The Grading Podcast

166 – The 5 P’s

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Boz: At an institution level you’re not actually designing the grading architecture and adopting that schoolwide. You’re putting in guide rails. You’re putting in so here is some of the lanes we can travel in, but you as the educator still have room to move around.

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’m doing quite well. I was looking out over, out my windows this morning and thinking, “Okay, it’s not quite the marine layer but the sky looks a little mixed.” But then I’m like, “I’m really tired of this Oklahoma weather that you brought- … metaphorically to California.” It has been so hot, which is typical, but it’s been so muggy. I’m done with it. It’s raining in the middle of the day here. That does not happen in California.

Boz: It really has been, especially just these last three or four days. It has been ridiculously hot, and I was working in my sunroom a lot yesterday, and just dying. And I’m sitting here right now going, “Oh my God, this feels so much better.”

Sharona: So I’m glad we got through it, but this has been… I literally think I texted my kids, “WTF, 90 degrees and it’s raining.” ‘Cause my kids are not living in California anymore.

Boz: But I have also, for those that might be listening to this that are in the American South, they’re probably laughing at us right now, going, “90 degrees and a little bit of rain? That’s nothing. Wait till it gets 100 with 90% humidity.”

Sharona: Yes. However, I once asked a friend, “Why are we willing to pay what we’re willing to pay to live in California?” And she said it was the weather, and I think she’s right. So the problem is not the weather. The problem is it’s a violation of the contract that we signed- … when we bought property in California. ‘Cause we signed a contract that said we will not have weather from the American South here.

Boz: Yeah. N- I’m not sure if Mother Nature agreed to that, but okay.

Sharona: How are you doing?

Boz: I’m doing really well. Just getting into the grind of everything of the semester, which by the way, it’s been a couple weeks since we’ve talked about it, but in another week or two I’m expecting an update on how your new course is going this semester. ‘Cause we’re now three weeks going into week four of the semester at Cal State, so definitely want to hear about some updates here probably in another week or two to how that class was going. ‘Cause we really did- Absolutely … we talked about quite a bit this summer of while you were trying to plan it and what you were gonna try to do with that class.

Sharona: Yes. And I have a lot to say, but I agree. I think I will have even more to say in a couple weeks when I see how some of my plans have panned out.

Boz: Yeah. All right. And besides what’s new with us though, we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta take a second and we’ve gotta talk about some big updates with the podcast.

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: So we actually hit a milestone a little while back, and we just breezed over it. What was that milestone that we actually hit what? Almost month and a half, two months ago now?

Sharona: Yeah, so in July it was the third-year anniversary of this podcast. We have actually been on the air, so to speak, for three years, which is extremely unusual in the podcast world. And not extremely, but that puts us in the top tier of podcasts because apparently, like 80% of podcasts make it to episode six and then stop.

Boz: Yeah. Not only have we made it a little bit past six, we’re actually coming up, this is what? 166?

Sharona: Yeah. 167? So we’re k- we’re s- 200 is w- within our crosshairs, although that’s a little ways off. Yeah. That’s another 30 episodes, 30-plus episodes.

Boz: But it’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this long. We’re still talking about grading, and people are still listening. In fact, not only are people still listening, that is another milestone that we just hit this week.

Sharona: This week.

Boz: What did we break this week for the first time?

Sharona: So we hit 50,000 downloads for the life of the podcast, and I just love the fact that it means that there’s been 50,000 hours of somebody listening to and thinking about and talking about grading reform. That’s just, that boggles my mind. That number boggles my mind considering there were something like 16 of us on that Google+ circle thing from 10 years ago.

Boz: Okay. I’ve heard you and Robert Talbert talk about that. I never heard the number. So there was only 16 of you on that?

Sharona: Probably. Give or take. It was pretty small. W-

Boz: wow.

Sharona: And at the time I could have named most of them.

Boz: Wow. How this community has grown.

Sharona: Yeah. Yeah. So I wanna thank our listeners. I wanna thank our new listeners if you’re new to us, ’cause we do see the statistics on the growth of the audience. We’re hitting consistently now about a little bit over 500 downloads a week, and we’re over 2,000 downloads a month, and it’s just, it’s growing and growing. And it’s not that– do I feel personally satisfied? Yes, of course. But what I care more about is that it means that the conversation about grading reform is growing and growing.

Boz: Yeah that’s really exciting. Like you said the whole grading conference was supposed to be an in-person. COVID hit. It blew up o-once you guys went to an online version of it or virtual version of it, and we’ve kept that. And there is no way that we would have the numbers that we have at that conference and the incredibly varied locations of where people are coming from with a in-person. But there’s also things at the in-person w- just y- you can’t replace, no matter what we do, how we try, there’s just some things you can’t replace that an in-person has. So it is great. We’re hoping, if this one does go smoothly, does go successfully, that it will be one of many that, you know, in different regions acr- across the country so we can try to get more people involved. But yeah that’s a big one that’s coming up. But there’s also some other news from the center. So what else is the center doing that’s coming up quick?

Sharona: So we are, I am going to the Joint Math Meetings in January in Chicago, and for the first time ever, the center is gonna get an exhibit booth. So we are going to be there. We’re gonna be showing off some of the work that we’re doing on some grants that we’ve recently gotten. So we’re hoping, I haven’t spoken to them. We talked about a little bit, but I haven’t confirmed, but I’m hoping Prairie Learn’s gonna be there with us. But we will have a presence at the Joint Math Meetings in Chicago, and I’m excited about that because that is one of the biggest conferences I ever attend. It’s over 5,000 attendees. And so to have an entire center about grading reform presence right after all these conversations are coming out in the news media about grading, I think is gonna be really exciting. I do wanna put out a call to some of our listeners, though. If you are gonna be going to the Joint Math Meetings, and you’ve been doing this for a while, and you wanna come help us staff the booth, please put in a message through our contact us or email us directly, ’cause we’re gonna need some additional help staffing that booth since I’m gonna also be hosting an invited paper session.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I’m really excited about that. I’m really hoping that the opportunity there is gonna happen to continue to sustain this conversation and keep it moving. So that’s why I’m really excited to be there.

Boz: Yeah, and you were talking about conversation, and we’ve been talking a a lot about how much recent media and just time in the news that grading reform has gotten. And no, we’re not gonna do another episode going down on Harvard and stuff, but it has been a lot of conversation in the recent past. And-

Sharona: And I see posts on it about LinkedIn- Yeah … in LinkedIn almost every day. Yeah. So it’s it’s, yes, we had all these news articles, but we also see it still in the news. I’m surprised that we haven’t moved on from it yet, which is great. I’m excited, but I’m surprised.

Boz: Yeah. In fact there was even an article that came out talking about this just this last week, actually just a few days ago on September 10th That was titled, “While Other Schools Weigh In on Grading Reform, Princeton Remains Silent.” Now, I don’t wanna, like I said, I don’t wanna get into this, this article right now, but my big takeaway is it talks about how many schools, how many of, the really big name schools are getting into these conversations and having these conversations internally about the need for doing grading reform. Now, yes, some of them, we believe, are taking a bad turn on that, but the conversation is there. And this article just goes on and on about talking about how many schools are there, and yes, they point out Princeton’s not, but that was my big takeaway, is just how much we are seeing right now.

Sharona: And how many times have we seen that we’re at a conference or we’re in another context, like when we were talking with Josh Warner last week, and it’s like people are talking about AI, and people are talking about AI, and then suddenly grading reform comes up. And I just read a really funny thing. There was a article on Josh Raikes Substack talking about Banana Land University, basically using the Savannah Bananas-

Boz: I love those guys …

Sharona: as a metaphor. I know, but as a metaphor or as an opportunity to rethink the university and they were… He was talking really about AI and its disruption and things, and at the very end, he says, “A counter-narrative that it would be wise for us to attend to, it’s the realization…” I’m sorry, I’m reading the wrong part that I wanted to read. But basically they were talking about spinning up AI agents and things like that to deal with this university thing, and he said no, you could try some other trick plays like the bananas, such as alternative grading.” And I’m like, “Whoa whoa, wait a second.” “A trick play? No.” But it’s popping up everywhere. I know. Including at Cal State LA. Yeah. Like I was telling you that I was having conversations with some other faculty and I’m getting opportunities to be featured on campus. So I guess my question is to you and to the greater world, and hopefully this is what we wanna talk about today, how do we keep this going? How do we keep the momentum and turn this, this news orgy almost into sustainable conversations?

Boz: Yeah, how do we go from this, this massive amount of momentum that we seem to have into sustainable change?

Sharona: Right

Boz: And in looking at that question, we came across something really interesting, and it’s by one of our favorite people, Matt Townsley. I love that guy .

Sharona: The sportscaster of grading reform himself.

Boz: Yep. He wasn’t the sole author, but he was the name that definitely stood out to us. But they did, he did some research, and they called this The Five Ps of Starting and Sustaining Grading Reform. And I kind of wanna get into this for a couple of reasons. First, any time we’ve talked about Matt, his name comes up with K-12, and we have talked so much about all this recent news about grading reform, it’s all been higher ed. So I wanna get back a little bit to my K-12 brethren, and talk a little bit about what they propose in this research, what they found of how to actually take this from starting to sustaining.

Sharona: But to clarify, we don’t believe that K-12 and higher ed should be separate in this conversation. That, that really- Absolutely not … this should go all the way across. So even though this article is about K-12, and we’re gonna dive into it from that perspective, I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned for higher ed here as well.

Boz: And that’s where I want to go with this, is a- as we talk a little bit about this, what does that look like in higher ed? Because even though you’re right, these aren’t separate, there is definitely some structural differences, and some of these five Ps, I think has quite a bit of structural difference between, the higher ed and the K-12 worlds.

Sharona: Yeah, I agree So where do you wanna start with this?

Boz: First let’s just get right into it’s, that says the five P framework. What are the five Ps?

Sharona: Yeah. So the five Ps are people, purpose, policies, pace, and persistence. All right. So those just trip off the tongue, right? Yeah. You’re gonna remember all those now that I gave them to you?

Boz: Oh, absolutely. People, purpose, policies, pace, and persistence.

Sharona: Say that without looking at it on the screen.

Boz: So I definitely wanna talk about these. I think it makes sense to talk about them in order, even though … I’ll be honest, I’m really interested in the pace one. But yeah let’s talk about what these five Ps mean.

Sharona: And when you say in order I think what we mean is these are in order of the way they are listed. I don’t think these are necessarily the order that they happen. Don’t know that for sure,

Boz: I would disagree with you. Now, of course it’s going to be some circular motion, but- I don’t know if I agree. I think that this is at least the first three are kind of- in order and do require some

Sharona: I’m gonna push back a little bit in the sense that I think this, that’s true if you’re trying to do institutional change. I wanna be careful not to say you have to have all these in place to start at a lower level.

Boz: Okay,

Sharona: so- you could start at an individual course or a course sequence level. You don’t have to have all these things, but if you want it to stick and sustain, then maybe you need all

Boz: five. Okay. So l- let’s do, because you’re right, that is a distinction. And this research was specifically about how does a school do this. It’s- Okay … th- this w- this research and this framework is not looking at how do you do this as an individual instructor. It is looking at how do you do this at an institutional level, at l- at least at a school. I think you could probably apply a lot of this to bigger districts or regions but at least at a school. So we-

Sharona: Okay. Fair enough …

Boz: we do wanna frame it like that. So you’re right.

Sharona: Because as mu- as much as I love this, this is not how I did it personally.

Boz: Yeah. But-

Sharona: So I just wanna make that distinction.

Boz: Yeah. Yeah and you’re right. You’re right. That is a distinction that, that needed to be made because it does look different when you’re doing it at an individual level, and then trying to do it at an institutional level.

Sharona: Okay. So let’s dive in. So the first P is people. So what do they say about getting the right people?

Boz: Yeah, so that’s the first part of it, is this isn’t something that can be, that’s gonna be done alone. You do have to get a group of people that, are like-minded or that are looking at making some sort of change. You’ve gotta be intentional with who that body is made up of. And it needs to have some diversity in it. So-

Sharona: Before you go there, I wanna point out one thing that they say here. In mathematics, we love our definitions.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: We love labeling things. I really like the framing here they’re using from the research called a guiding coalition. So they’re saying step one is form your grading guiding coalition, and I think having a name like that, whether or not that’s what you call it, gives you something to hook onto that you can recruit people into and have a purpose for. So who do they say should be in this?

Boz: So I do one of the, the big things before it talks about, who should be in this, that it does actually talk about distributive leadership, and they’re trying to dispel the myth of the heroic leader. The one person that, you know, really champions the whole movement and is driving that force, which is something I see in K-12 quite a bit. What’s wrong with that? If that person ends up leaving for whatever reason before that change becomes, really just integral to the culture of that institution, what happens?

Sharona: And we saw that I believe back on episode 101 where we spoke with Doug Wilson. So even though he was that visionary leader for his high school to change everything, he still really did not set himself up to be that heroic single leader.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I agree with that completely. So if they’re not gonna do a single heroic leader and they’re gonna do distributed leadership, then who are the types of people that should be, especially in K12, the kinds of people that you need on a guiding coalition like this?

Boz: Yeah, so you need a variety of teacher leadership type of positions. You’ve gotta have, your department chairs. These are people that oftentimes are elected by the department to represent the department and the department needs. So you need those kind of people. You obviously need administrators. You need your instructional coaches. So a, a few things that also I think were really important and to remember, get the people that aren’t in the classroom, especially the counselors. Like in the K12 world, counselors play a behind-the-scenes role in so many things that if you really don’t have them on board, a lot of reform or a lot of things that you’re trying to do will fall apart and you’ll have no idea why. And it’s because of this kind of behind-the-scenes support that counselors provide that a lot of times they just, they, I don’t wanna say they don’t get credit for it, that’s not quite the right word, but they just it gets overlooked their role in the K12 world when it comes to a lot of this stuff.

Sharona: I agree. I agree. I’ve seen that now. To be honest, I feel like I’m seeing that at the university in ways I didn’t expect. Because my perception, which goes back from when I was a student, which was many years ago, I don’t know that I ever spoke to an advisor Like, I don’t know maybe the very first semester of the very first time I was enrolling for things, and never again. But college advising actually does guide a lot of people, especially some of our first generation students. And so if you don’t have advisors who are speaking to the students about their schedules involved, and if they don’t know what’s going on with you, they don’t know how to coach students and guide students in line with… and they’re not even talking about grades the same way we are.

Boz: Yeah. A- and again, and this is an interesting thing ’cause you, you brought up the higher ed version of a counselor and their purpose. In the K-12 world, I think they even play a bigger role because they’re dealing with the programming of students, and advising is similar, but not quite the same. So yeah, i- if you’re trying to do any kind of large reform of any sort, grading or any sort, I cannot encourage you enough to include counselors, at least in the conversation. They really are, like I said, in the background of so many things, and it just, it often gets overlooked what their role is and how it might affect the success or failure of your initiatives.

Sharona: And then the other thing that I thought was interesting in this section is the, the research that they’re using that from which the words guiding coalition comes also talks about how big this guiding coalition will make, and they say that change often starts with just two or three people, but then grows from half a dozen to 20 to 50, depending on the size of the organization. So again, I like this idea of having a name for it. Maybe you sit down with anywhere from three to six people to start with the conversation of the purpose of this coalition, but then it could grow quite a bit, and it should probably go grow quite a bit depending on the size of the organization.

Boz: Starting off with that almost like a committee organization group of two, two, three, four people to identify, who are the players that you need to have to get that group, once it’s formed, focused and going. And, if we’re talking specifically about grading reform, that’s I think where you really need to take that body and ground them in some of the research and some of the readings of the issues with traditional grading.

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: That is something that you and I learned very early on in our side of our careers that deal with doing PDs and trying to help groups that want to redesign their college courses for grading reform or alternative grading. And that first thing we learned is we had a group of highly motivated people that wanted to be there, people that were bought into wanting to try something different. We didn’t do that grounding piece

Sharona: We didn’t know we had to.

Boz: Yeah. We didn’t do it, and what happened is we had these really highly motivated people that were all motivated for slightly different reasons. They all had issues with traditional grading, but they were different. And the fact that we didn’t have that overall view of just how many issues there were, we ended up recreating some of those issues with the grading architecture designs that they came up with. And again, n-no fault of theirs. That was completely our fault as facilitators. So that’s, and that’s what this research also said. That’s the first step. And in fact, if we’re gonna link this, they actually even in one of the appendices give a lot of great resources of where to start. Where do you ground this team?

Sharona: And since I suspect that a lot of this list that’s in the article is K-12, don’t forget we also have the resources page on the center’s website to provide syllabi and samples, but also books and articles and resources as well as the history of the stuff that we’ve mentioned on this podcast. So there’s a lot of… There’s so many more resources now than there were even six, seven years ago.

Boz: Oh, absolutely. So now a question back to you. Who are some of those players? Who are some of those player types in the higher ed world? We talked about, or in the research it talks about, who do you want on this committee for K-12? Who are the players you would want if you were gonna try to do this at, the University of Sharona?

Sharona: I think it very much depends on, again, context is everything, so I’m gonna go from the context of a, a large regional public university, because I think it’s gonna change public versus private, larger versus smaller. But in a large regional, you have a couple of options. But if you wanna sustain it, I would probably go all the way up to the, try to get the campus, right? Get the campus going. So I think if you’re gonna talk about a campus-wide thing, you need to be thinking about the deans, the academic deans, but also the student success deans and stuff like that. You’ve gotta get some department chairs. Department chairs at a higher ed level play a very strange role that I think is a little different than K-12, but I’m willing to be corrected.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: They are the first layer of true administration, but they are the last layer of faculty governance, ’cause we have this shared governance structure, which by the way, is also coming under question and attack at the higher ed level for actually not working anymore. But anything above a department chair, you are a true administrator, but we don’t have like separate credentials and things like that you guys have. But a department chair is just barely different from a faculty member, just a regular old faculty member. So you need department chairs, but they’re just an odd duck. Especially ’cause many of them are researchers in their own field, so they’re just getting used to dealing with students and beyond their own classes. So it’s an interesting situation. So I’d say deans, I’d say department chairs. Ideally, you’re gonna have to go up another level to your vice provosts or your vice presidents And I would also bring in your advising teams, but I might also bring in some of your student services like financial aid and the library, because some of the choices you make have much bigger implications. Implications for financial aid, implications for scholarship, implications for, degrees. It’s complicated. So I think that there’s a lot of different groups, but I still think you can start pretty small. You can start with probably six to eight people.

Boz: I think you, you left out a really important group for the higher ed.

Sharona: Which ones? The instructors or the students?

Boz: No.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: Your CETL type people.

Sharona: Yes. Thank you. Didn’t mean to.

Boz: No, that-

Sharona: Sorry, CETLs.

Boz: No, we’re just brainstorming here, but yeah. I because… A- and that is a difference, I think, between K-12 and higher ed, is we are actually trained in pedagogy at K-12, and we have other system-wide things in place for trainings. Don’t have that at higher ed. CETL plays that role. So yeah, as a group, you have to have some sort of representation of whatever, continued staff training body that you have at your-

Sharona: If you have one.

Boz: If you have one. That’s right. That’s a big if.

Sharona: Otherwise, you can bring in somebody like the Center for Grading Reform.

You can bring in a, a CETL from another institution as a guest as well, potentially. But yeah. Yeah. Not all institutions have them.

Boz: All right. But I like the last line of their actual writing in this research, which is once this guiding coalition is together, the, the actual work starts with the second P.

Sharona: Right.

Boz: The first P is the organization, is getting the people in the room. The real work starts with the second P, which is the purpose. And I love- And

Sharona: to be clear, sorry, it’s the pur- is the purpose of grading reform, or is it the purpose of something else?

Boz: No, and that’s the whole thing. So something else that you and I have learned the hard way is that looking at grading reform and trying to reform your grading practices is great, but we need to ground that. And something, again, that we didn’t do when we first started, but coming up with that grading purpose statement. And-

Sharona: So I wanna be careful here, ’cause they actually mix these two things. The first part of this section of the paper is actually not the purpose of grades, but the purpose of grading reform.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And then they go from that into the purpose of grades. But

Boz: yeah, but it’s establishing that common why.

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: So yes, it does start with why are we trying to do this kind of reform, and then gets into more of the purpose of grading, what we want the end goal to look like. But they recommended two common questions for helping come up with this organizational why. Why are we here? Yeah. And I love these two questions. The first one are: How are grades important in our students’ current and future lives? And the second question: What are the possible implications of ineffective grading policies? Or, sorry, grading practices.

Sharona: Yeah. There’s one I also would, not a question, but I would actually add into this thing, is I would define what grades are. Because one of the things I’ve started to see coming up when I work with instructors is in my brain, I’m thinking mostly about the end of term grade, the grade that goes on some sort of a permanent record. But many instructors conflate that with all the marks given, because some people give like an A or a B or a C on an individual assignment. So I think we need to start to distinguish grades as recorded in a permanent record from all of the interior communication that’s done between students and faculty, and even like, even things like interim grades, right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Those are all very different whys and issues and implications than the sort of permanent record things.

Boz: Yeah. And we’ve we’ve talked about, especially in some of our earlier editions. When I was doing this often in, in my high school classes, the bane of my existence were those interim, those like five-week or 10-week grades that we in K-12 have to give that I think is universal in K-12. I didn’t think you did that at all in the higher ed. I have since learned that some institutions you actually do that. But yeah, those kind of interim grades, those were the bane of my existence because of the grading architecture I came up with, if I was really using it for the interim, all of my students would be failing at least up until the halfway, the midterm grade. There’s no possible way not to be, but I don’t wanna go down that rabbit hole, but.

Sharona: But I do wanna read this example of an answer to these two questions. So they gave a sample why statement, because you and I mostly focus on the purpose of grades themselves, but this is about grading reform specifically. And so they, their example is the Central High Grading Guiding Coalition asserts that effective grading practices are essential for creating meaningful report card grades that support valid decision-making regarding student opportunities and areas for growth and development. We further recognize that we must make a deliberate effort to ensure that such practices and grades are applied consistently across all student groups at our school. So this is different than anything I’ve really ever seen or talked about.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Because we acknowledge that grades are used to rank and sort our students. And we talk about wanting that ranking and sorting to be more meaningful, like the A should mean something. But this is different for K-12 because you have different sort of things you’re required to do for students than at the higher ed level.

Boz: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: So I just thought that was fascinating. Okay.

Boz: Be- before we m- move on- … I wanna pull the question back to you. If we’re looking at the University of Sharona, that’s gonna be a running joke now what are some of those things? Where do you want your coalition of teachers and educational leaders that have made up your team your P, your people- what do you, where do you want them to go? How are you going to guide them for purpose?

Sharona: For purpose of answering these two questions? Like th- this particular purpose statement?

Boz: Yeah. Or not necessarily the purpose of grading statement, but the purpose of this committee. Wh- where do you, at a higher ed, does this look that different at higher ed than it does

Sharona: So I think for me, the biggest difference is whose responsibility is it to provide student opportunities and direct, like directing student opportunities in areas for growth. So my perception, right or wrong, is that in K12, that responsibility to guide students into areas they can grow still rests with the adults in the room, the teachers and administrators and things. But in higher ed, we’re trying to grow that for students. So for me, it would go very much towards focusing on student success- as students define it. So that’s, so I’m, for the University of Sharona, I kinda wanna go the route that MIT is taking, which is we want the degree and the name on the degree, the name of the institution on the degree, to be the main thing that comes out for a student, and everything else comes from their internal drive, encouraging them to grow and to learn and to take more chances and take more opportunities and stretch themselves and not be held back because they think they’re not good enough to do something. So it’s a little bit different flavor for me, I think, because again, I read this sample one that says, “Support valid decision-making.” I’m like, who is making the decision?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And for me, I wanna put as much as I can the ability to make that decision on the student with the support and guidance, but not without restriction. Like I’m thinking back to, at least right now in K12 or when my kids were going through, who got to and who was encouraged to go into an AP class, an IB class, a sort of accelerated or more, more challenging class. There were some restrictions. If you didn’t get certain grades, you came under a lot of pressure to not take the next course, and I don’t want that pressure at the higher ed level.

Boz: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. All right. So what’s the next P?

Sharona: Before we go onto the next P, they do mention that once you have that Y level, then you also want to talk about the actual functionality of the grades. Yeah. Which is where we get to a grading purpose statement. So a lot of times the next thing would be to build not just the purpose of the coalition, but to start to build the purpose of grades themselves.

Boz: Yeah. And I would see that as kind of the culminating task of this phase, is that’s the end goal, is that universally accepted or institutionally accepted grading purpose statement.

Sharona: Yeah

Boz: And they do also just I like their they provide kind of a grading purpose template, which I don’t know if you read, but I really like theirs. I know we’ve provided some as well when we do our trainings is kind of- … here is just a, a sentence starter to get you started. But I really like this one that they did.

Sharona: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, it’s a appropriate template that can be modified, but it really gives you the components of what needs to go into this.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So then we get into something that the way they term it policies. I would replace policies with pillars For our model. ‘Cause I’m looking, what are the policies? And they’re like, formative versus summative evidence, number of performance levels, communicating non-achievement separately, reassessment, and extra credit. And this is not the language I would use, but I think there’s, the Venn diagram between this and what I would use is not quite a circle, but it’s pretty close.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Now I think it’s very interesting because I know K-12 loves this formative versus summative structure. It just doesn’t work mentally for me personally. The way I look at it is everything is formative until it’s summative, because student success defines summative. But I think that’s just a shorthand for myself.

Boz: But so one of, I think, the biggest takeaways for me though on, on reading through the, these policies piece of it is I like how they are recommending at a institution level that you’re not actually designing the grading architecture and adopting that school-wide. You’re putting in guide rails. You’re putting in “So here is some of the lanes we can travel in,” but you as a educator still have room to move around. So I think that is one of the key things. ‘Cause there are… If you’re gonna do that as a institution-wide, and again, some of the research that I’ve been, reading and learning about in my other world, in my actual LAUSD job which is from The Opportunity Myth and The Opportunity Makers, is the importance of consistency at an institution. So of course, this research again was focused on K-12, but just that consistency of knowing some of these guide rails, like knowing what to expect, even if there’s different flavors in it, just having those commonalities to a student that’s going from room to room in a, six through K- or six through 12, probably anywhere from four to eight different rooms a day, is incredibly important for our students. That consistency, that just being able to understand and expect some of these

Sharona: So I can understand where that research is coming from. I’m not sure how much that applies the same way at the university. I think at a high level, I agree, right? That if we wanna say an A means this, right? An A means that you’ve gotten proficiency in most of the course content or something like that I can understand. But as we dive into the details, we are seeing tremendous differences from discipline to discipline of what is needed for students to be able to learn that particular discipline. So in some of the disciplines, having very specific precursor knowledge is needed to build the next knowledge. If I wanna do calculus, as currently taught, I have to have some algebra skills. If I don’t have those algebra skills, like it, it’s literally meaningless gobbledygook. But then in something like creative writing, a lot of the fundamental structures that are focused on in lower grades and lower levels, like thesis statements and some of those other things, those get thrown out the window in, sometimes in creative writing and finding one’s voice. So I’m not sure how this building wide or how the consistency plays out so much at the university.

Boz: So

Sharona: again- I think it may have to be at a higher level and less granularity, but I’m not sure.

Boz: Yeah and like I said, that goes, I think, back to the guide rail mentality, and maybe those guide rails at the higher ed setting might need to be wider so you’ve got more room to play and wiggle than you would in K12. But having those guide rails … And yeah, m- maybe it does. Maybe the guide rails could have some flexibility and some differences from one college in a university to another college. But I do think it, it would be possible and beneficial if at some level at the university you did have these common guide rails within the grading policies. So maybe it’s not- I would agree … university level, but … but- I guess- … we’re seeing that. We’re seeing s- some good and bad grading policies at a, at the whole institution levels,

Sharona: I guess what I would say is if by commonalities we’re talking basically, like philosophically the four pillars. I do think that the four pillars can underpin almost any grading system in any discipline. The details are gonna be different, but having multiple opportunities to showing evidence of learning, having the marks communicate that progress I think those are relatively universal. And so if that’s the level we’re talking about, then I would agree.

Boz: Okay,

Sharona: then- It’s just getting down lower I find difficult.

Boz: Okay, so they’ve got an example of some common grading policies that, a, a school went through. So they’ve got five of them. Or this example had-

Sharona: Yeah, and the fifth one is, the fifth one is cracking me up, but we’ll get there.

Boz: But just looking at those, are these broad enough that, something like that could be done at a higher ed level?

Sharona: Yeah. These, these with… I, yes, I think that they basically renamed the four pillars, and the fifth one is something else entirely. ‘Cause they say formative versus summative assess- evidence. We call that eventual mastery matters. We’re just looking for evidence, and it’s the same thing really in my mind. Now, I understand why they have to do this, because this is being more specific of don’t put stuff that they haven’t mastered into the grade, right? So I think it’s a reworking of that.

Boz: Okay. But are you saying that if we went and got a random sampling of syllabis at a single college, that some of them might have things like attendance as part of the grade, some wouldn’t? Would they have- Oh, no.

Sharona: Look, all the bad practices are absolutely present in higher ed. I was thinking more that these are the policies we want, but you’re right, because the fifth policy is don’t do this. And so I guess I was looking more at the what we want and not really looking at the don’t do this parts. So I guess that first one is a mix of do this and don’t do that.

Boz: Yeah. But, like this third policy that this Central Junior High came up with, and I don’t know if this is a fictitious school or if this was an actual example of one, but like the third one, non-academic factors will be explicitly taught, assessed, and communicated separately. That guideline would affect how teachers could use attendance in grades

Sharona: A- and I do understand that. I guess I’m just struggling with some of the language because we don’t communicate anything separately at the university. Almost all of our stuff is single grade. There are no systems to allow multiple stuff. So I- you either have an opportunity to find a way to legitimately build it into the grade, which is what I do, because I have a learning outcome related to that stuff, or you just don’t count it at all, ’cause we just don’t have separate grades. I guess we could, but it,

Boz: I was about

Sharona: to say, do- The system issues with that would be so huge that I’m just not sure

Boz: do, are we sure? Are we sure that there’s…

Sharona: at my institution.

Boz: Okay, yeah. ‘Cause that’s the one thing over the process of being part of this podcast and talking with so many other educators, I am often surprised at some of the things that are out there that I didn’t think- … would be possible.

Sharona: Look, I think it’s entirely possible there are institutions that report multiple grades or can report multiple grades. I just have never been associated with any of them in the five or six institutions that I’m familiar with personally.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And like I said, let’s just talk real quickly ’cause we are getting a little bit long on time. That fifth one, this is again, one of those don’t do… I, w- I guess what I’m struggling with is it’s really hard sometimes in higher ed to say, “Don’t do this,” because of some of the academic freedom things that we have. But they’re basically, there’s a whole section where one of your policies should be about extra credit, and their whole policy is extra credit will not be given at any time. That, that is the policy.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And so it’s just interesting to me that, I’m not used to don’t dos as much as I am with do these things. Okay. But we have two left to look at, and I know you really wanna look at pace, so why don’t you take pace?

Boz: And I don’t wanna necessarily spend a ton of time on this, but I love the fact that I’ve brought this up a ton when we’re talking about trying to do reform and comparing K-12 to higher ed, and this idea that, and so many times in higher ed we’re given groups. Groups have time to make these adjustments. Our work that we did over the summer with McMaster’s University, like their goal, even though a few teachers might be doing it sooner, their goal was to implement these practices in fall of ’28.

Sharona: Yeah.

Boz: When we did this with the Climb project with the engineers at Cal State LA, again, the goal was a full year and a half, basically, of planning, of learning, and of putting these policies in place Oftentimes in K-12, it’s like Monday, you’re doing it on Wednesday. And that’s one of the things that they talk about in this pacing, is that you can’t. You can’t do that. You can’t do this we’re gonna put these in place, and I expect within a month everyone doing it.”

Sharona: I actually think they’re taking an even stronger statement here than just that.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: I think they’re saying, ’cause at the very first s statement is, “A common temptation is to set a firm start date.” Yep. So even if the firm start date is a year away, what they’re saying here is, “Don’t expect everyone to get there by then.” They say it’s much more likely where you might get your sixth grade team to do it, and then as the sixth grade team gets it done, then maybe the next year the seventh grade team will do it. Then maybe the next year the eighth grade team. This, even if it’s a long deadline, expecting everyone to meet it is not necessarily a great thing.

Boz: Yeah. So-

Sharona: So I do love that.

Boz: And like I said, I’ve made that argument and it I feel, I feel like I’ve been vindicated with some of them, what they’re writing in that as well.

Sharona: Did you read the second paragraph in persistence? So the last P they have is persistence. But read the first sentence of the second paragraph. “

Boz: The similar research on organizing change with- within schools consistently show that meaningful instructional shifts take multiple years to fully take root and require coherent ongoing support.”

Sharona: So Robert Talbert, one of our favorite people on this podcast, r- this week wrote, “The main thing I learned today as executive director of a Center for Teaching Excellence, before you can expect excellence in teaching from faculty, you have to give faculty tools to manage their classes, their time, their energy, and their attention, as well as permission to feel like whole people so they will have the head space to even think about pedagogy.”

Boz: Yeah. And going into this persistence I am not as familiar if this is the case in higher ed, ’cause even though I know CETLs exist and things, I’ve not been too heavily involved. We at the K-12, it’s almost every year we have to have new initiatives, and the amount of times that I have literally heard, “This too shall pass.” That is the rally call of, “Okay, we’ve got some new district mandate or district policy. Yeah, it’s gonna go away in the next six months to a year,” because that’s just how it happens. We do new initiatives. We’ll design a tool, an observational tool one year. We’ll use it for a year, and then it’s a different one the next year. So the amount of times I’ve gone in and tried to do PDs and a, a resister will look at me and just go, “Yeah, this too shall pass.” It’s ridiculous. So that ongoing persistent PD and support is so crucial

Sharona: And then the other thing they say here towards the end of this persistence thing, effective grading practices and the model for doing this redesign is a model to keep evaluating your grading practices. So building a feedback loop and reassessment and revision into your grading policies is also great, and that’s one thing we’ve talked about here on the podcast a lot is how often do we go back and look and change and tinker with our grading systems, our grading architectures.

Boz: Yep. And just that constant revisiting and improving, and not just improving, but what worked for, my students five years ago might not still be as effective as it is, as it was then because my students have changed But I, we are coming up on time. I wanna wrap this up. If you haven’t seen this research and this article and you are looking at doing this at, a higher level than just a single classroom, not only is this great material, they also link so many other great great things in reference. I love the fact that e- they even ref- you know, reference the Defours, and I always talk about how I actually got into this through PLC work. So this is just a who’s who a- and where to go for grading reform and grading reform research.

Sharona: Absolutely.

Boz: All right, so we are up on time. Is there anything that you wanna wrap this up with before we sign off?

Sharona: Just one more thank you to everyone who listens this far. We appreciate you and hope to see you at one of our in-person things coming up.

Boz: Yeah, and I hope to see that 75,000. That would be our next big goal. So for everyone, you have been listening to The Grading Podcast with Bos and Sharona, and we just wanna say thank you to all of you, 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.