The Grading Podcast

Matt: One more quick thing, I love to do this, I actually did this at a workshop recently, is I was talking to some high school educators. I said, all right, could you raise your hand right now if in your undergraduate experience you had a class of like, class size of like 100 or more, like a lecture hall type of thing.

Over half of the people raised their hand. I said, okay, great. I’m being kind of funny here, but what you’re saying is we should arbitrarily increase class size at the high school level now? To get these kids ready for their university experience? Is that what you’re saying right now? No, you’re not saying that.

So what you’re really saying to me is there are things that we do at the high school level that are significantly different for kids because we think they’re better for kids. And smaller class size is one of them and then usually the microphone drops and everyone’s either more mad at me or more excited that we’re doing what we’re doing.

Bosley: Well, that is a great Argument, again that’s something else I’m stealing.

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.

Bosley: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m one of your two co hosts, Robert Bosley, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: Hey, Boz. I am doing well. When we’re recording this, it’s the end of week 11 of the semester. Thank goodness. I’m ready for this semester to be over.

It’s been quite the sprint, but I’m also really happy to welcome everyone back. And I am super excited today. We have with us on the podcast, Matt Townsley, Matt, you want to say hello?

Matt: Hey, greetings everyone out there in TheGradingPod.Com land.

Sharona: Thank you so much. So for those of you that don’t know Matt, or I should say Dr. Townsley, he is a former district administrator and teacher. He has been implementing lasting grading reform and working with different districts. Currently, you’re an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, and he’s the author of multiple books, including a couple that we’re going to talk about today, Using Grading to Support Student Learning and A Parent’s Guide to Grading and Reporting, Being Clear About What Matters. So Matt, I’m so excited to have you on. We met you a number of years ago when we started the grading conference. And you gave a talk and that was really excited. Is there anything I missed in your bio that you wanted to get started with?

Matt: No, just big fan of the grading podcast. That’s for sure. I appreciate the dual focus on the PK 12 world and higher education. And there’s one thing I would say about this podcast is Sharona and Boz are not afraid to get down the weeds. And I really appreciate that about you all.

Sharona: Well, when I first asked Bosley if he wanted to do a podcast and he said, yeah, it sounds like a good idea, then he took a sip of soda. And I said, because I like to hear myself talk. He almost spit it across the table. True story. So Matt, when we usually have new guests on the pod, we do want to ask your origin story. So how’d you get started with grading?

Matt: Yeah. I remember some of the first conversations I had with my last period of geometry class. I started, I was the type of teacher where I would, every day the homework is something that was worth like three or five points and it was based on a combination of how much you did well, and how much you showed your work, and did you just put forth an effort? It was just that typical, like kind of conglomeration of just do the stuff and I’ll give you some points for it, all right? And so I started to ask my students like, Hey, how many of you would still do these daily math homework assignments if it’s worth two points instead of three, for example? We just talked about it. Why would you do it? Why wouldn’t you do it? How many of you would do the homework if it was worth one instead of three? Why would you do it? Why wouldn’t you do it? I said actually Mr. Townsley’s thinking about going crazy, next week I’m thinking about making them be worth zero points. Still giving you feedback, but instead of three like how many of you would do it and why? And so we legitimately had that conversation, right? And most of my students, because I had already had them for a while, they were comfortable with me as a teacher, right? And they’d say, well, Mr. Townsley, I wouldn’t do that. I’d rather be playing video games or hanging out with my girlfriend or whatever. And others were pretty honest saying I would do it because my parents would make me and others would say like, I don’t really care. I don’t do the homework now. I’m still not going to do it or whatever that looked like. And so then we started talking about, over the next couple of days, what are the longterm consequences for that? If you decide you’re going to start sloughing off on your daily math assignments, how’s that going to affect you longterm? Like how well do you really think you’re going to do on this upcoming test? Right? Just asked them. All right, if you’re telling me today that you know, as a result of not doing the homework for this chapter, that you’re not going to do on the test, why wait till the test to find out what you already know today? Like those are legitimate conversations. That’s in contrast, honestly, Sharona and Boz, to my previous practice, which was when homework had a point value to it, if you didn’t do it, I just slapped a zero in the grade book. And I thought the zero was the conversation. So now I had a frame of reference when students were not doing well.

So, Hey, remember that conversation we had a while back when you said that you knew that if you did not do your homework assignments that you were not going to be successful? Like, Hey, look, what’s happened to you now. And that’s what I would do, because I had the opportunity to do that with them because we had that conversation in class. And so one of the things I’ll often share when I support schools, especially when teachers are thinking about making this classroom shift from grades as compensation to grades as communication, is we have to do this shift with students, not to them. And that’s actually a part of the motivation for several of the books that I’ve written, especially the most recent one. Because what we found in my work, when I was a district office administrator in Solon, Iowa, is our early adopting teachers were very comfortable having these conversations with students about why they were doing it and what the positive implications were for students, and so students got it. And a kid that gets it equals a parent that gets it, typically. Okay, that message gets relayed home. Now, as we were going through our shift there were some teachers that were less confident. And I understand why they were less confident. Less confident teacher equals a student who’s less confident in understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing. Equals, guess what? A parent who is now questioning the process, right? And we could almost pinpoint at times where the parents that had these questions in our system were coming from because they had students in certain classes of teachers that were not yet feeling like they were confident or even sometimes philosophically on board with it. Again, this is not a blame game. That was part of our mess up, I guess you’d say, as administrative team in the process that we went through to roll all of these standards based grading shifts out. So we believe that in writing this book for a parent’s guide to grading and reporting, for example, that there needs to be a triad of communication. It needs to be educators, it needs to be parents, and students. All three need to be a part of this whole grading conversation.

Bosley: Yeah, we had an episode a little while back on buy in and that’s exactly what you’re talking about. If the educator isn’t fully bought in or doesn’t fully understand it yet, there’s no way that the student is going to be able to, cause it’s not going to be clear to them. And if the student’s not bought in, you’re right. There’s no way you’ll ever get the parent to buy in. And that is, especially in the K 12 world, such an important alliance between all three, if we really want to be successful at educating our youth. So.

Sharona: So I have a question based on that then, because I coordinate a large statistics class and after several years of curation and insistence, the faculty who weren’t bought in kind of selected themselves out. But what do you do with those instructors who are not as bought in, but their district or their school or whatever is like, no, you got to do this. How do you handle that?

Bosley: So it’s interesting. It sounds like you did something really right that Sharona and I actually made a pretty substantial mistake on. And that is, some of our early trainings, especially the one we do with the MAA, the first time we did it, we’re like, okay, we’ve the got all this stuff about the why, but we’ve got this group that’s already interested, because they’re self selecting to come to this. Maybe we can cut some of our time cause you know, we only had 30 hours with them. Like maybe we should cut some of the time and cut some of that why out. That was a huge mistake and, and something that now in this 30 hour intensive week long training that we do with the MAA, that’s almost the entire first day. I do some trainings at my school and yeah, that is our whole first workshop is just the why. It really is important to understand what’s wrong with the traditional grading. And we had a whole episode, that’s one of our first episodes on the podcast, talking about those why’s, because even with someone that might be bought in and might be willing to try something different. If you don’t really understand all of the why’s, you can actually recreate a lot of those issues with this kind of system. And in some ways it might even be worse with alternative grading. If you recreate that accidentally.

Matt: Yeah. To your point, Boz, if a school reaches out to me and says, Hey, can you help our teachers or administrators get started or continue to move forward with their grading reform practices? I’m with you. I will always start with a review of why it is that we’re changing our grading practices. And then I’ve got a specific slide that says something along the lines of the purpose of grades is to communicate students current levels of learning. And I’ll say like, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing with a lot of information that leads up to that. And that gives me permission then, just like it probably gives you permission in your workshop, Boz, to say I understand where you’re coming from, but that perspective or that thing that you think is helpful for students in your math course, for example, that’s not really going to help us do a better job communicating students’ current levels of learning, and so that’s why we don’t do that thing, or that’s why we’re trying to move away from that thing. I feel like we all need to be reminded of why we’re doing what we’re doing. So like high five Boz. Right on man.

Bosley: And I really liked what you were talking about, I’ve not seen this before, but this statement of purpose of grading. Every school, every Institute of education from K or pre K up to college has a mission statement and a vision statement. And a lot of them even have the cultural relevance or inclusion statements now, but yeah, I’ve not seen a lot of those I think you called it a great purpose of grading statements.

Matt: Grading purpose statement. You got it.

Bosley: Grading purpose. Yeah. I’m going to steal that. I’m telling you that right now. I’m going to steal that and figure out how to work that in. Cause I, I think that is a really great way to focus and to help kind of push this along. So I love that.

Sharona: And that’s an area where I’m listening and I’m going, Ooh, this is one of those unspoken. Well, not so unspoken because I’ve been speaking about it. But one of the things about higher ed, as compared to PK 12, is the higher ed institutions, that was not the purpose of grading. If you look at the history, the purpose of grading is ranking and sorting. And part of that is the elitism, right? It’s certain colleges are more elite. Certain grad schools are more elite. Certain faculty positions are more elite, going all the way up to the prize level, right? So there is definitely an unspoken, by most people, battle internally with higher ed faculty. Am I supposed to be measuring student learning or am I supposed to be ranking and sorting? And when I asked about what do you do with those teachers, I don’t know that in the higher ed world, that is how we would deal with it. Because there are institutions and there are administrators who actually, they’re like, no, we don’t even want teaching to be part of the evaluation process because we’re not here to teach. So I think that that is something that the higher education institutions are grappling with. And in fact, even in my own department, there are some who are like, well, that’s why K 12 doesn’t mean anything anymore is we’re trying to get everybody through it and higher ed is becoming this thing too. So it’s a little bit more challenging of a conversation. I don’t know if you’re seeing that in your institutions?

Matt: For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thankfully, I work in my, in the educational leadership program here and all of our faculty that teach educational leadership, are former district or building level administrators. And so they’re like, let’s just do it. And so we’ve got some great synergy of actually trying to model standards based grading practices in our courses. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re kind of on a journey to do that. One thing that I actually share, especially when I work with high school educators, is that there is a distinct paradigm .Difference between the PK 12 system and higher education. Here’s the best way I describe it. Every PK 12 educator has heard about No Child Left Behind, and they’ve also now, of course, heard about ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act. And you can get into the weeds about what all that means, but here’s how I summarize it. The aim in PK 12 is to make sure that every kid gets it. Like that’s our aim, like that’s what it is, right? Like we’re judged by that, whether we like it or not. We can argue about the metrics and so forth that are commonly used, but that is the aim of PK 12 education is to help as many kids as possible get it. And I share that. That’s not always the same aim in higher education. And so they’re not yet viewing things the same way in higher education across the board. To your point, Sharona, more of a sorting mentality, more of a norm referenced mentality than than we ought to have. But I think what that does is I know that I’m speaking towards the P. K. 12 audience here, but that gives the P. K. 12 audience permission to do it differently than saying, Well, we can’t do it that way because they don’t do it at the university type of thing.

Sharona: That’s a really good argument because that is one of the challenges we see. And one of the main ways that we fight against it is really I’m doing it. And so, you know, thousands of other faculty. But yeah, also adding in that paradigm shift and saying whether or not higher ed does this, your job is not actually to prepare for higher ed. Your job is to prepare every student. So I really, I like that.

Matt: One more quick thing. I love to do this. Actually, this at a workshop recently is I was talking to some high school educators. I said, All right, could you raise your hand right now? If in your undergraduate experience, you had a class of like class size of like 100 or more like a lecture hall type of thing. Over half of the people raised their hand. I said, okay, great. I’m being kind of funny here. But what you’re saying is we should arbitrarily increase class size at the high school level now to get these kids ready for their university experience. Is that what you’re saying right now? No, you’re not saying that. So what you’re really saying to me is there are things that we do at the high school level that are significantly different for kids, because we think they’re better for kids. And smaller class size is one of them and then usually the microphone drops and everyone’s either more mad at me or more excited that we’re doing what we’re doing.

Bosley: Oh, that, that is a great argument. I, again, that’s something else I’m stealing that I think that might be the best single analogy argument I have ever heard against that. Oh, well, they don’t do it in college that way or push back.

Sharona: So I want to go back though to, yeah, I agree. My brain’s worrying over that one, but I do want to go back to something else that you said a little while ago, which is this idea, I usually call it mastering mastery grading. So this idea that it’s going to take all of us as educators time to really get proficient and having proficiency scales for ourselves. How long are you finding it’s taking? What’s the general sort of median timeframe for a individual instructor and or a school to get good at this?

Matt: Yeah, my initial experience as a district office administrator was a bit tainted in a positive way because of our early adopters that were already into it. We had about 30 percent of our teachers that were early adopters essentially at that time of the vote I mentioned earlier. And so my personal experience is a bit tainted. I also teach change leadership classes now at the graduate level for future principals and superintendents. And I think that, generally speaking, the change leadership literature would say it’s going to take like 3 to 5 years to make any really significant, lasting, change. So our journey in Solon, Iowa was is after that year of voting, we were going to roll it out over the next two years and we made some mistakes. Our aim was as we’re going to try to empower teachers through training to help them do this thing in at least one class during year one and then all classes in year two. But it’s like a whole other podcast to explain the mistakes we made along the way. So I mean, even for us where I feel like we had some pretty good momentum moving forward. It was going to take us a year of the why and two more years to roll it out. That’s in contrast to literally one time I got called up to support a school district. Say, Hey, can you come to a one day workshop in April? We’re going to just do this thing in August. And I was like, Oh my goodness gracious. And so I showed up and did the workshop and gave them some feedback afterwards. And they were nowhere near prepared to do it. So, Sharona and Boz, you might be saying why? Why? You all highlighted this a bit in your recent episode when you critiqued those articles in the news. And one of them definitely is teacher training. There’s a bit of literature out there that’s suggesting that even in teacher education programs which I’m not a part of, but I am still in the college of education. I think teacher ed programs in general are doing a better job of preparing teachers for this. That’s what the emerging literature is suggesting, but it’s still not there essentially. So I think that’s a part of the process. But yet, as you think about a school district making this change, it’s not just brand new teachers coming out of teacher ed, right? It’s teachers who’ve been teaching for 1, 2, 3, 4. 25 years. And what have they been? What are they? What are they used to? Right? They’re used to points, percentages and compensation rather than communication. So it’s going to take some time to teach them. What do we have to teach them? For some, it’s a philosophical shift. For some, it’s a technical shift, right? What we’ve found in some of my my own research is, as we enter into this, even though the common core standards have been around for a while or the next generation science standards have been around for a while, it doesn’t mean that our math and science teachers, for example, or English language arts have a firm understanding of what those standards are, right? Because it If they’re not being asked to assess and grade at the level of a of a standard may not be really implementing those standards yet at the extent to which they’re supposed to. And so when we ask them to assess and grade based on the standards, they might double down and be like actually don’t know the standards as well as I’m supposed to. So how do I create a proficiency scale for one? So sometimes we have to double down and go back and help them learn more about the standards that hypothetically they were supposed to know more about, you know, 5, 6, 7, 10 years ago. Others of them, it’s assessment literacy. I know I’ve heard you all talk about that here on the podcast. I’d like to think that all of our educators have a firm understanding of the purpose of this mid unit quiz is formative versus the purpose of this end of unit test is summative. For them, there hasn’t necessarily been a distinction other than the test is more points or longer than the quiz. And so we have to double down on assessment literacy. And so there’s a lot of factors that I think kind of uncover themselves, or training opportunities that uncover themselves that are going to determine the extent to which a school district is going to have to kind of go back. It’s not just a grading shift, it’s a curriculum instruction and assessment. And as you all have highlighted recently on the podcast, changing the classroom culture shift as well.

Sharona: Well, and it’s interesting to me. I keep forgetting that you started as a math teacher, Matt Massey started as a math teacher, all four of the grading conference original organizers were in math. Is it because we get the computation of the traditional one that we can see why it’s so bad? I mean, why is math, or is it because we’re the ones that everyone’s pointing to and say you’re the fault, you’re the reason our students aren’t succeeding? Why is this coming from within the house, so to speak, in the math world?

Matt: I think a part of it is the nature of the standards. I think there is a certain level of discreteness or linear sequentialness of teaching math that makes, for some of us, easy to understand. I can assess this standard, right? That’s maybe in contrast to some other content areas where maybe they’re think of like English language arts. If you look at the P. K. 12 English language art standards, they’re very cyclical or recursive, I guess, or something along those lines. They’re teaching citing textual evidence in ninth and 10th grade. They’re teaching it again, 11th and 12th grade. And so by nature of teaching English language arts, some of those teachers are very like thematic and they’re thinking, Oh, I don’t actually teach the standards. I teach Romeo and Juliet, right? I teach the story. Sometimes there’s just these paradigm shifts. In physical education, as I’ve done a little bit of research, physical education traditionally has been, you get points for dressing out, right? Like that’s what PE was all about. And so they’ve never really been, " oh, and we do activities" in physical education. They have to reframe their thinking, and this is just an overarching generalization, to being instead of activity focused, to being what’s the standard and what’s the best activity to help us have students demonstrate that understanding. But then physical education teachers in reality are like, but the school just wrote this big grant. I got these pickleball equipment. Like, am I not supposed to be teaching pickleball then? They’re handed these materials, for example, and they think that they’re supposed to do that. And it’s not their, it’s not their fault. We have to help them think about the activity supporting the standard rather than the activity being the most important thing. So instead of being the Romeo and Juliet unit, or the pickleball unit. It’s really about the unit that helps students actually show us they understand this stuff. It’s classical understanding by design backwards lesson unit planning type of stuff that you all probably know about.

Bosley: And that’s exactly Joe Zeccola, and he is an English educator, and that’s exactly what he was talking about with his learning targets and stuff. It’s like, yeah, I’m going to use these themes in these books to assess these learning targets, but the Romeo and Juliet unit isn’t my learning target. It’s what I’m using to assess, A, B and C, but making that kind of shift of understanding. Okay. Yes I’ve got things that, specific things or books or units that I teach, but I’m using those as a avenue to assess my actual learning targets, which he designed. And, but yeah, that’s exactly what, what he was talking about as well.

Sharona: So I’m wondering what’s the state of the union now? Your school district you started with, I know you work with a number of schools in Iowa and through the Midwest, how’s the adoption going? And are you seeing any pushback, backsliding? What’s going on?

Bosley: I don’t know if, I know I have not seen or read any kind of real literature about supporting either at the district or at the admin level and how they support and help do this. So I’m very curious, I will definitely be looking out for that book. You said it’s due to come out sometime this spring of 24?

Matt: Yeah, this spring through Solution Tree. Yeah, we’re still finalizing the title and cover and all that stuff. Keep keep your eye out in the socials for all that stuff probably in the next couple of months..

Bosley: I’m excited to hear about that because I don’t know if there’s any out there and I’ve just not seen them, but I have definitely never read anything kind of at that, like I said, at that administrator level, and not just theory, but okay, here’s how you support in doing this, adopting this at a level. So that’s, that’s great. That’s exciting.

Sharona: So I wanted to move on now to some of your books. So like I have in front of me the Using Grading to Support Student Learning book. I know Bosley, you have the parent one.

Bosley: Yeah, The Parents Guide to Grading and Reporting, Being Clear About What Matters..

Sharona: So what was the motivation for some of these recent books? What, what challenges are they trying to…

Bosley: You know, I’ve talked on this podcast a couple of times that my first attempt at alternative grading was a disaster. I didn’t have a lot of the resources, I had read Grading for Equity. I had read some of Guskey’s stuff, but not as extensively as I’ve done now. I didn’t really have any of this supports other than Sharona as a sounding board and a partner trying to plan some of this stuff out. And it was a disaster. But why I have never gone back is because even that first time I did it, at the end of the semester, at the end of the grading periods where my conversations used to be, you know, Hey, Mr, how can I get more points to get this beat? You know, can I do extra credit? It was about Mister, what do I need to show you about inferential statistics? What do I need to show you about hypothesis testing to get this mastery score? So it instantly changed from the the point mongering point chasing game to actually about the math. And that is why I’ve never gone back. And it never really occurred to me that these conversations are the same conversations that the parents should be having. I’ve said it before when we talked about the buy in and I really do, the more I listened to you and the more I’ve read this book, the more cowardly I feel, but with my K 12 part of my world, I have been dealing with older students for so long, most of my students are either juniors or seniors, in the last several years, it’s been all seniors, that the parent involvement at that point is minimal enough that I’ve been able to kind of sidestep this. That instead of trying to really work to get the parent buy in, I wait for the handful of parents that are still really engaged and are worried and try to deal with them at a one on one basis. I, like I said, I’ll admit it’s a cowardly approach and it’s one that I definitely want to work on on my own practice, but I was reading through some of your book and, your chapter five begins with basically a story of a, of a dad and, and I think it was a sixth or seventh grader, seeing this report card of all these twos and freaking out. Because two out of four is 50%. And at the end of that first page after the dad talks to the child and really gets an understanding, basically writes an email to the teacher. I want to read from part of it. Dad was talking about how scared he was at first, but how proud when the daughter was talking about the communication and being able to actually say what the grading meant and what she knew and what she didn’t. That it made him so proud that own accountability that the student had. But kind of ended the email with, "But here’s a piece of advice, it would have been nice to have known this before I opened the email or opened the grades." I’m like, okay, yeah, that’s…

Matt: Yeah. Those, those vignettes, I think that we open each chapter with there Boz, they’re fictitious, but I tell you what, they could just as well be real. And they’re based upon the ups and downs of seeing this happen across school districts in the country. And so I’m with you. I’m with you. I hope that this book and these ideas can really be helpful for parents. Like we have this vision of, you know a teacher or administrator recommending this book to a group of parents that wants to learn more about it or a PTO or a PTA. That wants to learn more about, or school boards, for example. We think that it can be really helpful as a resource for teachers and educators that are really trying to get after this in the classroom.

Sharona: It’s reminding me of the last parent teacher interaction I had before my younger son graduated from high school, which was right around the end of the fall semester with his AP literature teacher because he was getting like a C. And I was horrified and I’d had a whole series of not so great parent teacher interactions. And the only way that that school does parent teacher interactions is the student has to be there. So that was fine. So, and it was on zoom, cause we were still marginally still in the pandemic. So my son and his teacher were at school and my ex husband and I were on zoom and in separate ones. And it was a really good conversation. Because he was struggling to understand her feedback. And she actually was doing the AP style teaching of you’re at a C right now, because if you took the test right now, you would get a two or a three or whatever it was. And she was able to explain to me and therefore to him what he needed to do with the feedback. And he didn’t know. It was the only really good parent teacher interaction we had and he did end up getting a five on the AP by the end of the year. But that leads me to a question for you. I’m wondering if you’ve seen this because we’ve now seen it come up a couple of times with some people that we’ve interviewed, that this was brought to their attention, this type of grading, through AP conferences and things like that. So is the AP pushing this kind of grading as an institution? Do you know anything about that?

Matt: Yeah, I’ve heard both. I was recently supporting a school and they were questioning, you know, Hey, how do I do these, the standards based grading thing in my AP class or my IB class, for example. And I think the, the specific question there was, is: Hey, there are not common core standards that the state’s requiring me to teach that align specifically with my AP calculus class, for example. But the aim of alternative grading, specifically standards based grading is, is that we’re assessing and grading based upon some learning goal. And so the response was, is Hey, you know what? The AP tells you really what’s going to be on that AP test. And so those are the learning goals that you ought to be teaching and assessing towards. So, a number of years ago, there was like an ACT sponsored conference. And so at that conference, for example, I know there was people there that were also kind of in the AP world. And so I know there’s been some snippets of it. I don’t know the extent to which they’re actually pushing it, but from my perspective, it makes sense if we just kind of as an AP teacher latch our minds around what those learning goals are that the AP exam is going to be based upon. Plus, I think it’s fair to say that as an AP teacher, we would want to do everything we can to set up our students for success to get that five, for example, on the AP exam. So why wouldn’t we want to be laser like focused in our instruction? Why wouldn’t we want to provide students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of how to integrate and all those different things in calculus, for example, leading up to it. I’d love it if like the college board or whoever just came down and said, this is the way to do it. That’d be nice.

Sharona: You probably heard me say, we get a lot of this, "I can see how this works in every other field, except mine" conversations. And one of the ones that’s been, some of the bigger pushbacks have been the board certification or licensing exams. And I’ve looked at instructors and said yours is the ultimate in mastery because most places there’s no limit on how many times you can take the licensing exam. Now, it’s very expensive and if you fail the law exam three, four times, it starts to be a problem, but once you pass it, no one cares.

Matt: You got it. That’s another great positive argument for this idea of that everyone learns at a different rate. And so let’s just try to honor that in the way that we grade students in a given reporting period.

Sharona: So what’s next for you and, and some of the irons you have in the fire? What are some goals you have over the next few years with this?

Matt: My professional aim right now is really to support educators in any way possible to make this change at the classroom, but more specifically at the systems level. And so I’m really excited about this book coming out this spring. That’s really going to help school leaders and their teams think about how to do this in a framework that I think is well accepted in the education and business world. John Cotter’s Eight Steps to Change. I’m really excited about that. Obviously, I’m really excited about this conference coming up as well for school leaders here in Iowa. And really, anybody that wants to come can attend. We have a limited number of seats there. I’m also very interested because as someone who has only been a math teacher and has also been an administrator, my knowledge of how to support teachers in this is admittedly limited. Like I have a certain amount of physical education content standards pedagogical knowledge to help physical education teachers. But those questions, as I support schools that are kind of in process doing this, often come up for me. And as I reference math examples, sometimes they’re like, yeah, I don’t know if that quite works exactly. Not necessarily pushing back on the idea, but just the detail. Here’s an example. A colleague at my university and I, he’s in science education. He and I have a paper coming out in a science teacher practitioner publication this spring that talks about like, hey, here’s the big ideas of standards based grading, but here are some different ways to implement it in science. For example, the next generation science standards are written significantly different than the math standards. They’re three dimensional. It’s the disciplinary content knowledge, the cross cutting something concepts, and the science engineering practices. And so, some educators will say, we’re going to take the entire NGSS standard, and that’s the level in which we’re going to teach and assess. We’d call that the braided approach. Others will say we’re going to unbraid that. We’re going to separately report out the disciplinary core idea, separate from the science engineering practice, separate from the cross cutting something or other concept Okay, I don’t know as much about this as my science colleague did but he’s like, oh, yeah both ways can work and so we wrote this paper then for science teachers to say here are some, like, implementation decisions you should be thinking about. So my hope is to continue to partner with people that know a lot more than I do about how to go in the weeds with certain content areas to support, broadly speaking, kind of like how the Grading for Growth book is trying to do that at the higher education level with these different case studies. I’m trying to kind of piecemeal that through different articles along the way. And maybe a book in the future would be great for K 12 of, here’s the specific ways to think about implementing it in math, science, English language arts, physical education, so forth. I think that would be a great project moving forward. I’m really excited, though, just about continuing to support our educators in here in Iowa and across the country. I think that there’s some really great resources out there that talk about why we need to change grading practices. And I think we need even more to support teachers and administrators on how to do this work. And that’s what i’m really committed to. From the book perspective, from the article perspective, from my empirical research perspective that gets me excited in the morning when I wake up and sometimes high as well.

Bosley: If you ever do want to try to tackle the Grading for Growth at the K 12 level, I know since that book has come out, any person that will listen, I push that book because I think it is the best of kind of that mix of both theory and here’s how it’s actually being done. Those case studies, I don’t think there’s any other book that I’ve seen that’s out there that does that. I am pushing it even at the high school level. So yeah, if you ever wanted to tackle that, I would love to see that. Because I do think that we need a little bit more of the practical, the nuts and bolts of how to do this.

Matt: A huge area that needs to be uncovered that you all dabbled in in a previous podcast here is there’s growing body of evidence, whether it’s just anecdotal looking at news stories or my own. Or others research about when schools are changing to more effective grading practices that we know that teachers need training. We know that they need support in doing this. We don’t know yet, though, the specifics. I just kind of threw out some broad things like, oh, they need a deeper understanding of the standards, need more assessment literacy. But we really don’t know down in the weeds what that looks like yet. And so I think there’s additional learning from my peer reviewed research lens that we need to do in that area. And so I feel like we’re just kind of getting started in trying to understand the supports that teachers and even administrators need to make these shifts. And hopefully as more people like Boz and Sharona continue to support people over in your part of the world and around the country, that we’ll be able to support even more teachers.

Sharona: Yeah, well, that 30 hour training that we’ve designed is right there. So absolutely. And we’re doing it, we’ve done it with math, we’ve done it with engineering now, so we’re hoping to branch out there.

Bosley: And you said your conference you were talking about is coming out in June of 24. Do you have the actual dates or are the dates still being ironed out?

Bosley: And you said that is open to more than just illinois educators or,

Matt: Oh yeah. Anybody in

Sharona: Iowa,

Matt: you got it.

Bosley: What did I say?

Sharona: Illinois.

Bosley: Oh, I’m sorry. Oh, I’m sorry.

Matt: Anyone in Iowa is welcome to join us and anyone in California is welcome to join us as well.

Bosley: Yeah. We’ll link some of the information that’s available now to the show notes and we’ll try to update it when you come out with the actual full registration and all that. We’ll, we’ll link it here.

Sharona: All right, Boz, any last questions for Matt as we wrap up here?

Bosley: Not a question, just a request. We’ve talked about wanting to do an episode that really is dedicated and focused to the parent buy in side. I would love to have you back on when we end up doing this episode to really, you know, we talked a little bit about it here. You know, getting into the weeds and having a more in depth conversation about that partnership with parents in this. So I’d love to have you back then.

Matt: You bet. Just a quick teaser, Boz. We have to help parents understand both what’s changing and also what’s staying the same. And also we have to avoid the temptation to use education-eze as many of us are so trained and familiar with using. Just a little teaser for that future episode. How’s that?

Sharona: All right. Well, Matt, as always, thank you so much. Do you have any last thoughts or comments you want to share or any resources you want to promote or direct people to?

Matt: Yeah, a website that I think is really helpful for educators out there. If you just hop on Google and type in the phrase, all things standards based grading, it will take you to a page on my website. It desperately needs to be updated, but there’s a ton of links to articles and books and school districts and things like that. I feel like it’s hopefully a one stop shop for educators out there at the PK 12 level that are really trying to think about getting started or moving forward with that. So hop on Google, all things standards based grading. And of course, a positive shout out for the book that thank you for inviting me to talk about today, a parent’s guide to grading and reporting, although it’s definitely written for a parent audience. We also hope that administrators and teachers out there will read it to understand how to help their conversations be even better with parents along the way. Thanks for having me today, Sharona and Boz.

Sharona: Absolutely, and thank you for your work. It’s very inspirational to those of us that are maybe a little later than you. I came to this work about eight years after you did, but definitely having you at the conference a number of years ago and getting to talk to you today has been phenomenal. Anything last Boz?

Bosley: No, just thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time on the podcast.

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.

Bosley: 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.