The Grading Podcast

Boz: She is now starting to blend these different alternative grading concepts together to make something that is specific for her students, her style, and her setting at this moment, which is the goal of all alternative grading, finding something that, that perfect, you know, or close to perfect product that really takes into account you as an instructor, your pedagogical practices, your goals for the class where they need to be at the end, and the needs of your customers, your students. So, yes, you are veering and bravo for it.

Joe: Just to, when you said it, Boz, just to piggyback on that, like you just said the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards line for the architecture of accomplished teaching. What do these students in this place at this time need, right? And you give it to them. So, I mean, I guess, cause my only problem with the entire blog, the only thing that I was so I would push back against what Bosley said. I didn’t understand the tone. That’s the first question I asked before we started recording was, what’s the deal with this standards based thing? And would it sound better if it said skills based?

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

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 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 am doing a lot better. I am still healing from my illness of a couple of weeks, but I’m back in the saddle and feeling good. This job has been a challenge this semester, but I’m getting to have some amazing conversations with faculty. And so I had a good week. How about you?

Boz: I’m doing all right, but I have to say you do sound a whole lot better than you did last time we recorded together.

Sharona: Although I still have some coughing, still going to do some muting and try to keep it off the pod. And with us today, sitting in the third chair that we keep warm for him, Joe Zeccola. Welcome Joe. How are you doing?

Joe: I am, I’m well. Similar to you last week, I was crazy sick and that was midterms. So I had to, sort of, settle for giving kids a midterm grade that I wasn’t in love with. So I slammed myself this week so that before we had conferences, they had more accurate grades. And ironically, it’s some stuff that we’re going to bring up today that pointed me in the direction of the subject of our discussion. So it’s kind of cool, but I’m glad to be on the other side of how I felt that. I had a weird week last week.

Sharona: So sorry. So Boz, do you want to introduce our topic for the week?

Boz: So, yeah, we are actually going to be discussing a blog post from another one of our friends of the podcast, and guest of the podcast, Dr. Emily Pitts Donahoe. The blog was titled "Teaching and Reading Analysis with Standards Based Collaborative Grading?". So do you want to talk a little bit about this before we jump into it?

Sharona: Yeah. So just a little bit more as a reminder to our listeners, Emily is a frequent guest on the podcast. She’s also one of our co organizers in the grading conference. And what I loved about this article, I’m going to actually start with the last paragraph of the article because Emily’s not sure she’s comfortable with some of the things she’s talking about. So she says, "This is very much an experiment. I’d love to hear your thoughts. How are you teaching reading, writing, or analysis? What kinds of hybrids have you intentionally or unintentionally created in your grading systems?"

So in this article Emily is a first year composition teacher and she is struggling with a problem that I know nothing about called the rhetorical analysis paper. And she goes through some of the components and some of the things she’s doing and she had some revelations and those revelations led her to. think that her students needed to practice some specific skills, and which we thought was really interesting. I thought was really interesting because that’s one of the push pulls in math, is how much do we focus on specific skills, and how much do we focus on concepts. And what she’s come up with is it’s altered her grading system a little bit, where she’s introduced some flavors of standards based grading into what had really been an ungrading or collaborative grading system. And as I was reading through this, I was like, well, gee, I don’t really know. I mean, I know I can do rhetorical analysis, but I know nothing about teaching rhetorical analysis. And in math, it seems pretty obvious to me that if you don’t know some of your basic number facts, or if you don’t have some basic algebra, how are you even going to approach some concepts?

So that’s when I said to you, Boz, I think we need to get Joe on. Because I need someone who actually knows what rhetorical analysis is, and can maybe help us explore this idea of, is writing holistic? Is it skills based? Is it a combination? Joe, would you please define for those of us who are not writing teachers, what is rhetorical analysis and how do we teach it?

Joe: Sure. So let’s just do it in two parts. Cause one of the things that it’s, it’s weird for kids to sort of figure out is what is analysis, right? And to analyze something, you’re breaking something into its parts and looking at how they work. So for rhetorical analysis, you’re analyzing the process of someone using rhetoric, which is just how are they trying to persuade us? Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. So this ends up being a major deal in 11th grade English classes, especially AP English language and usually first year college comp the ability to look at how someone, you know, and, and it happens in any kind of text, but predominantly we push toward nonfiction. Although I use lots of fiction because there’s a great text that was written a long time ago saying everything’s an argument that a movie is trying to persuade you in one way or the other. So you can analyze almost anything rhetorically, but the idea is just to look at what are the ways in which the writer or speaker is trying to persuade us.

Sharona: Okay. So how is somebody trying to persuade us? How do we teach students? Like what, what are they supposed to do with this?

Joe: So what they would normally do, and before we get into the nuts and bolts of Dr. Donahoe’s blog post, what they’re supposed to do is figure out, generally speaking, and she talks about this, in some length, which I resonate with almost everything she’s writing, other than, you know, or since I’m coming from, I guess, what you call a standards based grading, her hesitancy, I’m like, yeah, I’m kind of moving more in her direction to more collaborative, but we can get there. They’re supposed to read a text. They’re supposed to determine what the speaker or the retort, the person using rhetoric’s purpose is like, what are they trying to do here? And from that, you can look at paragraphs, you can look at sentences and you can look at how that particular piece aligns with the purpose. And then you can look and say, okay, what are they doing here? How, how is this sentence trying to persuade me?

And there’s a lot of ways to do it. And you can look at what rhetorical choices are they using? How do those play into their purpose? And how does it work on an audience for a rhetorical analysis? There’s something called Aristotle’s rhetorical triad. This goes all the way back to Aristotle as does most, you know, most of our most Western thought sooner or later gets back there. And what he talked about is speaker or rhetor audience text, and there’s relationships between them. So in other words, we’re right now talking right. We have a relationship. I’m speaking to you because of our relationship differently than I would with other people. So you analyze that you analyze, you know, in this case, especially because neither of you have a lot of experience with it. I’m being a little more fundamental about rhetorical analysis, but not a lot because you’re both highly educated, thoughtful human beings, right? Whereas if I was talking to a room of students, I’d do it differently. Or if I was talking to English teacher colleagues, right? So those are all the ways you analyze. How are you speaking to this audience to get your point across about this text? And those are the things that they’re supposed to break apart and talk about.

Sharona: Well, and in my defense, I did take a year of rhetoric when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. So, you say Aristotle and I’m like, Oh yeah, I remember reading about that. But that was many, many decades ago. And like I said, I actually do know that I am capable of doing rhetorical analysis and that I’ve done it. But I would have no idea why I know how to do it or, I mean, I know I know how to do it well, but I don’t have enough metacognitive awareness of my writing anymore to be able to break it down. So that’s, that’s interesting.

So Dr. Donahoe or Emily starts with the problem she’s writing about in this article is that she’s never been happy. with how her rhetorical analysis units have gone in the past. It’s a required component. But she’s finding it difficult to make it authentic. So finding real sample materials is difficult. And her goals, one of her goals is to "only assign writing tasks that might have life and relevance beyond the walls of the classroom." That’s a quote. How did you react to that? I mean, are you in the same place with that? Are you, what are you doing on your assessment side of these rhetorical analysis?

Joe: So, I, I actually, it, it really resonated with me, I always have kids write papers but not That’s a different thing. Like, because when I’m teaching rhetorical analysis these days, it’s part of AP English language. I’m building in, they have to write three essays and one of them is a rhetorical analysis essay. So I’m building in the constant work on essays. But when I teach rhetorical analysis, we do it in smaller chunks as well. And what this just reminded me, because I’m, I’m doing a few Mariah and I are actually Mariah Muller, who was on a couple episodes with you. We’re going to be discussing, I I’ve come up with a couple of new ideas to sort of break down rhetorical analysis that I’m going to use and reading, since I don’t know her, I’ll call her Dr. Donahoe. Cause I feel weird calling someone I’ve never met, Emily. But Dr. Donahoe stuff just reminded me that that’s how I should be assessing the discrete skills. I do that with almost everything I do.

Anyway, I break almost everything into discrete skills, you know, the way I would sort of analogize it. Is when I, when I’m teaching my son to play baseball, like I want him to love playing baseball, but we work on throwing, we work on hitting, we work on the different component parts of both. We work on catching. So for me, it’s very natural to work on the skills. And I just resonated really heavily with her point about what we miss as English teachers over and over again. I think I’ve talked about this multiple times here is everything we do. We seem to want to assess by writing. And the problem with that is writing is its own thing. And rhetorical analysis is a reading skill. You have to be able to read it and understand it. So I really liked the fact that what she’s doing first is saying, let me see if you can do this thing. You know, my big thing in my class this year is I say, do the thing over and over again. And I define what the thing is for this particular tasks.

And I, it just reminded me, I need to really do this as well as get the analysis piece down. And then have them presented in an essay. And those are two different things. Because there’s also a lot of different component skills for writing essays. And then just To answer one more piece. I have a little bit of attention. I know. Kelly Gallagher, who’s a pretty influential English teacher’s made a lot of money off his books and does some really good stuff. And he’s still, by the way, teaches and gives us all articles of the week. So I want to shout that out, but he’s real big on when are they going to do this kind of stuff? And I, I guess I sort of recoil at that in the sense that writing papers is a college thing, but it’s argumentation. So they are going to do argumentation for the rest of their life. They’re just not necessarily going to present it in essay form. So I, I actually don’t, I don’t have that tension that she has, but I certainly agree with her about this is a reading thing. So let’s make sure they can do this reading thing before you worry about the writing thing.

Boz: See, and that’s interesting that you bring that up, because that was one of the things that Emily brought up in this paper is that she was realizing that part of the reason she was not happy with how her units in the past had gone is that a lot of the fundamental skills that a student needs to be able to do this, they’re not coming to her with. And I know you’re going to absolutely disagree with this next statement, but she blames a lot of that on standardized testing, which I know you just absolutely love. And for those that can’t hear the sarcasm,

Joe: Yeah. I, I love me some standardized test. Yeah. Yeah. Biggest waste of time in all of our careers.

Boz: But yeah, she, she brings up, you know, that breaking it down to get to those, those reading skills. Cause she also recognizes and acknowledged that it’s, it’s really a reading skills, but her fear is the Dr. David Clark and Robert Tabard called the dead frog problem in their grading for growth. And I kind of want to get your take on this is if you are breaking it down into these individual components, And again, I know you grade more on a standards base, moving towards a ungrading or, or a collaborative grading where Emily is coming from the other end and moving towards, towards the standards base. But I wanted to kind of get your reaction to this, this whole dead frog problem. And the question she’s asking herself is if we’re breaking it down into these individual components, are we losing sight of the, interconnectedness of the whole thing.

Joe: Yeah, I really, like, I don’t see it that way is the best way to say it because again, I was just watching, you know, play a baseball game last night and they were showing a hitter who’s been crushing home runs. And the whole point was he was working on where his hands were in his swing. He was working on that component of his swing, right? So breaking things down into the discrete skills is how we do things, you know how many of us have maybe less. So now when we have Android pay and Apple pay. But in the past I would have my most often used debit or credit card memorized. Well, how you memorize numbers is in groups of three or four. We break things into component parts over and over again in our lives. It’s how we understand things. You make it simpler.

So I don’t think you’re killing anything. I really love the way they want to be in deep collaboration with students. Right? I mean that, I couldn’t, again, I keep going more and more in that direction and trying to build that, so that I see. The idea that you’re somehow killing it by taking it apart. I think you’re making it simpler and simpler is not always easier, but it certainly is more comprehensible. And, you can work on the individual parts and then work on putting it together. So I just, I, I, I see it the opposite way. That I think that’s how you make it easier to do all those things you have to do. And there are a lot of moving pieces in rhetorical analysis. It is the thing kids struggle to do most when I’m teaching them because it’s the first time they’re doing this kind of higher level thinking.

Sharona: And what I’m reacting to, as you say that Joe, I feel like in mathematics, we have the same problem and we come at it from a very different angle in that as successful mathematicians, we understand that there are these big, huge overlying concepts and interconnectedness among all these skills. And yet the standards that we teach and the, or not even the standards, but even the way that the textbooks are written and the way that we’re trained in mathematics is this laundry list of very, very discreet skills. And we do so much of that, that we lose all the interconnectedness. And that’s one of the struggles that we’re constantly having when we’re introducing alt grading in, in some of the STEM fields is this push for, but there is a quote unquote, right answer. There’s actually not a right answer. A lot of times there are many right answers, but there are actually also wrong answers.

Joe: And that sounds like an English teacher answer. Because that’s what I would say. There are wrong answers, but there are far more than one right answer.

Boz: Yeah. But Sharona, that was why I was kind of bringing that up is because I think a lot of times in math education, both at the K 12 level and at the college level, we have broken it down so much and dissected the frog so much that we have lost sight of those interconnectedness. So when I read that in this article in that question that she was having to herself, it really resonated because I honestly do believe that’s a big problem with math education in this country is that we have gone to that extreme of dissecting the frog to the point where we have lost. So I was, but yet there seems to be some breaking down that needs to happen. Like you were saying, Joe, with this particular skill.

But yeah, I really reacted to that when I read that and I can see why she is questioning her practice and questioning that particular thing, because I do think it’s possible that you can do that. I don’t think she’s doing it at by any means by breaking down the way she’s doing it right now. And it sounds like Joe, you would agree with that, that she’s not gone anywhere near to the point that breaking it down so much that you’re losing the actual goal of the task.

Joe: What she’s doing is the whole reason I break it down is the way she broke it down, is I look at what I want them to do. Right. And this is the whole, I need created. And what are the steps or the pieces that need to get there that are in and of themselves challenging, right? So that way you’re not like you give someone the task to build a house. Where do they start? Right. Whereas you say, okay, let’s build the foundation. Okay. Let’s put some walls up. So I think she’s breaking it down properly. She’s looking at how do I teach them to do this thing? And these are the, these are the ways to do it. I, I approach it slightly differently than, than she does. But again, I was reading, I went and looked at her, her assessment piece and her assessment tool. And I thought, this is great. It’s getting them a way to look at it into chunks that they can handle what, what both you were talking about with math, obviously, you know just to reiterate for everyone listening, Bosley mangles the English language in a way that is so preposterous. Here, ask him to say analysis again. Right. And watch what happens.

And that said. I’m far worse at math, so I can’t say anything. And it’s also, and I say this very clearly, and I know Sharona would push back against this to all of us. It’s all because I didn’t prioritize it. Not cause I can’t do math. I would never say that. So my point is, I don’t understand intuitively when you say you overbroken it down, but I would say I’m only breaking it down in the sense of thinking about how I put it back together again. So, I don’t have that problem because I’m always concerned with the whole, but I also know that if I don’t break it down, it’s too much. It’s overwhelming.

Sharona: So let me ask you this question then, since we’ve sort of bashed on standardized testing, but I wonder, and Bosley, you’ve at least seen enough of the language side, you might be able to help answer this. How broken down does it get in the standardized testing? Have they taken it so far down in English that you’re in this laundry list of skills or are there still holistic pieces of writing in the standardized testing?

Joe: There are holistic pieces. And Bosley and I know this, I had my students at Santee when Bosley and I were together, had great success on the performance task for the smarter balanced assessment. But that’s because I taught them to write so that that just happened. My, objection, and I know Bosley and I have the same issue is they have a computer assisted piece that we can’t see how it works. So I, I completely balk at reject and utterly dismiss any assessment that we can’t see under the hood for to know what it’s assessing, how it works, what the kids got wrong. The performance test for math and English. Is assessed by human beings like us who get paid not nearly enough. Otherwise, otherwise I do it. Cause I want to see it, but they get that, but teachers get paid to score it and they’re using a rubric we can see, and it’s very transparent. So that piece is fine, but the rest of the stuff we’re giving them is this computer assisted gobbledygook that they won’t show us how it works. So I just, I just, and it, and it does break it into much highlight the, the correct, the correct phrase in this paragraph, that is whatever they’re asking you to do. Yeah. That’s way too much of the, the pieces ask them to do a performance task. That is to create a whole text. That’s fine.

Boz: But, and I know Joe, you would definitely agree with me on this one. One of the bigger complaints is just how much time and Instructional time we lose doing all of this, the levels of assessments that we have to do, and with the focus on those scores and having to try to break it down to not just do well on the performance task, but trying to get these scores up in both the computer aided test and math and English. And those are very much, very specific. Broken down, unrelated skills that you don’t get to test the, the interconnectedness until you get to the performance task. And..

Sharona: So I have two questions I want to ask real quickly about the performance testing, and I want to go back to the article. So I have not seen any of the standardized testing. In either math or English. So Bosley is the performance task in math really holistic? Or is it still at a very molecular level?

Boz: It is more holistic, except there is a few concepts or a few discreet skills that it’s based around which ones those are you know, they, they change and our students getting to see that kind of task and stuff is not something that they get enough time doing because we have so many of these very skill based things we have to get through, you know, and how much content is in a typical course, you don’t get enough time to really, you know, Okay. We’ve just learned, you know, about these three or four statistical ideas. Now let’s put it together in this whole task where we’re analyzing some policy and we’re making recommendations on policy change based on statistical analysis of data, like there’s, that’s a huge jump from here’s a data set. Find the mean to, okay. Are you a policy change based on data? That. It’s a really big jump that our students don’t get enough time to try to get from one to the other.

Sharona: So this leads me to back to the article where Emily writes confession. I’m almost a little rankled that this is working so well. It feels a little too systematic and writing is not at all a systematic activity. In fact, I wonder if in some ways This method replicates teaching practices associated with standardized testing. It also feels somewhat foreign to my own training as a humanities educator. So is what she is doing so systematic that it’s now a problem? Or I mean, what, what are you, what’s your reaction to that, Joe?

Joe: I, I think of writing as very systematic. So I, it’s interesting. One of my favorite texts that I was exposed to when I first became an English teacher was a book called Time for Meeting by Randy Bomer. And his philosophy still guides how I engage texts with kids. And it’s the idea that the only reason we’re here is to make meaning of things, to make sense of things and to connect it to our lives that’s it. But what I realized was, and I watched this with my kids, and it happened, this change happened at Santee, I don’t know if Bosley remembers this, but basically, he’s very loosey goosey, and what I mean by that is, there’s not one way to do things, we can do things in lots of different ways, and I really, I was sort of when I got to Santee is when I sort of came into my own as a teacher. And I tell my students now at at John Marshall’s head, the lunatic they see before them became that lunatic at Santee. That’s when I sort of became the teacher that I am.

But I tried this sort of loosey goosey practice where, any, all these things work. The kids, the kids couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t work. And then what I, what finally got me to the place I am as a teacher and kids still come back to me for this, and I’ll answer that, was I realized that what worked for me as a student was structure. That structure liberated me. That a blank sheet of paper was, was too much freedom. I didn’t know where to go, but when I had structure, it gave me the playing field and the rules and I could do all kinds of stuff and I could bend that structure and I could play with that structure and it sort of resonated to my time in grad school in theater arts, where my mentor always pointed out that long before he played with cubism, Picasso was an expert drafts person. He could draft the human body flawlessly, that you understand the principles before you break them. So from that, I created these organizers that I remember are an administrator that Bosley and I were fond of for quite a time. They’re just raved about these organizers for how to use what’s called keyhole structure, which I’m guessing Dr. Donahoe would consider quite formulaic. Although they’re pretty detailed and there’s a lot of room to play with them.

But the point is students have been so liberated by them and use them so much and say, thank you for giving me a way to understand writing. They come back to me in college, say, can you send me that organizer? I’m like, yeah, here you go. And, and I point out to them that I’ve used that organizer for a three and a half page paper and for an 18 page paper that I wrote in grad school and that they’re, the structure is the same, but it doesn’t mean the paper looks the same. So my point is, All of that is very systematic. And I found that it certainly liberated me. And when I leaned into it as a teacher, my students were more successful and they were empowered by it. They were not bored by it. They were not, you know what I mean? Like again, kids come back to me and want to want to work with me again, because they liked the way their writing grows. So I would argue writing in many ways is systemic. That doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it, but it certainly is my way.

Boz: That’s interesting because talking about that structure, because one of the other things that Emily points out is one of the things that she’s really enjoying and why she is really looking at this and going, okay, this kind of feels weird to me, but it seems to be working, is the conversation she’s having with her students. And in this article, she puts some of those quotes and it sounds like that structure that she’s has broken the rhetorical analysis into has given her students a way to talk about it. That is much more meaningful than, than they had in the past. So it sounds like maybe her, her students are reacting similar to what you were saying and that this structure is actually allowing them to be more free and doing better at it.

Joe: It’s giving them language too. Like I still have a hard time figuring out the context of an argument because she has made that a thing. I don’t use that particular language, but I see it right away going that’s exactly what my kids would be doing. That the minute you give them the language for it, they start embracing that language and you’ve made it systemic in a way that allows them to discreetly discuss their understanding. So yeah, I think it’s fantastic. And I guess what I would say if Dr Donahoe was here, what I would say is like, are you really worried that this is going to undo all the stuff that you do? There’s no way. The way that she’s clearly engaging with her students. No one’s gonna confuse her with someone who’s gonna beat the love of writing out of them. There’s no way.

So I hope she continues to lean into this because it, it doesn’t mean you go all the way to the other side. It doesn’t because you have to make the whole thing. That’s why I still do whole rhetorical analysis essays. It’s just what this is reminding me is that should not be where I do all my formatives on rhetorical analysis. Once I get it set, they can demonstrate it in a larger essay when I know they’re good at it. And I’m going to lean into what Dr. Donahoe is doing here in my own way with this new structure that Mariah and I are going to play around with, because again, it’s a reading skill and we need to be doing it this way. So yeah, I love it.

Sharona: Let me attempt to play devil’s advocate, which is really hard because I’m not an English teacher. But one of the questions that I’ve asked a few college level writing instructors recently, because AI is really shaking people to the core. And in math, yes, we’ve had these systems for a while. They’ve been much harder to use. So it’s shaking us, to a degree, in terms of assessment but I’ve been talking to English faculty and the question is, why are we teaching students to write? Because if you can sort of put some scrambled thoughts into an AI generator, and get what sounds like a pretty decent piece of writing out of it, what are we really trying to get students to do? And their answer to me is, we’re trying to allow students to find their voice. To have a method for them to express themselves. And as part of that, there’s a huge emphasis at the university, or at least some universities, to be very careful about not centering white academic style writing.

Because a lot of these ways that we structure things have a history that smothers distinct voices, especially diverse voices. How do you respond to, is this structure that we’re talking about here, or is rhetorical analysis different because you’re analyzing someone else’s writing? But then as a rhetorical analysis paper, is that your voice as a writer or like, how does that voice piece come into all of this?

Joe: So yeah, I mean, I guess we have to sort of decide what that looks like to us. I think people would very much criticize me for being too willing to embrace the white style, although I would argue Ta Nehisi Coates writes in that style. And white is not a word that I would use to describe him. So the two, I have two answers. One, as Dr. Donahoe points out, this is a reading exercise. So the separation is so wise. Like you need to get the reading down before you do the writing and then you could write about it any way you want to. Like if you want to do that more open ended writing to not go so much with the cultural imperialism of white collegiate writing.

Right. I get that. Teach the kids to play that game, but I’ve got my persona as a writer. It’s a very different persona than others. You know what I mean? And I teach the kids to find their voice and I show them ways they can play with structure to use style. But I want to see them show me how to do that style because again, that structure will give them a way to construct an argument that they need to do. And I show them how I use that same ability to construct an argument, to write a demand letter of my previous landlord when they committed fraud, trying to take my deposit. And I got every cent back. Right. So again, that style, made my wife and I money when someone tried to cheat us. So I would call that a real world application. I think she would agree with that. But for me, it’s just two different things. Yeah.

Sharona: So, if we’re trying to teach a student to write a rhetorical analysis paper, if that is the goal, teach them to write a rhetorical analysis paper, the argument is that step one is they have to be able to read a paper and complete the analysis regardless of how they write about it. Is that what I’m hearing?

Joe: That’s, that’s exactly right. That if we want, and you don’t have to want a rhetorical analysis paper, which obviously Dr. Donahoe is landing on, which is, you don’t need to do it that way. Right. But yeah, if you want, or if you want students to do a rhetorical analysis essay, they have to be able to do rhetorical analysis. And when done well, you can demonstrate this in a Socratic seminar. And that’s another thing that I do is my kids show me rhetorical analysis in a seminar, which I can score because again, I can score their reading response without paper. I heard it. There it is. Right?

So they’re just two different things. And then for, for the essays, I mean, once kids learn how to write an essay for me, they can write all of my essays. You just have to, it’s a slight shift between literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, argument synthesis. They’re mastering the same form of essay writing that will empower them all the way through college. So that part is there’s a bunch of moving pieces But they’re they’re the key is you have to know how to do the thing that’s in the essay. And in this case, you don’t need to do an essay to demonstrate that.

Sharona: So it sounds like What she’s really grappling with and I could be wrong, but this is sort of how it’s landing for me is her goal is to teach writing and there are some non writing skills that are needed to do the things that she’s trying to teach them to do. And so maybe it’s those non writing skills that are sort of on a standards base because even though she’s grading or assessing their written answers to this stuff, she’s really looking for the content of the analysis and not as much the writing. She’s looking for things like clarity of the argument, like their, their own persuasiveness, but that’s not so much about finding their voice when they go to do a rhetorical analysis paper. That’s when their own voice is going to come back in, is in the holistic assignment. Is that what I’m hearing?

Joe: A hundred percent. And while you were doing that, I just Googled someone to make sure I was quoting the right person, but there’s a, a, a fairly famous. Book that connects to Cal State LA Carol Booth Olson, the reading writing connection. You can’t divorce writing from reading much, you know, so if you want to teach writing, you’re teaching reading at some point, you have to, most of us develop our abilities as writers based on how we read. And Booth Olson worked with the guy, Bob Land at Cal State LA on a bunch of research. That’s the connection. Anyway, I, I got those books as part of my credential and it’s, There’s some, she’s done some great research on metacognition and reading, things like that, but also talking about writing. And if you’re a writing teacher, you are by definition a reading teacher. So I think that’s what Dr Donahoe landed on here is I want the writing, but this piece is not a writing piece.

Boz: See, and I wonder reading, really the first paragraph of, or not the first paragraph, but the first paragraph of the section of this that’s called the problem. I’m kind of curious because she points out that the rhetorical analysis is something that’s a required component of most first year writing courses in most departments, including hers. But I’m curious. And I would love to actually ask her next time we see Emily, if she had 100 percent control of her course and could make her own student learning outcomes not tied to department requirements, if this would be one that was actually in it. Because it almost sounds like the way she wrote this first paragraph is that this might not be a unit that if she didn’t have to teach, she wouldn’t teach and possibly because it is more of a reading skill than a writing skill. Am I off base with this or?

Joe: I mean, what, why, again, if you can’t divorce them, why would you skip it? And one of the things I guess I would say about in the wild, just to remind ourselves, we’re in the middle of election season right now. Being able to discern how someone is persuading you is very useful for a human being to know when they’re being played. You know what I mean? And to know when they’re okay with the rhetoric they’re getting.

Forgetting the thing we used to do when I think when we were in school, we’d look at advertisements or whatever. I’m saying just in the political sense, there’s so much rhetoric getting thrown at us. Being able to look at that and be able to take it apart, I think is a quite is a very worthwhile skill to make someone autonomous to keep them from being at the mercy of highly educated people who are using language to dishonestly persuade them.

Boz: Yeah, as a stats teacher, this is my favorite season. I love election season as a stats teacher for that same reason, pointing out, yes, there’s oftentimes bad graphs and media accidentally, but especially in this season, there is a lot of them out there purposely because they’re trying to make an argument by manipulating numbers in a way that it’s, it can be misleading. And pointing those out and being able to recognize that. Is a big part of the stats class. I teach at the high school level and part of, you know, the class that, that I teach at the college level that Sharona, you and I started with that. Now you, you coordinate, you’re not actually teaching in it, but you’re coordinating the whole thing. So I, I love this, this season and it’s for the exact same thing that you were just talking about, Joe, is being able to recognize when highly educated people are trying to manipulate you.

Joe: Right, right. So yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s really useful and just, I know we’ll be wrapping up soon before we do when, when you both want to talk, I would love to talk about how i’m stepping more into. Dr. Donahoe’s direction in terms of collaborative grading. Cause I, it is, it was interesting to me to read this going, wow, I’m stepping towards you and you’re stepping towards me. So.

Boz: Well, and why don’t you go ahead and, or did you have something you wanted to ask?

Sharona: Well, I was actually just going to reference a part of the paper that I kind of think leads into what you’re saying. So let me reference this part of the paper. And then if you just want to go straight to your grading, you can, but. She, after her paragraph where she talks about the systematic way of teaching this or not, she was talking to some faculty about AI and if there are different types of cognitive work, could you have AI do part of it? And right after that paragraph, a couple of faculty members objected and said, no, all parts of writing are interconnected. And she said that she doesn’t disagree, but she wonders if the process is different for our students. That the skills are all connected for us because we’ve mastered them, but when you’re just learning how to learn them, maybe it’s helpful to break it down. And so I wanted your reaction to that and then lead that into, and where are you taking it then on your grading system?

Joe: Sure. And I’m, I’m reading the part we’re talking about. Yeah. I actually think that she’s dead on with that, that especially for students and especially for kids in high school, right? My whole, and I know Mariah mentioned this a week ago, everything I do comes back to the reading apprenticeship framework. Everything. It just, it transformed me as a teacher. And what that does is it talks about that because most educated adults are wielding so many processes in concert, we look at everything as holistic and we don’t realize that until you get all those processes mastered, you’re not going to be able to do all those things.

So breaking it up really helps. I agree a hundred percent that that’s certainly how I work. And again, for high school students, I can really resonate with if you’re teaching adults to be fully collaborative. I have too many kids that are gaming their grades for me to be a hundred percent in that. Yet, I’m going more and more that way. So what I’m doing is thanks to Dr. Fox. I got into, I read Pointless and I love, there’s a whole thing in there, the story of my learning journey.

So I have kids. I created a progress tracker, a progress monitor, and a grade portfolio where they have to, every time I give feedback on something, they have to write a quick, short, two to three sentence reflection on it. And these are breaking broken down by the learning targets we’re currently working on, and they’ll have a sense of for all the different learning targets. Where are they? Where do they want to go based on my feedback? How far are they from getting there? And then at the midterm and final, and they just did the midterm when they’re writing the story of my learning journey. And it may even go into , full grading conferences by the end.

And what I’m finding is A) I’m doing that for every learning target B) based on some great stuff in the Hattie Fisher and fry book maybe fray. I’m not sure. Developing assessment capable visible learners. They talk about just the efficacy. And I know Bosley mentioned this with Mariah, the efficacy of students self assigning grades. So I’m having students use a bunch of resources for their speaking and listening work, and it’s not participation. It’s actual speaking and listening with really clear articulated, you know, goals, and they’re telling me their score and. I can overrule it if they’re just trying to sell me, but the vast majority are being harder on themselves than I would be. And what that’s doing is it’s making them push harder.

And a couple of them, I told one of my best kids, I’m going to let you keep this lower score. You know why? Cause I know you’re going to equal the goals you’re setting, and then you’re going to be on proficient and look how much you will have grown from actually being a little harder on yourself. So the kid gave himself a two and a half, I would have scored him a three. And I said, I’m keeping the two and a half. And then some kids laughed when I told the story, I said, what are you laughing about? By the time the semester’s over, he’s going to be a three and a half. Pushing a four. And more importantly, what that means is he chose to grow because I know the A is coming for this kid. Right.

And so my point is I can see myself doing more and more and more of that. And having them once they’re bought in that we are, we are, we are agreeing that we’re in partnership on building these skills, letting them argue for their grade, as long as they’re showing me legit evidence for it. And I love it because again, they’re in charge. They’re the reason I created this progress tracker was, I said, I want you in charge of your grade. I said, I’m only going to be computing grades for you four times a year. And I can certainly look in the, in the, in between I go with this tracker. You can tell me your grade at any moment. And it’s not a percentage it’s based on skills. So I just, I, I see myself going more and more in this direction. And Lord knows the research shows that, you know, students assigning Self assigning grades has got massive efficacy because it puts them in charge as opposed to making them sort of helpless to our assessment.

Boz: Yeah, it kind of puts them in the driver’s seat instead of just along for the ride.

Joe: Exactly.

Sharona: So she asks two questions right at the end of that. So the first question is definitely for you. The second question is for all three of us. And I have, I, I have something very specific I want to say about it. The first question she says, writing instructors, have I trampled all over best practice over all best practices in the teaching of writing?

Joe: I’m trying to, where’s that question at?

Sharona: It’s right underneath the skills being connected for us because we’ve mastered them. It’s the next one. Am I way off base here is the paragraph. It’s the last couple of sentences there.

Joe: I would say quite the opposite, right? Like, again, I think she’s breaking it down in a way that it is more comprehensible for her students and I’m guessing if she asks them to do a rhetorical analysis essay after having done this work, the results she would get would be fantastic. But yeah, I do not think for one moment she’s trampling over the teaching of writing.

And I certainly share everyone’s concern. Like I’m the most anti AI person in the world just because I want kids to find their own voices and I try to get kids to agree to leave it out. If I was a college student and I wanted to brainstorm, I might use AI for that part, but I want them to find their own voice. So I’m a real big believer in do the thinking yourself. But this breaking it into the skills, I just think it’s a form of chunking, which we do as readers as well, just to make that point, right. When we’re reading something that is big and dense, we read it in pieces. We do everything for the most part in pieces until we can get it all right.

I mean, even as teachers, right? Like there’s a phrase that Bosley and I always talk about because it’s a football and baseball phrase, which is when players get better, it feels like the game slows down for them. And that is certainly true. I know we all think that as teachers, right? You see that once you’re experienced, I’m always ahead of my students. When I, when I was, when I was new to this game, Oh my God, the room was moving so fast, right? Well, one of the ways. To get it to slow down is to, is to break it into its discrete parts. First, I’m doing this, then I’m doing this, then I’m doing this. I think, I think she’s doing that. And I think she’s organically found one of the key operating principles for how people learn.

Sharona: So then she asked the second question. She says, alternative graders. Am I wrong in thinking that this way of assessing analysis veers into something that looks like standards based grading? And I would say, I think she might be wrong, she might not be wrong. I think the challenge is what exactly are you assessing? Are you assessing their ability to do the analytical reading and communicate to you that they understand the piece of text that they are analyzing? Or are you evaluating their ability to write a rhetorical analysis paper? What is your learning outcome specifically? And if your learning outcome, because you’ve done this breakdown that you have found you need to do to give the students the skills they need to be able to do the thing you want them to do, but it’s only standards based if part of your grading architecture is based on learning outcomes that are more on the reading side. Am I wrong?

Boz: I don’t, I don’t think you’re wrong, but looking at when she goes into describing how she’s actually doing this without doing a rhetorical analysis paper, I think that’s exactly what she’s doing. And I would say, yes, she is going into a direction that veers into something like standards based grading for this unit. What I disagree with her is the tone of which I’m reading some of this, that she thinks that’s a negative thing. So first, we’ve said this a million times, there are so many different ways of doing alternative grading. And if you get three people in a room, you’re probably going to have four to six different ways of doing it. And this, kind of blending of ungrading or contract grading and standards based grading is filling a need that her students have.

And I love Emily to death, I know how much she is over to the ungrading or contract grading side. But she has found a area where her students actually need something a little bit more on the standards base, and I don’t think she should be afraid of it. I think, like Joe said, she should lean into that. And I think it’s a good thing. She is to the point in her reflective practice, because she is an extremely reflective person, that’s the whole reason why she wrote this, that she is now starting to blend these different alternative grading concepts together to make something that is specific for her students, her style at her setting at this moment, which is the goal of all alternative grading. Finding that perfect, or close to perfect product that really takes into account you as an instructor, your pedagogical practices, your goals for the class where they need to be at the end and the needs of your customers, your students. So, yes, you are veering and bravo for it.

Joe: Just to, when you said it, Bosley, just to piggyback on that, like you just said the national board of professional teaching standards line for the architecture of accomplished teaching. What do these students in this place at this time need? And you give it to them. So, I mean, I guess, cause my only problem with the entire blog, the only thing that I would push back against is what Bosley said. I didn’t understand the tone. That’s the first question I asked before we started recording was what’s the deal with the standards based thing. And would it sound better if it said skills based?

Because again, she determined. that the kids were struggling to develop this skill. So she backwards engineered a way for the kids to build this skill. That’s called great teaching to me. And I applaud her for that. And I certainly agree that just like the phrase that I didn’t get to say that I also never really used until I got to Santee, and now use all the time, is the tail wagging the dog. Like a lot of these standardized tests, especially all the interims and all this nonsense is the tail wagging the dog. I don’t need it in my life. This is not that. She determined this based on what her kids needed. I think it’s, I, again, I, I couldn’t be more impressed. And again, it is reinforced my need to make my formative assessments for rhetorical analysis reading based because she’s right.

Sharona: Well, and the thing I would also say is, I don’t know that I would call it standards based grading, actually. What I would call it. Is she has scaffolded some more specific descriptions of what it means to be successful in this area because she’s still having the students propose their own grades. If you don’t give students a structure on which to to do the evaluation of their skills, then they have nothing to work with. So what she’s discovered is that piece of her scaffolding needed a little bit more detail. So I don’t know. Yes, she’s giving them marks. But it’s more like hey, you’re an expert. They need a guidepost. They need somebody to say, you’re going in the direction that is doing what you wanted to do or not, sometimes. And I don’t know that they can always do all of it themselves.

Joe: I mean, what you just said is exactly why I teach writing the way I teach it, right? That without a structure, we have no place to go. And I can’t tell you just to, just to hammer this point home, that when I provide the structure that I guarantee you a lot, a lot of, you know, English teachers would call formulaic. I, again, my kids write very detailed papers that some of them are, you know, are pushing seven, eight, nine pages. Some are writing three pages. So I’m not getting the same work. What I am getting is the kids who embrace it, that structure allow it liberates them and they go in different directions and they get more creative because all of a sudden the structure provides confidence. Like you said, they need an expert to say, this is what it looks like. I give them exemplars from previous students doing the same assignment, all kinds of things, but then what it does to their confidence and their ability to transcend that structure, it’s, it’s evidently successful. I see it. You know what I mean? And I think that’s what you’re talking about. Even with the grading practice, you give, you provide a model, you provide guidance, students will achieve.

Boz: All right. So I’ve got one more thing I want to ask the entire group because we’re all alternative graders, we’ve all been doing this for a while. And Emily asked this at the very end, and I think it’s an interesting question for the three of us, because I think all three of us are, have done it to some degree. And the very last line is, what kinds of hybrids have you intentionally or unintentionally created in your own grading systems? So, Sharona or Joe? Either one of you want to talk about like these different hybrid of alternative gradings that have ended up in your classes..

Sharona: So I think I’ve brought this up on the pod before, but my most hybridy one was my History of Math class. Because it was definitely a smushing together of what I would call specs and standards. And actually, Joe, that’s the one you did the rubric, you helped me with the rubric for which was a godsend. Cause I was like, it was one of those, well, I know good work when I see it, but I can’t tell you why. Okay. So in that class, they had four projects, plus they had a learning community. And they also had, I think, 10 learning outcomes, which included the learning community. And to get an A, you needed four projects complete to my satisfaction, not theirs.

So I was definitely not on the ungrading collaborative side of things. I was on the, I am the arbiter side of things still, but it was you had to complete four projects and you also needed nine learning outcomes complete to a proficient level. And the way you got those learning outcomes was in the projects. So all of the assessment was in the projects.

And it was sort of this like grid thing, but you had to accomplish these projects. The projects had specifications. It was like, you have to do this and this and this, and this, it has to have this piece. It has to have this piece. The writing has to be clear. The math has to be correct, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the content has to touch on your understanding of one or more of the learning outcomes. So that was my most hybridy one that I definitely do not have a name for. Because it was a math teacher teaching history through projects that involved writing. So I think maybe that was why it was so hybridy is the content was so hybridy.

Boz: And then Joe, you’ve said that yours is actually Is what you would consider standards based, but it is moving towards the collaborative or ungrading kind of field of alternative grading.

Joe: Yeah. And, and I would say, you know, very deliberately and, one of the things that I’m constantly trying to figure out and just having this conversation with you both now is making me think about it is when I make the kids do this more, I’m doing less grading and I need to do less grading, right? I need to read their essays, but for other stuff, the less I do, the more I can focus on teaching and learning. So I’m, I’m thinking, you know, Watching how the story of my learning journey goes, watching how this student self assigned grades go and maybe pushing more and more into that, you know, I I’ve still got to do legally grades, right? I’ve got to do certain things, but I can get to the minimum of that and put most of my effort into reading essays, which is what students certainly prefer because they get the real feedback.

And thinking about it, I think that’s the direction I want to go. I want to give students more of an ability to tell me they’re great. As long as I, once I get them to buy into doing the same game, like we said, they’re always harder on themselves than we are. And. As long as I can just be there to say, nah, you’re not a B you’re an A at this point, you know what I mean? But let them do that work. It’s going to A) lighten my load, so I’m doing the more real teaching and less bookkeeping of grades, and B) empower the students more. So, you know, I think that’s going to be, I mean, it, As I sit here now, that’s what I think the journey is going to be. And it’s certainly the direction I’ve been going.

Boz: Yeah. So, and I, I know for, for my high school stats class, especially I’ve taken a lot of the underlying concepts of the quantitative reasoning with statistics class that Sharona, you and I do at Cal State, but because I have so much more time, I’ve been able to go into more detail on some of it, but I’ve been able to also, introduce more methods, more types of assessments because that is what been one of my concerns and complaints about the class we do at Cal State is all of our assessments are quiz based assessments pretty much. Yes, we have one presentation, but that’s a particular. Learning outcome that it’s all the other statistic outcomes are assessed through a through quiz like assessments. So in my high school statistics class, it really has become a hybrid between a version of standards base joe and I would call EGI and specs like, like your history of math did, but, and it’s, I’m intentionally bringing in different projects that the students can do as a alternative assessment to the quizzes or some of my learning targets that is the only type of assessment you know, is doing these projects, which is very much a specs base graded.

So yes, I’m I’m doing the hybrid similar hybrid that you did for your, your math history or history of math. And I’m really enjoying it. And I, I think it’s doing well for my students. So I’d love to hear what other kind of hybrids people have gotten have come up with. It. I love the fact that Joe’s and Emily’s are the two extremes coming towards each other. But I’m curious what other hybrids are out there. So if you’re listening and you’ve got a hybrid method, let us know about it.

Sharona: And I want to add that it was very enjoyable to respond to a blog post in our community. So if anyone has any articles that you see that you’re like, Hey, we’d love to hear you discuss this. Please, use the contact us form and send in an article or a book that you think we should be looking at and discussing. Joe, any last thoughts before we wrap up?

Joe: I just, I really enjoyed this and whenever Bosley says, do you you want to come on the pod for whatever reason, the answer is always yes. But I mean, I just, I got a lot out of reading this. So I just want to thank Dr. Donahoe for this because again, it’s got me leaning more into the reading aspect of rhetorical analysis, which by the way, like, next week, I start at hardcore, so the timing could not be better. And just reminding me to, to keep going in this direction of more collaborative grading for myself.

Boz: All right. Well, thank you as always for joining us, Joe. It’s always fun when we, when we get you on. And thank you, our audience, for sticking around and listening. And we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website. www. thegradingpod. com or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a featured 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.