The Grading Podcast

[00:00:00] Sharona: And it talks about grading practices, there’s just a bunch of grading practices, and it talks about employing professional judgment and considering a student’s more recent or most consistent performance in the standards are some ways of avoiding inaccurate grade reporting. So it’s just a statement of how to do things better, but again will make people go, what is that about? And now we have a conversation we can have, right? So, it’s approached in a way that hopefully it will move some of that skepticism. Why is that a best practice? But it’s not decreeing in a way that gets it attacked.

[00:00:32] Boz: 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.

[00:00:58] 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.

[00:01:27] Boz: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

[00:01:35] Sharona: I am doing well. And , I’m particularly happy to be welcoming our occasional third co host back to the pod, Mr. Joe Zeccola. How are you doing today, Joe?

[00:01:46] Joe: I am very well, especially excited to be invited back on. I found out about this yesterday and it made my day.

[00:01:52] Sharona: Well, we’re very glad to have you. And the structure today is to be a little bit different because of the topic. I’m actually going to be interviewing the two of you as if you are guests. So the topic today, on the podcast and in our community, we’ve been hearing recently, that’s been coming a lot about system wide changes. Whether it’s at an entire department level, a school level, or a system level. And I understand that LA Unified just did their first grading policy update in about 20 years and a little birdie told me that you and Boz might have had something to do with that. Can you Joe, give us a short summary of what are these new options in the policy? And then we’ll go into a little bit more of how that went for you guys.

[00:02:37] Joe: Sure. It’s the secondary policy. I’m not sure what’s up with elementary, but secondary marking practices, the original or not the original, but the, the first bulletin on this came out in 2005. So there’ve been no official changes in secondary marking practices and procedures in 19 years. And they’ve been looking at changing it. And so they decided to do some big changes to look at non traditional grading practices. To really embrace what you would call standards based mastery what LAUSD calls equitable grading practices. And as part of coming up with their new practices, there was a big consultation meeting with our teachers union. And even though these are areas where the district has full control and can implement policy, to their credit, they wanted a consult with UTLA and Bosley and I are part of the UTLA grading task force, along with many other teachers and our secondary vice president, Alex Orozco, made sure to get us involved. And we were involved in about, I don’t know, like five or six meetings giving input to help create these new practices that are helping to encourage teachers to make these shifts, I think is the best way to say it. And certainly the way UTLA wanted it to be to encourage teachers to start making these recommended shifts.

[00:03:56] Sharona: So, Boz, can you give us maybe a couple of the details? What are the kinds of things that a teacher in LA Unified might be looking at having available to them now?

[00:04:05] Boz: So, going back to what Joe was talking about with the original policy or the, again, I don’t know if it’s the original, but it’s the one that this is replacing that dated back to December of 2005, they’ve made quite a few changes both in just some of the structural stuff that was there before compared to now, but also leaning a lot more towards encouraging people to use non traditional grading practices.

[00:04:35] Sharona: Can you give some examples? Specifics?

[00:04:38] Boz: Well, and I think Joe was said it really well. The district does have, even though grades, by ED code in California and by our UTLA contracts, our final grades are ours, but the district has a right to implement different policies and procedures about the way we do our grades. And what this policy has done really well is not dictate any kind of, you know, forced move to nontraditional practices or what specifically what the district refers to as EGI or equitable grading. But does a lot of encouragement to go that way. Gives a lot of definitions and a lot of policies that we, the three of us, definitely believe are best practices, but again, does it without forcing it.

[00:05:35] Sharona: So what’s coming up for me when you guys say this is I had a meeting yesterday with a university level faculty member in it from another state where literally they have a specific policy at their institution that says 80 percent of the grade needs to be based on major proctored assessments. And this faculty member was worried how they could do alternative grading given what appears to be a percentage policy. And I was able to walk them through, no, that doesn’t mean anything like you have to give points. But I could say, look, almost all my grade is on major proctored assessments because all of my learning outcomes that I test are done in a proctored assessment style. So I guess what I’m struggling to understand right now from you two is what changed?

[00:06:24] Was there something that was, oh, hey, you have to give this many grades or they have to be with this many points or, I mean, how detailed did the policy get or was it general principles and what’s changed? So Joe, you want to try that?

[00:06:37] Joe: Yeah, there’s a bunch of little changes. There’s a lot of general principles.

[00:06:41] So just to clarify what Boz and I were talking about, I went and looked while we were talking. So one of their first statements, it just governs all of this. That points out why I appreciate them consulting with UTLA because they realized that you have to have the consent of the governed at some level to be able to pull it off, which is "The Board of Education has the authority to adopt rules and regulations governing a grading system. The principal has responsibility for implementing board policy."

[00:07:04] So there’s where this is coming under, just to point out Bosley’s point that according to Ed Code, teachers control grades, districts control grading systems. And they’re not at any level contending it shouldn’t be, but the kind of things that changed and your statement about assessments reminded me of this really sort of screwy system that came out a few years ago.

[00:07:23] There was a big hubbaloo when the district released something that’s saying "no more than 15 percent of a student’s grade can be based on homework." And it just, teachers lost their minds. And the principle behind that obviously was, you know, this, this sort of standard math based reason for homework that they use to govern all homework, that all it is is practice.

[00:07:42] And the point is practice shouldn’t be all that, but it was a stupid way of saying it because again, all homework isn’t practice. Right? Drafting an essay at home isn’t practice, reading isn’t practice. There’s a lot of things about it, but their heart was in the right place. So now they’ve replaced that just to give you an idea with some of the differences.

[00:07:57] How they’ve said it now is "meaningful homework is an extension of classwork and is aligned to the standards for the course. It can be used to provide students with additional opportunities for practice and to improve their learning. Homework might not provide reliable information about student academic performance and should be considered very carefully when included in the final grade determination, if at all."

[00:08:18] But nowhere in there is there a mandate. So there’s a lot of statements like that. There are some hardcore changes they are now saying, and I’ll just read you a few. "Grading practices are to reflect individual student performance and proficiency of the standards." So they’re saying unequivocally grades must be aligned to standards, which again makes complete sense to any of us.

[00:08:39] And as long as you can standards based your stuff, that’s great. And then there’s a bunch of statements about what they call EGI aligned practice, meaning equitable grading and instruction aligned practices, which is just the name they adopted when they shifted from mastery. So they’re calling them equitable practice.

[00:08:53] So for example, talking about they reflect the idea that all students can learn and they talk about the shift from competitive systems, which I think is something we would both be huge on. The whole idea that all of us, before we made this shift, were looking at grading as a way to sort of reward the best as opposed to the "A" is can you do the thing, right?

[00:09:12] And now it’s saying that. So "no competitive system, which a few available high grades in each course, to an equitable system in which all students are supported to demonstrate grade level proficiency and standards." So to sort of support the Guskey/Bloom idea that 90 plus percent of our students, we should be working to get them to A’s and if they’re not, we should be questioning our practice.

[00:09:32] Those types of things, we can go into more detail as you want, but those are some of the meaningful shifts.

[00:09:37] Sharona: So I just want to summarize a couple of things I heard. And then what I would like to go to though, is what I think will be of more use to the listeners of the podcast is how did this process work?

[00:09:48] Cause it sounds like you got to a final good place, but what I was hearing you say, and we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, that we want to move away from time, place, and manner of a specific thing. Like it’s "in class" or it’s "at home", or it’s timed, or it’s not, those kinds of things, to what is the intention of this thing?

[00:10:09] Is it to demonstrate evidence of learning, or is it for a student to work on getting to that level of mastery? So when you say it’s standards aligned, or it’s not just aligned, it’s actually measuring the proficiency of a student on that learning outcome. Is that correct?

[00:10:26] Joe: Yes, that is 100 percent correct.

[00:10:27] And just to add some more meat to that particular sorry, I’m about to get to a horrible metaphor just to add more more substance to that. They’ve now got revised criteria for grades and I was just looking at it myself as I was preparing for our podcast and realizing I’m going to, of course, update my syllabus and here’s what the definitions are. And these are the definitions we’re all supposed to use. An "A" demonstrates an exemplary level of proficiency in course content standards that were explicitly taught. Then "B" demonstrates proficiency in course standards that were explicitly taught.

[00:11:01] "C" demonstrates near proficiency in course standards that were explicitly taught. And then D is limited and Fail is has not yet demonstrated. So again, you’re saying you have to be teaching to the standards and then you’re saying your grades are about what is their progress in achieving the standards. And then we are, and it says in there, that our syllabus must contain statements as to how we get to that place.

[00:11:20] So that way it gives us plenty of freedom in defining what is our syllabus. Exemplary level of proficiency is that gets to be the teacher’s call, right? But they’re saying they would like it to be aligned to the philosophy of getting all students there, which again is, is what we would do in any other task, but academic classroom learning, right?

[00:11:40] If anything else, if you can do the thing, that’s what proficient is.

[00:11:44] Boz: Yeah. But that, that is one of the specific things that is new from the last policy, those definitions of what a grade means is one of the things that was directly changed. And, but yet, even though they did that and earlier in the policy, you know, it does talk about what are some best grading practices, and it actually goes through a whole, you know, almost traditional versus non traditional look at these without mandating that part.

[00:12:20] Joe: Right. It says recommended practice versus traditional practice. Right. And just to do another shout out. So when I say UTLA for people who don’t know, it’s United Teachers, Los Angeles, second largest teachers union in the United States. And Alex Orozco is our secondary vice president. And the big push that I know Bosley and I were supporting Alex in was just saying, because you know, right now it’s less than one out of five LAUSD teachers have really, gotten themselves to be certified in these equitable practices that we, we know the district can implement it, but we also know that would be inequitable to our teachers just to mandate.

[00:12:56] So we were pushing for this to be, to quote Alex "aspirational", right? So to provide the guidance to North Star, the way for teachers to shift without mandating it because our concern was you can do whatever you want. It’s not going to work if you push this way, you’re just going to lose people. And we were very clear saying in meetings with the district, Bosley and I, especially, that this is something we want.

[00:13:19] And the last thing we want to do as people were trying to create new converts every day to this, this movement is to turn people off by, by taking overworked teachers and giving them a new mandate.

[00:13:31] Sharona: Well, I’m very glad to hear that we managed to thread that needle. Boz, would you share with us a little bit about how this went?

[00:13:39] Because Joe’s saying you guys came in, you came in under influence with UTLA and you had objectives to have the teacher voice. How did it go? How receptive was LA Unified? How was the process?

[00:13:52] Boz: And again, I really do want to give, you know, props to LAUSD for the way that they’re, they’re handling it and the way they’re trying to encourage teachers to get away from traditional grading.

[00:14:06] We’ve seen around the country, you know, much smaller districts, but they’ve tried to mandate it top down. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. And when it doesn’t, it can be pretty ugly. So I do want to give props out to LAUSD for the way they’re doing this. But and I don’t know all the details.

[00:14:26] This was in process before I came in and before you came in Joe, but no, it was really good. They, you know, we were brought in, a small group from the district representing the district, including parts of their EGI instructional team, a small group of us representing UTLA coming in as advisors make our recommendations and to give feedback and suggestions on this policy.

[00:14:57] With the, the way it was worded on how, you know, how to thread that needle, like you said, between trying to encourage it without mandating it, because you know, you’re right, Joe, we’re, we’re maybe 20%, maybe a little higher than 20 percent at this point, but not much of our teachers are really trained in.

[00:15:19] Sharona, you and I know this better than most, this is not a two hour, one shot PD that can be done over the summer and expect to successfully redesign a course to utilize non traditional grading practices, like it doesn’t work.

[00:15:38] Sharona: So other than the fact that it’s not a mandate. What else, though, do you feel is really good about either the process or where they ended up? Anything else other than it’s just not mandatory?

[00:15:51] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. So, well, first of all, again, I agree big shout out to LAUSD. And by the way, one of the things they also did well, and as a union activist, I can go off on things I don’t think they do well.

[00:16:01] So I think when we feel this good about it, we should be effusive because it was that good. We brought in as many UTLA teachers who wanted to be involved and there kept being a call out to secondary teachers. So our group was a little smaller because of how hard it was to make all the meetings, but they certainly would not have fought us if our group was bigger.

[00:16:19] So good on them for that. And the process was they listened pretty, pretty intently to some of the things we did. So for example, one of the things that was my sort of bailiwick that drives me nuts is I’ve heard around from people who don’t understand alternative grading practices that we can’t have zeros in the grade book.

[00:16:36] Right. And I like was doing all I could to get there and say, of course you can. Like if I have no evidence, I have no evidence. It’s a zero. And I use the missing assignment thing. I’m not putting incomplete when there’s no work that’s misleading to parents. I go the key is twofold. One, you’re not supposed to average it into anything because it doesn’t tell you anything.

[00:16:54] And B, the real case against a zero is a hundred percent about the mathematical annihilation that occurs when you put a zero into a hundred point scale, right? So we made the case no percentage, no averaging, but then they, so they switched it and said zeros are fine as long as, so that’s under their list of things that Bosley hinted at.

[00:17:12] It’s a whole list of EGI aligned practices and they basically say, the two columns are, it starts with evidence based, equity focused grading practices outlined in the Exploring Mastery Based Learning and Grading Advisory Group recommendations are identified below, and their recommendations. So, it’ll say "evidence based, equity focused grading practices reflect only the level of academic proficiency on course standards taught".

[00:17:36] "Whereas traditional grading practices reflect a combination of academic and non academic factors", like work habits and stuff, " Generally include only summative assessment data while formative assessment data drives instruction." That’s for recommended. Non recommended, "include both formative and summative assessment data."

[00:17:51] And I know you and I, Sharona, talk about everything’s formative, but I do hear their point.

[00:17:54] Sharona: Yeah, everything’s formative until they succeed and then it’s summative.

[00:17:57] Joe: And then it’s summative. Exactly. But I love that point that why are we like, you know, I had kids freaking out because they blew a formative.

[00:18:03] I’m like, it doesn’t count until you get it. And then it counts, like it’s no big deal, right? But then it talks about one of my favorites, and this was something that, by the way, FYI, UTLA was able to use to make the point to teachers because some teachers said, we now have to accept late work forever.

[00:18:20] And I don’t do that. I don’t think any of you do that. But what I do is I’m very reasonable about it. So it says evidence based equity focused grading practices employ systems to support flexible deadlines as opposed to punish students when deadlines are not met, regardless of academic proficiency demonstrated.

[00:18:36] But that’s, it’s A) it’s a recommendation and B) it’s a recommendation that has a wide range of flexibility. So that’s the kind of thing I think that Bosley and I are complimenting the district for because, yeah, it’s mandating standards aligned instruction. We were sort of mandating that anyway without mandating it for years, but now it’s just crystallized.

[00:18:52] But this kind of thing are providing all of these sort of North Star guidelines, and there’s many more of them that we can go into if we want to, but saying, here’s where you should be going. Like one of the key definitions is they define terms. They talk about learning targets, which was, you know, our first podcast that we did together.

[00:19:08] I, and it’s as, as we would all say, learning outcomes or learning targets are the most important part of the whole game. So they’re defining terms in a way that if people start just reading this, they’re going to get a baseline level of instruction on the, on these practices that will start that long shift in practice that we’re talking about.

[00:19:26] So there’s a lot here that to like about that because it’s, it tends to be fairly educational and it might provoke more questions.

[00:19:33] Sharona: Well, and what I like about some of what you’re saying is If I’m a teacher in LA Unified, I might be going, well, what’s the big deal? You’ve been telling me to be standards based forever.

[00:19:45] And I think the argument becomes, but you might not have realized that your own grading system was actively working against you. So if you feel you’re already standards aligned, hallelujah, you’re 75 percent of the way there. We’re not going to maybe tell you that you’re probably not as aligned as you think you are.

[00:20:02] But, you know, if you think you are, great! And then so now we’re just going to restructure the grading system to specifically be checking for proficiency on those things. And then once you start doing that, you start realizing how not aligned you might be.

[00:20:17] Joe: Exactly. And they’re even one of the new things they’re saying, and it talks about grading practices. There’s just a bunch of grading practices and it talks about employing professional judgment and considering a student’s more recent or most consistent performance in the standards are some ways of avoiding inaccurate grade reporting. So it’s just a statement of how to do things better. But again, we’ll make people go, what is that about?

[00:20:38] And now we have a conversation we can have, right? So it’s approached in a way that hopefully it will move some of that skepticism. Why is that a best practice? But it’s not decreeing in a way that gets it attacked. And just to go to the top level thing that I, I highlighted, but we’ve got to mention is, it says this updated bulletin aligns with the board resolution exploring mastery based learning and grading and supports the goal of increasing the use of equitable grading and instruction practices with the provision of appropriate support such as professional development opportunities and resources.

[00:21:09] So it supports the goal to increase the use, that that is reasonable, especially when they couldn’t, they could mandate, but that’s the way it should be as opposed to something that’s going to turn teachers off. So ideally there’s a lot here for people to go. I can do some of this.

[00:21:25] Boz: And that’s, that also goes back to one of the other things I think LAUSD has done well in this whole process of, you know, trying to move away from traditional grading, which is, they have been supporting the training of it, without mandating the training of it.

[00:21:45] You know, you and I both, Joe, are LAUSD certified trainers of EGI. So we can actually train people on how to do this and get them certified as practitioners. But this is something that district has been supporting, but again, has not been mandating, which that same kind of mentality shows through in this new policy. And, you know, if you’re listening to this and you are an admin or even at a district level, and you’re looking at trying to move whatever your system is away from traditional grading, I think that’s one of the biggest lessons that you can learn. Is that this cannot be mandated for multiple reasons, whether it’s the actual grading policies or the training of it. Do things to try to encourage people, you know, encourage teachers to go this way. But starting to mandate it can be problematic at best.

[00:22:51] Sharona: It’s problematic right now? Or it’s problematic forever?

[00:22:56] Joe: Problematic until we reach a tipping point, right? Like when you get just, and this is interesting because this, this aligns with sort of organizing standpoints too, if we were doing union organizing and Bosley and I are both, you know, I’m the more hardcore rah rah union organizer, but Bosley’s got a pretty hardcore union streak in him as well.

[00:23:13] And both of us are in the same mindset, which is we, we want the change that’s best for students until you hit teachers so hard where it’s like it’s not going to get to students, so you’re now abusing your workers, you know, slow down. I think both of us would say the same thing. Wherever that tipping point is probably two thirds or more of us.

[00:23:29] When you get to a point where the momentum is taking on itself, then you can flip the switch to mandate. And then the people who are just obstinate in the face of clear student need and clear best practices are going to have a decision to make, but that’s, that’s a far cry from 20 percent ish of us are doing it.

[00:23:48] We haven’t won them. Right. And we have to do our work to do that. Otherwise you’re just going to have mean teachers. And, you know, we fought real hard for the kind of powerful union we have in UTLA. And that union is doing an awful lot to fight for students best interest. And none of this is, is against that.

[00:24:05] It’s just saying, you don’t make this happen by mandate. It’s A: too hard. B: they don’t have the staff if they wanted to. But more importantly, the way they’ve done it so far has created so many teacher converts that we, that will, we’ll move this along if they just provide the resources. And I think right now, maybe the biggest obstacle is because of, you know, California budget situation, the resources aren’t flowing at the moment.

[00:24:26] You know what I mean? I think that would probably help us as well. If that, if that shifts anytime soon.

[00:24:32] Sharona: Okay. I’m going to give Bosley the tough question now. So we talked to quite a bit what has been done, right. I’m going to open the floodgates with what do you think was suboptimal in the process that you went through this year, not necessarily in the result.

[00:24:50] Joe: I love the word suboptimal, by the way, best hyphenate ever.

[00:24:54] Boz: You know, and I’ll be honest, I think they actually did this process pretty well.

[00:25:03] Joe: I’ll give you, I’ll give you one suboptimal for Bosley to go off. One of the challenges was because they knew where they wanted to go anyway, and I think we support that, these were always meetings at the end of a day on weird days. So getting people together wasn’t ideal. I would argue if this mattered enough, you release a bunch of us, and we, we handle this in one full day at the district. And we, and we release people from all across schools with different, you know, I mean, you, you get a bigger, more diverse group and you hammer it out for a day or two that, that would have been more optimal.

[00:25:38] I’m still happy with the result and I think they really listened to us which was productive, but I do think one of the challenges was getting all of us on there. We were getting Bosley before he taught a class, was getting me in the car. Like we were just doing everything we could to get people into the rooms.

[00:25:52] So that was suboptimal. But I mean, part of that is just the nature of the business, I guess.

[00:25:57] Boz: Yeah. And that’s always, when it comes to something like that, that’s always a fine line between wanting to keep teachers where they’re supposed to be, which is in front of our students, especially considering how much time, you know, we already lose how much of our instructional time that we lose for everything from, you know, mandated testing to, you know, all kinds of ridiculous things.

[00:26:22] I, I agree it, it wasn’t as optimal, but at the same time, I appreciate not trying to have to ask teachers to miss instructional time.

[00:26:38] Sharona: So, how much of you feel like the process went right because you ended up in the right place, but you had concerns along the way? Or, did the process have to overcome things to get to this final result that you’re happy with?

[00:26:54] Or is it more that we now see the next set of challenges?

[00:27:01] Boz: No, that there was, you know, especially with some of the language of this with the original draft form, it was more mandating. It was a little bit more heavy handed, but I, I don’t think that was done in any kind of malicious terms. It was more of, and again, props to LAUSD for realizing this, but it was more that this was written from people that hadn’t been in a classroom for a while.

[00:27:29] So having eyes from people that are still in the classroom and in the middle of this, they were able to, you know, make sure that that language did thread that, that needle between really do wanting to put these ideas forward and at the same time, making sure that they weren’t putting anything down that made it sound like a mandate that maybe could be misunderstood or misconstrued by an admin and be used to weaponize against a teacher.

[00:28:04] Joe: And that was one of our big concerns was not bad admin. Our concern was an admin who thinks they understand something they don’t understand because the district has not yet trained all administrators in this. So our concern was if this seems too much like a mandate, you’re going to create all these unintended problems that we’re going to have to clean up as teachers. And to their credit again, they did this and I agree.

[00:28:25] I think they wrote the stuff as policy, because the last one was policy and then they did this listening to us and there was, you know, Alex Orozco myself, Bosley and some other great educators who, because I haven’t got their permission to name them, I don’t want to name them, but I would love to shout them out.

[00:28:40] Our big point was just jumping up and down to say, this is unique. We are building the plane while we’re, while we’re flying the plane, we’re all in process on this. We’re still trying to get it done. So, issuing it as a decree when the learning management system, has to be, to use Guskey’s words from your session with Dr. Guskey, has got to be, you have to turn off all the defaults, to use Bosley’s and my words, has to be hacked to make it work, is problematic. If you’re going to say this is policy because you don’t have the, the, the infrastructure support and with 80 percent of a teaching force that now is almost up to 40, 000 again with 80 percent of us untrained, how are you going to train them all?

[00:29:20] Even if we say yes now.

[00:29:23] Boz: Yeah. And not just us, you mentioned admin. I don’t think the admin are even up to 20%. Like, I don’t think, I don’t think they’re even close. So yeah. Making sure that this language was clear enough that this is not mandated. These are recommendations. Because yeah, only maybe only 20 percent of teachers, but it’s definitely less for for administrators.

[00:29:51] Sharona: Well, and how many people we’ve spoken to, Bosley, that we ourselves have trained and we’ve said things like there’s no one true way to do this. And they’ll come back later and they’ll go, well, I’m not really doing alternative grading. And we’re like, well, what are you doing? And they’re doing all four pillars, but they’ve put in a percentage somewhere or they’ve done something.

[00:30:10] And we’re like, you’re absolutely doing alternative grading. You’ve got the clearly defined learning outcomes, the helpful feedback, the marks indicating progress and the reattempts without penalty. If you have those things, you’re in this umbrella that we call. If you make a mandate that has too much in it, people are going to have trouble interpreting it.

[00:30:29] Like this one university that I was talking to yesterday, this faculty member, this is a mandate. 80 percent of the grade has to be, 80 percent or more of the grade has to be based on major proctored assessments. And then that immediately sends people down to, well, I have to have points and percentages to get to that 80%.

[00:30:47] I’m like, no, you just have to be checking your learning outcomes most of the time on major proctored assessments. So getting that communication across takes time. And if you have a mandate, you’re against a clock to try to communicate. And that I think puts too much pressure on the system.

[00:31:05] Joe: I think, I think that nails it.

[00:31:06] And also like, if, if I was to say, now that you were just speaking, like one of the flaws in this is we should have the four pillars in here. They don’t look at it that way. It’s not as clearly defined as that, but when the goal is to create pathways for people to shift, if that’s the goal, or to use their language right to support the goal of increasing the use of E. G. I. or equitable grading practices. Well, then that’s good. Then that’s what it needs to be because it isn’t that.

[00:31:32] So, yeah, I think I think you’re right. That’s sort of that sort of hits it right there that because it’s not it’s not there’s nothing impractical about it, even though I think when I hear you say the four pillars, I think that’s a great way for me to be, you know, approaching change with teachers, that you do these, you’re doing it, right?

[00:31:47] Sharona: Right. And, and I think the four pillars is an excellent theoretical framework for actually doing course redesign. I don’t know that it fits extremely well into a policy document. So the question then, and one of the reasons we wanted to have you on Joe and Boz to talk to you about this is what is translatable to other people?

[00:32:05] Are there lessons what you’ve just shared. Like don’t make it a mandate. Make sure your systems are in place, have the support and training, but what other lessons can you share for those trying to do it at a school or a district level? Boz?

[00:32:21] Boz: Well, the biggest one is don’t try to do it on your own.

[00:32:25] Bring in, you know, bring in the people that are actually on the front lines in front of the students already doing this. Bring them in, which is exactly what LAUSD did, bring them into the conversation, have them be part of the policy making, the planning you know, whether it’s on policy, whether it’s on training, whether it’s on just next steps, have the people that are already doing it in the room.

[00:32:56] Sharona: Joe, anything to add there?

[00:32:59] Joe: No, and again, I just, like the more I look at this, the more I think to, to Boz’s point. And again, I’m not, we’re really not trying to stroke LAUSD yet. Like there we saw a lot of drafts and both he and I were like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa on some of the language. I feel like every single serious concern we had was heard.

[00:33:18] And, and I think that’s, that’s the big key, that this is what other districts should be doing. They realized that obviously as a big strong teachers union, we’re a force to be reckoned with. But in this case, it’s their ball. They can do what they want to do. And they said, no, let’s consult. Let’s do this the right way.

[00:33:35] And when we had big objections on just language that would be unhelpful, it was heard. And again, the big concern from the union was, from our union don’t want a third party my union, the big concern from our union was for teachers who aren’t there yet. You gotta do the training, you gotta do the work.

[00:33:50] And, and I feel like this all does that. So it really does a nice job of, of talking about that while providing, as you were saying, the impetus for teachers to read this and go, let me ask more questions about this. What is this? What does this do? Like just talking about like giving assessments back in a reasonable amount of time, but reasonable being defined as time for the students to take further action on it.

[00:34:13] You know, so in my case, like mine didn’t make it so that they could be redone before the mid, mid week grade. Mine made it back so they could use them on their next revision, which is still part of the same process and you see it and you go, Oh, that fits. Like there’s just, there’s a lot of language in here that supports thinking about how do we support retakes?

[00:34:28] How do we support students to learn the things we need to get them to learn, that I think is very different from most grading documents that we’ve seen. Like just to talk about how many, how many things were written? It was until 2000, Guske was saying very few books were even written about grading, you know?

[00:34:45] Boz: Yeah. Like from 70, from the seventies to the 1990s, like one book and then four books and then 20 books. And then 60 books.

[00:34:55] Joe: Exactly. Right.

[00:34:56] Sharona: And we just did a search just with the term standards based grading on Amazon and there were like 107 books in the last four years.

[00:35:04] Joe: Yeah.

[00:35:04] Sharona: Not all of them evidence based, unfortunately.

[00:35:07] Joe: Right. Right. And in the district in 2005, as a big, large district, we’re usually fairly behind the curve. I would say in this case, for a variety of good reasons, I don’t know that we’re ahead, but we’re on it. That, as I said to you off the air, as part of my micro credential and equitable grading, we had multiple opportunities to interact with Dr. Guskey. We had other people on, so they’re, they’re trying to expose us to some of this thinking, which is, is quite helpful. So yeah, I, I was worried this was going to be problematic. I was quite worried in the early, the early draft certainly gave us cause for concern. That’s not where it went. That’s not where it ended up.

[00:35:46] And. I’m excited to see how, you know, if we can move people, again to quote Dr. Guskey, to skeptical, once they get there, can they grab onto a few principles here and take it and run with it in some way?

[00:35:59] Sharona: Well, it sounds to me like one of the things that really worked, although it may not have been LA Unified’s intention, but they had some people who were already doing this.

[00:36:08] You were doing it, Bosley was doing it, some other people were doing it. So if you’re in a school district, a smaller school district where maybe nobody’s doing it. Then maybe you don’t start with a massive policy change. You identify a couple of teachers who are willing to go into their classrooms and try it and they can speak to it.

[00:36:26] And that kind of reminds me of what Guskey said about the report cards where they’d made this big change to the report card. And for one semester, they sent both the old one and the new one so that people could experience it. And then they said, Hey, we don’t have enough money to send both pick one.

[00:36:41] We’ll send you whichever one you want, but you’re only getting one and a hundred percent of the people picked the new one. So it might be one of those things where you try this and you could even do a situation where one, I haven’t seen this done, but you could have a situation where one teacher calculates it both ways and whichever way you get the higher grade is the one you get and almost all the time it’s the one that’s got the revisions and the retakes and things like that.

[00:37:06] I think a couple of people I know actually may have actually done that.

[00:37:10] Joe: That, that would be cool. That would be cool to see. And I think my, my admin who wants me to try to do something like that at our school, which is also interesting. He was talking about that.

[00:37:18] But what I love that your point is I agree. I don’t think it was their intention at all. I think their intention was to do their due diligence and make sure UTLA had eyes on this because they wanted to respect the process. And I admire that the irony is, you know, the people on that call, all the people from UTLA, were all trained by LAUSD’s EGI team at one level or another, Bosley probably being the least among them just because he was ahead of them.

[00:37:42] Right? But he’s still been part of shaping and learning how that training happens. So he’s intimately familiar with it, intimately familiar with it. Whereas in my case, with Bosley’s encouragement, that’s how I got certified to do it. How I learned it was through the district and and look, to credit the district’s training program as well, most of it involves interacting with a lot of readings from Guskey, you know, from Bloom, from the big thinkers in the field. So it was, it was all very much not, you know, just making, bringing it, bringing us into the broader educational community. But yeah, that was the sort of happy accident, the people that they were getting consulting from were people they trained one way or another.

[00:38:24] Boz: But that, you know, now that you’re mentioning the training. That’s another thing. If, if you’re listening to this and, and, you know, you’re at the district level or at a you know, some sort of systematic level and you’re wanting to make these changes, that’s the other big takeaway is the, the training has to come and it, it has to be supported.

[00:38:46] This is not a small training. You know, it was what, 20 hours of training for us, Joe, to get the practitioner certification. And then on top of that, we did what? Four half days when we were actually the big group of us in the training?

[00:39:05] Joe: No, it was, it was four full days.

[00:39:07] Boz: It was four full days.

[00:39:09] Yeah. So, we’re talking about an investment in training. And that is something that cannot be short sighted. Also how LA USD has done this, and maybe one of the things that for one reason or another, they’re not doing as well now. And again, not necessarily their fault, but when we started this, like they were doing a lot of incentives to try to get teachers to attempt this training.

[00:39:36] A lot of those incentives are no longer being done. You know, some of them are, but not, not as many. And again, yes, it’s some of its budget concerns. There’s, I’m not blaming LAUSD, but they have moved away from it, which is one of the things that I do think that is unfortunate because it’s going in the wrong direction.

[00:40:01] Yeah. If you are, if you’re listening to this at a, at a system and you’re wanting to do this.. Be prepared to support long term training on it.

[00:40:14] Sharona: But I want to pipe in here that yes, there’s definitely an investment of time and of money. I think this is one of the things where you’re going to get the highest bang for your buck in terms of training translating directly to student success.

[00:40:32] So, we’re in the process, Bosley and I, of, you know, we’ve designed a training course for teachers. It’s 30 hours of asynchronous instruction. It’s actually probably 25, the 30 hours includes lunch breaks, but we’re in the process of putting together a, a manual on how to run that training. That manual will be freely available because it’s funded by an NSF grant.

[00:40:52] But getting people who know how to run that training, it’s a very, very productive training. And it really sets people off on the right foot, but you also have to give them time. I mean, the faculty that take our training, the shortest that I’ve seen people implement is three weeks from the end of training to when their class comes in.

[00:41:13] Typical is a full term. Six months to nine months to possibly a year, depending on how many people you’re trying to coordinate. So it just, it takes some time.

[00:41:22] Joe: The biggest, I think the biggest thing that people don’t realize is the training is the first part, but then the next part, and it’s certainly where LAUSD is not killing it yet.

[00:41:34] Although if they work with their champions, you know, Bosley and I are both, whether officially or unofficially, the EGI champions at our school site, they’re trying to decentralize that in a good way. The good part about it is that you have them there. The bad part is how they’re using them. Once you get people trained, that’s sort of the beginning of the conversation, right?

[00:41:52] Because what you need to be doing is checking in with them on a regular basis to look at all the different problems that happen when you put them together. Put this out into a classroom. There’s so many issues that come up that I had a group of three teachers doing it last year, and they’re the only ones at Marshall that were doing it because there was three of them.

[00:42:07] We could, we, we were able to kill that, but the minute you grow bigger, people need to be checking in. Well, how do I handle this situation? How do I handle that? How do I apply pressure for students to get work in when they know I don’t penalize late work, whatever. Right. And, and that, that’s not happening certainly at our district in a big enough way. And that’s the thing. You’re right. It’s all about if you value something, you know, going back to DuFor right. If you value professional learning communities, you make time during the workday to do it. You find paid time to get people supported on this. And yeah, that would be where LAUSD is currently falling short and, just to take one of the lusters off, California looks like it’s having a budget deficit right now and they’re concerned about it. If Bosley and I want to teach our teachers, we are certified to do that. But in order to pay the teachers, the money’s got to come out of the school site budget.

[00:42:55] And schools are being asked to make ridiculous budget choices right now that they can’t afford to make. While our district is sitting on a $5 billion B dollar surplus, which is only 38 percent more than they’re required to have under statute. So I mean, there’s money and they’re not using it because they’re worried about who knows what.

[00:43:15] So that that would be, I think Bosley is right and you’re hitting it right. The money is so well spent. If you do it, you will get transformational change, but you have to invest the money in things that you value.

[00:43:27] Sharona: And I have seen, and the feedback we’ve gotten from the trainings we do on this, is that this is the most valuable PD because it is so tied to both the personal investment and emotional investment of a teacher in their students as well as the practical. Teachers often want how to’s. How do I do this in this classroom? And we have a million and one examples of how this is done. And our goal as trainers is to coach the teacher through their emotional journey to realize what’s right for them. That fits within these principles.

[00:44:04] So one more question that I have off the top of my head, and I’ll start with Bosley on this one. How impactful do you think this policy is going to be versus the implementation, the incentives, the training, like does the policy make such a huge difference?

[00:44:20] Boz: See, and that is one of my other critiques of LAUSD and this policy so far and it might be different at your site, Joe might be different on a lot of other places, but I know I was on this team.

[00:44:38] I didn’t know it had officially came out. Like I’d seen the final draft. I didn’t know it officially came out and is dated February 26th of this year. So it was out a month before I knew it was, and there has been nothing from my school site administrators, from anyone about this policy.

[00:45:01] The first time an admin said something about it was two days before we went to spring break when our grades were 10 week grades were due, they attached this policy, which they hadn’t really examined yet. To say you can’t give Ms. So with LAUSD in our first five week grading period, we’re allowed to give a M for meets standards for anything that’s above a C.

[00:45:27] And I think, I don’t remember if Joe, if you and I are above.

[00:45:30] Joe: The C or above.

[00:45:32] Boz: What did I say?

[00:45:33] Sharona: Above a C.

[00:45:34] Boz: Okay.

[00:45:35] Joe: You said above a C.

[00:45:36] Boz: Okay. C or above. But I don’t remember if we’ve talked about this on air or not, Joe, but.

[00:45:41] Joe: About the M?

[00:45:43] Boz: Yeah. So the M, you know, we could use this in the five week. Well, this policy comes out and says the five week is the only time you’re allowed to do this.

[00:45:56] In the previous policy, you could actually do it in the five and 15. Even though, you know, Joe, you and I’ve never used it in the 15. So that one thing was pointed out when this policy was sent out two days ago from my admin. That was, that’s the only mentioning that it’s, that they had.

[00:46:20] Before this, I probably did not know that there was a grading policy in place for almost the first nine years of my teaching. Like the, the, the policy that this is replacing came out the December of the year I started teaching and it was probably a good nine years before I had ever seen that policy. I’m afraid for, for that happening again.

[00:46:50] I’m afraid for this policy to have had all this work and it really be, like we’ve said, I think it’s a really good policy and it’s in the right direction, for it to be completely brushed aside and just not having any attention paid to it. That’s my biggest fear about this policy is that it won’t have any impact because people just won’t know it.

[00:47:16] Joe: So to build off that, I agree with Bosley a hundred percent that it came out in a really haphazard way. As a courtesy, we were allowed to proof the final draft, but it was final at that point and we were good with it. I, my gut was, it was going to be released in May. Because there’s no point in it being released in February in the middle of the year.

[00:47:36] I’ve actually told one of my good friends who’s an admin, he would be a fool to try to enforce this. And after about a five minute conversation, my friend agreed with me that I just said, it makes no sense. You’re middle of the year, you’re middle of the semester. People are still working. You want them to look at it and think about some shifts and think about some shifts, but why on earth would you do this midway?

[00:47:55] So I find that, it’s just sort of incomprehensible to me why you would drop it in February. I don’t know what it does for them. I think it’s, again, just sort of weird bureaucracy stuff. I agree on the M thing. Ironically, that was one of my big fights. They had removed it entirely. And Bosley and I are two of the people, because I know when we were working together at Santee, we would fight admin.

[00:48:16] They’re like, you should be giving grades five weeks. I’m like, I don’t have data to assess at five weeks, especially in the fall when it’s three and a half weeks. I’m like, I have nothing to assess. So

[00:48:25] Sharona: I’m going to, I’m going to put the best possible spin, totally attributing great things to LA unified that they may not have intended for why it came out in February.

[00:48:35] If I were in charge, I would have brought it out now with the statement that now is the time you should start thinking about this because we really want you to try it in the fall. And by giving it to you now, we’re not only giving you the summer, when a lot of you are not going to be working for a significant portion of it, but as Bosley and I have talked about, people need time. So this would be a great time for it to come out, so that teachers can start getting teams together, getting some training, and starting to work towards a fall implementation.

[00:49:04] Like I said, I’m giving them the best possible interpretation. But I would also say that I would argue that whether or not they said that that’s what I’m going to attribute it to, if I’m a trainer. I’m going to say that that’s why they did it.

[00:49:17] Boz: The only problem with that is, like I said, this was sent out by one of our APs two days before grading. That AP didn’t really know much about the policy. Like I went through, pulled the one that this is replacing and went through and highlighted it and made notes of all the differences for him so he can look at it and at least suggest, okay, do we maybe want to start looking at possibly doing some trainings, the second semester, your second half of spring semester.

[00:49:50] But yeah, that I would love to think that’s what district did. And maybe whoever was at the top that made that decision, maybe that was their idea, but by the time it actually got down to the schools, that was completely lost. Cause there was almost no communication.

[00:50:07] Sharona: I guess what I’m saying is if you’re connected with your champion team. My advice to the champion team would be make like that’s the reason.

[00:50:15] Joe: Well and better yet We can go

[00:50:17] Sharona: Because no one’s gonna argue with you that it’s not.

[00:50:20] Joe: Well, and we can also ask.

[00:50:22] Sharona: No one’s gonna argue with you Oh, no, we didn’t want this.

[00:50:25] Joe: No, I would say we can we I was gonna suggest the way I don’t share Bosley’s fear that this will be forgotten if he, myself and all the rest of us who care about this don’t want it to be because again, we can push it.

[00:50:38] Like you said, you nailed it. There’s a champion team. There’s a network of people at school sites that we can, I think it’s going to be up to me, Bosley, and I’ll get the rest of the grading task force people out. And I bet you, I can get Alex Orozco to at least do it as well as say, forewarned is forearmed.

[00:50:52] Let’s give people this information, right? And just ask them. Ask that this be talked about from the district. That’s what’s so weird that they, they released it like this. They should be asking us to lead people through it at the end of the year. Say, think about this for like you said, you’ve got the summer.

[00:51:08] Think about how you can do some of these implementations because A couple years ago they did something else that was equally effective. I think it was fall of 22, maybe came out in summer, but asking that we implement some sort of equitable practice change. And it was pretty realistic. And again, you could do the same thing now and say, go look at this and pick see which things here you can do to get people to think about it.

[00:51:31] So we can make sure it’s not forgotten, but I, you know I, I, I don’t get why they do what they did, but we can certainly, it’s certainly the good part about it being out early rather than late is there’s a lot of opportunity we have to get it into people’s hands.

[00:51:43] Sharona: Yeah, so we’re coming up close to time, but I have one more conversation that is going to pull this back out of LA Unified, a little bit, out of the policy.

[00:51:52] And Boz and I’ve talked about this a little bit. This is experience I had this week. But you know, we stayed in after our initial implementations were terrible because of the student conversation changes, right? That’s why, I don’t know if that’s true for you, Joe, but for Bosley and me, horrible initial implementations.

[00:52:11] Okay. Now we, the three of us are trying to influence things at a bigger level than our individual classrooms. And it’s hard. And the first time that I’ve had these conversations with people, I’ve messed them up. Like I, I’ve, you know, been a little bit like, well, you’re awful and evil if you don’t do this.

[00:52:31] And like, I’ve made all those mistakes. But that being said, I now get to have some of these amazing conversations with admin and I’m starting to see conversations change. Like, I started this semester with some of my stakeholders being like, It’s DFW rates. It’s DFW rates. And now they’re like, Oh, wait, your second standard is not doing well.

[00:52:52] Well, what does that mean? And what does that mean for the students? And is it a numeracy issue? Is it a literacy? So the conversations are changing? Are you having or are you expecting to have that same impact where just doing this work of trying to be influencers on systemic change is giving you rewarding conversations with colleagues?

[00:53:09] Or are you not having that experience?

[00:53:14] Joe: For me this year, it’s not as it was last year because I was getting more people into it, but I think that’s going to happen the second half of this year. My implementation, I think I said this to you on the air, my implementation went better than y’all’s did. I just said y’all because everyone’s saying it now even though It doesn’t fit me at all.

[00:53:29] Anyway, but despite that, what did it for me was the student conversation shift, right? And I would argue now, and you would have to tell me, Sharona, if you’re seeing this at the collegiate level, if it was ever a thing, but I know Bosley and I are seeing grade grubbing at a level we’ve never seen before post pandemic, the transactional learning.

[00:53:49] So when your grades are linked to learning. There’s no grade grub. Right? The point is you gotta show me you can do this. So, and just I said this, I don’t think I said this on the air just to tell people about the reward for this and why, to further tell people if you’re thinking about looking into the the training program that Bosley and Sharona are are talking about, go do it, is for me, I use this to maintain my national board certification.

[00:54:13] I mean, this stuff is gold in terms of what excites me about teaching. It is gold in terms of what ensures student learning. So there’s nothing more valuable to me than this. I mean, my wife told me a couple of years ago when I was exhausted during pandemic and she was saying F double S meetings, I was doing this Sunday meeting with people doing this kind of work.

[00:54:30] And I walked out of the meeting and said, should I stop doing these? And she goes, why these? I see how you walk out of those things. You’re energized, more of those meetings, less of the other ones type of thing. Because it was feeding my soul because of the results it was having in the classroom. So that’s my hope that this can be used for that because I have a really clear challenge from my administrator who’s very supportive, my direct assistant principal who works with me on equitable practices to like get four or five new people.

[00:54:57] And again, it’s all realistic. There’s no pressure on me other than my own ego wanting to deliver on the challenge, but I feel like this would be a nice way to do that. And I certainly, when I have those conversations with teachers who are willing and interested in taking the step, they tend to like the results quite a bit.

[00:55:14] Sharona: What about you, Boz? Are these conversations energizing or draining?

[00:55:19] Boz: The conversations with the teachers are always incredibly energizing. You’ve seen me before, just dragging coming in, especially during the fall when I’m at both my high school and at Cal state LA. But spending two hours of talking about something like this isn’t work.

[00:55:40] It’s two hours of recharging. Now I will say, so I, I, I definitely re energize when I have these conversations with teachers. I will say though, going back to your question, I haven’t had the conversations getting into the weeds of the data, like what we were talking about a couple episodes ago with what’s going on with the stats course, I haven’t had that yet.

[00:56:05] And I am hoping to get enough of a department or PLC at my school in line to where we can have those conversations, but I haven’t yet.

[00:56:18] Sharona: And I definitely shared on one of the episodes that we recently recorded, Joe, that there have been some real challenges with some stakeholders at my university this semester. Some people inserting themselves in ways that I found unfortunate.

[00:56:34] And it really centered around our DFW rates. So our rates of people getting D’s F’s or withdraws. And so it was a very negative, downtrod, like how come you can’t do better? How come you still have 30 percent of your class failing? And those conversations have shifted over the course of the semester.

[00:56:56] As I continue to meet with these stakeholders, because the DFW rates are what they are, but I was able to do some data analysis to show that our equity gaps have closed. And then I’ve taken it to the next step where I’ve said, okay, let’s look at these students who are at risk of these D’s, F’s and W’s? What patterns do we see in where they are struggling with the content?

[00:57:16] And just most recently at a conversation where we really dug into, Hey this one learning outcome is suspiciously low at this point in the semester, what’s going on? And our suspicion is that it’s a literacy issue and not a numeracy issue, because there’s no calculations in it.

[00:57:34] There’s no arithmetic. There’s really no math, even though it’s a statistics course. So we were able to have a conversation about, hey, maybe our course, which is a first year GE course, maybe we should be meeting with the English folks that have these same students the first year and calibrating the lexile level because maybe our lexile level is too hard on this assessment.

[00:57:57] And I pointed out that it was important because I am a successful product of this system and I’m a mathematician. So between those two things, maybe I’m not calibrated correctly for a first semester freshman. And that was an amazing conversation to have.

[00:58:19] Joe: I think that’s, I think that’s fantastic. That’s real, yeah, that’s real data analysis. Without getting into the weeds we can do off the air. I would encourage you to go way beyond Lexile just because Lexile is pretty limiting, but there’s an easy way you can, you can look at a text and figure that out, but I think you, you nailed it, right? You, and you’ve got the, the opportunity to easily village approach those students because they have to have the English class anyway, right? So they’ve got both the classes. So you’re gonna get that.

[00:58:48] I think that’s, that’s spectacular. And just to, to, to toot Bosley’s horn in a way he doesn’t expect me to toot it. Something else that’s going on at his school. I know because one of my mentees was my student teacher last year, who is at Santee doing some really good work.

[00:59:02] I hear firsthand about how methodically they are identifying and trying to support teachers shifting to alternative grading and how much easier it is for new teachers to make that shift than it is for vets. And you know, I was hearing about a particular, a particular colleague there who was a little resistant to it, who apparently within the last few weeks, Bosley was in that person’s room with some other people making, making some moves.

[00:59:27] So you have like, that kind of stuff, like it may not gratify you, but it sure gratifies me hearing about it because that’s how change is supposed to be made. That, that is, that is you working in tandem with your colleagues to help people to sort of see, you know, all the benefits in this. And I think that’s fantastic.

[00:59:44] Boz: Well, thank you. And I, I think that’s probably gonna be where we need to start wrapping up. So, Joe, I want to thank you as always for, for being on with us. We, we do need to have you on more often and not be so long since

[00:59:57] Joe: I’m gonna cry if it’s any longer. I’m gonna cry.

[00:59:59] Boz: Thank you always for taking some time out of your.. Any , any final thoughts? Sharona?

[01:00:06] Sharona: Nope. That’s about it for me this week. Thank you, yes, again, Joe. We are going to get you on. In fact, we have a plan to get you on with another fellow guest. We’re just waiting for her to finish her defense of her dissertation. And as soon as that’s on, we’re going to be scheduling that one.

[01:00:23] But it’s been such a joy to talk to you and everyone once again registration for the grading conference is open and I would encourage Joe, by the way, K 12 teachers, please join us. I understand that the conference is largely higher ed focused, but these principles don’t change. So check out the grading conference at thegradingconference. com and we will see y’all next week.

[01:00:43] 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.

[01:01:07] The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

[01:01:15] 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.