The Grading Podcast

Sharona: One of the things we could say a lot about alt grading is that grading itself is extremely personal. That it’s an expression of an individual instructor’s values, what they think is important and how they relate to their students. And I’ve said multiple times that I teach three different courses and they have three different grading architectures. So the question came up, isn’t that a contradiction with course coordination? Because if you’re doing course coordination and you have 15 or 20 instructors and you’re imposing a grading structure on them, aren’t you sort of violating this fundamental idea of how personal grading is and how the effective way to do alt grading is to personalize it?

Boz: And that’s a fair question because it does, you know, standing from the outside, it does look that way.

Welcome to the grading podcast. Where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students’ success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach, and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week you will get the practical, detailed information you need. to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

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

Sharona: I’m alive. I’m putting one foot in front of the other. We have just finished week 14 of the semester. And by the end of the spring semester, I’m just, I’m toast. I’m completely toast. But luckily usually having these conversations rejuvenates me. So hopefully I will be less toast about an hour from now. How about you, Boz?

Boz: You know, I’m in a similar situation, not as much for it just being week 15 and in my high school setting, but it being week three of testing. And I am more involved with testing this year than I have ever been. And with some of our new district mandated tests, like it’s ridiculous. And the fact that I’m having to be as involved as I am is just mind numbing, exhausting and energy sucking. So yes, this semester has been a long semester for me too. And unfortunately I still have three more weeks of it, of just testing. So, but as the same with you, this is usually one of my highlights. So I’m hoping to feel better after this.

Sharona: You and me both. So what are we talking about today?

Boz: Well, we’re actually going to be talking something that’s really in your wheel house, and some of the aspects that go along with that, and that is course coordination.

Sharona: Exactly. Exactly.

Boz: What exactly do we mean when we’re talking about course coordination?

Sharona: So that’s an interesting question because just like with alt grading, if you take two people who do course coordination, they mean completely different things often. So I’m going to give what I would consider to be some fundamentals of course coordination. And there may be people out there who disagree with even those fundamentals, and then maybe describe some of the different types that I’ve seen. So typically in the higher Ed world, course coordination means that there is a central person, a coordinator, who’s fundamentally responsible for trying to ensure that the different sections of a single course have some commonality. The point of it is to try to avoid the idea that two different students in two different sections are going to get completely different experiences. So typically we would expect the course content, you know, maybe the learning outcomes, if they have been designed for the course, to be the same across all the sections. We would typically expect there to be some sort of agreement on the order in which the content is taught and the pacing. And quite often, there’s some form of common assessments or common assignments. Would you add anything to that?

Boz: No I would say if this kind of sounds familiar to our K 12 listeners, this is a lot like what you might call a PLC or an FLC. So a lot of these same ideas about not wanting students experiences to be defined solely by which instructor they get. We see this a lot in high school and middle schools. We see this a lot in some of the earlier courses in college, like intro sciences and a lot of the G. E. courses where colleges often have several sections, taught by several instructors for a single course.

Sharona: So in the sciences and in mathematics, typically that also means a common text. Even going back to when I was in college, you know, when you were taking Calculus 1, the department would adopt a Calculus 1 text that was good across the board. Even though that might have been the only thing that was really in common among the different courses. So often there is a common text. But when I took English, when I was in college, English 1A, there was a lot more flexibility. Different instructors would pick different texts to use as reference materials. So you really had to look specifically for your section to know which textbook you were going to use.

Now, our experience of course coordination is a lot more than that. What I have seen in my department at my university, I would consider we have the Goldilocks situation in a way, or we’d have light, medium and heavy. Where light is just maybe a common syllabus and grading system, a canvas shell that is handed off, but then within that, instructors have a lot of flexibility through the semester. And they just are given a common set of materials and they’re expected to bounce off of that. Then there’s the medium level that goes a little bit further, where perhaps you have common assessments, and you may even have instructors getting together to grade their assessments. And then you go even further than that, which is the way our general education statistics course works, where we not only have common assessments, we have a Canvas blueprint that controls pretty much everything in the course, we have weekly quizzes that are all generated from the blueprint, we even have common lecture slides and clicker slides, and we have a pacing guide that instructors are usually within a half a day of where they’re supposed to be in the pacing guide. So we have what I would call the heaviest of the course coordination.

Boz: And it’s not just that we also have a common grading architecture in this course, this is a alt graded course, but we even have agreed upon ways of grading, which we’ll get into how we do that in this episode. But yeah, it is very strictly coordinated and you were saying our experience. It’s, well, it is an experience you and I share, but I also teach in a second coordinated course at Cal State that is not this, that’s actually is the statistics course, but it’s the department of Education’s version of this gen ed, which is coordinated, but not to the level of the math one. So it’s more of a medium or somewhere in between the light and medium. So yeah, I’ve got experience in both of them and they, they can be very different at times.

Sharona: The reason though, that I wanted to talk about this on the pod today is because a question came up this week when I was speaking with other stakeholders. One of the things we could say a lot about alt grading is that it’s a grading itself is extremely personal. That it’s an expression of an individual instructor’s values, what they think is important, and how they relate to their students. And I’ve said multiple times that I teach three different courses and they have three different grading architectures. So the question came up, isn’t that a contradiction with course coordination? Because if you’re doing course coordination and you have 15 or 20 instructors and you’re imposing a grading structure on them, aren’t you sort of violating this fundamental idea of how personal grading is and how the effective way to do alt grading is to personalize it?

Boz: And that’s a fair question because it does, you know, standing from the outside, it does look that way. And if I wasn’t personally experienced with this gen ed math statistics course, I would probably agree with the question. But we’ll kind of get into why I think it’s not a violation, a direct contradiction later, but it is a very fair question. So I’m curious as to how you answered that.

Boz: And just out of curiosity, why do you keep saying we?

Sharona: Because you were involved. I was the coordinator, but well, okay, let me clarify, we in this case does not necessarily mean you and me, although it did too, because you were involved in the dual enrollment class.

Boz: No. You were, you were the coordinator, but yeah, I was behind the scenes with a lot of it and helping set up.

Sharona: In this case, the we also includes Dr. Silvia Heubach in my brain. Okay. So I was on a team of two coordinators, Dr. Silvia Heubach and me, and I’ve told the origin story of this. So I’m not going to repeat that. If you’re interested, go back and listen to some of our early episodes where we go into our origin story. I think our, actually our very first episode was about us and launching, but people did not revolt.

The key was, over time, our team feels that they have a say, because they do. So everyone has been able to come to the table and say, this is what I need in a grading system. Let me give you one critical thing that we do today, that we developed over the years, that I think addresses this personalization, which is our proficiency scales.

So we talk in the grading architecture episode about proficiency scales and we said don’t use a four level rubric that has good to great in it unless you have a purpose for that good to great. Our grading architecture does not distinguish between good and great, but we do use a four level proficiency scale.

Boz: And why is that?

Sharona: We have some instructors who feel very strongly that it is important to them to communicate to the students the difference between good and great. And that they want to do it through the proficiency scale. They don’t want to do it strictly through the feedback. So after talking about it as a team, we agreed that for the purpose of allowing instructor feedback to be personalized and nuanced, we would use a four level scale that has a distinction between good and great, but we don’t actually try to come into alignment between the difference between good and great.

For example, in my specific sections, I don’t use the great. We have a check plus, I don’t use it. And I tell my students, I don’t use it because my personal value is that I don’t feel that I can adequately distinguish between good and great. And so I don’t choose to use it. But other instructors in the same course, feel very strongly that they do want to distinguish between those two things. And so we allow them to do so. And that allows for some personalization in the ways of giving feedback. So I would say that this meets our criteria of the distinction having a purpose. Even though the purpose is not involved in the final grade roll up.

Boz: That purpose is giving some of that freedom and that personalization back to the instructors, because in a lot of other ways it has been taken away. However, like you were alluding to it was taken away at the beginning. Like let’s not beat around the bush. It was, and that first design was not good. Partly because of our own inexperience and the fact that we were imposing this on other instructors. Since then, even though we’ve had different instructors come in and out, we’ve also had a core set of instructors that have been, you know, been with us since day one, and we have really grown into what we are today. I would call a PLC what other college faculty seem to use the term FLC more often, a faculty learning community versus professional learning community. If there is a distinction between the two, I don’t know what it is. So if anyone’s listening and there, there is an actual distinction you know, please don’t get mad at me. I’m going to use them as synonyms because I don’t know what the difference, I’ve not never seen any difference in them.

Sharona: I think that the main distinction is just two different worlds came up with two different terms.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: For the same thing.

Boz: And as for prep for this episode, I actually went to go and try to find some FLC books to kind of see what the difference was. I see lots of scholarly articles about FLCs. I do not see a lot of books. So I don’t know if it might be exactly what you just said. It’s just difference of where it originated from and where the work is being done and why there’s two different terms.

Sharona: Yeah. I don’t know. I, I definitely use them interchangeably, although I do tend to, I use them interchangeably, but I’m aware of my audience. So if I’m speaking with higher ed instructors, I tend to use FLC. If I’m speaking with K through 12 instructors, I tend to use PLC. Again, it’s just, different worlds, different synonyms, different usages. But I did mention the proficiency scale. And I said that we don’t try to come into alignment and that’s the other big piece of how you do this as a team. So we’ll come back, I think, to the other places where people can have input and make this personal, but I want to move to the part of how do you do this in a coordinated place or as a team? Because, aside from coming up with the architecture together, I think what happens week to week to week is really the core of how you make alternative grading effective in a team environment.

We wrote a blog post on this a while back for Grading for Growth, and we call it Grade Norming, although I think the title of the post said Normed Grading, which is slightly different. But why don’t you describe Grade Norming and how we do it.

And this is a practice that is done in the K 12 world in AP testing forever. You get the instructors together and you actually work through some of the actual student work with the rubrics and come upon agreements of what does, you know, the proficiency line look like? What, what does it actually look like? What criteria will meet the things of the proficiency scales, what won’t. We do this with our statistics course. God, how long has it been that we’ve been doing it on Friday nights at six o’clock?

Sharona: At least..

Boz: Four years?

Sharona: Since the pandemic.

I think it’s when we, I think it’s when, was it before the pandemic?

Boz: I don’t, I don’t know. We’ve been doing it for a while.

Sharona: At least, it’s at least been since the pandemic. So it’s been four years now. Friday nights from 6:00 to 7:30. We are the people with the least social life in the world. We get together on zoom and we norm the grades.

Boz: Yeah, we actually look at students work and we’ll go through, we’ll discuss, you know, what was good about it. What was bad about it. We’ll discuss what was incorrect, but showed some levels of learning and understanding and maybe the mistakes were minute algebraic or arithmetic mistakes, but not actually content mistakes.

So we’ll go through this process and we’ll vote on whether we think it’s overall meets our level of proficiency or doesn’t. Now, like you said, we do use a four level rubric in this course, we only come to an agreement about, is it above the line of proficiency or is it below? So we argue about the line between two and three. If you want to grade it all the way down to the one, which is no evidence of learning at all, or all the way up to the four as, you know, exceeds expectations of learning, that’s up to the individual instructors, but we come to agreement on what is not quite yet there and what has met.

And then we do this several times until we get to the point to where we can all quickly look at it and go, yes, that is. No, it’s not. And then we take those same criteria and use it in our own classes. So that’s the, I’ve kind of done it at an overview, but that’s the process of what we call grade norming. And again, in the K 12 world, this ain’t nothing new. This is what we do in AP testing, anyone that’s ever been an AP grader will tell you, yeah, that’s exactly what they do. They, they get together.

Sharona: Except you have to do it for all of the levels of the proficiency scale, right?

Boz: I have never graded AP. I believe so. But I know the process is basically the same. I even do this in my K 12 world when we do what’s called an ICA, which is the, like, practice SBAC test for anyone that has to do Common Core and Common Core testing. But yeah, this is a process of taking common assessments and applying common grading lenses.

Sharona: And what’s critical about this, and I think this is where, this is where we as a team are at right now, so we use a continuous improvement process. We’re constantly adjusting our assessments, writing them from semester to semester, but we are taking a hard look right now at that bar between the two and the three between the not good enough and the good enough because there is no objective level of good enough versus not good enough, particularly in the general education course. That’s not a prerequisite for anything else. So who decides what’s good enough?

Boz: We do.

Sharona: Exactly. We do as a team. But why are we inherently right? Our team is all mathematicians and we’re teaching a general education quantitative reasoning course and there are no objective guidelines out in the world that says this is what good enough looks like. So we have to debate it and that’s what we’re doing.

Boz: But yeah, this is one of the aspects. And if you’ve, especially if you’re in K 12, if you’ve ever done any PLC work, this should sound pretty familiar. This is actually where I got this. Like I said, between my work with PLCs and my learning about PLCs and just being around some of my colleagues that are AP graders, that’s where this process comes from. And we’ve been doing it in my K 12 setting for a very long time because we started common assessments a long time ago.

Sharona: Now, I want to specify that there really are a couple of different ways that this plays out. So the way we do it is we agree upon the bar and then everyone goes back and grades their own students on the entire assessment. There’s another way you could do this, which is where what we used to do in the dual enrollment classes, is we still agreed upon the bar, but then one instructor would maybe grade everyone’s on a certain problem. So if we had five problems on an assessment and there were five of us, I might grade question one across the board. We’d still sit and norm. We’d still come to agreement as a team as to what is good enough and not good enough on question one. But then we would be passing papers around the table, which I remember doing with you at two in the morning. We would have these massive grading marathons and we would go through and one person would grade all of one question or one set of things. And that is another very legitimate way to again, calibrate the grading.

Boz: There’s actually a third way too.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: And this is often what we do, especially with the ICA or some of our other common assessments in my high school, is we come together, we make those agreements, and then we randomly assign the students to get graded by different teachers. So I might get some of my students, but I also might get teacher A’s and teacher B’s. And so I’ve got a stack of a hundred to grade, you know, maybe 20 of them are mine. Maybe, you know, maybe not so, but that’s another way to kind of try to ensure that equitable piece. Whereas we grade, it doesn’t matter whose it is. And, you know, part of my school’s vision and mission statements are the fact that we see all students at my school as our students, and we all take responsibility for their learning. So that kind of fits right in with that, that kind of vision and mission. I’m might not be as applicable to a college setting, but.

Sharona: I definitely think there’s context where it could. It’s not applicable in our particular context, but I think it absolutely could be.

But I also want to go now. You know, the topic here is not just how do we grade or assess or markup student work, but really taking it even bigger because our team is really a team on the entire course. And as we’ve discussed, alt grading permeates every aspect of the course. It enables the backwards design. It impacts the active learning component, because if we’re all have this target of students showing evidence of learning in this specific way, then everything we do leading up to the assessment needs to be aligned.

So what we have seen happen is every part of the course that we touched originally in the redesign has now been altered by different members of the team raising their hand and saying, I think there’s a better way to do this. Have we considered X, Y, Z? Could I try it? And so one of the jobs of an effective course coordinator, in my opinion, is to make space for the contributions of those team members. And that is also then how the grading and the personal values comes out. So for example, if we have a set of 10 statistical learning outcomes and one instructor says, you know what? I’m uncomfortable with our probability outcome, because I think there’s this important concept that’s not there. Could we consider rewriting it to include this thing? Well then we’re going to have a conversation as a group.

Because if we rewrite that learning outcome, then we also need to write an assessment that checks for evidence of it. We need to write clicker slides that teach it. We need to make practice problems that look aligned. So any of those changes can impact the whole course. The key here is we have made it clear, I have made it clear to the team, we welcome that. And as long as they’re willing to put the work in, we can do that. So we have one instructor who has rewritten our clicker slides multiple times to come into alignment. We have another couple of instructors who’ve suggested assessment problems. We have other instructors who have suggested language for our assessments. We have other instructors who have come up with some active learning activities in the classroom to supplement or have built supplementary materials for our co requisite.

So even though at the end of the day the grading is the same, the elements that we put into the course that are going to be assessed or that are going to be checked, either they’re part of the habits of mind learning outcome, or there’s something else that’s all been contributed by the team over the last six years.

Boz: So in your role as course coordinator over this, and no offense, but you really did start off as a dictator. Like this is how it’s going to be you know, tried to do some things to encourage people to buy into that because by contract, none of them had to, but yeah, since then it really has become the role of the coordinator is to manage and to, you know, keep the wheels rolling, but you’re no longer, you know, that dictator over this course. It is okay, yeah, here’s all these other great contributions, you know, bringing them in. So it really is a coordinator position, not a dictator position.

And I’ve seen other coordinators, not at Cal State, I don’t want to insult anyone, but I’ve seen other course coordinators that do feel that that dictatorship role is what it means to be a coordinator. And I’ve never been in that kind of situation, although some people might say that was me at one point, since I’ve never been in one, I can’t say that it doesn’t work, but I don’t think it would work for very long, like,

Sharona: I think it again comes back to the context, right?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I am lucky that I have had six years of a core team, as we spoke about, but even people who come in new, like we have TAs that come in and out, we have other instructors that come in and out, and they’re nervous. You know, a lot of these people are nervous. How am I going to teach this course? I don’t know how to teach the course. Some of them may have taught the course, but yet be worried about fitting into a new team. So with new instructors, it is a little bit more dictatorial. It’s like, this is what you need to do.

But we also make it clear that the reason we say that is that this is for support. This way, everything is done for you. We have a lot of data to show that it’s successful. And if you need to miss a class, one of us is going to jump in. If you get behind on your grading, one of us is going to jump in. So it’s not even so much top down heavy handed force, although that is present, but it’s also bottom up support. So I think the more that we’re able to emphasize it’s a gift. And again, the instructors who come in and out, they’re usually either freeway flyers in Los Angeles, so they’re working at multiple institutions and have spent a lot of time driving between them, or they’re TAs. This might be their first ever course that they’ve taught. So most of them have been extremely grateful. That they’re getting such a fully functioning tested course that there’s a lot of support for.

Boz: And I’ve got to say I think it’s not as uncommon in a K 12 world, but I don’t know. I’ve never really heard of any other course at a higher Ed where literally, we do, we jump in for each other. Like I’ve taught in another people’s classes, we jump in with grading, like I’ve graded multiple other instructors for personal reasons. Something comes up and they just can’t do it that week, but yeah, because we are such a team and because we do meet and calibrate our grading and talk about this stuff and work as a functional PLC, we actually can do that.

And like I said, in the K 12 world, it’s not unheard of, but I’ve really never heard of another team like that situation in a higher Ed and like I said, I’ve taught in some other coordinated courses and no way you could ever done that.

Sharona: So two things about course coordination have entered my life recently. And when you said that, I was thinking about them. One is course coordination, and especially as it interacts with alt grading, was a big topic of conversation at a workshop I was at recently. And a lot of them were not yet there, but they were course coordinators who wanted to figure out how to bring alt grading in and were very curious.

So we had to do a full course redesign. To do that thing, we had to decide, were we stretching it, were we supporting it, what were we doing? And that was when I was able to persuade Silvia to try out Alt grading. Since we were doing a full blown “what is this course” anyways. We didn’t even know if we were going to keep it as a what type of intro stats? It was an intro stats, but what type? Was it a traditional intro stats? Was it something else? We decided to go down this route of consumer of statistics, consumer of data.

So when we launched it, everybody knew that there was a huge amount of attention. There was a huge amount of stress because we were putting students in the course who in the past would have been placed into remediation. So it was not stepping into an existing course. When we first launched coordination, it was a brand new course, even though the number hadn’t changed and in theory the content hadn’t necessarily changed.

But what if I were to go in today to an existing course structure, maybe even one that was already coordinated? How would we go about doing the alt grading? And I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I want to hear your thoughts on it. I feel like I would start very slowly with a lot of listening and trying to wrap my hands around who this new, this new team I was working with is. Because the last time it was a brand new team.

Boz: So I would actually, depending on how new you were to coordination, I actually might suggest taking even a step further back than that, and that would be to really drown yourself in the literature around PLCs. Now I know a lot of that literature out there, especially in book form. There’s, like I said earlier, there’s a lot of scholarly articles, but in book form, a lot of it is around the K 12 world, but most of that is, I think, still applicable if you’re doing this in higher ed.

But that would be my first suggestion and first step is really do, you know, go and get, the Learning by Doing by the DuFours, which, by the way, I have the first three editions. I’ve read the first and third, but the fourth one is is coming out later this month you know, or books like the PLC+, which I have never personally read, but I’ve heard is a great alternative to some of the Dufour stuff. But yeah, that, that would be my first, because I really do think this coordination is going to always work better in a PLC or FLC kind of model.

Sharona: What’s going to be hard for me if I ever get this opportunity is taking over as a coordinator for a course that’s already been coordinated, but is not using alt grading, thinking about what the process is to move a team when you don’t have that beautiful opportunity of a full course redesign, right? And I’m leaning towards two things being my sort of entry point, my tiny little entry into getting faculty moving in the direction of alt grading. One of them is the second chance grading we heard about a couple episodes ago with Brie Tripp and Rob Furrow. I definitely think that taking some of the quizzes and getting that second chance grading in, especially given how much they raved about the student response to that and then starting to align the assessments with the learning outcomes, even if the proficiency scales are still points based.

Boz: So I think it really boils down to the team that you’re going to be working with. Some teams might be ready to move further, faster, or others, you might need to be slower. You know, I’m working with a group right now, College Bridge, the group that brought us together, and they’re taking a group of schools in the Central Valley area of California and doing a lot like what brought us together, which is that dual enrollment bridge between 12th grade high school and freshman college.

This is a group that is motivated that already has some knowledge of alternative grading, even though very few are practicing. But this is a group that wants to do something different. So are we going to jump straight into Alt grading? Probably not, but we’ll probably be there by year two, where if you’re working with a group that might need to go a little bit slower, which there’s nothing wrong with, then yeah, introduce one or two things and kind of going back to, I love how often I’ve referred back to this, but that article by dr. Dr. Robert Talbert again on those 20 small things. There’s a whole list of things that you could try to do with a group that might need to move a little slower.

Sharona: The other place where it’s interesting, because you’re right, so many groups are at so many different points on this path. I feel like our G. E. Statistics team is very far down the path. We’re really into the nuance and the weeds and the tinkering. But I just spoke with someone this week that I’m hoping to work with their school next year and their school. They’ve gone to standards based grading across the school, it’s a middle school. And now they’re really questioning whether their assessments are authentically measuring learning.

So as a team, this is the next step for them is to really engage and grapple with what does authentic evidence of learning look like given their institutional context and constraints. And so we’re going to hopefully be having a lot of trainings. And this is again, another area where what’s so much fun is that you get to work with your colleagues as a team because teaching can be very isolating, you know maybe you run into some people in the hallway and especially in higher ed, I think it’s less so.

Perhaps in the high school setting.

Boz: Oh, no, it can be very much of the high school setting to the model of, I go in my classroom and shut my door and my classroom is my world, my universe and there is nothing outside of it is not a, a uncommon kind of setting or, or belief about the classroom.

Sharona: And I find that draining. If the only people that I’m engaging with are my students, because I give a lot to my students. And they give back to me, but it’s not enough. So I want to be in a community of professionals that are grappling with the same challenges that I’m grappling with and that care about the same things that I care about. And so what’s really been amazing about this Alt grading journey as a team is getting to have these conversations. And so I definitely think that is one of the benefits to doing it, whether it’s course coordination or just teamwork.

And in fact, what I’m looking at now as well, I brought this up to my administration is, we’ve closed our equity gaps in our course. But what we have not closed is the gap between the two flavors of the course, the supported and the non supported. We’re still struggling in the supported class to bring those students up to the same levels as the students who don’t need that support. And what’s come up is this might be a cross disciplinary challenge that we need to now go outside of our discipline specific team and start working say with the first year writing team and start to calibrate the levels of the language we’re using, the expectations on academic language.

So how cool would it be if most of the freshman instructors started talking to each other? You know, we’re a 23, 000 student campus. We’ve got something like 1, 200 instructors. What if every instructor, or most instructors who taught freshmen, came together and compared content and compared things and said, are we having similar levels of expectations? It just would be amazing.

Boz: Yeah, and I have to say this, over my almost 20 years of teaching now, this has been one of the biggest personal changes in my beliefs and philosophies of education. When I first started, I was very much, this is my room, this is my universe. It was my personal responsibility to get these students to a level they needed to be in everything that happened in my room was my control. And, and it really was, you know, the PLC books and a lot of the Dufour literature and seeing after I’d been department chair for a few years and seeing how different classes could be, even though they were supposed to be the same course. I started to convert that like, okay, maybe this my classroom, my universe model isn’t actually what’s best for students.

And like I said, there is so much great, I mean, I think the Learning by Doing it is the fourth edition is, is the 25th year anniversary of it. I mean work from, and yes, I’m saying Dufours a lot. Dufour and Guskey, like, you guys all know how much I talk about Guskey, but the Dufours are the same way with the PLCs as Guskey is around assessments and grading. And the PLCs and the Dufours is really where my educational reform journey started. So, going in and a lot of that literature, and like I said, Yes, it’s geared for K 12, but if you’re in higher ed, I still recommend, you know, especially the Learning by Doing and they’ve got a follow up to that one that is called..

Sharona: PLCs at Work, is that the follow up?

Boz: No, it’s a Frequently Asked Questions about professional learning communities at work. It’s another newer book, It’s only, I think, six or seven years old, but those two in combination, like, if you’re going to try to do any kind of course coordination, I really do, I can’t recommend those enough.

Sharona: So going back to the main theme, which is how do you do this as a team when grading is so personal? I would say that the number one thing is find first and foremost, your areas of commonality. And it doesn’t have to be, by the way, in a course coordination situation. So for example, we just spent the last several years working with our engineering department. They don’t have course coordination as we would think of it. They don’t have a coordinator who makes sure that this statics course and that statics course is the same. But what they do is they did their redesign as a team. So they came to agreement on what the learning outcomes were and how much evidence of learning was required. And so they basically they did their architecture as a team by agreement. They sort of discussed it out. Then they went and implemented in the classes and then they started to iterate. So the classes are beginning to diverge a little bit. What they’re keeping true to is they’re keeping true to what the ultimate learning outcomes are. What do they want? What do they feel is necessary to pass the class?

And so what some of them have done is they’ve taken what was, I think, nine learning outcomes and they went down to seven and other people went to 11. And they adjusted their passing to accommodate the fact that they tweaked their learning outcomes. Like some people felt the learning outcome was too big and they split it into pieces. Other people felt that there were too many learning outcomes. So they combined them a little bit. But in general, they’re still in agreement that these are the fundamental things you have to know to be successful, to move on. And they continue to talk. So there is room for that as well.

Boz: But I think that is one of the, probably the most important pieces, the fact that they are continuing to discuss, even though they are diverging a little bit they are continuing to discuss. And that’s how this whole thing started. I was once asked in one of my high school trainings, you know, that this sounds like this redesigning for alternative grading sounds like a lot of work and I’m like, it is so don’t do it by yourself, you know, work with your PLC. And that engineering one, that’s really how it started. The people, the two people that were leading this, you know, went to those instructors that taught the higher engineering courses and said, what do students need to already know to be successful in your course? Like what do they need to leave statics or materials actually? You know, what must they know to have a chance to be successful? So again, this idea of communicating and working, whether it’s, you know, just for basic discussions like that are really working as a team. Education’s hard. Let’s make no joke about that. Education is hard. It’s a lot easier when you start working together.

Sharona: And part of what’s hard at the university level is that not every institution puts the same importance on the teaching part of the mission. And so one of the other things that can be very beautiful is if you get your teaching focused faculty together again, it combats that isolation that can happen when you’re at, say, an R1 or R2 institution where teaching is not the focus. That can be really difficult if you want to put time into your teaching. So spreading the load, hugely important, hugely, hugely important.

So I think we’re getting close to our time, which always surprises me because we always start this and I’m like, I have three little bullet points and I’m like, how am I going to talk for an hour? I should not doubt myself anymore on that topic, but any last thoughts? On doing alternative grading as a team for either environment, higher ed or K 12.

Boz: I want to put it more of, regardless of if you’re going to do it with Alt Ed or with Alt Ed, with Alt Grading coming together and forming these PLCs or FLCs is actually, in my opinion, the best way to improve any kind of instructional setting. Now, would you and I personally love to see that eventually go into Alt grading too, absolutely. But, if you’re at an institution and you are in that, my room, my universe, just starting to work with others, starting to work with and starting to form these PLCs or FLCs. I cannot stress how much of a difference that can make. And if anyone wants, you know, we’ll put in some of the show notes, some of the books that we were referring to, or some of the other resources. But if anyone ever is wanting to look at that, there’s also some great conferences out there with those, but yeah, I think that would be a great first step for any, cause it was my first step as well. What about you? Do you have any last thoughts?

Sharona: I do and one of them is If you’re already in some sort of a team environment and you can’t get the whole team into Alt grading, try making space for some people to try it. Because that would be my other goal. If I get the opportunity to work with a different class, I may not be the benevolent dictator and take the whole class at once, but I might say, hey, who’s willing to come with me on this journey to try Alt grading in a few sections? And how can I still make that aligned enough? That it is compliant with the goals of course coordination, which is the students learn the same things, but I would probably try and take it there and then do something like on the common final do a straight percentage comparison to show that that maybe to see if I can show that the students in an all graded class. Learned more, did more, performed better, because at the end of the day, mathematicians, at least, they really want proof.

Boz: Well, and this also goes back to what Dr. Guskey brought up in the episode we interviewed him, is that when you’re trying to make these big changes, it actually is better, works more efficiently if you change the experience first and then the beliefs. So yeah, maybe you can’t change that person’s experience, but you can show with, you know, relatively similar groups of students and show the experience change there to start to move that needle.

Sharona: So hopefully all of this has given people food for thought. I know that course coordination and alternative grading are two humongous topics in math education at the higher ed level. I don’t know if it’s exploded quite as much in some of the other disciplines, but we’re starting to see it.

And if there’s anyone out there that would like help I’m going to, I’m going to do a shameless plug here. So skip ahead 30 seconds if you don’t want. We do develop professional development in both alt grading and course coordination and the combination also do PD on authentic assessment. So if anyone wants us to work with your institution, we’re here. Feel free to contact us.

Boz: We don’t just do it in higher ed.

Sharona: No, we do it across the board. The school that I’m talking about that I’m hopefully going to work with next year is middle school. So I’m not as sure on my skills on elementary school. I’d have to bring in some experts there.

Boz: Yeah, yeah, me too.

Sharona: Although, again, you know, looking back, my kids are now in college. They had standards based report cards when they were in elementary school. So that was already from my older one. It was 15, 16 years ago, and he was getting standards based report cards. And man, I was not the right parent for that. I wish I had known then what I know now. I’d be so much more excited about those report cards. I hated them back then because I didn’t understand them.

So one last plug schedule for the grading conference., If you’re still listening, it’s coming out probably this week. So excited. Hopefully we will see everyone at the conference. I’ll turn it over to you to close this out, Boz.

Boz: All right. Well, hope everyone’s enjoyed and we’ll see you next time.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.TheGradingPod.com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show, or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website. The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State system or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.