The Grading Podcast

Boz: The purpose of this is to be curious as the coach. It’s not to give advice. It’s not to say, “Oh, have you thought about doing it this way?” Or, “Oh, you should have, you know, used this kind of sentence structure or paragraph structure,” or, “Have you considered changing this wording?” It’s actually being curious and asking questions.

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 you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m good. I’m a little bit tired because I’m on the road and I got in last night to my hotel room at 2:00 in the morning in the time zone that I’m in, so I’m a little spacey.

Boz: So where are you then if you’re not in lA?

Sharona: I am in New Orleans, and this is the second time in my life I’ve been in New Orleans, and for the second time in my life, I’m probably not going to see anything of actually New Orleans.

Boz: Oh, why?

Sharona: I am here on the ground for about 36 hours, and the bulk of that is to see my son. So the I’m not here in New Orleans to be in New Orleans, I’m here in New Orleans because this was the one show that was on a Sunday that I could get in and out for to actually see his show live. That is my purpose for being here. We might try to go to the French Quarter tonight, but the problem is I can’t eat anything in New Orleans. Because I’m Jewish. So I don’t eat shellfish, and I don’t eat pork, and I only do a little bit of spice, and it pretty much means I can’t eat here.

Boz: I was gonna say, yeah you pretty much described the opposite of Cajun food there. Yeah. In fact I recently- Yeah … I think I shared it with you, but I heard a comedian that was saying, he’s half Creole and half Jewish, and how, especially when it came to eating, those two cultures completely clash.

Sharona: Yeah. No, completely clash. And then layer on my personal taste buds on top of that and yeah, no.

Boz: I know there’s been a lot of rain and stuff out m- Midwest. Are y- is the weather there okay? Are you getting hit with some of the storms and stuff?

Sharona: Yesterday when I got here, it was crazy hot. It is not today. Today it’s 71 degrees and sunny, which given, where in LA it’s 88 degrees and sunny, and you’re under a red flag warning for high winds and fires. And I actually had to text my sister yesterday, and her house is in an evacuation zone for one of the fires. Although she is out of the country right now, so her husband’s dealing with that. So yeah, little worried about that, but glad to be here. It’s a lot cooler without being cold, which is nice.

Boz: I hope the show goes well and you get to enjoy some time with your youngest.

Sharona: I’m excited to meet his cast. He has apparently been talking me up to them, which makes me feel amazing, but supposedly they already love me, so hopefully they’ll love me more when they see the gifts I’m bringing.

Boz: All right. That’s some kind of new news in your personal life, but we have a lot of news coming out of the center. So one of the big ones is we’ve got one of our events coming up that registration is now open on the site. So what is open?

Boz: Where can they do that at?

Sharona: So you can go to our website centerforgradingreform.org, and scroll over the Events tab, and then click on the Northeast Regional Grading Symposium, and register right there.

Sharona: So I just continue to be shocked at the quality of the keynotes that we are able to get for our conference. So our first keynote speaker the one opening the conference, I believe, I hope that’s correct. One of our conference speakers is Cate Denial. She they are a professor and chair of the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester, and wrote the book about the Pedagogy of Kindness. But I have really enjoyed reading their work and seeing how it interacts with grading. So super excited. Actually, I guess it’s Pedagogy of Kindness, I think- Yeah … is the actual title.

Boz: Yes. Pedagogy of kindness.

Sharona: Okay. So that’s our first one. Our second one is been a guest on the podcast, one of yours and mine icon people that we like to refer to, and that’s Peter Liljedahl. So founder of Building Thinking Classrooms movement, math instructor, and unbelievable alternative grader that we didn’t know that he was known for.

Boz: If you haven’t already heard, back on episode 154, we had him on as a guest, and we knew alternative grading was part of, his repertoire and was part, ’cause it is part of his books. But we didn’t know until actually having him on to the Grading podcast that his work in alternative grading actually goes further back than what he’s most really known for. And he was so much fun having on the podcast, and he said he had so much fun ’cause he doesn’t get to talk specifically about grading as much as he would like to because, everyone knows him from the Building Thinking Classrooms, which he absolutely, is phenomenal work and stuff. But yeah, he really enjoyed getting to come on the Grading podcast and just talk more in depth about grading. So I am really looking forward to his keynote and just seeing where he might take this.

Sharona: And then we have a third keynote speaker, ’cause we do one per day, and this is one where my two worlds collide. So I do talk, I teach in math, we do all this grading, I’m very focused on STEM education, but I have this whole other side of me that is theater and theater education. So I love the fine arts and looking at education in the fine arts. And so our third keynote is Jessica Zeller, who is a professor of dance in the TCU School for Classical and Contemporary Dance. And she wrote a book called Ballet Pedagogies: Philosophies, Perspectives, and Praxis for Teaching Ballet. And this is one of those where I’m like, oh my God, is grading a big deal in ballet? And apparently, yeah, it can be very problematic, along with some other challenging pedagogical situations in ballet. And I just love the fact that we’re able to have a conference that runs the gamut from hardcore STEM to extreme fine arts to social studies and English to licensing. It’s all over.

Boz: Yeah, and it’s funny ’cause, I hear this a lot. We both hear this. We’ve heard it from every aspect of, I can see how this can work here, but not in mine. And over the last couple years with how the grading conference has just grown, and we are bringing in insights from outside of math, outside of STEM. Now even getting outside of, what some people might call core subjects and getting into some of the theater things. It’s amazing to me, good pedagogy is good pedagogy. And seeing this across so many different facets, yes, it might look different in my math class than it does, but there’s some of the lessons learned and some of the ways it’s approached and just the lenses. So having a keynote– Correct me if I’m wrong, have we had a keynote before that was from the fine arts spectrum of education?

Sharona: I don’t think so. We have representation on the organizing committee, and we’ve definitely had some sessions. ~Yeah. ~But I do not think we’ve had a keynote speaker from the arts.

Boz: Yes. I’m really looking forward to that. And you brought up the fact that we do have someone that’s will be, this is her second conference that she’ll be with us that’s on the organizing committee. And again, her perspective that she has brought in to the committee as well is ~just, it’s ~just great having, such an outside kind of viewpoint that actually helps you think deeper and refine your own thinking

Sharona: So thinking about refining your thinking and going deeper, I think you just teed up quite the intro for today. So why don’t you tell what we’re gonna be talking about today on the pod?

Boz: Yeah, we are going back to one of our favorite places to beg, borrow, and steal from, the Grading for Growth blog. But this is a guest post that came out on October 12th, so just about a week ago. That it’s titled, “Talking Is Also Thinking: How Teaching Students to Coach Each Other Before They Write Makes AI Shortcuts Less Tempting.”

Sharona: So I was attracted to this even before I got to the subheader, because one of the ways I’ve always defined extroversion versus introversion is that an introvert needs to think in order to be able to talk, and an extrovert needs to talk in order to be able to think. Sometimes I get so jumbled up in my own head that until I let the word salad come out and try to organize my thoughts, I can’t do it until I talk. And so I was like, what is this article about? And that was before I even got to the subhead. And how does it relate to grading? That was my other question.

Boz: Yeah, and I was really interested looking at this because the subheading did catch my eye, and then when I got into the article, realized, oh wow, there’s a lot more here. But we have, over the last, couple of months done a lot of talking about AI, not just about how it’s showing up, but really ways of trying to counteract it. It’s here. It’s here to stay. What do we do about it? And one of the-

Sharona: I wouldn’t, I would argue, actually, we haven’t just talked about counteracting it. We’ve actually looked at do we integrate it? Do we– So I think when you say counteract, what do you mean by counteract?

Boz: A lot of the conversations has been, around ~how do you it’s here, ~what do we do? How do you ~g- ~guard against it? And, or just what do you do with it? And one of those conversations that really came up was this idea of defensive moves versus offensive moves. Defensive moves, trying to block it, trying to prevent students from using it. This came up in Susan Blum’s interview that we had not too long ago. It’s come up in several other places. If that’s our strategy, if we’re going to, let’s take technology out of class, let’s go back to blue books, let’s ~d- ~do this, do that, that is purely defensive, and that is a game I will die on this hill that we will lose as educators. It is growing too fast, too quickly. Actually finding ways to either integrate it, use it, or get the students to understand why they don’t wanna use it is more offensive. And as I got into this article, that’s actually what this is, i- is looking at a very student-forward offensive way to battle against AI.

Sharona: And I think that when this started is, and this is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot, is why do we need to battle against it, right? I feel in my gut like there is a reason to not just let students go willy-nilly and use it however, because, in my life there, there’s no one telling me I can’t use it. Yes, there’s certain very small niche things like if I wanna get something published, there’s some rules, right? But as far as my day-to-day life, I am free to use it however I want. And so the question I was also grappling with is why shouldn’t the students have? And again I feel like my answer was I don’t think they should, but I was having trouble articulating why, and I think that this was part of it, and I wanted to share the beginning of this article-.

So this article is written by Zia Hassan. He’s a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University studying personal knowledge management, motivation, and AI re-related methodologies, and he teaches a course, at least the one he’s talking about, that’s a lot of writing, and given his interests in terms of knowledge management, it seems like, huh, he might have some really interesting things to say. And his first response once a student turned in a ChatGPT essay, he confronted them and threatened to invoke academic integrity, and the student said no. And so he went and did some AI checking and asked AI why the AI thought it was written by an AI, and the AI was basically, because it’s well-written: complete sentences, proper punctuation. And he kinda went, “Okay, so a student who can write well is gonna get flagged as AI. This is not going to work.”

Boz: All right, so

Sharona: So he started thinking about the changing he needed to make, and he was looking at his prompts, and this was what really got to me in this article, that a typical essay prompt might be: what are the two traits that make an effective teacher? And that’s something that could really be handled by AI in theory, but not with any real depth of thinking or any engagement on the part of the student. So that’s why I was like, okay, I’m now really interested in seeing what his solution is to this situation, because I do want people to be able to engage with a question like that, especially other educators or future educators.

Sharona: So he decided that he wanted to go to ungrading, is what he says. That’s the first thing he’s like, “I figured the best way to do this was let’s remove the emphasis on grades.” And I’m like, “Okay.” Yeah. “I’m sold. This guy is my kind of person.” Of course, it’s on the Grading for Growth blog, so not a surprise. But he decided the first thing he wanted to do was ungrading, and then I really liked how he defined ungrading for himself, which he meant, means reducing the number of the grades I need to record, and therefore, that the students have to stress over. Doing this frees us from the prison of points and allows real learning to take place. I also wanted students’ work to be better before they ever turned it in. And I’m like, ” yeah, how do I do that? How do I get them to engage with the work before they have to turn it in and get it back from me?”

Boz: But so going back to the article and what this author and educator said was that with the shift in the grading practices, with going away from traditional grading, going into his version of ungrading, that shift away from points and grades to feedback actually opened up a bunch of structures, opened up some time, opened up some things for him to actually get what he was trying to get the students to do, which is go into deeper thinking. And that’s what the most of this article is about, is what did he do? With all this extra time, this, this extra structure what did he do with it? And I love this idea, and this comes– like I said this is hitting my own background now. ‘Cause what did he do? He turned the students into peer coaches for each other. Now, granted, that’s not easily done, and this article goes into a lot of really big details of how he did it, but this idea, and like what you were saying, giving them time and place and a structure to coach each other, to go into deeper thinking, so when they do turn in something, it is a much better product from the very beginning.

Sharona: And at this point in when I was reading the article, I’m like, “Okay, this is intriguing. I have no idea how to do this.” And that’s why I wanted to turn to you because you’re an actual trained coach. I am not a trained coach. I do some coaching, especially in the theater world, but I’m not trained as a coach, and I’m certainly not trained as an instructional coach. So I wanted to turn it back to you and say, can you give us an overview of what he did, but also from your perspective as a trained coach, what do you think of this?

Boz: All right. So let’s go into first, let’s do some of the logistics of how he did this. And I’m gonna read some of these things directly from the Grading for Growth blog. But a couple of things that he set up. So first, the students are paired. One acts as a coach, one acts as a coachee, and then they, those roles will switch. But when they’re a coach, they’re a coach, and when they’re a coachee, they’re a coachee. So this isn’t a open conversation. This isn’t a back and forth. This is one person has one role for a specific amount of time, and then those very distinctively different roles switch. One of the other things that was, he had in place is that coaches simply begin by asking a prompted questions. So he provides some questions that they can use, but that’s where the coaching experience starts with.

Sharona: Actually, I think the first step is the coach actually reads the assignment prompt. Yeah. So the very first thing that happens is the coach reads the prompt out loud. That is the prompt that they’re writing on. So it’s not even the coaching yet, but they are kicking off the prompt as the conversation starts.

Boz: Now, there was one thing that when reading this, I was curious about, and I don’t know if he makes it clear in the article, maybe you saw it, but I’m curious if the students had seen that prompt before this session actually started, or is that question the first time they’re seeing the prompt?

Sharona: So I don’t know if they’ve seen it in a previous class session, but he does do a sample coaching session with that exact prompt to kick off the lesson. So he either has a student, or if he has a TA, he might ask the TA, but he acts as the coach, and he does a sample cycle of coaching immediately before they’re paired off to do it themselves.

Boz: Yeah and that’s one of the structures he puts in place of how, like he does this, makes sure that this is done successfully, is he does model that, and we’ll get into that here in a moment. But yeah, the, the coachee responds to that writing prompt, not in written form, but in oral form. Responds to that, and then the, the coach starts to ask probing questions. Asking those questions, not giving advice, not, arguing, not giving their opinion, but just asking probing questions to make the coachee think deeper.

Sharona: And this was something where I got confused because I was equating this with peer review in my head. I had it mixed up, and I didn’t understand that a peer coaching process was different than like a review process. So these questions are really eliciting thinking, and they’re not about trying to correct mistakes or anything like that. So this isn’t, “Oh, hey, did you realize you made a mistake in there,” it was– it’s really this, this probing process. So I wanna distinguish here that coaching and review or editing are very different processes.

Boz: I also do wanna clarify, there is different styles of coaching. I am actually trained in a couple of different styles, and some of them are contradicting to each other. The most recently, the style of coaching I’ve been getting trained in and that I am trying to do in my own job is what’s called transformational coaching, which is something very similar to this. The a-asking these probing questions, not saying, “Oh, next time you should try, doing this warm-up,” or, “Next time you should try doing this technique.” It’s more of this kind of questioning and probing, which again, is why when I was reading this, I was like, “Oh, wow, these students are getting to do something that me, as a 22-year educator, has just started doing in the last two years.”

Sharona: Yeah

Boz: But yeah, so-

Sharona: That’s why I was excited about this …

Boz: this process continues until a preset amount of time is up. So they can’t quit, they can’t switch roles, and the coach has to continue this probing questions and this going deeper for the allotted amount of time. I think he said in most of his, it’s like a 10 to 15-minute timeframe.

Sharona: I think it’s 10 minutes for each role. So you do 10 minutes with person A as the coachee and person B as the coach, and then another 10 minutes on the swap. So the total iterations, at least 20 minutes.

Boz: If you read further down in the article, it says the coaching part, the single side coaching, is 10 to 15 minutes. And then, yes, after the, the first cycle is done, the AB partners switch, and they start the entire process over again with the same writing prompt, the same amount of time. But this time the roles are completely switched.

Sharona: But if you’re gonna do something where you want students to deepen their thinking, it takes time, and I think it’s time well spent, especially if it means that the quality of the work you’re gonna get as the instructor is gonna be so much better potentially.

Boz: Now, if you’re hearing this and you’re going, “Wow, my students wouldn’t even know where to start,” or if you’re even thinking, “I wouldn’t know where to start,” that is, like you said, you brought it up already, but one of the things that he does is he demos this. And from what I’m reading, it sounds like he demos this with an actual students, and even jokes that student gets two coaching sessions. But yeah, actually demos and doesn’t do a two-minute demo of what the students are supposed to do for 10. He does the full thing. And he– I don’t think- Yeah … he has them switch roles, but he does the full thing of, “This is what it looks like.” Provides several probing questions that the coach can use. I don’t think it’s the only questions they can use, but gives them, the demo, gives them some questions they could ask. Stresses a couple of things about it. So he says in this article that this style of coaching is, mirrored a- and influenced by the International Coaching Federation, which I am not actually that familiar with. I kind of wanna look that up ’cause it also, like I said, very much sounds like the transformational coaching that I have been studying for the last couple of years.

Sharona: Yeah. I… we’ll link it in the show notes, but it’s definitely one of the, one of the big coaching, They say that they have 58,933 members of this International Coaching Federation, so definitely seems like an organization to take a look at. The other thing I love about his demo, before he finishes the demo but before he sets them loose, is he asks the class, “What did you notice about the conversation?” ‘Cause what he wants them to do is reflect on what did the coach do. ‘Cause we’re trying– That’s what we’re trying to do with this, is we actually have to train the students on being coaches.

Boz: And it wasn’t just what did you notice about the conversation, it was what did you notice during the conversation? What was the body language? What was the non-verbal? It wasn’t just what was said, it was all those non-verbals, all those gestures that we make as we speak. Really forcing the coach to be a very active listener ‘Cause it not, I’m not just listening, I’m also paying attention to, ~or ~what your non-verbals are saying,

Sharona: and then there’s one last thing that he instructs the coach to do at the end of this process, which is he says I guess there’s a couple things, but what is the one big takeaway here, or what are three big takeaways? So he’s taking the coach through a full cycle of not only where are we starting and what do we do through the conversation, but how do you end it? What’s the conclusion to the coaching cycle? So I think having a beginning, a middle, and end is an important structure for students.

Boz: Yeah. But you had brought up kind of the difference earlier between coaching and peer grading or peer reviewing and I do think he talks a little bit about this, and this is definitely part of what makes some coaching strategies different than others. ‘Cause I’ve also done, cognitive coaching and some other things. But this idea that the purpose of this is to be curious as the coach. It’s not to give advice. It’s not to say, “Oh, have you thought about doing it this way?” Or, “Oh, you should’ve, used this kind of sentence structure or paragraph structure,” or, “Have you considered changing this wording?” It’s actually being curious and asking questions.

Sharona: And let me be clear, I think, and one of the things that we hope to talk in a future episode, is that both of these strategies, peer review and editing and peer coaching, are both valuable and potentially critical when we try to start to scale alternative grading practices.

Boz: Absolutely. But they do both play very different roles.

Sharona: And they have different structures and different ways you have to train students to do them. I also think that they’re possibly some of the most valuable skills we might be able to teach our students in a world where learning itself is gonna continue to change at the rapid pace that I think it is going to change over the next couple of decades. Because regardless of the technology tools, regardless of content, if you are somebody who knows how to sit down with another human being and make that human being’s thinking, help them make their thinking better that’s such a powerful skill.

Boz: All right. So he did this kind of experiment. What were some of the results that he saw?

Sharona: Before we get to that, there is one last step- Okay … that I forgot. So after you do the big takeaway, there is a commitment that the coach asks the student for, and that commitment could be any number of things. But some types of commitments is that the coachee might write an introduction or compose an outline or do something that the student is then gonna bring back to the same partner- as an accountability-

Boz: That commitment is a commitment that the coachee decides and makes. So the coach- … the coach would ask them, “Okay what commitments, what are your next steps? What are you going to do between now and whenever?” Those commitments, it’s not, okay, me as the coach going, “Okay, I want you to, do a draft of the first two paragraphs.” It’s you as the coachee going, “Okay, this is what I’m gonna commit to do.” And then like we said, these roles would then absolutely switch and me now being the coachee and you being the coach at the end, you would prompt me, but I would be making commitments based on what I saw and got out of this conversation this coaching session

Sharona: So you asked me about the results. ~Yeah. So I will go there now. ~So he says, first of all, that when he uses this strategy, the students get really excited, and more quickly than if they were having to sit down by themselves and start writing this. Because they might not be super excited about the prompt of what makes a good teacher. But when they’re talking to each other, that social interaction is a critical point. And I don’t know about everybody’s institutional context, but I teach a lot of freshmen, a lot of first semester freshmen, and they are struggling to meet a friend. They’re struggling so hard. I don’t know if it’s because I’m at a commuter school. I know that when I think back to my freshman year, living in the dorms was how I met people. And so being at a commuter school, I don’t know how you meet people. It’s really tough. So I think the fact that you actually get to have a truly engaging conversation between two random students that met in a random class, it’s powerful.

And then he mentions one session of the actual coaching that stood out. So the student was asked the essay prompt about what makes a good teacher, and the student started off by saying that the good teacher is good at instruction and at motivating. That’s where they started. But then as they went through the coaching session, by the end, her understanding of both of those things, good at instruction and at motivating, had completely changed. So she figured out for herself that motivating really meant developing good relationships, and that being good at instruction meant having good pedagogical techniques, which is much more specific than just being good at teaching.

Boz: Yeah. So there are two results that he saw that he wrote about that I really wanna call out, ’cause I think they’re both so incredibly powerful. And the first one is actually the last bit of this section of the blog post. But he said, the biggest change in the student’s work isn’t the length, it isn’t that they’re covering new topics, it’s not that they’re writing more, it’s just that they’re writing deeper. They’re going at this at a much deeper level. The depth of knowledge that they’re demonstrating through their writing is at a much deeper and dramatically increased form. So we’re getting deep. The second thing that I wanted to call out, which I think he kinda hides in the writing, and yet is so incredibly powerful is that, and I actually wanna read this ’cause of how much he kinda hides it. But this is about midway down. Said, “Realistically, teachers won’t sit down with every single student and ask them these questions,” mainly ’cause we don’t have time, I added that. But pairing students up scales. We’re always talking about scaling. How do you do this in large scale? But the next sentence is the big one that I think is kinda hidden. “And later, students can coach themselves after asking these questions in other classes where no one is there to coach them.” They’re learning how to learn. They’re taking this, and these questions that they’ve been asking externally to a partner, they’re now asking internally to themselves. So not only is the work in his class getting deeper, the work in other classes are going to get deeper. And I think that is an amazing result.

Sharona: I completely agree. I love the scaling, I love the learning to learn, but I also love, and I completely believe, that if you spent 10 minutes start talking about a topic, and you go down to write, say, an introduction, you’re not gonna go to an LLM because you’d have to spend just as much time bringing the LLM up to speed on your conversation as just writing down the damn introduction yourself. Because you’re gonna write down this is what I said, and this is what I mean, and this is.” So, the student has a lot more confidence in what they themselves believe and think and can write, and they have the motivation to get down their own thoughts.

Boz: If the students are getting into this deeper level thinking, then they don’t need as much assistance from, any kind of LL what do you call it? Large language LLM.

Sharona: LLM. Large language model.

Boz: Or AI. They already have it. And this is why I’m saying this is an offensive way of guarding against misuse of AI, and I think we should probably make that distinction earlier, too. There is use of AI, and then there’s misuse of AI, and we’re really talking about the misuse of AI when we’re talking about offensive and defensive ways to defend against it. But yeah, if the student has it, has that deeper understanding, doesn’t have the pressure from the grades, there’s a lot less motivation to want to misuse the AI

Sharona: And I love what he says here about the revision process, because when you’ve paired up these students, essentially there’s no limit on how often they can choose to get together and continue the coaching cycle. They could do it up until the thing is due. But if they wanna get together and, or they wanna talk on the phone, or they wanna work through something, they can. And so it scales the feedback loop process. Like even just doing the one round of coaching gets draft zero out of the way, as he says.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But they could also do a second draft if they come back and they’re meeting with their accountability partner, and they’re showing off their intro or whatever they wrote, that’s a, that’s another round of feedback they’re gonna get before it ever hits the instructor’s desk.

Boz: Yeah. And that’s something that we’ve discovered and we’ve talked quite a lot about, is when you provide students an opportunity to do something or a structure to do something and they learn it’s good for them, they continue to do that structure whether , ’cause all the time we hear this, “Oh, if we don’t grade it, students won’t do it.” If we don’t count homework for this much, they’re not gonna be motivated to do it. That’s true if the motivation of the class is grades and points and not learning. But when– and we’ve seen this over and over when our, in our stats course, when we give the students the structure and they realize the structure is good for them, they continue using the structure even when they don’t need to anymore, even when they’re not getting, any more points or any more benefit out of it other than it’s helping them learn to learn. It’s helping them learn to master the skills that we’re trying to get in the class

Sharona: Exactly. So towards the end of this article, he does give a, “If you want to try this,” sort of list of steps, and there’s two that I don’t think we’ve mentioned so far that I wanted to call out. One is he says to give a two-minute warning at the end of each coaching cycle, at the end of each 10-minute, 10 to 15-minute cycle, and the students know that it’s time for the coaches to ask for that big commitment, that takeaway. So they’re wrapping it up with intentionality that’s customized but substantial, so they’re not coming back with something meaningless. And then secondly, during this time, you as the instructor are circulating and rescuing stuck pairs, because some pairs are gonna get stuck. This is a skill that is brand new to them, and so some of them are gonna look at each other dumbly and say, “I don’t know what to say next.” And so you, as the more experienced coach, can be prepared with a set of questions where you can step in, ask one question, have the student respond, and then turn to the coach and say, “Do you see what I did there? Can you do something now?”

Boz: Yeah. And I also love the very last thing that is part of this, and it’s even– Well, it’s not the last thing. The last thing is a list of some really good coaching questions. “Tell me more about da, da. What does that word mean to you?” So that’s the last part, but before that, highlighted, “If you’re thinking, quote, ‘My students won’t take coaching each other serious,’…” which I can already hear, and as I’m reading this article I can see and hear people saying, “Oh, this , might work for some students, but that’s too complicated for my students,” or, “That’s too hard for my students,” or, “My students won’t take that serious.” Have them try it, then talk to them about the results. Point out that even if they didn’t have a life-changing moment, which most aren’t going to necessarily have, especially the first time, but even if they didn’t, they still got deeper into their own thinking. If you’re doing it properly, there’s really no way to do this without some deepening of thinking. So just try it.

Sharona: Yeah. What we’re doing is we’re motivating students to invest in their own growth as a learner, and making it about them recognizing what’s worthwhile for themselves.

Boz: Yeah. And again, this all sounds like great pedagogy, and I would argue it is. What does this have to do with grading? And that all comes down to that very first thing he did, is he had to go away from traditional grading. I do not personally, and someone, you might argue with me, and someone might be able to do this in a great way in a traditional class. I don’t see how this works if you’re doing traditional grading. A, I don’t see how you have the time and the place to do it. B, I don’t see how you grade something like this. If we’re focused on points, if we’re focused on the grade and not the learning, I don’t know how successful something like this is.

Sharona: I suspect it’s like all the other things that I was trying to do before I switched. I did active learning. Active learning was better than standing up at the front and lecturing for an hour. I think peer coaching is probably better than just handing them an essay prompt, even in traditional grading, but there’s a cap on its effectiveness, and that cap might be quite low until you get the grades out of the way.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And then this explodes in its effectiveness.

Boz: And again- … this all came from the idea of trying to manage misuse of AI and LLMs.

Sharona: Yeah.

Boz: As long as the focus is on points and grades and not learning, that piece of the motivation is always gonna be there.

Sharona: Yeah.

Boz: Now we talked earlier about peer coaching versus, peer review, peer editing, and I’m gonna kinda tease up an episode that we’re hoping will come to fruition very soon, because these are both very powerful things. And we talked about you had equivalated them as the same thing, but they are very different. They have very different roles, but can both be very powerful. And we recently came across another article that talked about this, about peer reviewing and peer editing. So we’re gonna try to get, longtime friend and guest and someone we haven’t had on in a while, we’re gonna try to get Joe Zeccola back on, and we’re gonna dive just as deeply as we did with this peer coaching with peer review and peer editing.

Sharona: Thank goodness, ’cause I have a problem I gotta fix.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: So hopefully we’ll have him on soon. Cause these are things that as college instructors, I got some training in active learning and things like that, but I did not have any training on teaching students to do this stuff. Not really. So I’m excited. I’m also excited in general about how grading opens up so many of these conversations. It’s shocking. It’s still shocking me. I’m 10 years in, and I’m still shocked by the degree to which grades impact every single aspects of a classroom. Every single thing.

Boz: Even if it is, like you said, is just that blanket kind of smothering or capping the effectiveness of good pedagogical techniques and strategies like this. But we are coming up on time. Is there any other last-minute things that you wanted to bring up before we wrap this one?

Sharona: I just wanna thank everybody for continuing to engage with this work who’s listening. Our, our numbers on the podcast keep growing, our numbers of people who wanna engage. I don’t know if we mentioned it at the top, but if we … I don’t think we did, actually. We forgot. But if you’re still listening, institutional registrations for the grading conference are actually available now. So if you want to have your center for teaching, or if you have an organization that wants to get a group together, go ahead and email us at info@centerforgradingreform.org, and we will get you that institutional registration information for next year’s grading conference.

Boz: All right. That sounds great. And for everyone listening, this has been 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.