The Grading Podcast

79 – Phil_Stringer

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Boz: So I had a question since you were just talking about you know, doing feedback. In fact, you were grading before you got on here, has your feedback, like your style or amount of feedback changed since doing this?

Phil Stringer: Yeah, I think. I used to do a lot more corrections. Teaching math, I think I jumped in and did the work for the kids. And so I definitely give more questions now back to the kids. Like, why did you do this? Or, Hey, check, you know, these steps here. And if, if you do that, it needs to be coupled as well. I believe it needs to be coupled with some time to actually do those things too. So we have some reflection time that we use in the department when we give back assessments. And the assessments don’t have any marks on them. They have no marks and no levels. So the kids only can, you know, they look at it the first few times, especially they’re like, what did I get? And of course, the whole, what did I get and then toss it away, whether or not they got what they wanted or, or Or didn’t becomes now, okay, well he left me this feedback. Does that mean that I’m proficient or extending? Like, what does this feedback mean to eventually it just becomes, okay, I need to attend to this feedback. And he’s given me some time to do that.

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

Sharona: So I am very proud to report that I have survived my semester of exam generation. I still have not yet quite survived my semester of answer key generation because I still have to do that, but we are recording this, it is finals week and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not an oncoming train. So how are you doing Boz?

Boz: Yeah. You know, it is, even though this is probably going to come out a little while after we actually recorded, we’re recording this in the final week of both Cal State, it’s finals week, and then it’s also the last week before break in my high school settings. So, yeah, it’s just a few days out. I’m definitely looking forward to it. It’s been a great semester, but it’s also ready for that break.

Phil Stringer: Thank you.

Boz: So one of the first things we always like to ask our new guest is just how did you get involved in this world of grading reform?

And then I went back the next year and now there were multiple sessions on standards based grading. And I thought, okay, I better actually see what this is about. But it, it didn’t fit where I was quite at with the school that I was at. So I put that on the shelf as well. But it kind of kept niggling at me. And one of the things that I was tasked to do when I first came to the, to Crofton House, when I first came to this school as a new school employee was, I was actually the educational technology coordinator here. And I had to teach. Everybody how to use a new online grade book that we had. So I had to sit down with each staff member. There’s over 100 staff members for about an hour or more per person. Do some small groups, do some individual work. Yeah, It was a massive rollout on how to use the new gradebook. And so yeah, my office door was always open and I was always busy but it was the first time I ever got to look into anybody else’s gradebook. And I knew what I had done for a while 15 years, 20 years up to that point in my career where I, you know, collected points and had them nicely organized by tests and quizzes and projects sometimes. And so I thought to myself what are all these other people doing? Like, what categories do they need? And, and then I started just seeing some interesting mathematics. Sometimes I would see English teachers marking things out of six because they had a rubric that was out of six. And giving that the same weight as a Participation mark out of 10 that they gave on a Monday and a Tuesday and a Wednesday and a Thursday and a Friday. And I just said to them, you know, that it’s just adding all of these numbers up and dividing. And they said, no, it just spits out a number accurate to three decimal places. And I said, okay, well, do you want to me to show you how to create like at least buckets for these different things, so it weighs it properly.

And then I had other conversations where a teacher would give a larger quiz out of 30 and then realize one of the questions wasn’t written all that well. And so they wanted to reduce it to 29 and a half as the denominator? Yeah. They just like, they had one mark. Then they thought, okay, well I’m gonna divide this into two parts and take out a 0. 5 somewhere. And the grading system couldn’t handle decimal places as what it was out of. So it would treat 29 and a half out of 29 and a half still is 29 and a half out of 30. It continued to round up the denominator.

And so they started telling other people, they didn’t tell me this right away. They told other people, Oh, the grading system won’t allow decimal places. And so then I started getting people who are like, well, they got one outta six on their essay, but that translates to, you know, 16% or 16.6%. Well, that’s not a good example. Five outta six on it. You know, that translates to, oh, there’s all these decimal places, we better run it up to the thousand. So then they made the denominator like out of 60,000 or something like that. And I’m like, but it’s still got a weighting of one against, anyway, on and on and on, the mathematics behind this, and I thought there’s gotta be a better way than all of these things, and to be honest, no two people, even in the same department, had the same gradebook.

And so I thought there’s got to be some standardization that we can do. There’s got to, there’s got to be a better way at organizing all of this data. And so that little niggle in the back of my head about standards based grading got a little louder and I started investigating some resources, mostly books at that time to, to try to figure out what to do.

And then I thought, as I’ve done through most of my career I’m just going to try this. And because the naysayers always say things like, well, that might work in, you know, middle school or, oh, that might work in humanities. I thought I’m going to do this first in AP Calculus BC, because if I can make it work there, then I won’t have any other naysayers. And so that’s what I did. And I, I designed Standards for the course. I thought I was doing that quite well and off I went and I tried to explain it to the one class of kids at my school and get feedback as I went.

And it fell flat on its face mostly because mostly because I had 40 content standards. And that’s it. And so I was trying to measure 40 really specific things, and I couldn’t do that very well without assessing summatively way, way, way too often or way too granularly. So I quickly realized that i. e. I don’t know, after the second unit test, that I was doing this completely wrong. And I, I managed to make it through that first year somehow and then tweaked it. I think I got it down to about, 15 or maybe 20 standards the second year. And I drew in some colleagues at that point too. So there were a couple of people in my department that were interested in what I was doing. And so we started working on it together a little bit and they thought, well, maybe this will work in grade eight, or maybe this will work in my, you know foundations of math class. And so a little bit of capacity started to grow. And then I realized that even 15 or 20 standards was probably too much. And so as the years went by, the number of standards started to settle down closer to maybe eight to 10. And it started standards based grading started to grow at the school in the department. Within departments, there were some science teachers, PE teachers, all over the school, people were wondering what this is about, hearing mostly from students that there was some changes to the way assessment was starting to happen in some people’s classes. And of course, then they started comparing.

So it hit a critical mass maybe about 10 years ago, where we decided to stop, kind of put a little bit of a pause on things, and see whether or not this was something that a the department was going to do fully or, call call us crazy, could we actually embrace standard space grading at the school and try to move the school forward? So yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the origin story of up to the point of where More systemic change needed to be made. And how I got interested in looking at grading in a totally different way.

Boz: Okay. I have so many things to comment and ask you about, but I’ve got to say, we’ve had what, probably 20 plus guests on by now? And we always ask this question and it, it always surprises me to see the different places and the similarities and the differences. But you’re the first one that has come on saying that part of what brought you into this was seeing someone else’s. And that is something, because when I first started doing like some of my pedagogy reform and just educational reform work, it wasn’t really around grading per se. It was around PLCs, but that was one of my things with the PLC is we’ve got this teacher roulette where a kid’s grade is more determined by the teacher, because of these weights and the way they set up their grades. And they’re being so drastically different and just how many conversations I’ve had with people in PLCs teaching the exact same thing. And they’re like, Oh yeah, I think our grade books are really similar. Like you’ve got the same categories, but your percentages are so drastically different that the exact same student could get three or four different letter grades. So I’m glad to see someone else kind of coming from that point. Cause I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone else that, in our interviews, unless I’m forgetting someone, Sharona.

Sharona: No, I don’t think so. But there are two other things that you said. Like I love the similarities and I love the differences. So the whole, I screwed it up royally the first time, is almost universal.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: I do want to reassure you, you are not the person with the craziest number of learning outcomes. The one that I really heard really do it was Robert Talbert’s first time when he had 64 in a one semester math class. So that, so that just, I don’t know if that’s helpful or not, but we’ve all done that. I also love when Bosley, you almost fell off the chair because the standard thing is, oh, I see how that works in fill in the blank other discipline, but not in my fill in the blank discipline. We had math, say it about science, science, say it about math, dental hygienists, say it about engineering, phys ed, say about kinesiology, like, Literally point at any other discipline from your own and you can get that statement.

And I went to one that Sharona and I have now actually presented at a couple of times, the CMC South and the, great conference, you know, a lot of great stuff, but yeah, I don’t think I ever remember hearing anything about. Standards based or anything like that until what, the mid teens, Sharona?

Boz: Well, publication, but actually seeing it in a conference. I don’t remember.

Sharona: So the first time, yeah, so

Boz: not

Sharona: not at all. The same thing.

Boz: Yeah.

Phil Stringer: Yeah. So. I, we have a local university here, the university of British Columbia, and they have their own conversions for the AP scores to how they view those grades as percentages. And so I piggybacked off of that and thought, well, if UBC, which is just, you know, taking quite a number of our students and super close by are using a particular grade conversion. I could piggyback off that and use a similar kind of grade conversion. And so I went onto their website, looked up what that conversion was, and said, okay, well, if I’m going to build a four or five point scale, I need to have similar numbers. And, and I just, I played with that. I knew that If I were to use, you know, a four on an AP means something to me and that four spits out this percentage, which is what that university was using at the time, then I shouldn’t be too far off of reality or other ways of grading. And so I, I felt fairly comfortable with going with those percentages as my baseline. Unfortunately, there isn’t a hundred percent in that system. So I thought, well, if they could show me the kind of five out of five level twice during the year, twice in a row, then I would give them 100 percent because some of these kids need marks above a 96, I think was what you used to take the five to be, and we need students to have that mark’s even higher than that for some universities and competitive university programs. So I, I designed my own system based off of almost the one to five scale of the AP plus my own additional category. That was like five star. If you should, you know, I’ve, I’ve worked twice. But that was the basis. And then, as I said, over the years, it morphed. And, and I really wanted it to work with those, that first group of, of calculus students, because I really believed that this is going to be a better thing. And if I could make this work here, there’s really no limit to where it could work, no pun intended.

Boz: But did you get, did you get any pushback from the students or the, or the parents?

Phil Stringer: I, to be honest, I don’t, I don’t think I did because, I, I had historic data. So I, as long as I could go back to either the students or any parents or admin with class average hasn’t changed. And you know, the students are still getting into university and still have, you know, great grades. you know, they’re still really competitive against their peers, then I, there’s, there’s no damage being done. And the kids were actually feeling like, I don’t have to get it the first time. You mean I can have two or three or four chances and you’ll, take, the more recent or the using some of those kinds of language strategies with them, they were like, this is great. I mean, I don’t have to get it right away. And this thing isn’t going to haunt me, you know, that I got zero out of 10 on the first try that I did it. And when I say zero out of 10, I, I haven’t given a zero out of 10 for however many years, a decade now or so. But like the equivalent of that, or if they did a formative, you know, check in and they, they didn’t do as well as they wanted to, they know there’s always opportunity to recover. And I just think that went so far with the students, especially in a course where there’s a lot of new symbol or there’s a lot of new thinking when they first get into that. But if I had done this with a grade eight group, where maybe a lot of the kids already knew the, the mathematics eight curriculum and they were all kind of at that. upper end anyway. I don’t know that I would have been able to use that as any kind of leverage later on.

Sharona: So you said that this took you up to the point where you went to more systemic change. So why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about that systemic change? What happened next?

Phil Stringer: Well, once you get to a critical mass of teachers trying to do this and of course although we would talk to each other and share ideas, I don’t know that we had A unified approach. And so, although changing some of the courses to standards based grading was better than traditional grading in the school, there was still a discontinuity between the subject areas. And maybe even classes within the subject area. And so that was causing a different kind of tension, you know, that, you know, my class had 10 learning standards and I looked at it this way and another class had five learning standards and they had a different number of levels to their learning standards. Like there wasn’t a continuity between those classes. And, and we had conversations about. you know, well, IB does it this way and they have, you know, their number of levels and they have this understanding, what if we built a system that was more like that and more unified?

And so, yeah, it came, it came to the department head table, which is, there’s one representative from each academic area of the school and P. H. E. Creative arts, applied design. You know, there’s there’s eight or 10 people who are in leadership positions at the school, plus admin at the table. And it was basically a discussion about assessment and we’ve got this thing brewing. Should we tackle it? And we made it our priority. And we sat down and said, if we’re going to do a good job of this, what do we need to do? And some standardization was one of the first things we decided we needed to do. So we could all speak the same language to students so that they weren’t seeing a completely different version of standards based grading between them. Departments or between teachers in a department. And so at the approximate same time, we had some curriculum changes and assessment reporting changes in the province. And so we were able to Kind of double dip and say, Okay, well, we’re redesigning some of our curriculum, and we’re going to redesign some of our assessment based on a few things that the government was telling us we should do more of like no zeros and take a look at your late policies. And over the last 10 years or so, they’ve just rolled out more and more and more of those assessment policies that are matching more and more and more to Standards based grading without actually saying it is.

And now our K 9 in our province is four levels, emerging, developing, proficient, and extending, which is the language that we jumped on prior to them officially making it the language. And so we had. Levels for our standards based grading that were synced really nicely with what the province were doing, and it came down to a meeting. We sat down this, this group of leaders and said, are we doing this for real? And everybody said, let’s do it. Not without hesitation. There are people who, you know, their departments hadn’t fully understood what they were getting themselves into and some of the work and rethinking of things that need to go along with some of these assessment reforms, but we sat down and over a year got people resources and had conversations and designed a and we have a assessment policies and practices document for our school that outlines. What do you do if and we ran through all of the scenarios and how how many standards and what are the levels and what are our understandings that matched are mostly are provincial levels and how to convert to, you know, from these levels to percentages when they’re needed, and we have to report percentages in grade 10 currently, so we had. Ways that were standardized for everybody.

And now we said, okay, we’ve got this framework. Let’s do it with all the grade eight classes. And so we rolled it out with the freshman grade eights, whatever you call them. And then we moved that up to grade nine and 10 grade 12. And last year we graduated our grade 12s who hadn’t seen anything except the system. Even when we rolled it out to grade eights, we didn’t stop teachers who taught multiple grades from using that system. So as soon as it rolled out to grade eights, I was already using that system with my grade 11 and 12. So the transition was like, it wasn’t as clear cut as it just rolled up through the grades. It was rolling up and sideways and downwards and whatever as capacity allowed itself. But now we’ve just got students who, obviously the new students in the school need to be taught what is and, and how you’re being assessed and what does all that look like? But they’re getting the exact same message, whether they’re in science eight or math eight or art eight or PHE eight. They have, we’re linear, so they have eight courses and they’re Learning how all of this has that same language across the board, which is the real power to this. So,

Boz: yeah, no, I, I, we, I’ve tried and just getting some common language around mission and vision or getting common language around goals of a department is hard enough, but yet is extremely powerful. So the fact that you guys were able to pull this off with a grading purpose and an assessment purpose and structure, Is quite impressive Like How big of a school are we taught? Like how big is the staff that.

Phil Stringer: We, we’ve got 500 students and just over 500 students grade eight to 12 with 70 staff. I’m just making a quick guess. No, a little bit less 60 staff. It, it wasn’t, I don’t want to make it sound like it was easy. It was not easy and there were definitely given takes. So, you know, if you have to know. Like I, I knew that if I could design the system myself, I would have maybe made some changes to it, but I’m looking at the system going, Oh my gosh, the strength that we have, if everybody’s on board for this system is enough. And I can live with the small tweaks that I wish we had made, or we could be making, or maybe I’m wrong and I can, you know, adapt. I, I think that there was. You know, there were some really interesting discussions because how. A performance class like drama or P. E. Maybe looks at some ways of measuring standards versus a heavy writing class in the humanities versus a skills class in math or science like it was some very good professional discussion around those things. And the policy and practices document that we’ve had, we’ve made tweaks to. over the, you know, the last number of years, but the original document held true. We, we kind of vetted it with some experts in assessment and they gave us feedback and they said, Oh, you have to change this part and that part. And have you thought about these other things? And we either listened to them or we didn’t, but it was our document. So, and it was our context and our school.

And so I think there was a lot of power and In being able to say no and being able to figure out this matches what we need to do here. I, I get asked about, Oh, you know, can, can you come to our, you know, our school, or can we come in and take a look and see what you’re doing? And it’s so context dependent, like the actual schools themselves that you know, I’m happy to work with other people through some of the process, but. It really takes sitting down and talking within the staff about what’s going on and kudos to the leadership, like, you know, the department heads and the admin at our school for being able to give us free rein to do this. You know, I recognize in a lot of the public schools in British Columbia, at least the the teacher autonomy, you can’t tell me what to do kind of thing. Like, I, like. In some ways, because we’re at an independent school, there’s a little bit more directive, but if you’re at an IB school, you can’t be like, I’m not going to teach the IB way and I’m not going to, you know, be assessed, assessing through the IB standards. So that’s the lens that we’ve always used. Like, if you want to be part of this kind of assessment community, this is what we’re about.

Boz: Yeah, and I mean, that’s, we, we talk about, and you know, to your point about working with other schools or other districts, you know I, I’ve seen it where even just individual teachers try to pick someone’s grading system up and duplicate it. That’s one of the powers of the system. Any kind of alternative grading, but it’s also one of its curses is it is very personalized, you know, and I think, Sharona, you say it all the time at grading is one of the most, you know, personal things, relationships we’ll have with our students. That’s what makes alternative grading so great is you really can make it work for your students, your class, your philosophies, your values. But that also means you have to do that then, because it, it has, I’ve, I’ve seen it just fail miserably taking a system that is vetted, that works great for, you know, teacher A, teacher B, because they have a different philosophy, they have, you know, a different pedagogical style, absolutely doesn’t work for them.

Sharona: Well, and that, I mean, I know that you and I talked about this offline, Phil, but not only do you have the same language. the same levels. You said something about the same number of standards across different classes.

Phil Stringer: Well, like, well, in a mathematics eight class, we have four standards that we’re using for the year, that’s it. And that is common across all of the mathematics eight classes. But if I look over to science eight, they have six standards. So it’s roughly the same number of standards. We, we aimed for, I think we said approximately six or like four to eight kind of standards is the number of standards that most of the courses have at the school.

Sharona: That’s interesting. Cause I know you kind of said, Oh, I got down to like 15. I routinely work between 15 and 25 learning outcomes in a semester. And so. I know people. We did four once. It was a nightmare. It was a disaster. We did 20 once in the same course. That was also a disaster. That particular course now has 10 content standards and five other standards, mathematical practices and some other things. So I just, I have trouble comprehending a successful four standard class because we did one and it was not, it was not good. It was so not good. Right, Boz? You were there.

Boz: Yeah, but it was also, I mean, because, you know, like I said, I, I know, especially some of my English colleagues that use a lot less. And. It works for them. It’s with the way they, they grade and the way their standards are set up. Ours, especially in the math class that she’s talking about, is a little bit more, you know, skill focused and discrete things. And I think when you do that, you’re, you do tend to have more learning targets are standards. And when you have the bigger, broader learning targets that. You do, you have fewer.

Sharona: Yeah. And I guess most of my classes I’ve gone smaller than that in content, strictly content standards are strictly, but when I include other things, like I have a habits of mind standard that sort of groups together everything that’s not assessing for proficiency that’s in there, I tend to have some mathematical practices or some writing practices or something like that in there. So, You know, they overlap. They’re not discrete things. And a lot of them assess on the same assessment. Like you would not, I would not assess any of the practices by themselves. They’re always paired with content standards of some sort. So maybe it’s just a different way of slicing and dicing the stuff.

Phil Stringer: Sorry, one of the other things, and when you said, you know, habits of mind, we actually intentionally this year also looked at our learning habits and we designed our own scale and our own system for learning habits and rolled that out across all the grades this year. And so now a report card actually starts, not with learning habits meets or doesn’t meet, but like, independence, responsibility, organization, collaboration is done. And then scale of I think we’re using seldom sometimes consistently. And so that, that actually shows up when it says math eight, that shows up at the top of the report card, because we all know that these are the, you know, the way that we teach students about their own personal ways that they learn and be responsible and can be independent and organized and collaborative, all those kinds of things are the things that are going to help them be responsible adults. So we put that at the beginning of each course, and then after that are our standards with the proficiency levels attached to whatever standards have been set. done and then an anecdotal comment from the teacher after that. So it’s, it’s based off of some work that we’ve looked at of like, if you think it’s important, then make it stand out and make it important. If you, you know, just make it work habits meets, then you, you know, the kids are like, nah, they don’t, they don’t see it as anywhere near important. The parents don’t see it as anywhere near important.

Sharona: I’ve always said in our current system, before we burn it down. If I’m not grading it, they’re not going to learn it now. I don’t mean they’re not like, it’s not the doing it’s the learning, right? So if I think it’s important for students to, in some combination, do a certain set of tasks that will help them learn, whether it’s retrieval practice or some of the other things I need to somehow grade it. But then I also need to therefore have a learning outcome about it, because if I think something is that important. If it’s so important that I can’t let stuff be late or that I have to have whatever behavior it is, I’m like, then call it a learning outcome and make it an intentional part of teaching in your course. Because someone has to teach students how to learn. I might as well do it as much as anyone else. So we, so I do have that habits of mind one. And that one for me, I’m at a university level, so I don’t have multiple grades. I got one single end of term letter. And so I’m like, Hey, one of your 15 learning outcomes is learning how to learn, do a bunch of stuff. And I, you know, tell them this is worth this much. And this is worth this much, but I want them to accumulate a pot of skills. So we do that. So where do you go now? Like what, what’s, where are you at? And where are you going next with What you’re trying to accomplish with at the school or you personally?

Sharona: 10 is is statistics.

Phil Stringer: I just feel like I need to have them. But to be honest, I could probably do a little bit of an analysis and see if I collapsed all of the content ones into one content standard. What kind of difference does it actually make to their overall mark? And I bet it’s low impact. And so instead of collecting so much discrete data, what if I reduce the amount of data and think about it a lot more holistically? And so that that’s those kinds of things like giving capacity to other people to bring that. feel that you can just mark more holistically. I’m still going through and giving still going through and giving comments, but I don’t have any mark. There’s no mark associated. And so, you know, the kids are getting feedback from me of that are questions and time in class to go respond to those questions. So it’s just It’s building capacity to do that within myself and the department and the school and the kids. So, yeah. Yeah, I think we have a great model here and I love it when other people want to come visit and take a look and see what we’re doing. And there’s always a few things to improve. We’re taking a look at, now we’ve got a few years of data, we’re taking a look at does this really match historic data? Are our conversion numbers correct? So, you know, when we take a kid who’s got You know, proficient developing, proficient developing, whatever kind of data we have, and we’re converting that over to a percentage, which we all use the same conversion everywhere in the school. When we make those conversions, are they kind of accurate to historic data and where we need them to be? And yet, still flexible enough to match changes that the government are telling us as well. For instance, they just told us that the lowest level now also includes students who aren’t yet at grade level. And so, you know, is, is that a fail? And if so, what percentage do you assign to a category where some of the students are minimally meeting and others are not yet at grade level? And so that’ll be a conversation that I’m sure we’ll have to have. Soon to figure out if the percentage conversions we use are right. Not that there’s a right, but work for our community.

Sharona: So have you not seen any improvement? Like you’re saying accurate to history, but history could be. Well, I don’t know. You’re at such a high performing school. Maybe that’s not the thing, but historically, one of the challenges, the reason we’re doing this is because historically our students are failing. I don’t want that history. I want. I want to get the passings and the A’s and that’s what we’ve seen.

Phil Stringer: Yeah, fair. Yeah, fair enough. And, and we don’t, I don’t want to harm our students through changing assessment, first of all, I think that going back to, you know, AP calc, I don’t want them to, they knew the game of school and how to get all the extra points and bonus points and which questions, you know, you could do and which things you could get away not doing. Now it’s all about the learning. So as we shift to everything being about. Learning and under deep, deep understanding of what we’re trying to teach you, I want to make sure that the marks are like that. We’re not being too rigorous with things as we expect, maybe more. And, and at the same time, I don’t want to be I want to be careful of great inflation.

Like I don’t want to say, okay, well, I saw you do this twice. So it doesn’t matter if you do this again for the rest of the year, you’re kind of like a high watermark of once you’ve shown me, you know, that you can do this to a hundred percent, then I’m just doing it. Then it’s just 100 percent for the rest of the year. We do want to honor, you know, the fact that the grade 12s can still do some of the things we teach them in September and October when they graduate in May, so,

Boz: so I had a question since you were just talking about you know, doing feedback. In fact, you are, you know, we’re grading before you get on here. Has your feedback. Like your style or amount of feedback changed since doing this?

Phil Stringer: Yeah, I, I think I used to do a lot more corrections teaching math. I think I jumped in and did the work for the kids. And so I definitely give more questions now back to the kids. Like, why did you do this? Or, Hey, check, you know, these steps here. And If, if you do that, it needs to be coupled as well. I believe it needs to be coupled with some time to actually do those things too. So we have some reflection time that we use in the department when we get back assessments. And the assessments don’t have any marks on them. They have no marks and no levels. So the kids only can, you know, they look at it the first few times, especially they’re like, what did I get? And of course the whole, what did I get? And then toss it away, whether or not they got. What they wanted or, or, or didn’t becomes now, okay, well, he left me this feedback. Does that mean that I’m proficient or extending? Like, what does this feedback mean to eventually it just becomes, okay, I need to attend to this feedback and he’s, you know, he’s given me some time to do that. So it’s, it’s really changing from a grading culture to a learning culture and it takes a while and now it’s hardest with grade eights because they come from a whole bunch of different either our own we have an elementary school here or from other elementary programs from around the city. And they’ve had all sorts of different experiences. And, you know, not just with math, but with assessment as well. And now they’re coming in and they’ve got. Some guy telling them that they’re going to not get a grade on something and and so it does. It takes a little bit of work with them going back to your question of parents as well. Sometimes it takes a little bit of work with the parents to have them understand what we’re doing. I like to use There’s a great little, I’m sure you’ve seen the parachute packing analogy, but there’s a great little.

Sharona: We use it all the time.

Phil Stringer: There’s, there’s another one that I find works better with parents, which is here are two restaurants that you’re going to go to, and these are their Yelp scores, and they, they have the same average or very close to the same average. And which one are you going to go to? And, you know, it’s 50 50 or, or even one is quite a bit higher than the other. And then you show them the page of recent results. Where the recent results are flipped and or, or clearly show, you know, Oh, this one must be under new ownership or this had such great burgers. And now it’s, you know, not so good anymore.

Boz: The chef is left or the new chef. Yep.

Phil Stringer: Yeah. And, and I find it goes a long way with the parents. And even other adults and teachers to because parachute packing, like who packs a parachute, but like restaurant analogy, like lots of people are using online ways of taking a look at restaurant scores and deciding where they’re going to go for dinner, where they might try to go for dinner. And so you know, and, and, I’m sure that they just use average for a lot of that stuff. They see a 4. 7 and a 4. 2 and they go to the 4. 7 place and it’s worthwhile clicking through and taking a look at the 4. 2 recent reviews and the 4. 7 recent reviews. So that, that helps with parents. And I do that on parent night quite often.

Boz: But the reason I had originally asked about the feedback was because early in my, in my career, I spent a ton of time, you know, doing feedback and, you know, I, I had read different things about, you know, question writing or guiding questions or so, but I, I spent a lot of time on feedback and the students were like, Oh, I got a 75, great. And you know, it would frustrate the crap out of me. And it wasn’t until years later that I realized why it was. Everything in my class, everything in my grading system was about the points. So my students didn’t care about the feedback. All they cared about were the points at the top. And that, that one took a little bit longer to kind of shift. Once I made, you know, made the jump to alternative grading, the conversations changed instantly from, you know, how do I get more points at the end of the term to, okay, what do I need to show you about this? You know, what I know about inferential statistics, the, the, the feedback took me a little bit longer, but yeah, once I stopped putting the points on it, you’re right, it’s, it becomes more about learning than about grade and that’s, that’s where we want our students to be.

Phil Stringer: And, and I know some schools won’t even give back the grades, you know, until some future time, you know, be that a report card or be that, you know, You know at the end of the semester or whatever happens to be. But we also want to be transparent with the kids. Like I gave you this feedback. And by the way, this is actually where you’re at. So that they have a sense of what to do and they’re standing in a course. Like, I think there’s a balance between I have that information and they should have that information to like, just because I’ve not put many marks on here may or may not mean that you are emerging and it may or may not mean that you’re extending. So I do. I do need to, I think, report out to the kid at some point. And so what we do is we have an online gradebook and we can open the grades for any assessment after school. And so the kid now can take the assessment, look through it in my class, ask kids, ask me, get some help, do some reflection, work on the things that they have questions about either for me or just maybe the They guessed on something and they still have a question about how to do something. And then they’re not comparing with their peers, like, Oh, you got provision and I got extending. What did you do? They can go home and in their own kind of privacy, see what their data is and be like, okay, I got developing on this standard. I need to make sure I get in and attend to this.

And so it still provides them that transparency. See, it just delays it a little bit, but I don’t, I think there’s, we have to be careful of like, that’s their information. And, and if you delay it too much, especially, you know, at a higher performing school, if you delay that too much, then the kid’s like, I don’t know where I’m at in a course. He goes, you know, and then you’re going to get all the, problems with parents going, you know, how are you doing in math? I don’t know. How are you doing in science? I don’t know. I got, you know, I got a quiz and I didn’t get, where are the marks? You didn’t get any marks? Like what’s going on? So I think coupling it with the the data that sits with the proficiency scale and just, you know doing that short little delay has gone a long way as well because the kids know the kids know where they’re at. They can see their data. We have a graphical way of them seeing their data over time. And so there’s really no unless they don’t go onto the system. There’s no excuse for them to say, I don’t know what I’m where I’m at. I don’t know what I need to go improve on.

Boz: But I like that of just pure feedback, nothing else for a short period of time. And then back, you know, when they’re in their own home, personal setting, then being able, I, I like that. That seems like that would alleviate a lot of different issues. So I don’t know. Can we do that in Canvas? Sure. I don’t, can we try

Sharona: that? I mean, we can, if we just don’t put the rubric score on, cause it’s greater than zero, you just do the feedback.

And then. You’ll just have to go back in later and put the rubric score on. But if you put the zero in the feedback, that’s all they need to be able to see it.

Boz: Well, but that, that’s us having to touch it twice. Can the system automate it for us so we can put it in and then delete it?

Sharona: Look, I have lots of things to talk to Canvas. So if anyone who’s listening has connections to Canvas, Canvas, I love you. You are the best of the learning management system gradebooks for mastery, and I have a few iterative suggestions to improve your system.

So where are you going next? So you’ve got the school, it’s operating, you’re iterating, but you personally, I mean, you managed to get a full blown systemic change. You got anything bigger in mind?

Phil Stringer: Well, I, I am working outside of the school sometimes. So I’ve got a, a few schools, one school district in British Columbia that I liaise with and help them with all sorts of things with assessment. Not just standards based grading, but, you know, feedback and yeah. But whatever kinds of things I, they think that I can help with I’ve, as, as I said, or you said in the bio, I’ve done lots and lots of speaking around the province and worked with schools across Canada to just look at, you know, ways that they can do either small changes or, you know, maybe eventually systemic changes. It’s, it’s really tough. You know, the timeline that we had turned out to be pretty quick. And that was five to 10 years really from like when I started it to when it was being implemented across the school. So to think that, you know, a school district or a province or, you know, even, you know, A school or department can make a systemic change in, in a year or two, I think is a little bit foolish. I, I also know when I’ve worked with schools and gone back a number of times, that’s a lot more successful than any kind of one and done. work that you do, or, or, you know, if a school hires you know, an expert to come in and work to really think about building that relationship, because a lot of teachers will hear a message and then they’ll hear another message and then they’ll hear a third or fourth from different people. And sometimes some stuff can stick with one or two people.

So I, I don’t know. I, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve always played around with writing a book. I don’t, I just, I haven’t fine tuned what that will be about quite yet. So yeah, I don’t know. I, I’m. I’m enjoying work right now, which is a nice thing to say as a teacher. I’ve got fantastic students, amazing school and department. I get to coach the varsity soccer team. And yeah, I’m in a great spot. So it’s a good question. What’s next? Because I, I’ve had these kind of five year plans throughout my career and it’s kind of I don’t want to say winding down, but I’m like, yeah, it’s, it’s in a good spot right now.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, the whole reason we have a podcast is because I refuse to write a book. And when I proposed the podcast to Bosley, he was like, thought it was a good idea. And then he took a sip of something we were sitting at a table at a restaurant. And I said, well, cause you know, I love to hear myself talking. That, that sip almost went all the way across the table. Well, I think we are coming up on time. I have at least seven more questions I could ask, but I’ll let you ask the final question if you have one.

Boz: No, no. I was just going to thank you for coming on and ask if there were any last minute thoughts or advice from you or any last minute thoughts, Sharona, that you want to say before we head off.

Phil Stringer: Let you go first. The, the only thing for me is like, I, I watch, my wife’s a teacher as well in elementary school and I watch what elementary teachers do. You know, and especially the further you go down grades and the, the creativity that kindergarten and grade one and grade two teachers have around continuous assessment and they, you know, they don’t have, maybe we say the pressure of grades, but like they’re, they’re. Yeah, they’re, they’re just teaching so holistically and so well and so integrated that I think when we, the further we get up in the further you know, we become these niche specialists, the more we actually need to look back and think about being holistic experts as well. So that’s the last bit for me.

Sharona: Well, I want to thank you for coming on. I, you know, we went from having no Canadians to having three in the space of about eight weeks. Keep it coming, Canada, because I think we’ve got a lot to learn from you. Back over to you, Boz.

Boz: Yeah, I’m starting to understand why when we had Guskey on and he was talking about, you know, looking for good grading and had he had to go all the way up to Canada and find it. So it’s been, it’s been a thrill. If you ever do get that start writing on that book, definitely let us know, but it has been a pleasure. I want to thank you and I’m going to thank our listeners and we’ll see you guys next time.

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 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.