The Grading Podcast

Robert: And pick up this book and read it and actually use it like a workbook almost to build your own system. Like we’re, we’re giving you the plans. Okay. Not just the arguments.

Bosley: Welcome to the grading podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’, learning from traditional grading to meth, 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 podcast. On tonight’s episode, we have our very first special guest with us. This person is a math educator, a book author, a blogger one of the original organizers of the grading conference, and a good friend of ours here at the Grading podcast. So please help me welcome Dr. Robert Talbert. How are you today, Robert?

Robert: I’m good. Thanks for having me on. I’m really honored to be your first guest. I can only go uphill from here for y’all.

Bosley: So anytime we have a new guest on, one of the things that we want to know is a little bit about yourself, but also what brought you into this world of alternative grading.

Robert: Okay, I’m a professor in the math department at Grand Valley State University. We’re here in western Michigan. We’re in the Grand Rapids area about halfway between Grand Rapids City and Lakeshore. And I’ve been at Grand Valley for, this will be my 13th year, unbelievably, in the fall. And so my role is mostly just simply to teach as a classroom instructor, but I also have a role in our president’s office.

I direct a program called Laker Learning Futures, which is a program to connect faculty with teaching innovation research projects. And so we implement teaching innovations in the classroom and then study them and try to, you know, surface a lot of innovation that takes place underground at Grand Valley, try to get it surfaced so it’s no longer underground and we can figure out what to invest in.

And I tell this story in the book and also our blog. But this student was a very bright biology, I think, chemistry possibly, major and she came in and very bright, but just on a 10 day delay from everybody else, like she would, if you gave her time, she would be all over the most, most abstracted and difficult concepts, of course, mastering these things. But you don’t get time in a traditionally graded class, which is what I had been doing, for the first, you know, 17 years of my career at that point, and you know, she is super excited, super active and engaged in the class. And first test hits. She bombs it because she just hasn’t quite had the time to get up to speed with this material yet.

And so she is mathematically eliminated from getting an A in the class after the very first test. So that takes her engagement down several notches. Now she’s just like an ordinary, I’ll show up for class cause I have to kind of student. Second test comes around, same thing. Bombs that one too. Now she’s mathematically eliminated from a B and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse from there.

She just began to really spiral into a state of, I would just call, you know, mental unhealthiness in a lot of ways. I mean, just wouldn’t you, I mean, you’re, you’re, you really like a subject, you’re trying to study it, you’re trying to do the best you can, and just gradually piece by piece, you know, the assessment system wears you down and basically communicates to you that you’re worthless and you have no ideas to speak of.

And eventually she dropped the class. I’d never heard from her since. And I remember finishing that class up just saying to myself, I don’t know what I’m going to replace my way of grading with, I don’t even know what’s out there, like, I have no idea what an alternative grading system might look like, but I can’t do this way of grading anymore.

I can’t do this anymore, and I won’t do this anymore. So, this was December. I had another class coming up in January, just a few weeks later. And I was just fully prepared to just invent a grading system. Like I, I don’t know what this is going to look like, but I’m going to take my whole Christmas break and invent a grading system.

Fortunately, I did not have to invent anything because Linda Nelson, who is a genius and a legend and the whole area of faculty development, just written this book on specifications grading. I had no idea what specifications grading was. Never heard of the term, but I saw Linda’s name on it and I thought, well, if it’s Linda Nelson, it’s going to be pretty good.

So I just devoured this book, learned about specs grading, and in space of about two weeks time, I just immersed myself throughout everything that I had written for my next class and converted to specs, grading, and ran it that way. So it was a trial by fire. I do not recommend that course of action to anybody.

You should really take your time with converting to alternative grading system. There was a lot of stuff I did wrong that first time. But. It was better than the other times and I have not had a student get locked out success ever since then. So that’s origin story, it just kind of goes back to one student.

Sharona: So I have a question for you, Robert, because you and I got connected through the Google circles. What caused you to create a Google Circle on this stuff?

Robert: Well, because I overshare everything. I’ve been a blogger for a really long time, right. I used to work in a small, like very small liberal arts college before I came to Grand Valley, which is a fairly large institution. We have 23,000 students and we have sixty faculty in the math department. It’s a big place. But before that, I had spent 10, 14 years actually in small liberal arts colleges where I was like maybe one of two math faculty, one of three math faculty. And not everybody in my department, although they were great colleagues, did not share my lust for innovation, I guess you could say.

Sharona: That’s pretty cool because that’s how I met you first was actually through the Google Plus Circle and then I went to that event you were talking about at Cal Poly Pomona, not knowing you were talking there.

Robert: Right. We just sort of ran into each other. It was pretty interesting.

Sharona: Ran into each other and I think we talked longer after that than you did giving your workshop on flip learning.

Robert: I think so.

Sharona: I think we did.

Bosley: And something I kind of find interesting about that is isn’t that kind of where the grading conference like started to come about? Was you guys meeting there and then that growing with Kate Owens and a few others?

Robert: I, go ahead Sharona.

Sharona: Think that led to the meetup at Math Fest and Math Fest is where the conference started. Would you say that’s the correct?

Robert: Well, I can tell you this, where the conference itself really got started was David Clark and I, David Clark is my coauthor on the Grading for Growth book and on the Grading for Growth blog, and he’s also a colleague of mine in the math department at Grand Valley. And our offices are along hallways that intersect like in a T and we we’re literally running into each other constantly when we were in-person on campus. And so we just, this happened one day and I, I think I just say, Hey David, you know, we ought to, we should make a conference about this stuff.

He was like, yeah, that’d be cool. And that, that’s where that came from. But I would say going back to like running into you Sharona at Cal Poly Pomona and knowing Kate Owens you know, that was the network to make that conference happen was definitely in place before David and I literally ran into each other.

Because we started putting it together and realized, you know, putting together a conference, it turns out is pretty hard work. And we didn’t have any idea what we were doing. And at that time it was going to be an in-person conference. We were just going to host at Grand Valley. And then we realized we were way over our heads and we thought, well we need to pull some more people in on this.

The first two people we went to were Sharona and Kate, because that’s who we knew. And we knew them because of Google Plus and because of conferences. So, conferences are putting in work, that’s what they are supposed to be for is to make these networks, right?

Sharona: Exactly. So, okay. I’m going to ask my first question, unless, Boz, do you have more that you wanted to ask right now?

Bosley: No, go, go ahead.

Sharona: Okay. So, people who might be listening to the pod, maybe came from the conference, maybe came from Twitter, this is pretty early in the sequence of the podcast, so one of the reasons we wanted to have you on so early was because, like you said, you’re a prolific writer, and so you have a blog with David Clark, Grading for Growth, and you have a new book out. As of when this is going to air, the book is either out or going to ship shortly. I do confess to having ordered a couple copies already. But can you tell us a little bit about why a book?

And that’s, that’s kind of where that book came from, was just, I just want to take all the little bits and pieces writing that I’ve done over the years and stitch ’em all together, connect the dots, add some research to it. And just kind of make a book. And that book’s done really well. And so I felt like it was time. Especially with David around, because like David Clark is a genius and he’s an amazing teacher and you know, has really pushed the needle on alternative grading and inquiry based learning.

And I’ve learned a lot from David. And there are others in our department who are also amazing practitioners of these alternative grading systems.

Sharona: Well, and full disclosure, Dave is a future guest on the podcast.

Robert: So I mean, between the two of us, we had enough experience. It was just like, I think it’s, we, we just realized it was time to do the same thing with alternative grading. Right? Because we had been using it in various forms in the classroom for several years by that point. And it would just be good to have everything we think we know about alternative grading into one volume that we can give out to people. And it’s got everything that you at the moment, I think, would need to know about alternative grading. So that’s where the book came about because of that desire to just sort of get. It’s more like I, I think the thing that has really set apart our book, and something we’ve committed to really early on to make it a little different from other books about ungrading and alt grading that are out there or coming out there, is that we do make some impassioned, you know, moral arguments for why you should think about using ungrading and alternative grading, but we also give blueprints, right? This is a big deal for us. So we want to actually get the means of doing alternative grading into the hands of professors. You can pick up this book and read it and actually use it like a workbook almost to build your own system. Like we’re, we’re giving you the plans. Ok. Not just the arguments in favor of.

And so we really felt strongly that that was a need out there. At this point in time, like there’s a lot of interest and people are, I think you talk to people who have read you know, someone like Alfie Cohen’s work and so forth on grading. It’s like, yeah, that’s, that’s the great idea, but how do you do it?

That’s, that’s the question we kept getting. It’s like, ok, well here’s how to do it. And that’s what the book is about. And the blog grew out because I had read about Chris Rock, the comedian, Chris Rock. He has this practice of showing up unannounced to small comedy clubs just to try out jokes that he might deploy in his large shows, and he shows up with a notebook and a pen on the stage and just like, tries a joke out, stops, makes some notes about how, how it landed or how it didn’t land or whatever, and just kind goes from there. I thought that’s what we need for the book and we need to workshop these ideas for the book and a blog is a great way to do that. So the blog has been about trying out ideas in public so that the, the public who reads it can comment and tell us, well, that was really useful. Or it’s like, well that’s, that’s a load of, horse hockey or talk or whatever the case may be. And we can take that feedback back to our writing process and say like, this worked really well, this over here, not so much, but it actually, but it could be good. So the blog has been a way for us to beta test, I guess, and focus group out some of the ideas. And in fact, you’ll find some, some of the early versions of chapters of the book or sections of the book on the blog, that they’ve got their life first there.

Bosley: See, and that’s really interesting because that practical piece of your book is also part of the reason why we’re doing this podcast. We’ve seen there’s lots of great educational podcasts out there. There’s lots of great, you know, books and stuff like you alluded to, but we’ve worked with enough staff now that we see a lot of people really kind of fumble the first few times that they try this. And you even mentioned, you know, how bad your first one was. We talked about the first time we tried to do this, Sharona, and how much of a disaster that our first attempt at alternative grading was. So that’s one of the goals. So I’m thrilled to hear that that’s in the book. I am also looking forward to getting your book. I’m still wanting to find a way to get a signed copy.

Robert: Well, don’t wait for that. Just buy it.

Sharona: Well, and then, you know, along those lines, Boz, one thing you and I have been talking about lately is, as we’re out there in the world talking about this stuff, more and more people are coming up to us going, yeah, I heard about this thing and it’s all the buzz, but I don’t really understand it. I don’t really need it. And we’ve taken enough people through the process of conversion right now to understand just how challenging that first conversion is, and we don’t want people to get turned off from continuing with it. So I guess that would be going back to your personal experience, my next question would be after, you know, what was your disastrous first experience, and, and if people want to know, we’ll drop a link in the show notes to your keynote, I think it was from last year, where you quite vulnerably shared how bad it was. Why did you continue doing it?

Robert: Well, because it was the right thing to do. I mean, it was the right thing to do. It was obviously the right thing to do. I just wasn’t doing it well at the moment. But that’s ok. So I mean, I basically am subjecting myself to the very same process of iteration feedback that I expect from my students. Like, you’re going to try something out, you’re learning differential equations or whatever, something hard, and you know, the first time you do it, I mean, it all looks good when you read it, watch the video or listen to professor lecture, but then you sit down and try to solve a differential equation and it’s like a train wreck. But that’s okay because you’re just starting. Okay. And the whole idea is to iterate on this process with feedback. And so, yeah, I mean, Sharona you said vulnerable and I kinda have to laugh at that almost. Because to me it’s just like, that’s not, I mean that’s just like normal, people will sometimes come up to me and say like, well it was really brave of you to share out. It’s like, Really? Okay. I’m just, I’m just sort of like saying, wow, that did this and it was, it was like, it wasn’t a total disaster. There was a lot of things wrong.

And I’m very happy to share that with the world. Because I want to get better what I’m doing, you know? And the only way to do that is to put it out there and let people see it and comment on it.

Sharona: Well, and I suggest that that’s because you have so internalized a fundamental principle of this grading system, you’re not even recognizing it, which is you’ve internalized failure as a needed part of a learning system and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. And I think that’s one of the things I know I’m trying to change with the work that we’re doing here is failure’s not failure. It’s an important and integral part of the learning process.

Robert: Yeah. And I, I guess that’s right. I mean, I, I’ve reflected a lot about how my experience as a musician has informed my process as a teacher. I’ve been a musician since I was in middle school, and I do play a lot of music now and, you know, it’s like when you’re a musician, you try not to make mistakes, right? Obviously. I mean, making mistakes, it’s something you try to avoid, but you’re going to make mistakes. And the practice is just an essential part of what you do as a musician. You cannot make good music without a whole lot of practice. That involves a whole lot of, of sloppiness and just, but you listen, you record yourself, you get a teacher, you get the feedback, and eventually it starts to stick. And what we see when we go see a band play or watch something on Youtube its the result of thousands of hours of feedback and failure.

I guess growing up as a musician, like that’s where it got internalized. But yeah, I think you’re right. And sadly, higher education does nobody any favors because it sort of stigmatizes failure in many ways, even though expert researchers know that you have to try things and fail. And yet, you know, the, the system that we have for keeping our jobs in higher education is sort predicated on getting things right all the time and often the first time. So, especially younger faculty who might be victimized by this honestly. How do you get tenure , you’d have to do basically everything right. You know, and there’s not much margin for error. So I think I grasp that that’s a difficult thing, but it’s, it still strikes me as funny sometimes with like, vulnerability is just part of my DNA, I guess. I don’t know. I overshare in other words,

Sharona: Or again, for you, it may not be vulnerability because you don’t stigmatize failure for yourself anymore.

Robert: That’s true. I mean, for me it’s just like, it’s a day that ends in "y", I mean, it’s not really, you know, anything special.

Sharona: So I know that I, I’m trying to hold myself to that same standard and be willing to fail publicly, essentially, and not feel embarrassed by it, because it’s just an opportunity to learn and, and do something better.

Robert: Right? Yeah. And I think that’s where the value of these communities of practice that have really built up, like starting with a Google Plus circle, that was like a very early attempt at a community of practice around alternative grading or mastery grading as we called it back in the day. I think the grading conference has been an amazing outgrowth of people who are just hungry for communities where they can feel safe to do these kinds of things. Like, you can, you can go into a classroom and just really stink it up with your syllabus and like, realize it, and then come into the Slack for alternative grading or to the conference and fully disclose all the bad things that went wrong and you’re still accepted, you’re still okay. In fact, you’re better than ok. You’re getting better every day the moment you do that. So I want to give a shout out to you and Bosley and everybody who puts that conference together, because the value of that community towards pushing the needle on this, this movement is like, can’t be overstated.

Sharona: Well, and tie to that the Slack channel that you were forced to move the Google Plus to, right?

Robert: That’s, that’s right. That was, that’s the where it evolved. Google Plus shut down and we had to figure out what to do with it so we moved it to Slack.

Sharona: And now Slack is charging. We got asked if we’re going move it.

Robert: There is no good way to do this. Everybody charges in the end.

Bosley: Where does it go next?

Sharona: Well, we were asked, are we going to move it to Discord?

Robert: Well, that was the thing when Slack started charging, it’s like, well, do we move, do we take it to Discord? Do we host something? Eventually, we just said nah the free version is okay. But tomorrow it could be different.

Sharona: Well, and that’s another reason we launched the podcast is because I said to Bosley, one morning over breakfast, and I almost made him spit his drink that he had just taken a big one out over the, over the table, but I said, what do you think of doing a podcast? And I thought he was going to look at me and say, you’re insane. He didn’t, he said it was a great idea and then I made a…

Robert: He was thinking it though.

Sharona: Well, no, no, I made him spit because I said something snarky about myself that he agreed with, and that’s where he, I said something about liking talking and he, he lost it.

But I do know that for, for me, I listen to a lot of podcasts and they do create community. There’s opportunities to create community. So I know that over time we’re hoping to create community and, and as we get this off the ground, we’ll also be, you know, supporting some, some community stuff here as well, so.

Well, I never would’ve done what I had done if I hadn’t sat down with you at Poly Teach. Because first I heard Uri Triesman say that the only innovation that sticks is disruptive, and you have to go big or go home. And then I sat with you for a couple of hours talking and I went back to Cal State LA and told my co-coordinator that I needed to take a coordinated GE Statistics course into standard-based grading. So thank you for that.

Robert: That’s, the dedication for our book in the very front says to those who have the courage to make the first step. David Clark came up with that. Because I told you a genius, right? So I love that statement. I think that’s really describes your experience too, Sharona. You had the courage to make that first step, and that’s all it took. The first step, and then you have community effective feedback.

Sharona: So going back to the book then for a minute, what do you hope people will get out of it? Like if you had to call out a few things that you’re particularly proud of.

Robert: Well, I think my favorite thing, two things about this book that I really resonate with, and I’m so proud that it turned out the way that it did. First of all, the heart of the book is a large collection of case studies. I mean, this is not abstracted stuff. I mean, at least a third of the book, if I’m recalling this correctly, is case studies of actual, like real life frontline instructors in higher education systems of all sorts. I mean, some are large R1 universities and I think we have some, have a community college in there. We have some adjunct professors who are doing, and they’re all sharing their process. And you really see the full range of how a person might implement alternative grading in some form that fits them, fits their students. You definitely walk away from these case studies with a sense that’s there’s not just one way to do it and that you can adapt to almost anything. And I love the fact that it focuses on other people.

Really, honestly, I feel like the one, one of the great opportunities we have with the book and also with our blog moving forward, is to elevate other people’s voices and other people’s practices. Cause there are, there are a million instructors out there in higher ed who are just getting it done. Like they have big classes, they’re still doing it. They’re have online classes. They’re still doing it. They have coordinated lab sections. They’re still doing it. It’s like they’re completely undeterred in doing the right thing for their students. I think it’s just so cool, inspiring to read the details about what they’re doing.

And it’s not high level stuff either. It really gets into the weeds. I think that’s important. And the second thing I’m gonna come back to saying, we, we have this one chapter that almost went in, in a very different form, but our, our editor liked it so much, he made us change it back. That is basically a self-contained workbook that can go to this chapter, and it’s just like a step by step by step by step, and David and I came up with this process of just, you can walk through the steps of this workbook chapter and create a prototype of your own alternative grading system that you can then iterate on and improve with. So you are really getting the details and the blueprints for how to make this work in your own classes. And with the case studies you get like some inspiration and, and some assurance that this actually works in real life.

There’s all kinds of stuff that I’m, I’m really happy with the way the book turned out, but those two things especially I, I think are, are gonna be, I hope, hopefully, you know, people will come away with a sense of like, I can do this. I, I can absolutely do this with the students I have. I don’t have to be in any special place or have a special position or have any special funding or whatever.

I don’t have to have small class sizes. I can do it where I’m at and I can do it well because everybody, I see all these other people who are doing it well.

Bosley: See, and that’s, that’s really cool. Cause that’s one of the things that I have found, especially working with my K-12 partners, is as we’re going through this and as we’re trying to convert from a traditional graded class to an alternative, a lot of them seem to have the idea that, you know, alternative grading or specs grading, like there’s one version of it. There’s one way to do it, and you just need to tell me how to do that. I think Sharona and I both like to joke, if you have, you know, a hundred people in the room that do alternative grading, you probably have 120 ways that it’s done. You know, that this, not only is this, you know, a more equitable and, and more accurate grading system in my opinion, but it also has a ton of freedom so you can really make it work for your style, your class, your students, and the purpose that your class is supposed to be doing.

Robert: Yeah, absolutely. Which makes it very much unlike traditional grading. I mean, if you want a one size fits all, then traditional grading is it, I mean, you just slap points on stuff and then average it. I mean, and I think we all understand at this point that that’s, there’s a lot of problems with what that particular approach.

It’s sounds good on paper, that’s what we’re used to, but boy has it got some serious issues on all fronts. So, I mean, you’re absolutely right, Bosley. I mean and I would say too, that no one person does alternative grading the same way in consecutive semesters. At least If I’m looking at my own experience, man, I’m constant, I can never leave well enough alone, right? I mean, constantly tweaking. I’ve kind of started to like settle in on a comfortable approach that I tend to kind of go from my default. I have to now get to the point where I have question my assumptions about alternative grading. Like why, why am I using, you know, this many learning objectives?

What if I didn’t have any learning objectives? You know, I just kind of making myself get outside the box in alternative grading. But yeah, there’s plenty of room for evolution over time and there’s absolutely not one way to do what we’re talking about. We tried to isolate some of these ways early on in the book writing, david and I did, but we couldn’t do it because there were just too many, too much variation. So we, we came up with this model called the Four Pillars of alternative Grading. It’s like no matter who does it or who, who you do it on or with, or what your subject is or whatever, you know, alternative grading, all forms that we could identify as alternative grading have these four, you know, sort of common characteristics to them. And so we focus really heavily on the, on that in the book. And it’s like, look, you might not do straight up ungrading the way that, I don’t know like Susan Blum does and describes her book and that’s ok. It’s OK if you don’t and you might not do specs grading just like Linda Nilsen set it up to do. And that’s also okay. But you’re probably gonna want to focus on certain things, and that’s what you gotta focus on.

Sharona: Well, and just to clarify, especially if we have someone who’s new to the pod, if you go back over the last couple of episodes, we will have just we, we not only dove deeply into some of those issues with traditional grading, which quite frankly, Robert, are even worse than we’ve talked about before.

Bosley and I have been doing some really deep dives into it and, and, and talking on this topic. And then we do have an episode, and we’ll insert it into the show notes, on the four pillars that will be coming out before, before this one does, because those, those are the foundational ones. But I also wanted to go back to another thing that you said and piggyback off it, that you keep iterating. So where are you now with your alternative grading practices?

Robert: That’s, that’s a good question. So, I, I right now my sort of comfort zone, I guess if you’ll, is a specifications grading set up where I conceive of designing a class of like a 3D axis, like these three axes of student engagement that are not totally independent, but you can measure them independently.

One of them, because I teach math and most of my classes are math courses that computer science majors take or engineers take. So there is a lot of basic computational skill that happens in those classes and that’s one of the axes. So one axis of grading is you know, just foundational computational skills, like you should be able to find the eigenvectors or eigenvalues of a 2×2 matrix. That’s something that was a foundational skill.

But there’s also another axis that’s perpendicular to that about applying things. I should, should also be able to show evidence that you can take those foundational skills and apply them to interesting and useful problems. So that’s another axis I want to measure my students’ progress on. And then there’s a third axis that you could just call engagement if you want to, or being a citizen of the course. Are you showing up? Are you doing your pre-class work? Are you active on the discussion boards? And that kind of thing. And so, you know, my, my grading system kinda uses these, Linda Nilsen would call them bundles. I guess. I think of it more of just like categories of things. So I have different assessments that, not too many, but measure along each those axes.

So like I have a whole bunch of assessments lined up that I call application extension problems, application problems. Variation of that. And that measures the the axis of can you apply foundational stuff to new things. And I have another set of assessments that might be like homework problems, basic homework problems and skill quizzes that measure the foundational skills. And, and some things to measure engagement, like how just simply turning in class prep exercises.

I’ve gotten very deep into the weeds on this, on the Grading for Growth blog just recently. If you go there there’s a two part post on grading for growth in an engineering math class. Read both parts of that, you’ll get way more detail than you can digest, you know, in lifetime, I’m sure.

But grading students just simply in terms of how much accomplishment, how, how often did you do acceptable work along each of these three axes. That’s, that’s kinda where my system is kind of, the basic question that my current approach is designed to ask to, to answer, I should say. There’s a whole lot more detail than that, you know, descriptive enough. I understand. But..

Bosley: And, and kind of on that same note and going back to what we were talking about before with the different flavors of alternative grading, do you use something like basically similar to that in all of your classes or do some classes like have some sort of variation? Because I know , Sharona, you teach a couple of very different classes, like you do a GE math class and you also do like a higher history of math. And those two grading systems, even for you are very, you know, very different. Very different from class to class.

Robert: Yeah. Well, they have to be, I mean, those are two different, fundamentally different subjects basically that you’re teaching there and, and different students too. I mean, the history of math class has probably got a very different clientele than like a, like a statistics, basic statistics class or something.

For me, my, my teaching schedule has not nearly as much variation. In fact, I try to make it that way. Right. I’m, I’m one of these kinds of people. I like to teach the same course over and over and over and over again and just keep getting better, try to get better at it if I can. So like this next year, I’m teaching just one class, I mean, just multiple sections of the same class all year long next year.

And that’s by design. Because I want to really go deep on this one particular class. And that’s, that’s all I do. I mean, I teach like three different classes. Computer discrete structures or computer science 1 discrete structures, computer Science 2, and differential equations with linear algebra.

And that’s, that’s basically it for me. And those are, those are fairly similar kinds of classes. It turns out even though the, the, the subject material’s kind of different. And so I tend to use the same approach. Now, on the other hand, a couple of years ago I taught a class on abstract algebra, which I’ve taught many times before, but this, it’s a very different class because the, you know, it’s a, it’s an abstract math class. It’s an upper level class. There’s a ton of writing in it. It’s mostly pre-service teachers. And so that class was my first attempt, and so far only attempt, at ungrading individual student work. We got a course grade in the class and it was collaboratively determined between myself and students one-on-one, using a portfolio of work that they collected throughout the semester. I got that idea from David, because David Clark, again, is a genius and he can run this thing to perfection.

My, my experience with ungrading was not perfection and it’s probably all on me. But that I don’t know how deep you want to go into that. But that was a very different approach, thinking about ungrading.

Looking back, I wrote about this on my, on the blog, looking back at the, at the engineering class and differential equations with linear algebra those students were just fantastic. I, I loved that group of students, but they were so grade conscious. It was like working with pre-med students, like super grade conscious.

And I, I had, I thought many times during the class, I should have ungraded this one. Cause like the only way to get their brains unplugged from grades is to just not have any, I think I kinda, and that would be a class that, you know, I, I, I have… my criticism of ungrading is that it only works as well as students’ abilities to self-assess. Like if you have bunch of students that are just not experienced or skilled with determining whether their own work is the quality of their work, this is not gonna, you’re not gonna get real far with, but, you know, these engineering students were awesome at that. I totally could have ungraded it. So the next time that class comes around in my rotation, I might try, you know, a Alfie Kohn style ungraded setup just to see what happens.

I’ve got to have a better relationship with the engineering department though, too. Cause they might not appreciate that. We’ll see, I don’t want to, I don’t want to make them mad, you know.

Sharona: And I thought it was interesting what you just said is that, what I’m hearing you say though, is that, the goal of the class in part is what determines the type of grading, the goal of the class, the, the audience of the class.

Like like Boz said, I teach a history of math class. I’ve only taught it once so far. I’m hoping to get it back. I don’t have it back yet. And I really had to think about, you know, I’ve got 15 weeks to teach, you know, 30,000 years of the history of math. What the heck do I want them to know? It’s not a prerequisite course. There’s no specific knowledge that they have to have. And it was my first time teaching the course, so I didn’t have any, I mean, I was going to be learning along with the students, and I decided that my goal for that class was really to focus on teaching students to learn a subject they’re not familiar with.

So I picked some very, very broad themes and said, you need to choose during the course of the course, which of the four projects that I’m having you do is going to focus on which theme. And so the themes were things like, You know, gender and race as it impacts identity as a mathematician in history. Or one of the themes was, you know, number systems number, ancient arithmetic and number systems. And so they could pick anything from ancient Egypt to, you know, to the implementation of the, the Hindu Roman numeral systems and all kinds of things. And we, we discovered all kinds of things together. I didn’t quite ungrade it. I would call it specifications graded, because I was the one setting the bar for when something was good enough, because I wasn’t even sure when… it was sort of those, I’m going know it when I see it, so there’s no way they’re going know. So yeah. So for me, that that’s what drove it.

Robert: And right. And so, You asked this question basically like, what is this class supposed to be about? Like not, not what, what’s the list of content in it? Because you didn’t really have, it wasn’t really focused on content. I mean, you had content, but that class was not about content.

It’s very different from a differential equations class where, yeah, it’s kind of about content. I mean, there’s also some things that are not just straight up content, but there’s a lot of basic content you need to know if you take a calculus class or a psychology class or differential equations class.

But something like that, it’s more, it’s very high level. It’s way up in the top third of Blooms taxonomy most of the time. And so that’s where, you know, if you want to see if students are succeeding in that class, you have to sort of think about what’s class about. You know, just like if you ask, if I ask you like what’s Lord of the Rings about, you know, you don’t start listing off the characters. I mean that’s, I mean, it is about the characters, but it’s about something much bigger than that. And that’s where you gotta put your focus.

Sharona: So I have a couple more questions but Boz. Do you have some that you want to, that are coming to mind right now?

Bosley: I, I’ve got one topic I I want to ask you about, Robert, but if you’ve got other questions, Sharona, go ahead and ask ’em, because this is what I want to ask him about is actually the connection between the two books.

Sharona: Okay? So the questions that I had left were, and this is partially because we are gonna link some of the stuff in the show notes, but the process that you and Dave used in writing the book and, and what you use in the blog, is there anything in particular you’d like to highlight as awesome or not great or what you learned through that process? Because that’s very different than like being a PhD mathematician.

Robert: Yeah, it was, it was a really interesting process and I really enjoyed it. I mean you know, David Clark is a great writer too. It turns out he has very good instincts. And, but we’re, we’re also really different as writers, I would say. And me coming from being a blogger, I’m, I’m much more sort like, you know, the king of the hot takes. I’m just like, shoot stuff out there online. It’s just a blog, right? It’s, it’s all good. And I would do that with the book and David just shoot that down immediately. It’s like, no, you shouldn’t say it like that. because that’s going to make people mad, you’re probably right. So I mean, it was more, it was very much a give and take.

We split up the work of writing the chapters. David is responsible for all the case studies. That was his sabbatical project last winter semester was to put together all these case studies and do interviews and so on. And I was responsible for some of the early chapters, like the research summary and the history of reading summary that’s in, there was a fascinating chapter to write.

We worked in isolation for a long time, but last summer in about this time, we had an August 1st deadline with our publishers, and we were really kicking it in high gear. And we would set up a Google document with a draft and asynchronously we would go in and add our stuff when it was our chapter to do, and we get online on Zoom, we live in the same town but it was easier to get on Zoom, and we would pull up the draft and the Google doc in front of us, and whoever didn’t write the chapter would read it aloud. Word for word and let the other person who wrote it actually listen. And that turned out to be like an amazing way to write. Because when you write stuff, you have this sound in your own head of how you think it’s going to turn out.

But then you hear somebody else say it and it’s like, God, that is the worst writing I’ve ever heard. Who put this on paper? Oh, it was me. And so then, and so I would be sitting here with my keyboard and while David would read back my manuscript writing and I would be making edits live. Like, wow, that was crap. What was I thinking there? Or hey, that was pretty good. Or whatever the case may be. And so this, it was interesting to have, like converting it into an oral experience was like what really made it click. I think our writing really took off after that. We would probably spend sometimes 15, 20 hours a week on Zoom calls, just reading to each other, like, like bedtime stories.

Like the worst bedtime story ever. Yeah. It’s our, our process evolved. We even brought a, put a blog post up about this. It’s on the for growth blog where we actually recorded an entire one of these sessions. If you ever seriously, were so bored that you had to be bored out of your mind, you can go watch us do this whole thing.

Sharona: Yeah, we’re actually gonna link that in the show notes. I already have it.

Robert: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t advise spending the whole time on it. Cause it was like a full, like one and a half hour recording and the blog is pretty similar. You know, we take turns writing. We’re, we’re going to be moving to a new schedule pretty soon where we’re going to be, each of us posts once a month and then we have guest posts.

And I think it’s mostly because we’re always there Mondays, like we don’t take Monday off unless it’s holiday, but, you know, we would create a shared Google document and type the draft in and then the other person would go in and make edits and suggestions on the draft and come back and just do things. And I think one of the things that makes us work on the blog and in the book is like, David and I have this commitment. Like, we don’t try to make anybody sound like anybody other than who, they’re like, I don’t try to make David sound like me. David doesn’t make me try to sound like him. Guest posters coming in, we’ll, we’ll offer, you know, edit advice and so forth, but you’re going to, you’re going to keep your voice. This is a distinct voice that you have if you write for us. And I, I think that’s what makes it interesting. Just like, you know, we’re talking right now on a podcast, like, if you’re, if I tried to sound like Bosley, you know, vocal inflections and everything else, you know, it’s like why not just have Bosley, why have a person on here at all.

Sharona: Well, and you know, I’m going suggest that maybe you need an upcoming guest blog about launching a podcast.

Robert: Hey, we have a whole form on our blog for this, and I can give you the link for that. And we’re, we’re booking now. We want to, we, we really want to, now that the book is kind of almost out, it’s supposed to be out in, in, in July, just in a few weeks. We’re no longer using it, obviously, to like beta test chapters from the book. Because there, there’s nothing to beta test. We really want to shift gears and start going deep on this whole idea of other people’s practices, right? I mean, like the, we have, we left a lot of case, case studies out of the book. We probably almost have enough case studies to make that we didn’t put in to make a second book, honestly.

And we would love to hear from anybody who’s doing this. We, we already have five guest posts kind of juggling, we’re trying to get in the schedule right now. We would love to be booked out a whole year in advance if possible. So, yeah. Podcasts included

Sharona: I’ll definitely put that link in the in the show notes as well. And if you’re listening to the pod and, and want to be published on the Grading for Growth blog, it’s GradingForGrowth.com. And we will definitely put that up there. So those were my, the last of my questions. So Bosley, you said you had one you wanted to go to town with.

Robert: It did get much better.

Sharona: Yeah. Over 500.

Robert: It was at least, least 10 times than what we had expected. Yeah.

Bosley: So Sharona had asked me to join that first year as just kind of tech support to, to help, you know, help out with the, the zoom rooms and all of that. And I thought she was crazy, but then she told me that you were part of the organizing committee and at that point I was like, I’ll, I’m willing to do whatever you want me to do if I get to meet, you know, Robert Talbert.

Robert: That’s, that’s, that’s way more credit than I deserve Bosley, but thank you.

Bosley: But one of the things that I found very early on, especially when we went to pandemic, because that’s kind of where Sharona and I started to do a lot of our training, is how well the flipped classroom or flipped learning worked with remote education and how well that kind of worked with alternative grading.

So I’m curious to get your insights and your input on how these two ideas of, of, you know, the flipped learning and alternative grading, you know, compliment each other, or if you think they, they do work together.

Robert: Oh, I, I definitely think they work well together. Although you don’t have to. I would say like if you’re, if you’re really not into the flipped learning thing, but you like the alternative grading or vice versa, then you know, anybody listening don’t, you know, interpret what I’m about to respond to by saying like, yeah, you gotta do both, or you don’t care about students or whatever.

Cause that’s not true. But I do find that there’s an intersection that we all discovered in the pandemic. We all talk, everyone talks about mental health now. You know, I think that that issue about student mental health has been around a lot longer than we think it has been. It’s, it predates the pandemic by a wide margin.

They want to be, despite all appearances, sometimes I think students really want be actively engaged and constructing their own understanding of what it is they’re learning. They don’t want to hear some talking head give a lecture on zoom about differential equations or whatever. And so when you start putting it in those terms, students are going to be happiest when they’re most active.

Then, okay, how do we make students, how do we give students the greatest amount of active engagement in a class? Well, now you’re talking about like, well, we have got to get a lecture out of the classroom. First of all, that’s, that’s the, the exact opposite of an active learning experience. So the best way to do that is through a flipped learning experience.

But then there’s also this piece of, you know, we want students to be involved, to be engaged when they’re active, too. Not just active, like mindlessly doing things, but doing things purposefully and towards a goal. And when you frame it like, "I want students to learn purposefully towards a rational goal", that’s a feedback loop.

Ok. That’s a, that’s, that’s where feedback loops come into. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing or what you’re learning, the way that you get good at it in a way that satisfies you, like from a heart, is through a feedback loop. And our grading systems just weren’t doing that. And so, there is flipped learning and active learning and alternative grading.

I think they all kind of meet in the middle where students’ needs are the greatest. By putting in an alternative grading system, you’re saying all this activity that you’re doing, it, it, it means something. Because when you start iterating through this loop and you get, you know, re attempts without penalty and you get helpful feedback and you know the marks you get actually indicate, you know, your progress on things, then what we’re doing is you’re saying your activity matters. Like it’s going somewhere. Okay. It’s purposeful and it’s meaningful. And then you have students who are much more ready to buy into whatever activity you’re doing because it’s going somewhere. It’s not just like I’m showing up and I’m working problems in groups and then I’m going to get hammered on some one and done test. So, that’s where I’m seeing these two concepts kind of link up with each other, is the active learning is given a great deal of purpose in students’ lives by assessing them in alternative ways and the alternative assessment then kind of makes students feel more comfortable doing whatever activity it’s we’re doing.

Because that’s how you’re going to be be graded, that’s how you’re going to get good at something. I think they meet in the middle with active learning. I think that’s the common denominator they have.

Sharona: And I think, I think you’re absolutely right. And I also think that the, the thing that I’ve been telling a lot of people is that alternative grading is the linchpin. It’s the thing that allows all the other things that we’ve been trying to do to actually work.

Robert: Yeah, I, I would say that’s absolutely true. If you, if you look at it in the negative, you definitely see the truth of that. Like, suppose you did all this active learning and then you just gave three tests and a final, like, like, okay the only reason I am doing active learning now is to get a good grade on that test. And so it’s, it’s super extrinsic motivation at that point, and it’s kind of like it’s a means to an end. Whereas as instructors, we really want that act of learning to be an end in itself, right? I mean the lifelong learning, which is like in every university’s strategic plan, oh, we really care about lifelong learning around here.

It’s like, well, do you? I mean, look in your classroom, what are you doing in your classrooms that proves it? Lifelong learning is all about, you know, learning as an end in itself, right? If you graduate from Grand Valley or wherever, and you don’t have the ability or the taste for learning things over your lifespan through feedback loops and through activity, then what did we just do with you for four years other than take your money?

Bosley: Yeah. And that’s funny that that phrase, "lifelong learner" is also in every single high school mission and vision statement I’ve ever seen.

Robert: Well, well, it’s just like, if you don’t have it in there, then what are you even doing? Right? I mean,

Sharona: I do think we’re at time now. So I do want to say, Robert, I was really looking forward to this. You have definitely been one of the inspirations in my journey, and it’s always just such a joy to talk to you and hear from you. Are there any things that you want to share with the people listening, ways that they can connect with you online or read what you’re doing?

Robert: Sure. So you mentioned my, my blogs. I have my, I kinda have a bad time with restraint when it comes to writing things. So I have, my website is rtalbert.org and that’s sort of an aggregator. Things that I post elsewhere tend to end up reposted there. So kind of a one stop shop and you can learn more about my books and what I’m doing.

I also write with David Clark at gradingforgrowth.com, I also have a third blog called Intentional Academia which is about, it’s very different. It’s, it’s about finding balance and meaning and purpose. It’s not a productivity blog, that’s what I should say. But anyway, it includes a lot of stuff about productivity hacks and, and systems that you can employ to have a more meaningful and enjoyable experience as an academic.

That’s at intentionalacademia.substack.com and like you said the book is coming out called Grading for Growth. I could tell you the subtitle, but it’s like the world’s longest subtitle. We did not choose the subtitle. It’s like, it’s like almost a, like a 50 word subtitle. And that is going to be out next month in July from Stylus publication.

You can pre-order it now and get it when it’s hot which will be, should be pretty soon. Otherwise I’m occasionally on Twitter, probably more than I ought to be. And elsewhere you’ll find me, I think, try to maintain little outposts on any viable social media.

Love to connect with anybody who has a question, wants to learn more, you know?

Sharona: Yeah. We’ll put links to all that. And I, I do believe you’re available to be hired as a speaker or educational consultant. Where is that information? Is that also on your rtalbert.org? Website?

Robert: Yeah. You go to our albert.org, there’s a little menu across the top and there’s one that says speaking and speaking and workshops.

So you click on that and it kind of gives you a little bit of information and there’s another page you can click through from there to get a little sign up form or information.

Robert: I know, crazy how long ago that was. Right back at both of you. It’s been great to kind of watch you. I best wishes on this podcast. I think you’re, this is a great space to be in. I think you two are the perfect people to do it.

Sharona: Thank you. Well, we, we talked about writing a book and we said, no way.

Robert: Yeah. Books are too hard. Nobody reads books.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, and, and although I do more writing than I ever thought I would as a mathematician, I am not first and foremost a writer. And Bosley you love writing.

Bosley: Oh yeah. Anyone that’s ever seen me write knows how sarcastic that was.

Sharona: So with that I think we’ll be signing off. Again, we’ll put out everything in the show notes and coming up on the pod we will definitely be bringing a lot more detail as we continue to dive in into some of the details of how to do this. You know, we’ve got episodes coming up on assessment design, calendaring, planning, getting buy-in from students, admins. We’re going to have a whole conversation at some point about due dates. So we’ve got a lot of things coming up. Anything else you want to say Goodbye with Boz?

Bosley: No, just you know, again, thank thanking you, Robert Talbert. I, you know, like I said, you were been a huge inspiration in my growth as an educator, and really, I don’t know if I would’ve agreed to be part of the Grading Conference at the beginning. If, if you hadn’t been in there

Robert: Sharona would’ve convinced you, she would’ve twisted your arm hard enough. You would’ve given it eventually.

Sharona: Yeah. But it was a lot easier with the bribe

Robert: if you can afford it. Bribes are useful, that’s for sure.

Sharona: Yeah. Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website.

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