love that.

Boz: All right. We are kinda coming up on time. So again I wanna thank you I always like looking back and doing these kind of reflections, but I think this is the first time when we’ve gone this far back. So thank you for being willing and opening to do this with me.

And for our listeners, thank you. For all of our new listeners like I said, we’d love to hear why, how, you guys came on this. But for everyone else, you’ve been listening to The Grading Podcast 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