The Grading Podcast

Bosley: These learning objectives or targets, or whatever you want to call them, are very specific to a course. So you can’t just, you know, slap learning objectives on, you know, five completely different courses. So each of these are very personal and unique, both to the teacher, the course, and the situation that you find yourself teaching in.

Sharona: So let me ask you this, what makes a good learning outcome for an alternatively graded course?

Bosley: 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 student 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 Grading podcast. Today’s episode, we will be going deeply into what exactly we mean by alternative grading, looking at some of the definitions and some of the broad categories of alternative grading. I’m Robert Bosley, and here with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing?

Hello

Sharona: everyone. How you doing today, Boz?

Bosley: I’m doing good. So

Sharona: in our last episode, well, that was quick. You just, I’m doing good. You going to give me a little more than that? Come on.

Bosley: Well, I’m just so eager to jump right into this. So on our last episode, we really looked at and kind of tore apart the mathematics and the issues with traditional grading.

So if we’re going to have the standpoint of this doesn’t really work to reach the goal of what we believe a grade should be with talking about communicating to our students the progress and achievement that they have. So, how do we do that?

Sharona: Well, and before we even start there, I wanted to share something that I believe: my philosophy about grading, and I want to emphasize my philosophy about grading is based really, it’s really grounded in the right now.

So I think as I learn more and I start to think to the future of what grading could be, it might change, but I’m really focused right now on where we are today. And where we are today is students have been trained that what is being graded is all that matters. So I believe that what you grade is what students will learn.

So therefore, I want my grading system to incentivize to the best of my ability. The things that I want my students to learn. And so one of the things I like about alternative grading is it has really expanded my mind to really think consciously about what I want my students to learn. And as we’ve worked with this community to come up with what we consider to be the four pillars of alternative grading, the very first strand of that is clearly defining what we want our students to learn.

Bosley: Exactly. These clear learning goals or learning targets, whatever you want to call them, is, I think, one of the most critical components. And unfortunately, it’s also the one that gets shortcutted by a lot of people when they first start this.

So let’s actually start with the big one. What is it not?

Sharona: So, a learning outcome is not a common core state standard. For example. So a common core state standard is a statement of something supposed to be learned by a student that is written by educators for educators. So it’s not an existing common core state standard.

Bosley: Yeah, and whether you’re in a state that’s common core or not, it is not your state standards. I think that’s the the big point. Those state standards are written for us, the educator. They’re not written for the students.

Sharona: And in higher ed, it’s not your course learning outcome most likely. So almost every one of our programs, you know, the, the, the universities and the colleges they’ve gone through and they’ve done, you know, university or, or institutional learning outcomes.

Those drive down to program learning outcomes, which are for specific degrees and specific programs. Those drill down to course learning outcomes. None of those are really the thing that I want my student to learn, at least not in a way that is useful to the student.

Bosley: Yeah. And, and again, it goes back to the, all of those things are written for us, the educators. They’re not written for our customers, our learners, our students.

Sharona: And just to tie into, you know, last week’s episode on traditional grading, our students are learning a lot of things that we don’t intend for them to learn. They learn that following the rules and compliance is the most important thing because of that compliance grading aspect. So I had to challenge myself to get very, very clear and explicit on what I want students to learn. And that’s not just the content, that’s not just the discipline content of my course.

Bosley: Yeah. And, and another thing that, and again, this kind of goes back to why I have switched and why I feel so passionate about this, is with traditional grading, I think it, one of the things unintendedly, that our students learn is that mistakes are bad. And this goes back to the, you know, the fundamental, um, belief about how you learn is through trial and error. It’s through making mistakes and growing and learning from those.

Sharona: And, and another thing we hear a lot when we start to talk about clearly defined learning outcomes or targets is that it feels like a laundry list of skills. How do you feel about that?

Bosley: You know, I don’t completely disagree with that, nor do I think it’s always a bad thing because these learning outcomes are so uniquely tied to the specific course that you were teaching at the time. There are times and there are courses where it is a lot of procedural understanding. Is it always? Absolutely not. There are, there are lots of courses out there that, you know, depending on the level, on the purpose, it isn’t. But yeah, sometimes it is. And you know what, that’s ok.

Sharona: And so what I would say if, you know, if you’re looking at starting this process for your course, try to not start with a default assumption of what a learning outcome has to be or can be or should be. Because we have seen so many different courses with so many different types of learning outcomes, and we’ll definitely dive into some of them. However you would articulate what you want a student to learn can become a clearly defined learning outcome.

Bosley: Yeah, and you know what? What is it about your course that you think is important for the students to come away with? You know, a, a good friend of mine, that I hope to have as a guest, probably several times, Joe Zaccola, one of the things, and he’s a high school English teacher, one of the things that he feels very strongly and passionate about is the student’s ability to self-edit and peer review. So those are both skills and both things that are part of his learning outcomes, even though they might not be expelled at, you know, exactly that way in the common core state standards for English 11 and high school.

Sharona: Well, and for me, I want my students to learn how they learn. So I’ve written a learning outcome, you’ve heard me talk about it, I call it, variously, my habits of mind standard, my Triple P, my Preparation, participation and practice standard. I’m trying to teach my students how to learn mathematics. That is one of the objectives of my, of my course because I, I think it’s done very poorly, and as you get into higher and higher level mathematics, you have to figure out how to learn things for yourself.

And so I try to provide a learning outcome that basically says, look, you need to learn how to learn. I think that these are the various ways you might learn, so I’m going to credit you for doing these things, but you pick which ones are most valuable to you. And so there’s some flexibility in there, but I literally have a learning outcome on that. Uh, when I teach history of math, I have a learning outcome, for example, the impact of gender and race in the history of mathematics. I’m not trying to get them to tell me specifically about a specific woman or a specific race or a specific gender situation. I want to know, can they pick up the patterns of gender and race? So that’s not a skills based outcome. But then, in my linear algebra class, they need to know how to compute the basis of a vector space. And that is a very specific skill.

Bosley: Yeah, and that’s what, going back to what I was saying with these learning objectives or targets or whatever you want to call them, are very specific to a course. So you can’t just slap learning objectives on five completely different courses. So each of these are very personal and unique, both to the teacher, the course, and the situation that you find yourself teaching in.

Sharona: So let me ask you this, what makes a good learning outcome for an alternatively graded course?

Bosley: That’s a great question, and I think there’s a few key elements, but before we can really start talking about what makes a good one is what you do before you start writing these. And that is really going and defining for yourself, what is it that you want your students to come out of? What skills, what concepts, what activities do you want your students to leave your course?

Sharona: You know, I completely agree with you, and I know you’ve heard me say this, but I envision almost all of my courses as a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So for example, in calculus two, or in the whole calculus sequence, calculus one is the mathematics of change, calculus two is the mathematics of accumulation, calculus three is the mathematics of motion and space. And then in calculus two, you also have the Mathematics of the Infinite and things like that. So I like to have these sort of story themes that I like to use when I create my course. And I think that having those big ideas, You know, what do I want students to learn? I want them to learn the mathematics of accumulation, but I also want them to learn how to learn. I think it’s a critical, critical piece.

Bosley: All right, so once we have that part done, and again, this is where early practitioners of, of alternative gradings. This is one of the two biggest mistakes they make, is not taking the time to really do this part. But once, once we’ve come up with our why, why does this course exist? What do we want our students coming out of? How do we go from there? How do we start writing good learning objectives?

Sharona: Well, number one, however you’re going to measure whether a student has done what you want them to do, you have to write your learning objectives so it can be measured. And again, whether you’re going to measure growth or you are, and whether you’re doing the measuring or the student’s doing the measuring. Because part of what we’re trying to do here is under this umbrella of alternative grading, I’m going to take a little side step for a second. Under this message, this umbrella of alternative grading, we’re trying to encompass all of the methods that we’ve heard about.

And that’s everything from ungrading to standards based grading to specifications, grading to contract grading, collaborative grading, equitable grading, insert adjective here grading, anything except traditional points and percentage based grading. I think all of these systems base start from a perspective of knowing what you’re trying to accomplish with the class, but then at some point, you, again, assuming you’re in a final environment of an A, B, C, D, F or pass, no pass or some sort of of a final grade,

Bosley: some sort of multi-level final grade

Sharona: multi-level, final grade, what do, what does the student have to accomplish in order to get a final acceptable grade of a pass or an ABC or whatever, whatever the student’s target grade is. You have got be able to measure that somehow.

Bosley: Exactly. So the, so the language of your learning objective has to be measurable,

Sharona: Which usually by the way, means it needs to be a verb.

Bosley: Exactly. So I, I think that’s one of the key parts of the anatomy of a good learning objective is it, it has to be measurable. It has to be some sort of action. Another one that I, I think is critically important is it does need to be student facing.

Sharona: Yeah. Something the student needs to be able to do.

Bosley: Yeah. Again, early practitioners, the two ways that I like to tell early practitioners to try this is either the "I can" statements written from a student’s point of view or the "students will be able to". So those are two very practical ways to make these learning objectives student facing. So we’ve got student facing, we’ve got measurable.

Sharona: It should be written at an appropriate language level. So this is something we see, especially when we start talking, remember about those common core state standards. If you’re writing a learning objective that is readable by someone with a master’s degree in English, it’s probably not appropriate for an eighth grade student. And it also needs to be some, so lexile levels is what we talk about, but also it needs to be understandable by the student at least once they’ve learned it.

So if you’ve got some discipline specific content in there, we work with a lot of engineers, they use something called a free, a free body diagram. Students will be able to create an accurate free body diagram. I’m not an engineer I still can’t tell you what a free body diagram is, so you don’t need to be able to understand it before you learn it, but once you’ve learned it, it should make sense. So you don’t want to be several levels advanced.

Bosley: Exactly. So it, it needs to be language appropriate, needs to be student facing, needs to be actionable. Is there any, is there anything else that a good learning objective should have? Like the components of it?

Sharona: Well, for me, I also, I don’t want too many things in one thing. Like I don’t want them to demonstrate that they can do this thing, these 17 ways.

Bosley: See, and those last two points you made, I think are the biggest reasons why most state standards, at least at the K-12 world, whether it’s common core or not, don’t fit our definitions of learning objectives because a) they’re not written at a student’s level of understanding. And I mean, I, I can pull up some of the common core math standards. You could make a whole course from one learning outcome, you know, students, you know, students can graph linear, quadratic, exponential polynomial function. That’s very, like, each one of those are very, very different. And that’s kind of what the standards are actually written as. So those are the two really big reasons why I say state standards are a great place to start. Because that is, as a teacher,

Sharona: that’s what you’re legally obligated to.

Bosley: Yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to be teaching. But that’s not the way the learning objective should be written.

Sharona: Well, and and to clarify, even at the higher ed, I’m not saying you should ignore your course learning outcomes. Because your course needs to meet the course learning outcomes developed by your discipline and your institution and your program, unless you have the power to change them. I just don’t think they’re written well. Like I don’t think you should be showing them to students as is. But I absolutely meet the course learning outcomes. In fact, I, my courses more directly meet most of the learning outcomes at my institution. I actually have them directly mapped because not only do I map to my course learning outcomes, I also mapped to my general education learning outcomes for my GE courses. So I’m not saying you don’t use them. Just saying just you don’t show them to students because that doesn’t work.

Bosley: Yeah. You use them, you don’t copy them and say, oh, I don’t need to do this step. I’ve already got my state standards. Which again, especially in the K-12 world, is one of the two biggest mistakes I’ve seen is, oh, I, I don’t have to do this. I’ve already got my 23 state standards.

Sharona: Now, one of the objections I get usually at this point is, but when I go to assess, if I just, if they know that I’m assessing a specific skill, that gives away half the problem. Like, so for example, you might have multiple ways of approaching a problem and you want to assess each of those ways that they can do it, but you also want to know if they can pick the right way. So what I like to do is I write another learning outcome or part of a learning outcome for strategy. So I’ll have, can you use the right strategy as a learning outcome or can you set a problem up correctly as a learning outcome? So you have a lot of intentionality available to you.

Bosley: Yeah, and we kind of alluded to this earlier, but your learning objectives don’t have to all be completely content related, like it can be more broader. I, I know one of the things that I commonly use both in my K-12 but also in the higher ed, is I will use some of those standard practices of mathematics from the common core as some of my actual learning target. I mean, again, not word for word copying, but I’ll use those because those are the skills that are important to mathematics in a, you know, in a much general form. So, for instance, when I’m teaching algebra two, being able to recognize some of the patterns and being able to use those patterns is something that’s very important, I believe in algebra two. So those are one of my actual learning objectives that’s not directly related to the Algebra two content, but is at a more broad, spectrum.

Sharona: And we do that in statistics of course, as well. One of the mathematical practice standards we use is communicate a viable argument and utilize statistical evidence to back it up. So we’re not saying which evidence, we’re not saying which specific statistics, but it is something appropriate for the course as a whole that you’ve got to be able to make an argument and back it up.

Bosley: All right, so there’s, our first pillar is starting with clear defined learning objectives. So what’s, what’s the second pillar?

Sharona: So the second pillar is helpful feedback. So, Well it depends which one you wanna call second. Do we wanna call that one second or do we wanna go to Mark’s indicating progress or should we list all four of ’em? Because I’m a little bit, so I, I’m a little bit concerned about talking about helpful feedback before we’ve given everyone, all four of ‘them.

Bosley: All right, so let’s, so we’ve, we’ve talked about the first one and kind of got into detail. What are some of the, what are the other three pillars?

Sharona: So the other three pillars, which really go hand in hand are helpful feedback is the second pillar, marks indicating progress. So any assessments the students get, the marks they get back, tell them where they stand towards achieving what they’re trying to achieve. And the third one is re attempts without penalty.

Bosley: Yeah. Eventual mastery matters.

Sharona: Yeah. So eventual completion of meeting whatever expectations you’ve set is what matters. So those all three go together and they’re really hard for me to pick apart. So when you said second pillar, so let me go back to that helpful feedback. We said, on the previous episode, that mistakes allow thinking to happen. And to delve a little bit more into that the science of learning has really determined that humans learn from feedback loops. So you try something, you get some feedback. So you know, if you’re a toddler and you’re trying to learn to walk, you try to walk and you fall down and you get some feedback on your bottom. Did that hurt? You don’t want to do that again, so you’re going to try again. So you get these feedback and the feedback actually coaches you into eventual success and all human learning, and these days even AI learning, happens through feedback. So, you’ve got to give the feedback, but then you have got to give the student an opportunity to do something with it.

Bosley: And I think that is one of the key things that differs alternative grading, like what we’ve been talking about from traditional grading. Because in a traditional grading, I give the unit test on linear functions, say in algebra one, I might give the students feedback, I might tell ‘them, you know, hey, this is what you did wrong or point you into how to correct it. But my next test is what I’m going to exponentials like, and they don’t have anything to do with that.

Sharona: And even the next test includes some of the stuff you can’t recover the points. Yeah, the points are gone. So what I like about alternative grading is they’re going to have opportunities to try the same learning outcome, the same skill, the same topic again. So the purpose of my feedback is to point them in the right direction. I know for myself and especially my linear algebra class, I kick back stuff for immediate revision all the time. So my feedback has to say, Hey, where did you go wrong? And what are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out how to get it right.

Bosley: Exactly.

Sharona: So what do you think about the next one though? So what, so why don’t you explain the third there, or do you want me to,

Bosley: I was hoping to get the last one.

Sharona: Oh well. Okay. So I’ll do the third one. Marks indicate progress, right? Yeah. That’s what you want me to talk about. Yeah. So what do we mean by marks? So again, there’s a lot of weighted language around grades. The word grades. So we’re switching as a community to the word mark. So Mark is could be a check, or an x, for not yet. It could be a success or not yet language. It could be emojis. I tend to use a lot of emojis in my stuff because most of the language that we could use has extra weight and meaning. But the idea being that you tell a student where they are on the progress towards whatever goal has been set. It could be a goal that the student set, it could be a goal that you set. It could be a goal you set together, but whatever the goal is, the, the mark that they get on any piece of work indicates where they are relative to the goal.

And then the fourth penalty is the re, the fourth penalty. The fourth pillar is re attempts without penalty. Why don’t you explain that one?

Bosley: So, and, and again, this goes back to my core belief that, you know, mistakes allow thinking to happen. So with traditional grading, even if I’m allowing re attempts, they’re still getting punished for those early mistakes. With alternative grading, we don’t want to punish those early mistakes. We want to reward mastery or award achieving the proficiency level. Whether it took, you know, they were able to do it on the first time, or it took them multiple times. So we want to give those students multiple opportunities to show that they have learned. Regardless of if they knew it on the first time or not.

So this idea of allowing our students to redo or to reattempt these multiple times, and it really is where they end. Now, those reat attempts could be reassessments, it could be like what you were just saying that you do with your linear algebra, which is revisions. It could look other ways as well, but at the end, it matters where the student finishes, not where they started. Not did I get it the first time or the second time, or did it take me several times? It’s at the end. How much do I know? How much am I able to do towards those goals of the class?

Sharona: And so let me ask you this, does the re attempt have to be in the same form as the original attempt?

Bosley: Absolutely not. It, it, it can be, maybe at my first attempt for mastery or attempt for proficiency was a traditional pen and paper test. My next one can be too. It could be revisions on that. It could be reflections on that. It could be a whole completely different type of assessment. Those are really up to you as the professional in the room, you as the educator.

Sharona: Well, and I think that at least my impression has been in some ways that some of our folks that are in more writing intensive courses or writing intensive disciplines, they’re a little bit more used to the revise and resubmit process, but they still suffer from, at the end of the day trying to figure out a rubric that has points on it. So I’m hoping that some of our people in like the English discipline or some of the other writing intensives will have a little bit of an easier jump. I suspect that Joe, when we get him on the pod, is going to disagree with me.

I do know that I saw a tremendous amount of growth in my history of math class because that was a entirely a writing based course with quite a bit of mathematics in it. And I almost didn’t know what to expect from my students the first time I taught this class. But it was really nice that even from assignment to assignment, when the content of what they were trying to accomplish was so different. Like we had one learning outcome that had to do with demonstrating your knowledge of ancient numerical systems. And another one that had to do with the impact of, of gender and race on who identifies as a mathematician. Two completely different content areas, but they were able to show a much better strength of writing and the ability to put together an expository paper from one to the other. So even though the content was different and, and addressed different learning outcomes, I had other outcomes that could be shown throughout.

Bosley: Yeah. And, and again, I, I talked about using some of those common core eight standard practices of mathematics. It’s the same thing. They can look very different and be over very different content, but the ability to make a viable argument and, and critique the argument of others in a statistics class, might come from using regression models and making predictions. Or it could come from doing hypothesis testing and what those hypothesis testing, you know, the conclusion from those

Sharona: Exactly. Now, We’ve gotten quite a few initial pushback, even just from these four pillars. So can you think of some of the common things people say immediately once they’ve heard these four pillars?

Bosley: Well, the, the probably the most common, and the one that I think is the most ridiculous because it is again, only seen in academia, is, oh, well, if they can just redo it, they’re just re, you know, they’re not, they should know it the first time. That if, if I’m allowing them to reassess I have to somehow punish them from the beginning because they didn’t know it the first time.

Sharona: Right? Somehow reassessments in and of themselves are less reasonable for qualifying for proficiency.

Bosley: Yeah. And somehow I know you hate this word, but somehow it lowers the, the rigor of my grade or of my course.

Sharona: I don’t hate the word. We just have an entire episode to do on rigor, so that is what people say. I’m just trying to avoid using it myself. Yeah. But yeah, it’s less rigorous if somehow you have to revise it. Unlike every journal article ever submitted,

Bosley: Or, I mean, let’s look at outside of academia. Let’s, because in our worlds outside of being a student, every one of us has to take some test. I, I took my first big one at 16. It was called a driver’s test. Guess what? I failed the first one. I hit a curb when I was trying to parallel park. Automatic fail. When I did the second one, did they average my score? No, absolutely not. When I took the first time, I took the CBEST, the California Basic something,

Sharona: educational skills test for teachers.

Bosley: Yeah. The first time I took that because of my writing, my writing score, I failed that. When I took it again, did they average the scores? No. In fact, I challenge you to find me a single test that you take outside of being a student that does average a score.

Sharona: Well, and then we see this, especially in some of the disciplines where there’s an ultimate licensing exam. So we hear a lot, we need to prepare them for the licensing exam. And I’m like, okay, so you let them take the final exam again and again. How many times are you limited to taking your licensing exam? Now, I get that’s really expensive. No one wants to take the medical boards multiple times. No one wants to take the bar exam multiple times. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people spend a lot of money taking practice exams. None of which goes in, so the world. You’re right. And it, or even going beyond the world of exams, you know, I have an MBA in marketing. I spent eight years in the advertising industry. A lot of what I had to do was develop marketing plans. Do you think I just wrote them by myself out of my head and never showed it to anyone, and by the time it showed, I showed it to everyone, it was perfect? Absolutely not. I showed it to my boss and he kicked it back with commentary. I showed it to my other team members. They kicked it back. Eventually it gets to the client. They kick it back. It goes through rounds and rounds and rounds of revisions. The goal is to be able to take that feedback and make it better faster, because that’s how you save money.

Bosley: Yeah. And, and it all boiled down to that final product that you came up with. Does it matter how many steps, how many times you had to revise it? It came down to the effectiveness of that final, you know, marketing product, whatever it was.

Sharona: Right. And now the, the other thing I hear a lot of at this point is people are going, oh my God, I can barely write the number of assessments I currently have and grade them, and you want me to do more? You want me to let students try an unlimited amount of times I’m going to get buried.

Bosley: So that word unlimited is loaded. And, and when we talk about, I think we can do a whole episode on how you provide multiple assessments or multiple attempts at assessments. I do agree that unlimited might have some issues, but it also comes down to how you’re assessing. So one of the, especially in math discipline courses, we get our, the validness of our test through quantity. We ask several questions on the exact same thing to see if the student can do it over and over.

Sharona: Because they might miss it on one and you don’t want to do all of it on just one thing.

Bosley: Yeah. Or even the reverse. You don’t want them to accidentally get it. So part of dealing with this is doing better assessments actually, instead of going by quantity, going by quality. Okay. Asking different types of things. So changing the way we assess to begin with goes a long way towards this.

Sharona: Well, and I think you’ll see, I know many, many, many instructors who’ve been getting a lot of training on more authentic assessments and more effective assessments. But they’re running into the same old problems and getting frustrated because the points and percentages grading destroys the effectiveness of those more effective assessments. So I think if you layer this new structure, or not new, but alternative to traditional points and percentages on top of those authentic assessments. And for me, it all comes back to three words. Evidence of learning. I don’t care how the evidence of learning arrives to me as the instructor, whether it’s a conversation I’m having in an office hours, or it’s on a test or exam, or a paper or an oral presentation or a conversation that I overhear from one student to the next. If I have evidence of learning, I have evidence of learning. Now I don’t want to have complete chaos. So I design intentional opportunities to gather that evidence, but I’m open to that evidence showing up elsewhere. And so if I end up in a conversation with a student who did poorly on an assessment and as part of that conversation they tell me 3, 4, 5 other things that they should have put on their paper but didn’t know to put on their paper, but they know them? I’m not gonna make ’em necessarily write it up. Yeah. I got my evidence. And so, first of all, and, and well, and then tied to that, my experience is I’m really quick to know whether the evidence is sufficient or not. It’s much quicker than deciding 10 points, 9 points, 8 points, 7 points. I can look at a problem and in an instant know whether it meets my criteria of sufficient evidence, and, and then it takes me time if it doesn’t. It takes me time to give feedback.

Bosley: Yeah. And when we get into one of our later episodes, when we start breaking down what we call the architecture of your grading of your course, and we really start looking at how you assess an assessment for proficiency or whatever you wanna call it, we’ll really get into that in the different ways, and that’s where you do make up a lot of that time. If that’s done. If that’s done well.

Sharona: Absolutely. And then the other thing I wanted to comment about the unlimited is there’s also science on the path of learning. And from my personal experience with the types of classes that I do, if a student is unable to show evidence of learning by the third time that they attempt something, attempt a skill, that student needs some sort of an intervention before attempting it again. They need either reteaching, they need additional resources, they need some tutoring, they need something because when someone tries something three times and is, unless they’re, unless they’re getting significant growth. But in my classes, if they’re not getting it by the third time, they’re not going to get it without some kind of an intervention. And so that puts a little bit of bumper cards on there and then, We’re also going to talk in a later episode about artificial scarcity. One thing that is not scarce in our, not artificial, sorry, it is scarce, but it’s not artificial in our current system is the term. So at this time, however long your term is, which for me, it’s 15 weeks, at some point we’re going to run out of time for me to gather evidence of learning. So I can’t give unlimited. You know, just because we’re going to run out of time. So there are some limits. Now, one of the things I do with students though, and this is also just something we can talk about in the future, is if a student’s not going to be able to give me evidence of learning during the term, I’m going to expand my definition into the next term in my messaging. I can’t do it like logistically in my grades, but I can look at a student and I have done this and said, you know what? You’re not going to make it yet this semester, but I would really, really like it if you would come back to me again next semester in this course if I’m teaching it, because I’d like to continue on the path with you.

Bosley: Yeah. And that kind of gets to, you know, one of the, the foundations of alternative grading, which is this growth mindset. If you don’t know what growth mindset is, you’ve got to go out and read some of Carol Dweck’s work about growth mindset. But yes, sometimes not yet can mean not yet this semester. And yes, it’s, it’s costly, so we don’t wanna have to do it very often. Trust me, I know I did have to do this a lot. But taking that stigmatism away from this idea of, oh, I didn’t meet the standards I’m a failure because I failed this course. No, sometimes not yet, just, or that eventually mastery might mean next semester, right? It might mean you need more than the 15 weeks or more than the 20 weeks I have with them at the high school level. And that’s okay.

Sharona: Right. And what I love about this messaging is we’re learning that a lot of our students are getting bad advice. At least at my institution. They are working too many hours and taking too many courses for the scarcity reasons of financial aid. So I’m very acknowledging the real world aspect of that. But it doesn’t help my students to take 15, 18, or 21 units and work 30 or 40 hours a week and try and get an engineering degree. Those things are fundamentally incompatible in terms of time. So being able to tell my students, Hey, you need to withdraw this semester. You’re taking too many units. That’s okay. You’ve still learned something. You’ve learned what it’s going to take. And so I think that we can bring a lot more kindness and empathy into the process, even when a student isn’t going to meet these, these somewhat arbitrary term times, which by the way, we’re seeing go away in some of the more MOOC the multi, the large online classes. So, you know, which. Interesting side topic there.

Bosley: Interesting side topic. And again kind of goes to the same area of the conversations of, you know, do we even need the multi-level grades? The time limit is a world that most of us live in right now. Maybe later on we can do a, another episode talking about the time element and, and that time limitation. That would be interesting.

Sharona: Yeah, exactly. So there’s a lot out there to read. There are many people who’ve talked and we’ve, we’ve given several talks on these pillars. This is just an overview getting us into the world of alternative grading. There will be future episodes diving in quite a bit more deeply into each of these four pillars, probably multiple episodes on each of the pillars from different perspectives, different disciplines, different levels.

All right. Please join us next week while we continue looking at the different aspects of grading and alternative grading. See you next week.

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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 PO is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.