The Grading Podcast

84 – Corey_Bowen

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Dr. Corey Bowen: At Cal State LA, the students motivation tests off the charts. As an educational researcher, I have done research projects on my grants, our students motivation tests off the charts. They are there to actually learn, to actually understand, and this structure gives them a way to actually focus on learning instead of focusing on arbitrary made up points and a game that wasn’t designed for them. It gets rid of the game of the traditional merit grades and just lets them focus on learning ideas and concepts, which is what they want to do anyway.

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 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 better. You know we’re getting through our auditions in the theater company. I’m starting all my study guide generation for the semester, and it’s not quite as traumatic as last semester. So I’m actually in a pretty good place. I see you glaring at me. How are you doing?

Boz: So nothing job related, but on the personal note, I tried to do something yesterday, as the time of this recording, that usually takes me about an hour, which is changing my wife’s brakes, which I do very often because my wife rides the brakes. And ended up going for almost five hours and not getting it done because I can’t get a lug nut off of one of her tires. So I had things with that lug nut that I’ve never had happen changing tires for 40 years and I’m like stumped. I’m gonna try to get the vehicle running as well as I can if I can limp it or maybe tow it to a tire shop to see if they can just break the stupid nut off at this point. So other than that.

Sharona: So what I think is funny. Well, what I think is funny is on the pod you always ask me how I’m doing, but usually when I see you, I usually ask how you’re doing first. And I’ve learned that when you look at me and go, don’t ask, you really mean don’t ask. So I just had to bring that in anyway. So, but we do actually have a third person on the pod today who’s watching this with amusement. I’d like to welcome a Dr. Corin Bowen, Corey. We’ve been working with Corey for a couple of years, but she’s an assistant professor of engineering education in the department of civil engineering here at Cal State LA. Her research focuses on structural oppression in engineering systems, organizing for equitable change and developing an agenda of engineering for the common good. She teaches structural mechanics and socio technical topics in engineering education. She got her PhD from the University of Michigan. She has a MSE also from Michigan, but I just found out that she’s got a bachelor’s degree from Case Western Reserve University, which made me super happy because my parents went to Case Western before it was Case Western when it was Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve. So Corey, welcome to the pod.

Dr. Corey Bowen: Thank you. Thanks for having me, you two. Oh, and the department I’m in is civil engineering. You said civil education.

Sharona: Oh, that’s right because here it said civil. Okay. Sorry. Department of civil engineering. I got that.

Dr. Corey Bowen: Does it say civil education?

Sharona: No, no, no. I read that in my brain. I

Dr. Corey Bowen: it if it did. Oh, no, it’s all good. I sent you the wrong thing. I need to fix it then.

Boz: Well, thank you and welcome. We always love having a fellow eagle on the podcast with us. But one of the things we always like to ask when we have a new guest is kind of your origin story. How did you get into this crazy world of alternative grading?

Dr. Corey Bowen: Yeah through my mother. So, like you, I believe, my mother is a K 12 teacher. She does math in a rural district in central Michigan. She actually just retired a few months ago, so congratulations, Mommy, who’s definitely not listening to this because she retired. But even though she’d already been sticking out the brutal world of K 12 for decades and decades at that point, just a couple years ago, when she was really thinking about retiring she got into the world of alternative grading.

Similar but different environment to like what we deal with at Cal State LA. The school district that my mom taught in that me and my sister graduated from is three quarter students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. It’s, it’s rural working class as opposed to urban. Extremely white extremely conservative very, very different in some ways than Cal State LA. But, same problem of an education student an education system that is not set up to support the students needs. And my mother got into ungrading, which is not mastery based grading. But it was something that she read about and decided to try. And for a solid year there, every single time I talked to my mother, Any conversation about anything started with 30 minutes about what about ungrading. She was so roped in, which was crazy because she was so on her way out the door at that point, but she was so roped in anyway.

I wasn’t sure because at that point I had gotten a position to start at Cal State LA as a tenure track professor, but I hadn’t started yet. I was still a postdoc working on a STEM education project at Cal State LA. So I wasn’t teaching yet at Cal State LA. I was preparing to, and I knew that the system at Cal State LA was not set up in the best interest of its students that was working on a STEM education project at Cal State LA, so I obviously knew that. So I knew I was going to have to try alternative structures. So I was trying to pay attention to my mother as close as I possibly could to try to figure out, to try to beat into my brain that there are alternative ways to do things, and that I would have to be creative to try different things, and that some would not work, and that some would work in different ways, and I would just have to keep changing things like my mother was right at that point changing things.

I also had I was also really influenced by someone named Aaron Johnson, who is an assistant professor of aerospace engineering, but works also in the engineering education program at the University of Michigan. He is the person who introduced me to my field of engineering education research was my de facto PhD advisor, even though he wasn’t on paper. I met him when I was his TA in a Strength of Materials class. Now I teach my project is Strength of Materials at Cal State LA. I was his TA. Even at Michigan a school that serves predominantly extremely wealthy white students he was already concerned about trying to make trying to make the education system structured in ways that would serve there the minority of students that the system wasn’t set up to support. And he had already tried what I now can see was something leading him down this road to master base grade, right? So what he had started in implementing was, okay, every time I give an assessment, I’m going to give a little bit of feedback.

That’s the sense of what we do today, but he said, I want to get a little bit of feedback on that assessment along with the grade, along with a very traditional grade and then I want them to take some time afterwards actually go through my feedback actually look at their work and start trying to do it again and see what they can do different and see what they can do better and then I want them to give it back to us and I want us to re grade it. Okay, I don’t think that today I would, I don’t think I would call this master based grading. But it was pretty radical in the scope of a very, very traditional aerospace engineering department to try to say that students should be allowed to learn. That was a pretty far fetched idea. And because I was an ISA, sorry, that’s the Cal State LA term commission, called it a GSI, whatever, I was a TA for that class. I spent a lot of time just interfacing with the students, how they feel about how this is going, providing extra help, things like that. So I knew that students actually were using this as an opportunity to learn.

So I knew right away that when I started teaching strength materials at Cal State LA, I wanted to do Something that would completely take apart the existing system and do it different. But I didn’t know what different was going to look like. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try on grading right away. I know I wanted to do something like what Aaron had done at Michigan, but I knew I needed to do more than that. So I was starting to look into mastery based grading and try to figure out what exactly that meant, because I hadn’t done a lot of research at this point, when I found out about the CLIMB project at Cal State LA and that it could offer me some structure and help guidance in what mastery based grading was and what people were already doing in this area and even set up classes like the statics class that feeds into my strength materials class. And I was like, great. Because I’m going to do this regardless of whether or not this grant that I just found out existed exists. I’m going to do this anyway.

Sharona: And just to clarify for our podcast listeners, if you’ve been around a while, the CLIMB grant is the grant where we, Bosley and I, worked with engineering to redesign several sophomore classes to use alternative grading practices. So I just wanted to interject that. But anyway, so you found out about CLIMB and then what?

Dr. Corey Bowen: So I found out about CLIMB and showed up. I told Dave Raymond, then acting chair of the mechanical engineering department and one of the personnel on this grant, that I wanted to join. I told my civil engineering department that I was going to do it anyway, regardless of whether or not I joined the project. And then I met Sharona and Bosley, and they did a really nice like day long intro workshop thing and I was like, good, this is exactly what I was going to try to do anyway. Now, how can I and my first thought as, in learning from them and learning from the group, is I’m already trying to, as as the existing instructors are having these conversations, I’m trying to see where I see some instructors who are trying to do this falling back into what they know and what they’re comfortable with and where I see instructors that have been doing this trying to challenge things and do things even more different, even more radical, even more even more structurally opposed to how existing systems of education have already been disenfranchising all the students of color, all the students from working class backgrounds, which is virtually everybody at Cal State LA, to be clear, and perpetually just feeding our working class students into a system of capitalistic oppression by just trying to offer them a spot at the top of the oppressor’s table. Anyway I will get into my Marxist high horse later.

Sharona: So I want to follow up with that. So I want to provide a little more context at this point in the CLIMB grant where you came in, we had already done full course redesigns, alternative grading course redesigns, on the course you were going to be teaching. So we, and we had implemented them. They had gone into place for a semester. So now you’re coming in to a course that, in theory, has been fully redesigned. It’s got a set of learning outcomes. It’s got the multiple attempts at mastery. It’s got the feedback loop built in. It’s got the proficiency scale. So people have been listening to the pod are pretty familiar with these four pillars. So we’re now trying to, from our perspective, we’re trying to onboard you into a course that was designed, had run once, but was undergoing modification, at least a little bit.

Dr. Corey Bowen: I would say it was designed with, yeah, I would say, yes, it was already done with those pillars, but I found to be honest, almost nothing usable. In that first.

Sharona: And that was going to be my next question. So what did you do when we handed you this course that we thought was had been redesigned? And by the way, that other people are still teaching with that particular redesign, some modification. What did you do with that when we gave it to you?

Dr. Corey Bowen: So first thing I did is I just went through everything and saw, what I’m supposed to teach and what structure did they use to try to teach it? It was still completely dominant lecture based. It was it used, um, some online assessment. But the online assessment was taken straight from a textbook. So I’d say those are two big things, two big things. I wasn’t interested in talking at the students for class time. I also was wary of using class time for assessment. When I decided that I needed to be a little bit careful with how much I was taking off, biting off the first time, and I ended up still biting off quite a lot, I completely flipped the classroom in the first semester.

So I was working with another professor at Cal State LA, Dr. Maritza Sanchez, and she and I took all the material and completely flipped it in that first semester. We made videos for everything we intended to teach. We tried to focus on making the videos bite size pretty simple. She did a really nice job with like slide with. Slides and videos and stuff that was a graphic. I did it more writing based. So it was a little different, but it was also nice that I did some and she did some. So the students got to see and we each used each other’s videos, right? We made this package of videos and the students got to experience different kinds of learning through the way that she presented something versus the way I presented something.

We got nothing in that first semester, but rave student support for our video system. They loved our videos. Then I was in that first semester trying to figure out, okay, if I have taken mindless students with their face at the, on the desk out of the class period and trying, because I’m actively trying to put something that’s actually learning. into this class time. What does that look like? That very first semester, I don’t think it went super well, but it gave me the basis of what I needed to be able to change it to something that I think works much, much better today. In that first semester, I did basically student group work at least half the time. Which I still do today, but I think I do it a little bit better today than I did in that first semester. Essentially, when all the students are In different places around the curriculum because it is mastery. They’re all working on different things. I asked my civil engineering department to buy me a whole bunch of moving big whiteboards. I stored them in that classroom and then every day for class I would go ahead of time and move ’em all around the room, spread students out, and then I would have on our group work days, I would put up a problem from different topics that I know that different students are working on like top specific topics, different learning modules, we call them student learning outcomes, SLO’s that I know that a lot of students are focusing on right now and then just let them go to different areas of the room to work in small groups with other people who want to work on that a challenge with that method is trying to make sure that students don’t feel put down if they’re working on what’s considered an earlier SLO’s compared to later SLO’s but one way that that’s worked really well in my classroom in future semesters is getting rid of the idea of like a fundamental learning outcome versus some kind of like more advanced learning outcome and just saying, hey, it’s a free for all.

Everything’s the same. You know, that’s not even necessarily technically always true. That’s okay because what it does is it creates a mentality in the students that says all the different SLO’s are equal. They don’t build on each other. Okay, some of them kind of build on each other, but don’t really emphasize that for students. Just tell them some people are going to be stuck on this on SLO’s two for a long time and that’s okay. We’re going to keep working on it and then but you might have already gotten SLO’s nine. That one made more sense to you. Okay, fine. So today we’re going to be back on SLO’s two. It’s not because you’re a hind. You might have already passed seven, eight, nine. Actually, in reality, A lot of the students who are working on SLO’s two is because they are struggling. They’re hurt, they’re still earlier in the class, but the students don’t know that. So it stops them from feeling bad and it helps them be more engaged.

Boz: Yeah. And I’m going to jump in there real quick, because some of that language was actually from the design of the original course. When we Sharona, and when you and I were doing the CLIMB project with those original set of engineers educators, Part of their grading architecture was using the bucket method. We’ve talked about this before. We’ve got several whole episodes. I don’t want to spend too much time, but one of the decisions of the grading architecture is how do you take all the learning outcomes that students have or have not mastered or learned and wrap that up into a final grade and the way that the engineers, educators that were part of the original CLIMB project came up with was using what we call the bucket method where we classify each of the learning outcomes into different buckets and the way they did it is they had a essentials bucket, the things that everyone had to learn. And then they had some other ones that if a student wanted to get higher than a C. So that’s the structure that was handed to you. And you’re like, yeah, I, even if maybe some of these are pretty fundamental and pretty essential, we’re going to take those names off. So it doesn’t give that kind of stigmatism to the students. Is that what you were saying?

Dr. Corey Bowen: Yeah, actually, I kind of repackaged it, rebranded it. This last semester, my class went very, very well this last semester. In a department that I just found out has the, by far, the highest DFW rates in its history. My Strength Materials class, which my Strength Materials class, the Strength Materials class has been branded as the most packed content class of the entire curriculum and I had a passing rate of like 95 percent this semester. So something went very right in in the context of a department that’s really, really struggling right now.

Sharona: And how many is that class?

Dr. Corey Bowen: 28 students.

Sharona: Okay. Yeah. That’s always relevant to people who are listening to the pod for their context.

Dr. Corey Bowen: Yeah. It’s a the civil engineering department still has a cap of I believe 25 students a class and I let a few extra that wanted to take the class. I let, you have the right to let extra students in, so I let extra students in. But our cap in civil engineering department is lower than it is at other departments at Cal State LA. It’s still 25 students. One thing that I did differently with the buckets this semester was there are, there are the first four of my 12 learning outcomes that they absolutely do have to have in order for me to send them to the next class in the sequence. Passing only for SLO’s wouldn’t be demonstrating quote unquote mastery on enough material for me to pass you to next class anyway, but definitely of the of the SLO’ss that that they that they complete, they need to include the first four.

So instead of calling it like a fundamental bucket that gets you to C and then advance by the past that. No, I just said all SLO’s are created equal except by the end of the semester, I do need to pass just these first couple. It has to include those couple, but you can pass those at any point. And passing just those four is, that’s only a very small portion of the class. So passing these four learning outcomes is out of the 14 total technical learning outcomes, plus Sharona’s concept of the P3, which I used as an additional 15th one. The passing those four is not sufficient to pass the class, but it is required to pass the class. Because I am open to students that those four the content there, Is used in absolutely everything else. So, this has to be a focus. But because it’s not a one to one of, oh, the ones you have to pass are the ones to pass the class. I think that helped me reframe it a bit with the students away from something that causes shame to something that is a constructive building block. And a piece of feedback I got from students that helped me think this was working this semester, was I have feedback mechanisms constantly, like an official one, like after the class, but at least once a week I do like a non anonymous with your name on it with me feedback mechanism. That’s part of their P3 points.

And they’re, and then I. Yeah, the next class come back and kind of debrief out with the students and have a discussion with them on what everybody said as a whole and what we need to change about the class this week, what we need to do differently, we change the structure as we go if we need to, very open like that, and I really liked this semester when someone said what they’re worried about is making sure that everybody passes the class. So that was a really strong reframing away from making sure that I pass the class of individualistic competition based form of education that this is working and building something cooperative. And making sure that everybody gets through those four because students are, in mass, going to work in the small group sections on stuff that is that four, even though we are halfway through the semester, right? So they’re not feeling shame about doing it and they’re still trying to figure out how do we help each other and work together on this. Okay, then this is working in some piece. Of, of, of, you know trying to build some cooperative model of, of education.

Boz: So when you say you have this weekly feedback, you’re not talking about you giving students feedback. It sounds like the students were giving you the feedback on the way the course is working.

Dr. Corey Bowen: Oh yes. I’m very open from the beginning that my syllabus is not set in stone, that we are going to throw out the entire structure of the class. We are going to throw out we could throw out master based grading. We could throw out we will throw out what we do with the class sessions. At this point, what I’m doing now is like half group work and half gamification with class sessions. That’s working pretty well. I would say I have very, very. I had that last semester doing this very, very, very high attendance in a semester where the professors were reporting really poor attendance. And I think one thing that helps is this buy in of like, we’re doing what works for everybody based on all these discussions that we have in class together and the feedback that you have with me. The feedback, yes, when I say feedback, I’m saying the students giving me feedback on what’s working for them.

Now, I have to be really, really clear that it is not a voting scenario, right? If the student who is absolutely acing the class and needs no extra help and is doing fantastic and doesn’t, doesn’t even need my help. If they want to do something different with class time. I think our temptation as instructors is always to teach to the top. But that’s not my job. That’s not my job. And that is not what cooperative and supportive and equity based education looks like at all. I see that when I’m training my graders as well, the ISAs for the classes. That the ISAs will be tempted to teach to the top. And I’m always having critical discussions with them to try to figure out how do we, how do we not do that?

They’re going to be fine. Those students are already fine. So that’s one reason why my feedback mechanisms are not anonymous. I need to know which, this is working for which students and why. So that I can make decisions about how to change the class going forward, which I do not make unilaterally. I make them with my ISAs, and I make them with the students in the class. So if I think based on all the feedback I’ve gotten last week that I think we should try this a little differently, before we’re going to do it differently, I’m going to actually have a conversation with the whole class about it, and then we’ll have open time. Because sometimes some students don’t want to share in class. About what’s working or not working for them in front of the whole group, right? If they just want to share with me privately, or they just want to share with the ISAs. There’s a lot of power dynamics. There’s, there’s race and class and gender and all sorts of other things. It’s, it would be very very unfair of me to think that, that those dynamics don’t exist.

So I need to maximize as many different ways to get students ideas as possible in ways that are gonna be comfortable for them, and then change things how we need to. But the one thing that no one has ever suggested changing at least this semester, was the master based grading structure. Absolutely not. Students are very, very. Are very on board with the idea that they’re going to learn this way once we kind of break apart this hierarchy of me imposing it on them and do this in a cooperative way. Then they start seeing it as this is actually a learning structure as opposed to an imposed structure.

Dr. Corey Bowen: No, I did see it in my classes. I did not see it in this class.

Boz: On that class? Oh, okay.

Dr. Corey Bowen: And I do not think that’s an accident at all. This class had complete buy in from the students about what we were doing. They knew perfectly well that if they didn’t like what they were doing, that they had powers to change it. I had, so I had over three quarters attendance throughout the semester. Because if they didn’t think what they were doing was valuable, then they knew how to change what we were doing in class.

Boz: And that goes back to what you’ve been saying, Sharona. And when you’ve been talking, not necessarily on the podcast, but actually at Cal State is we think part of the issue with the student attendance is they’re not seeing the worth of going, actually going to the class.

Dr. Corey Bowen: Agency. They need agency. They’re adults. They’re adults. They need to have agency over their learning. Also, we need to be really quote unquote milking that cow of the fact that our students care more about learning at Cal State LA than they do at research institutions. The myth is it’s backwards. That our students are only here for a paycheck and that at fancy institutions they actually care about learning. That is bullshit. That is absolutely backwards. At fancy research institutions, the students, like I did at Case Western, right? We like I did in grad school at University of Michigan, like my students at University of Michigan did.

It is a game. It is a game that the students are trained at how to play the game, and they know how to play the game, and they know how to beat the game. And when there’s an issue with the game, it’s the instructor’s fault, not the student’s fault at fancy research institutions. At Cal State LA, The students motivation tests off the charts. As an educational researcher, I have done research projects on my grants. Our students motivation tests off the charts. They are there to actually learn, to actually understand. And this structure gives them a way to actually focus on learning instead of focusing on arbitrary made up points and a game that wasn’t designed for them to win. It gets rid of the game of the traditional merit grades and just lets them focus on learning ideas and concepts, which is what they want to do anyway.

The class that I started this semester, that also used mastery based grading, but was completely different because it was project based, is an AutoCAD class. It’s a required class for the new civil engineering freshmen, but how many freshmen did we have enrolled in three sections of the class this semester? When we only opened initially one section, it all filled up, so we opened a second section, filled up, we opened a third section, still filled up, had like eight students on each waitlist, and how many freshmen are there total in all three classes? Almost none. Because all the upperclassmen who aren’t required to take this class, have earlier registration than the freshmen who are required to take this class, so they all got in and the freshmen didn’t get in. So why are they enrolling in it in the first place when they’re not required to take it? Because it’s an important topic, it’s about AutoCAD and they know they need it in their careers and they are interested in, in design graphics anyway. So they want to learn. They actually care.

At Michigan, when I was a student, would I have signed up for something that wasn’t required just because? No, I’m there to play the game and get out. Our students are not. They’re there to learn. So our structures should lean on the fact that these are something that our students do better at. Is that they, what they do better at is the fact that they actually want to learn and understand ideas. And they’re willing to put in the work and the effort to just learn something and understand it. This is bizarre in this, in this, in this, wonderful, amazing on the scope of American higher education. And we don’t, we don’t utilize this at all. We have to. The master based grading is one way we can.

Sharona: So, you’ve mentioned a couple of things that I want to, that I want to follow up on because I want to, I want to pick at something that I think people are going to misunderstand if we don’t clarify. There are people who, if they listen to you talk, will make certain assumptions about your course. Particularly that it’s like a free for all. Like, if you’re willing to just throw everything out, it’s clearly a chaos engine happening. But I know you, and I’m listening carefully, and what it sounds like, you actually have a ton of structure in the class.

Dr. Corey Bowen: A lot of structure.

Sharona: A lot of structure. And that’s something that I think that people misunderstand about when you go to alternative grading because, just to follow up, we saw this last semester when we did our, our pilot quote unquote of traditional grading. In a lot of folks minds. Grading and pedagogy are mixed together, and when we say we want people to do alternative grading, we’re just literally talking about the pillars. We’re just talking about those four pillars of learning outcomes, multiple attempts at feedback at mastery helpful feedback, and proficiency scales. That’s all we mean. Now you came in and said, well, that wasn’t enough for me because I had those and I need those, but now I need space for pedagogy. And that’s what happened when people go back to traditional. They’re like, well, the problem with your grading system is that you use asynchronous quizzes. And I’m like, okay, yes, I use asynchronous quizzes, but that’s not grading. Those two things are different. Asynchronous quizzes is a tool to assess. You can use them in traditional grading. You can use them in alternative grading. And same thing that you said, you know, you can lecture in an alternatively graded course. It may not work as well, but you can like your delivery style of your content. It’s not the same as your grading. So those are two different things that often get mixed, right?

But I love the fact that you took this thing that we gave you. And although you made a lot of adjustments, you’re still there on the four pillars. You still have learning outcomes. You’re still assessing them for mastery. You’re still using feedback loops and you’re still doing, you know. And you’re still using a proficiency scale.

Those have not changed, right?

Boz: Okay, but I want to push back a little bit on this, Sharona, because even though I agree that you can change one without the other, you can change your grading structure without changing your pedagogy. How many people do we know that have really fully bought into any alternative style of grading and not changed their pedagogy?

Sharona: But that’s saying the quiet part out loud. And my point with this is that just because we do change, what we’re promoting does not require it. And so if you have a person for whom their own identity and their own things are not anywhere close to that, it’s okay to still promote just changing the grading. Because someone who doesn’t have the identity beliefs that the three of us have about ourselves is going to be so threatened by this that they won’t even try the grading. So I do think it’s important to separate, while still saying, because for me, I did the other thing first. I did all the pedagogy changes. They didn’t work. So for me, the grading works better with the pedagogy changes, but it works even without them. But for me, the other way doesn’t work at all. If you put the pedagogy changes in and you’re using traditional grading, it’s almost completely ineffective.

Dr. Corey Bowen: This is a really interesting debate. So I strive to be a critical pedagogist. I am sitting here trying to analyze systems of power. I am, as an engineering educator my goal is to dismantle systems of hegemonic oppression, capitalism, colonialism, all the isms. Through grassroots organizing and critical liberative education with a belief that that is not dichotomous to what engineering is or can be. That’s what I’m trying to do here. For me, the grading structure is just a tool. For me, I have implemented critical pedagogy in an engineering and social justice reading and writing based undergraduate course at a different university, that did have traditional grading, and the result was a very, very critical and liberative space. We were able to do that.

But I think the fact that we were able to do that was because that class was at the University of San Diego, okay? It’s like the University of Michigan in that it’s, not all of the student body, but a lot of the student body has quite a lot of social privilege. The existing grading scheme wasn’t really an issue for these students, realistically. It wasn’t. They didn’t see traditional education, they didn’t experience traditional education as a system of oppression, most of them. So implementing critical pedagogy, where I am being more reflexive about my power in the classroom, and trying to do something that actually puts me into a space of a learner and gives agency to students didn’t necessarily need a new grading scheme in order to make significant progress. At Cal State LA, I would say it absolutely needs a new grading scheme in order to make significant progress. But it depends.

Sharona: Well, let me clarify for myself. I was not a critical pedagogist. And I really still am not. Not that I wouldn’t agree with it, I just haven’t studied it. So, when I was trying to do things like flipped learning and active learning in the classroom in a traditional space, well, first of all, I was doing it in environments that were mostly places like Cal State LA, and, I don’t think I came to the critical pedagogy piece until well after I went to alternative grading. So I removed the oppressive piece of the traditional grading much earlier than I started to look at the power dynamics in the classroom. So maybe that’s the issue?

Dr. Corey Bowen: Another issue is that many Instructors are implementing mastery based and other alternative grading schemes in their classroom. They’re not doing it from a lens of power analysis. You can absolutely apply this in a very oppressive way. Your four pillars, I don’t think, are any kind of magic solution to the system of power analysis of authoritative hegemonic social structures in education. It’s a tool that if used in a critical way is extremely helpful, in my opinion, extremely helpful. But like we, in our CLIMB project, we’ve seen lots of instructors who we would say, like, Oh, we’ve flopped, they, it feels like they’re flying backwards and returning to traditional grading because they’re upset that this didn’t magically help.

Well, in my opinion, just my opinion, that’s one piece that was really missing and why it didn’t magically help was because they never considered handing any agency over to students. Yes, my class is extremely structured, but my structure is extremely flexible. I put up a very, very detailed structure and spend as much time as possible going over that structure with students and making sure that they understand, and we have the conversations about how it works, and we ask questions, and then part, and then once I understand what I’m, what I’m suggesting, I’m very clear that this is a suggested structure, then we start changing things. Okay, but I think maybe we should move, instead of doing this on Wednesday, I think we should do it next Monday. We should switch these, order of these things. We should move this assessment to this week to give us more time to study and then during the study time, we want to start we want to have more open hours with the ISAs. We want to change when that feedback is returned so that we can do, like, literally, like, the students and I are having this conversation to build that structure. It is a very, very detailed structure, but it is flexible because I’m very open with the students that In order for it to work well, then I need you to help me build something that works well.

Boz: And that agency that those students feel is absolutely got to be hugely motivating for them, as obvious by your attendance, I mean, like I said, last semester was a bad attendance at Cal State LA at least for, for all of us. And. I think if you look at the classes that don’t, that didn’t have that huge attendance drop off, you’re going to see that across the board for what something is happening in the class that is motivating the students. And in your class, it very much sounds like the fact that they have so much agency and buy in because they’re getting to have input and it sounds like weekly input. On those structures and how that class is actually being utilized, how their time is being utilized, which has got to be just a unusual and a great feeling for the students to know that, yes, when I come to this hour, hour long half class, however long it was, my time, it’s going to be valued. I’m going to get real value out of that.

Dr. Corey Bowen: And I need to give one other really important example about how the assessments are done. So, who has agency to determine these things? So, I in the very first semester, I gave the, I don’t call them exams, I call them checkpoints because I just want to be clear that it’s a checkpoint, we check it, and then either we move on to the next thing, or we go back and work on that some more, and it’s, there’s no stakes, so I don’t call it an exam. That first semester I did my checkpoints in class. I wanted to maximize the number of opportunities to retake. I was, I told the students point blank this semester, like, when they asked, can we do a checkpoint every week instead of every two weeks, I was like, I wish we could do one every day. I want you to have infinite chances. I want you to have infinite chances. I wouldn’t even have the structure of the semester if education was up to me. Even that is a very strictly oppressive thing that is causing these problems. All of this is garbage.

But with me trying to operate within a one semester timeline with I’m paid to teach this class for eight hours a week, is that a joke? And the ISAs are here to help me. I still can’t, I still can’t give you good feedback on your work, on checkpoints more than every other week. I can’t do it, but I can maximize it to give you one every other week all semester. That’s the most it’s possible for me to handle and your ISAs. And I gave them that first semester I did those checkpoints in class. Well, that means that a quarter of your class periods are spent on this. And that’s not learning, that’s assessing. I don’t want to waste our valuable class time on this.

So then the next semester, I moved them all online, which I was very happy about. I was like, yes, we’re not wasting time doing this garbage. Yay! Okay, now we can just learn in class. Well, there’s this little problem called Chegg, Brainly blah, blah, blah, all these other things. And all the professors know that these, these exploitative capitalist sites are a problem. But what do I see all the other instructors doing? Blaming the students. Now that’s interesting, because these sites take their money. My students, where 10 percent of my students are homeless, why I bring granola bars everywhere I go and to every class because my students are hungry. My students are hungry, and these for profit capitalist sites trick my students, my students, who I feel very, very protective of into spending their limited money in inner city Los Angeles on what they’re tricked into thinking is the only way that they’re going to buy their family a ticket to a better life. That is disgusting. That is absolutely horrific. These sites should not be allowed to exist. Forget the copyright infringement. No, it’s exploitation of vulnerable populations. It’s disgusting. I do not have a way to fix that.

So I really, really liked the idea that Maryam Nazari brought up in our CLIMB grant. If we had like an open testing center in our college where students could just drop in at any point, it would be the same flexible structure that online provides. But then they could just come take it in person at a time that works for them and we wouldn’t have to worry about these exploitative sites. Yeah, this is wonderful. Where is this testing center? It doesn’t exist. I mean, our office for students with disabilities isn’t even staffed enough to be able to have students be able to come take that whenever they need to. Like, how is this going to work? So, I was complaining to my ISAs that were hired by the grant that, like, we do have a magic answer here. But we have no way to implement it.

And my ISAs incredible, incredible, and they’re undergrads by the way, I gave birth with four weeks to go and they just covered my class. They just taught everything. They’re fantastic. My ISAs, when I complained at the beginning of the semester that I don’t have a way to do this testing center. They said, yes you do. You have us. They said, Corey, we’re doing the testing center. There’s no reason not to. And we’ll run it. And I said, but I can’t have you just spending 10 hours a week running a testing center. I only have you for 20 hours a week. And I need your help with other things. And they were like, what are the things you need help with? Giving good feedback? You think we can’t do that while running a testing center? Okay.

My ISAs, my undergraduate ISAs built the testing center and we did this this semester and it was fantastic. I crowdsourced from all of my strength and materials students what general times of the week work for them when they might be able to stop in. We found about like 10 to 12 hours a week that would generally worked for students. My ISAs ran it. And the civil engineering department helped me secure, like, a department space that I wouldn’t have to book within the booking system, that I could just use at a time when my department wasn’t using it for other things. And that became our testing center.

So for about 12 hours a week, sometimes it was 10 or 11, I would have all the different SLOs checkpoints set up in there. Granola bars. Calculators. I am open with students that they can use notes. I want them to prepare. I want them to work on example problems. And then I do not use book problems. I just, I write my own problems. So that I’m very happy if they use notes and things like that. There’s no way they can copy because they don’t have the problem. I just wrote it. Right? And they just come in whenever they want at a time that works for them. And the ISAs are always in there. And then the ISAs call me if there’s a problem. But guess what? There’s never any problems. It works just fine. It works just fine. So now, I don’t use any class time for assessment. I don’t worry about online exploitative sites and problems like that. And my one concern about this was what if students get upset that isn’t this like kind of breaking an unwritten rule that maybe actually is a written rule at the university where you can’t require the students to be somewhere at a time that is not on the registrar is like part of class time or whatever, right?

Like, especially our students that are working 40 hours a week on top of taking care of their kids. I had multiple students in my class with kids and had pregnant partners. I had that this semester too. I was like, isn’t this going to be an issue? And I was very open with students. Like if the checkpoint center doesn’t work, if this schedule doesn’t work for us, we don’t like this. We’ll go get rid of it. We will get rid of it. We will go, we’ll try something else. This is just, we’re going to try this and see if this works.

The students loved the Checkpoint Center. No one ever complained about, now we have to go to something else outside of class time. No, they loved it because they did not want to spend class time that we spent actually learning. They didn’t want to waste it on this. And they saw the value. They absolutely saw the value. Sometimes, students would have things come up with where they just couldn’t come, like, they were planning to come to Checkpoint Center later in the week, but then something came up and they couldn’t. Okay, then I was clear with them that they just need to message me, and then I’ll set up a different time with them to come in and take their checkpoint because shit happens. That’s fine. So yeah, I had that happen. But I was, I took care of it.

Boz: That’s the part cause it almost any, anytime you try to do something creative and out of the box, which this was, and this was a brilliant solution to a real problem. And I love the fact that it actually came from the ISA, but that’s the thing, any of these kinds of structures, I hear so much feedback. Oh, but that’s not fair because of this or because make exceptions. I mean, like there’s nothing wrong with having a structure in place that yes might not occasionally work for every single student because as you said life happens, especially with our students who you know are working part time full time are already having families are if they don’t still have to take care of you know parts of their family They have life our students have a bunch of life. So yeah things are gonna come up and so what? You let them come up and you make exceptions. Yeah, you, you deal with that when it

Dr. Corey Bowen: comes. I don’t even like the word exceptions because you’re, Exception to what? Exception to a rule. I don’t believe in rules. The rules are just a, are just a tool of white supremacist colonialism. Like what, what is the rule?

Boz: Yeah.

Dr. Corey Bowen: I’m not trying, I’m not trying to build a system that the existing educational structure sees as fair because existing world isn’t fair. I don’t even know what that word means. Is oppressive is fair? No, I’m trying to help my students learn and that is the only thing I’m here for. If I can’t do that then I quit my job because this is all I’m here to do is help them learn. I’m not trying to do anything else.

Sharona: So my only extension of that statement is I want to go beyond me, like I want to facilitate other people getting to the point that you’re at, other instructors, and I see all the baby steps. So instead of just saying there are no rules, what I try to do is I try to build a structured system that is so flexible that it is rare that I need something outside the built in flexibility. And even then, if I need something outside the built in flexibility, then we do handle it. But I try so hard to create enough structure that most of the flexibility that is ever needed is already available. So it doesn’t tax instructors who are not as focused as we are on these things. I want this to happen at scale. I mean, that’s like where I want to go. so.

Dr. Corey Bowen: I think here’s a good example, a good example of that, because you’re very right. Everybody, no, not everybody. Most people are more comfortable moving, changing and working incrementally. So for example, another class that I teach is I don’t have significant agency and control over. It’s a team taught class, maybe like your calculus structure. It’s the Introduction to Higher Education class for the Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology College. And I have a voice in that instructor team to try to push things to be, to make changes. But it is very much an incremental change game with a group of instructors.

And because the existing normal grading, traditional grading, and normal structure failed a significant chunk of the students, 40 percent of the freshmen last year, failed. For a class that has no technical material, so that was horrific. We changed the structure in an incremental way this semester to try to gain some flexibility. We had an excused absence form encouraging the students to reach out to us with issues that they were having, personal issues that, and we’re just gonna, one on one, like you’re saying, make exceptions to the rule to make change that actually meets those students where they are. And, and, it helps. And you know what? It did help. Absolutely did help. Quantitatively, qualitatively, feedback from us, feedback from the students, yes, it helped, it helped, it helped, it helped. But, can I push back on that and say, wouldn’t it be better if we just implemented a system, more like a mastery system, where students can just learn at their own pace. And then you wouldn’t need an exception to the rule of when this deadline was because you wouldn’t have the deadline, right?

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: Well, I’m one of those that’s somewhat conflicted on deadlines because some kids, some students need not to have deadlines, but some students actually really, really, really need them. So again, in my world, I try to build a system that accommodates both of those statements. So I have my triple P, lots of deadlines. Some of those deadlines are firm. Some of those deadlines are not. But in the structure as a whole, you only need like 60 percent of everything. So the ones that the deadlines are firm are just the ones that you don’t end up doing as much of and you do more of the other stuff. So I try to do both of those things. Like, I try to do all of it in the structure.

Dr. Corey Bowen: So as a person who would, as I would label myself as a learner, as somebody who is really helped by deadlines, I’m one of your students. Who would probably not get the shit done unless it was due on February 12th or whatever. I would be a student that would be labeled as like, yeah, they need the deadline. Thinking about that critically, as I don’t have a magic answer yet, but I’ve been trying to unpack this. What is it I actually need? Is it that it has to be done by this date or else it’s meaningless? Or is, is, is that deadline a mechanism that is working for Corey? Right? But there could be another mechanism that meets that same need that Corey has. I’m not sure what this is yet, but this is one thing I’m chewing on right now. It’s just a tool.

Sharona: Right, so for me, the stuff with the strict deadlines is the airplane seat version. It’s the stuff that, sure, you could go watch it later, you could do it later, but if you don’t come to class with it, It’s so much less valuable that I’d rather you did something else. So it’s usually the prep work, the like really low hanging fruit. Just watch this and answer one single multiple choice question before you come to class so that you’re ready to learn. You can choose not to do that, but I don’t even want you wasting your time on it once it’s expired and I’d rather you do something else. That’s my philosophy with that stuff.

Boz: Yeah, we did a whole episode on this whole topic about when is a deadline a deadline and when is it a suggestion? And that’s what it really boiled down to, what we were trying to say is what is the purpose of that activity or assignment or whatever. And if that purpose is still served by doing it, then yeah, your deadlines should be flexible. We have deadlines on everything. Some of them are just simply suggestions and they’re not really deadlines. They’re there for our students that need some structure. Cause if they don’t see the deadline, it’s I don’t need to do it yet, but then there are other things that. Yeah, if If you missed the deadline, the purpose of doing it has also expired.

So those are hard deadlines, but yeah, we did a whole episode on when, because that’s a, that is a big topic, especially when I’m having this conversation in my K 12 world, this idea of, you know, doing any kind of alternative grading or, or EGI means no deadlines and a student’s going to, you know. Turn in a semester’s worth of work on the last day, and I have to take it, which is absurd. It’s just one of those arguments that people will give to push back on this. But yeah, what’s the purpose of that assignment or that activity that should determine? If that deadline is really a deadline, or is it something that students are still going to get value out of going back and doing it two weeks later than you expected them to do it?

Dr. Corey Bowen: For me, it all comes back to the philosophy of what is the goal of for us of educators. If what we’re here to do is to help them learn, then any assessment that happens. Personally, I’d be really on board with assessment free education, but I don’t know if we’re there yet. Any assessment that needs to happen should, in my opinion, only be assessing learning. Like, because that’s what, I don’t know what else I’m assessing here. I don’t know what else I have any, any qualification to assess here. I don’t know why I would assess anything else. So if I’m assessing learning, and I want them to learn X, if they learn X on Tuesday, versus learning X on Thursday, does that mean that they automatically Learned it. They automatically like their learning doesn’t count like they can’t apply this later in life They cannot apply this to their work as civil engineers because they didn’t learn it on Tuesday. They learned it on Thursday Bad, bad, bad, bad. So now they’ll never be able to use it for the rest of their life because they didn’t learn it on the right day. This makes no sense.

Sharona: Right, right. But I would argue that there are legitimate reasons for deadlines that don’t have to do with learning. Now, let me give you two examples. One of them is, again, because we’re managing a large course, we release answer keys at a certain point. And once those answer keys are out, a student can’t take that particular assessment again. Ah. Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t take an assessment later, but they can’t take that one. Yeah, that’s the argument I have is that sometimes deadlines expire a specific thing, but they could still do the thing. They can’t just do it with that thing.

Boz: Yeah, well, but that’s not really a deadline because they’re still able to assess on that learning it’s just not that particular problem, you know.

Sharona: But that’s the problem when we’re talking about deadlines or due dates. There is a distinction between a due date on an object and a due date on when you’re going to learn something. And I do think that

Dr. Corey Bowen: there’s a difference

Sharona: that so, so I argue very much that I very much rely on due dates because of the structure I’ve built. Again, the bigger structure has the flexibility, the individual items might not. And I’ve tried to account for both of those things. That’s all, that’s all I’m arguing here is that there is no deadline on learning except for that imposed by the semester system.

Dr. Corey Bowen: And then, so if they don’t have the deadline on learning, then you’re very right that I’m not going to give the same problem to you on Thursday, but I’ll just give you a different problem that assesses the exact same thing. Now, from an instructor perspective, you’ve just created extra work for me because now I have to make another problem. Well, this is part of the war on publicly accessible education is that I’m supposed to teach strength and materials for eight hours a week. When something, if I do this well, I know because I have actually spent this much time on it. If I do this well, it’s going to take me more than 40 hours a week just for this one class with 25 students. I know that because I’ve done it. Okay, so it’s part of, it’s, it’s, it’s part of the bipartisan attack, actually, on all of public education and devaluing of critical education, devaluing of public education, devaluing of learning. An expectation that we’re going to create a structure that is efficient, an efficient factory of just pushing students through and the ones that are set up to succeed will and screw everybody else.

Boz: Well, on that note, we are coming close to time. I think we can,

Sharona: Oh, we’re at time.

Boz: Can easily go another hour or more, but I do want to start kind of wrapping this up. So, Sharona any last minute questions or thoughts?

Sharona: I guess. If it can be brief is sort of, I did want to get to the what’s next for you. I know that you have a semester of not teaching this semester.

Dr. Corey Bowen: I had a baby, so we’re working on that right now.

Sharona: But what’s next for you with this work? Are you, you go back and you start teaching and you’re going to keep iterating or, or what’s, what’s the next thing on your.

Dr. Corey Bowen: So a couple of things. For one major change I made to this class in the last couple semesters was creating more student learning outcomes. So, more units of learning making the class more scaffolded. So that is always my goal going forward is how do I scaffold it even more? How do I make the learning objective smaller? Not bigger. Not bigger. Instructors are going backwards. Smaller, when you make them smaller, easier pieces to chew on. That means create more material, create more structure, create more videos, create more, create more everything that’s gonna help give smaller pieces to chew on. But, that’s extra work, so that means that I need more help from ISAs, which means I need to train more ISAs and empower my ISAs even more to do work from their perspectives with their agency as long as I have support for them to do that, then, then I need to make sure I’m not using them just as graders, but actually using their incredible skills.

So that means a big, big job for me going forward is training more ISAs, and it is a very like, it is quite a process to train them to be Educators and not just mindless graders So that work and then my class that is a project based mastery based class for the new AutoCAD class That in its very first semester was kind of a mixed bag in that the structure of getting rid of engineering Science, this positivist idea of where I’m just going to give you a problem and then the right answer is 12. 6 and if you didn’t get 12. 6 then I need to help you figure out how to do it right so that you get to 12. 6. Instead having open ended projects that are also assessed through mastery, I could talk for another three hours about this, this is magic. The mastery framework actually makes a lot of sense, like even more sense than it does in our positivist courses. In a completely open ended project based way where I haven’t seen it used as much. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s really cool. There’s so much potential here as a tool. As a tool.

So, my big work for the next year It’s figuring out how to iterate on that more because the challenge in doing so, because I think that there’s just so much opportunity here. But the biggest challenge it immediately causes is that you need a lot more thorough feedback because of the open endedness of the work. The feedback becomes even, we are, I’m sure in this podcast we say all the time how important the feedback is that you’re providing to students, how important the feedback is. Okay, but that’s like times ten if it’s an open ended project. The feedback you provide to that student is everything. And the speed with which you can provide that feedback. They need that now, not a week from now. So this is my big challenge for the next couple semesters here, is improving the project base. Structure, project based, mastery based structure of my new open ended exploratory laboratory class.

Boz: All right. So I’m going to say it right now. A, I’ve got like three other episode ideas to have, bring you back on, but the next time you teach that class and at the completion of it, I, I would beg you to come back and let’s, let’s talk more about that cause I would love to hear how that kind of project based goes with, with the, just the mindset and the structures that you already have. It’s weird. It’s almost like you’ve got this ungrading mindset and applying, you know, mastery grading or, or standards based grading, but with this overarching burn it all down. Oh, you’re such a Ungraded, which I love.

Sharona: If you haven’t read the ungrading stuff, you have to because you are so in that camp.

Boz: Oh my God. Okay. Can you imagine having her and Jeff Anderson on a podcast together?

Sharona: Oh my God. My brain might break. Or even her and Jesse Stommel.

Boz: Or her and Jesse Stommel. But yeah, I definitely want to hear more about that your choice as a preparation as you get right before you teach it or right after you teach it the next time that, that just sounds like fun.

Dr. Corey Bowen: Okay, one, yes, let’s do that. And two, send me stuff to read, please.

Sharona: Oh, yeah. We can, we can send you a lot of stuff. I’ll give you, I’ll give you some links as soon as we jump off the pod.

Boz: Well, I want to thank everyone. I hope you guys have had as much fun listening to this as we’ve had making this. And we’ll see you next time.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episodes 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.