The Grading Podcast

85 – Patrick_Morres2

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Dr. Patrick Morriss: What I believe about my students when they walk in, am I telling a deficit story? Am I telling an asset based story? That drives everything. That drives everything. If I’m convinced that students have an academic deficit and I’ve got this 300 page document of curriculum that I’ve got to cover every topic on it, then my teaching and assessment is preordained. There’s no way off of that ramp. If I come in with a belief of deficit, student deficit, and that the objectives are closely tied to my curriculum, which is enormous, then I’m locked. There’s no way to get out of 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 are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am doing well, and I want to thank you, Bosley, because your work last semester has made my work this semester so much easier. I am in the middle of exam generation, and it is so much better this semester because of all the hard work that you did with me last semester getting Checkit set up to be able to do versions. So even though CheckIt is really technically designed more to support alternative grading, it also does really well at just general assessment versioning and flexible assessment generation. So thank you for your hard work.

Boz: Oh well thank you.

Sharona: I needed to say that. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: You know I’m actually doing really well. At the time of this recording, I just spent a whole day doing a regional training on geometry. So, taking geometry teachers from around region east of LAUSD and doing some planning, some unit launches, looking at some of the resources that are available. So that’s always one of the highlights of this new position is really getting to focus and work with other educators and just showing them and helping them plan with some of the resources that are out there and also just kind of being there when they get that aha moment, when we start diving into like some of the CAASPP test questions and saying, Oh, this is what they’re actually being asked about. They’re not asked about just simple mechanics and calculations. It’s actually this application and this modeling. So that’s always fun for me. And this group of geometry teachers was just a really fun group to work with. So I’m having a really good day.

Sharona: Well, and I said to you this morning, you seem happier. Because your previous job, which you did enjoy, had a lot of administrative work. You were constantly, every 10 weeks, shifting 2, 500 students around in different classes. And now you’re getting to actually talk math with teachers, which is a.

Boz: Lot more of my, yeah, a lot more of my time is more focused on instruction, whether it’s math or science, because I do support sciences as well. But yes, I get a lot more time doing that, which is. Much more enjoyable.

Sharona: Well, and I’m happy about two other things I did want to bring up. Grading conference registration is open and we have already, it’s February, the conference is in June, we have five institutional registrations this year already. Last year we had 14 total. I would love to hit like 20. So if anyone is thinking of coming to the conference and you want to see if your center for effective teaching or one of your institutional grants will pay for it, it’s really not very expensive for an entire institution to get to come. So that’s making me really happy.

And then also, we’ve been having people invite us to come speak on grading reform and authentic assessment. So the stuff’s taking off, but for all the positive stuff, there’s some flies in the ointment. And I am really excited to have someone back on the pod today to talk about those flies in the ointment. We are welcoming back Dr. Patrick Morriss, who was with us on episode 78. So Patrick, thank you so much for coming back on.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: It’s a pleasure to be invited back, Sharona. I think that’s the acid test of whether I was a good guest or not.

Sharona: Exactly.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Delighted to be here.

Sharona: Thank you. I’m glad you’re here because you have a lot of thoughts on something that I am currently agitated about. So I’m going to set this up for the listeners and then Bosley jump in if you think I’m misrepresenting. I am coordinating a whole bunch of courses that are still traditionally graded. And so one of the things that I’m trying to do is, yes, I’m trying to move in the direction of grading reform, but I’m also, in general, trying to move in the direction of what I believe good pedagogy looks like. And one of the things that I think good pedagogy looks like in mathematics is the use of tools, specifically the use of calculators.

Because I think that when we make things too pretty for students in mathematics, it gets so divorced from reality that when they have to view it with reality, they don’t know what to do. And the example that comes up for us is in statistics. We’ll give them a regression line and we’ll say the slope of this regression line is negative 35. 68 plus 1. 72x or something like that. And they can’t find the slope. And this is in college. They don’t understand the slope.

So I keep pleading with people, let’s do more realistic stuff. And so in these courses, I am putting more realism into the assessments. Even though they’re traditionally graded, I’m trying to give better assessment questions and give them as study guides. And I’m getting a lot of pushback from some instructors. I have some instructors who very, very much believe that calculators do not belong on an assessment. And other kinds of beliefs about, if you put a calculator on assessment, you’ve somehow compromised your standards. So one of the things you offered to talk to us about was belief systems and how instructors beliefs drive those educational outcomes. So what do you think of my situation and where do you want to go in general with this?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: What, I just heard you say a sentence, we compromise our assessment, was it principles or standard?

Sharona: Well, we compromise our standards. We compromise the level of work that we’re accepting from students by enabling them to have the crutch of a calculator, is sort of the unspoken.

Boz: We’re lowering the rigor and the demand.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Right on, right on. You don’t have academic rigor mathematical rigor, you don’t have academic standards. Yeah. Are you hearing that? Oh yeah. Right on. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s that. Academic standards get thrown. If people tend to pass your class, right? You don’t have academic standards. You must not be mathematically rigorous. I hear that all the time. People tend to pass the classes that I teach, and I do that intentionally. I use a lot of tools and assessment. But to hear that you’re compromising your standards, that’s, that’s a false choice. And, and that, that to me has been that, the falsehood of that choice that we have to, to to compromise standards in order to see equitable outcomes is, is the false belief that I just want to scream.

It’s like, let go of that one. And I’ll, I’ll tell you why. It’s compromising standards, lowering standards does not help anyone. No, it and in fact, it’s, it’s actually a soft form of racism. It’s like I don’t have the expectations of this group of students that I do of all my others. And that, my attitude, if I hold that attitude as an instructor, then, then I’m just enacting, trying to be nice to, right? If that’s the way it is, I’m gonna be nice to, I’m gonna relax my standards. That’s not being nice. That doesn’t serve anyone’s purposes. And it certainly doesn’t allow students, whom I believe, let’s talk about beliefs, whom I believe are totally competent in mathematics. They just haven’t, they haven’t found it in themselves and found a way to express it to me that I can recognize in an academic context. But if I believe that they are completely competent already, then lowering my standards is an insult. And I don’t, I don’t even want to, I don’t even want to go there. It’s like, let’s not lower any academic standards. Can we get behind that? Can we say that we’ve got we’ve got things that, we’ve got standards, I just want to say it that way.

Sharona: Well, that’s actually, I hate to say it, but that’s an assumption, right? That we have standards. Because when I talk to people about what they mean by that, they can’t articulate what those standards are.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Go.

Sharona: So, so my issue is when I used to teach in traditional grading, I, I didn’t lower the work I wanted, but I felt like I had to lower the level of the work I accepted because my students would show that they could do say the calculus, but they would make arithmetic and algebra mistakes. So was I going to hold them back in a calculus course because they had arithmetic and algebra mistakes? And that unfortunately is what I did. Yeah. Back in the day.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah, me too.

Sharona: Now, I don’t have to do that anymore. So if anything, it’s not just that I want to maintain my standards, I want to raise them. I want correct mathematical work.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: I’m with you on that.

Boz: That’s one of the one of the arguments that I know you and I get all the time Sharona. And I imagine Patrick, you’ve heard this a million times to is when we’re doing any kind of alternative grading or alternative assessment that we’re lowering our standards. I’m sorry. And I and I will like my students in my early career. You know, I’ve never been a hated teacher. I’ve usually you know, fairly popular with my, with my students and I will apologize to them, my early students before I, I really shifted to alternative grading because some of my assessment techniques, because of my grading practices, because of my belief that, you know what, hey, You didn’t show that you really understood this material. Instead of moving on. Okay, let’s talk about how we reassess how we do some feedback, how we continue to grow in this and not punish your grade. Once you do get it, my standards, my rigor, whatever you want to call it. is much higher. My expectations of my students now are much higher than they were, you know, a decade ago.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: I’m with you on that, Boz. Yeah, it’s like I wanted to say, look at what students write? If you say that they’re not, they’re not doing math, are they not getting a rigorous math class? They need to be able to show that they can do stuff. And I want to add an unstated part of that sentence in a way that I’m willing to recognize because that, that recognition is how we give academic credit for what we see. And I think one of the ideas we were bouncing around on the, the last time we talked was that I’d like to be able to recognize evidence of learning wherever it occurs and in whatever form it occurs. And that doesn’t mean it has to look exactly like an the answer to the question that I’ve asked. And, and, you know, I, I want to and this, this is, what do we believe about those assessment questions? Like there’s, there is, is there a right or a wrong answer? I mean, I’ve dropped conference sessions on how mathematics is right or wrong because that’s the way we made it. There’s nothing objective about it.

But I, I want to focus on that. Students can’t demonstrate the standard in a way that I’m willing to recognize. I just want to say that part out loud. And when I say I, I’m talking about I as a traditional grader. Right?, I have a very narrow view of what evidence I’m willing to consider. When I think of myself as a supporter of learning, then I am open to the evidence that a student will produce, in whatever form they produce. Now I want to give, I want to highlight, because I was thinking about a particular belief that I’ve heard, from, it was in, you know, a department meeting somewhere, but I mean you’ve probably heard something before. My students are so deficient they can’t even And then fill in the blank. And the one I wanna pick up on is one that I heard use interval notation. Now you know what I’m talking about here, right? Okay. It’s, it’s a detail and it’s a part of, it’s one of my standards, you know, course outcomes, students will be able to use interval notation. And I want to first support the truth of that statement because the students that in front of me does not know how to use interval notation, in a way that I’m willing to recognize.

Okay, so let’s dig into that. I say, that’s true. Let’s acknowledge that truth. Why is that? And then I’ll hear things like, well, they didn’t learn it in high school like they should have. And I say, okay, now we’re getting somewhere. And, and it’s true. We can, we can parse out about the should. That’s, that’s something else. But they didn’t learn it in high school. Okay, that’s true. Why is that? Well, turns out their high school only had a math teacher two of the four years they were there. Oh, well, that’s true. Okay, why is that? Well, math teachers can almost always get a higher paying job their high school just can’t pay enough to keep math teachers. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Why is that? Well, the high school’s underfunded. And I say, okay, that’s, that’s true. Why is that? Well, it’s a small tax base in that town. Okay, why is that? Well, it’s a really poor neighborhood. And you go, well, why is that? Well, the neighborhood is historically poor. And then you’re going to like, why is that? And you end up with some place like, well, I don’t know, poor people live there? Right? And that’s where you tend to hit a stop. And, and to be able to find out why that is, because that’s why the student in front of me can’t use interval notation, you got to dig into some history.

And I mean, read, I don’t know, Richard Rothstein, Color of Law, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Race for Profit, pretty much anything by Matthew Matthew Desmond, yeah, Evicted and, and you’ll, and you’ll, sooner or later you’ll land in historical municipal zoning ordinances, I mean, that’s where you’re gonna drop.

Sharona: Yeah, you’re gonna go to redlining, that’s, that’s where you’re talking about redlining. You’re gonna end up in redlining, at least in Los Angeles.

Boz: All over the country. All over, all over, yeah.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: So we know redlining, okay. So redlining, Homeowner Loan Corp and Federal Housing Administration redlined neighborhoods so that because they were high risk for banks to give mortgages, so mortgages didn’t get written there. And how did they decide? How did those government entities now decide the level of risk in a neighborhood? It’s like, how many black people live there, right? Okay. So the neighborhood was redlined by a racist government policy. Now let’s unwind that spool. Racist government policy labels a neighborhood high risk. So banks won’t make loans there. That makes the neighborhood poor, keeps its tax base small. So they can’t fund it schools adequately to keep a math teacher long enough to teach my student how to use interval notation.

And it comes right back home. And now. I want to drop a couple reference on you. We can look at that as true, the student cannot use interval notation in a way that I’m willing to recognize. When I dig into why that is and get into the history of it, I’m going to drop Travian Shorter’s something like asset framing, and my north star Rochelle Gutierrez is rehumanizing mathematics. What’s the other story about that student? It’s like now I’m looking at a student in front of me who is struggling to overcome historic and systemic disinvestment in their communities that manifests itself in an inability in my classroom to use interval notation. That’s a struggle I can get behind.

Alright, and now it sends me, like, how can I support the student in their struggle, their righteous struggle, that I want to get behind and support as an instructor in a classroom. I want to start having a conversation. I’ve got to think back about what I know about math. I’m talking about interval notation, that is not to go too deep in the weeds, it’s a one dimensional manifestation of the idea of an open or closed set, right? So if the boundary is included in the set, that’s a closed set. If the boundary is not included, that’s an open set. And so I started talking to the student to see if they understand these ideas of open and closed sets. And it turns out that they play basketball in the winter and soccer in the summer. And I said, all right, the ball lands on the, on the line in basketball. Well, you’re out of bounds. Well, the ball lines lands on the line in soccer. Well, you can play that, right? So they know that the basketball court is an open set, does not include the boundary. Put a little round perena on the end of that interval. And they know that a soccer field is a closed field, closed set because the ball on the line counts. It’s still in play. Put a square bracket around that.

What I’ve done is think back on what I know about my curriculum and my field and what I’m actually trying, the ideas that I’m trying to share. And it turns out that that student has a much more powerful idea of what interval notation is just this tiny little manifestation of. They understand open and closed sets. All they need is some vocabulary to layer over that, over their already lived experience. How can I capture that on an assessment? That comes in a conversation, right? And I learned that, in fact, this student who can’t use interval notation sure as very convincingly understands the mathematical concept behind it when I put it in context that is real to their own lives. Have I compromised my standards by accepting that as evidence for this learning outcome or this course objective? I don’t think so. In fact, I think what I’ve done is gotten some, gotten some documentation for where this student is so far beyond that little course course objective that I’m like you right there, Sharona, I want to get out of your way. Because you’re far more qualified than my assessment might have caught, might have measured in the way that I’m willing to recognize, right? That’s why I want to sort that out right there. Ahead of time, I want to get out of your way. You’re totally competent here. Have I relaxed academic standards? I don’t think so. I think I’ve kind of jacked them up.

Boz: Yeah, I was about to say, which one is really the more important concept here? The fact that as a student, I know the difference between a, you know, curved bracket and a square bracket or the fact that I can actually apply the concepts of, okay, here’s a set where, you know, the border is not part of it. And here’s a set where border is and actually being able to apply that like your example, the difference between a basketball game and a soccer game or a baseball game with the foul line, or, you know, the

Dr. Patrick Morriss: beautiful, foul line’s inbounds, right?

Boz: Yeah. The, the end zone, you know, just crossing that plane, like the, so which one is really more important for the understanding of mathematics as a whole and the understanding of, you know, the, how the world works within mathematics. Is it really more important to know that or to know the difference between a round and square bracket, which is a completely manmade construct that we, why is it that way? Because someone came up with it. Someone said, Hey, I want an easy way because almost everything we do in mathematics is because mathematicians are lazy. We didn’t want to have to write out ends included, ends not included. So we’re like, okay, I’m going to make this symbol and that’s going to mean, and then I’m going to make it a hard square. You know, it’s all made up. Isn’t the concept of understanding. you know, understanding what’s behind that simple, made up symbology, much more important.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: When you’re asking me, I’m going to say, yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: So I think what I’m hearing though, from both of you is that, and what I’m struggling with is, I see these beliefs that they’re really coming at me from instructors. They’re, they’re like, well, I have this very firm belief that I want to discuss via long emails to entire groups of people because that’s a thing. And I find it hard to push back in that environment. Cause I don’t want to write a book, there’s a reason we do a podcast and not a book and not a blog. But how do we get people to sit down long enough to hear what you just said. Because you said interval notation and I almost, the steam almost blew off the top of my head because that specific thing comes up. Now there’s another reason they don’t know interval notation, by the way, in addition to redlining, it’s because it’s been removed from the state standards.

Boz: Well, it has it, maybe not in all state standards, but.

Sharona: No, but in California. In California, it’s been removed. So now we have a belief that based on when we went to school, this is what was taught.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah.

Sharona: And those things are not necessarily taught anymore. There’s opinions about that.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah.

Sharona: But yeah, what you said about this belief that my students are so deficient, they can’t even… I’m in conversations constantly about what can we do to improve our students success in mathematics, in first year math, and the number one thing my faculty will say is reintroduce remediation.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Mm hmm.

Sharona: We just went through a massive project to get rid of it in the state.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah, remediation and support because this is coming from a position of love, right? We want our students to be successful. So let’s make sure we have a lot of tutoring resources available for those students who really need it, right? We want to support them. Do you feel that a lot as well, Sharona?

Sharona: Oh, yeah. In fact, our students get sorted into different classes based on where they get categorized, based on their math preparation, and the ones who are at a category level deemed not prepared, they are required to spend an extra unit’s worth of tuition for their support class. Now, that being said, the data is, I would say, inconclusive, but seems to support that kind of embedded additional support time, but

Boz: better than the alternative of doing the remediation and

Sharona: but it’s not clear if it’s better than just not requiring them to take that extra workshop.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah, that’s a good one. I mean, I don’t want to I don’t want to impose my will, dominance, whatever, on a group of students who, if I were to think about my own field and look deeply in their lives, I could find evidence. Like, if I’m going to be willing to do that effort, I could find evidence that they are. totally competent in my, in the ideas of my field. What they, what they don’t have is a way to communicate that in a way that I’m willing to recognize, right? That’s, that’s, highlight that right away. They don’t have the academic vocabulary to describe their own lived experience. If we can give them that vocabulary to let them see the mathematics that they have within themselves, and then put names on it, and then, and then they’re not going to keep saying, Hey, I’m terrible at math, because they’re going to start to believe that they really are good at math, which I believe, right? But they don’t yet have The, they don’t yet have the unlock, unlock the, the academic language and notation. Not yet. So okay, I can, I can add something to that because giving people the vocabulary to speak about their own lived experiences is a powerful teaching moment.

Boz: And for anyone that’s not already read it, that was a great summary of re humanizing mathematics. Like that, that’s at the, the core of, which again, there’s a few books out there that if you’ve not as a educator, but especially as a math educator, that’s one of them. Like,

Sharona: I would actually encourage anyone who’s, who. themselves has any sort of a math phobia as an instructor to maybe read that as well. Because I meet a lot of instructors who have the same deficit sense of themselves in mathematics if they’re not a math or STEM professor. But I have a, I have a question though, cause one of the objections that I personally have had with the conversation about deficit framing versus asset framing is if I’m looking at a student and they can’t do something that I expect them to be able to do in the way I expect them to be able to do it coming into my class. Okay. How do I not view that as a deficit? I’m not talking about coming out of my class. I’m talking about coming in. I don’t want to. deny reality that my students are not coming in with that same level of academic language. Right. And the same level of facility with symbolic algebra or facility with, you know arithmetic. I mean, they are coming to me at different levels and I don’t know always how to adjust. Like, how do I address this belief? That they’re coming with deficits.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah. Our, our mutual friend, Jeff Anderson. I was on a zoom call with him during COVID and it’s like something happened in his room. It’s almost like the laptop fell over. His camera’s all up in the ceiling. And it’s like, Jeff, are you okay? And he goes, oh my God. And he says, he was watching his toddler son learn to climb stairs. And he said, I heard him say, oh my god, that kid Jeff is a linear algebraist, and he talks like one. He says that kid is solving enormous systems of nonlinear partial differential equations. And, and it’s true. And it’s true. And where is that child solving all those equations? It’s in his body. That’s the embodied nature of the mathematical brilliance. I think Rochelle Gutierrez will tell you mathematical brilliance resides in our bodies and our emotions, right? So that child is doing math that’s off the hook that I don’t even think I could do numerical techniques to, you know, I didn’t think, I didn’t study partials in partial differential equations in either undergrad or graduate. I mean, that’s a little branch, but the math that the kid’s doing is off the hook, right? So, so how can I look at that and say, That kid can’t do math.

You know, I think of, of what it takes to do signal processing, like voice to text. That’s coming up in our in our college environment right now. What kind of processing does that software actually have to do to be able to take the words that are spoken, the audio file, and turn it into a text file? The computation is, is, I was digging into it. It is astonishingly complex. But you and I do that just sitting right here. Right? So, okay, so hearing is a killer app. We got that in our bodies. Now, I could cover chalkboards with, I don’t know, fourier analysis signal processing that that kid is doing when it hears, he hears his mother’s voice, right? So if I’m gonna say that that kid is deficient in mathematics, I’ve got a really limited view of what mathematics is, and, and I want to get rid of that limited view. And then be able to see and believe, we’re talking about believes, and believe that that kind of brilliance is walking into my classroom in every student’s body. And it’s coming with a lot of baggage that has convinced those students bodies that they’re terrible at math.

I mean, I’ve got a colleague who says that, you know, our students have been in abusive relationships with all their math teachers since, since jump. And it’s true, and in some ways, you know, it’s just like In any abusive relationship, you can sometimes come to love your abuser, right? So they don’t, they have a, you know, a math teacher that they loved who didn’t see that brilliance in them and, and made a test or made an assessment that required exactly the kind of, of expression of that mathematical brilliance that they’re not yet in possession of. And so label them as a deficit. And I just find that to be sad, sad. It’s like, I’ve got, I’ve got brilliance walking into my classroom. It knocks my, it blows my hair back and y’all, I’m bald, okay?

Sharona: I wish y’all could see what he just did. He removed his hat and there, there ain’t no hair there, guys.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: It takes a breeze to blow this hair back. Okay, they blow me away with their mathematical brilliance. Once they have a context, a question, an assessment prompt. That allows them to reach into themselves and see in their lived experience. They’ve got they understand open and closed sets closed and open intervals They understand that and then there’s like now they can once they see that and this is what kills me by you know I got so much content.

I got a cover, right? Once a student sees the mathematics in themselves, they devour content.

Boz: See, and that’s, that’s the argument that I get into with, especially some of my, my high school colleagues. Cause yes, there is a crap ton of stuff that we are supposed to cover. Oh yeah. If you’re just drugging through it, dragging, you know, anywhere from 25 to 35 kids behind you, because you are, you are literally having to, well, not literally, but figuratively I’m going to get myself in trouble, drag them along with you. It’s a lot of content to get through. If instead, like you were saying, you can open up your students minds and help them realize the lived brilliance that they have. Now they’re pulling you cause now they’re devouring it now. Yeah. It might take some more time at the beginning, but you’re not spending 180 days trying to, you know, out of your 38 students, drag 37 of them because you do have the one or two that, you know, does have that, that mental or that, that mathematical identity of competency and they, they are, you’re not dragging them, but you’re dragging the other 37, you know? Yeah, it is going to take you a lot longer, but that’s, that’s how you move fast is you stop doing all the work. You stop doing all the pulling instead, open your students minds and their eyes to see that brilliance that’s in them and see the math that’s around them cause that’s one of the biggest other things, in my opinion, is that the reason a lot of students have a hard time seeing that brilliance within them is because they don’t see the math within nature. They don’t see the math in the world because we’ve been teaching it in such a strict, narrow, starch way.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Disembodied.

Boz: Yeah, we have. We have completely disembodied the beauty of math in nature from the math in a classroom. There are two completely different things at this point.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Right on. And when you think about it, let’s talk about academic standards just for a second there. It’s like if I take my tiny little Academic standards, they pale next to the brilliance that you just described, Boz. So it’s like my standards are holding people back. And that’s what I heard you say earlier there, Sharona. Go ahead, jump in. You were about to.

Sharona: Well, so this is another conversation Bosley and I were having in the car as we were getting ready to come to this. One of the things I am grappling with is this is all great. And our, our standards might be limited. Is there still a purpose for getting them to have that academic language to have that symbol manipulation skill? And if so, how do I get people to believe that a, they can be the teacher that brings out the brilliance and still get them to get the academic language.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: That’s a great question, Sharona. The real challenge for a student to see themselves as a mathematical being is what, one thing first to see that, but then to be able to express it. And that’s where the academic language and academic abilities come in. Now, I would totally ask, you know, what, let’s focus on those abilities that we’re seeing are crucial. Like, I don’t know, using a trig substitution for a dev for a, to evaluate a definite integral pencil and paper with no, no symbolic manipulator calculators in the room. Okay. That’s. I’m sure that’s a test question that’s in the calculus class that’s in our vicinity.

Sharona: He is, he is nailing, you have like a bullseye to everything. I was, did you bug our car? Cause that was like the exact example I gave up. Like, why do we even need this?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: No, that came up in a math department meeting, exactly, like, is anybody still teaching trig substitutions to evaluate definite integrals? And there was a discussion, it’s like, well, you know, maybe we shouldn’t, but it’s on our course outline.

It’s in my content, it’s in my curriculum, I, I, I,

Sharona: It’s in my book, that I think a book is a curriculum and a course design.

Boz: I, I had to do it 20 years ago when I was getting my degree.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Right on, right on. What person in the 21st century, in any context outside of a math class, has to evaluate a definite integral by using a trig substitution, pencil, and paper?

Sharona: The engineering class that comes right after the math class.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: The engineering class, okay, that comes right after, that’s right. And, and that could change with a different professor.

Sharona: Mm hmm.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Wouldn’t ask that question anymore, and then it would be, then there’d be nowhere. I, I think I mean, we’re talking about student deficiencies, right?

Sharona: Right.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Student is so deficient they can’t even evaluate a definite integral with a trig substitution. I heard my students can’t even, I gotta get this right, find the zeros of a factorable quadratic with leading coefficient one. They can’t do it. And, and there was like nodding around the room. And you take that, you take that question out. So you take that phrase outside the context of a math department meeting and you’re met with ridiculous laughter.

Boz: Why are you doing quadratics with a coefficient of one? When did those really exist?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: We made them so we can make math problems.

Sharona: Right. And what frustrates me is. I mean, I gave this example to Bosley in the car and I apologize to all of our listeners who are not in a STEM field because this may or may not sound totally relevant. But I said, you know, I want to look at some of these instructors and say, if I handed you a map of a river and I said, you have to fly a drone and trace the river. How long would it take you to come up with a formula for the path? You know, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a scale, you know, of so many miles per inch. But I’m not giving you a formula. Well, if I throw that thing into Desmos, I can very quickly, because I have the skills of I could throw a couple of piecewise defined quadratics, cubics, get it kind of close. And then yes, I do know how to parametrize that so I could do that short of by hand and maybe that’s the skill.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah.

Sharona: But if I tried to have you hand draw, estimating quadratics and quartics and quintics, like, you can’t do it. And yet, being able to calculate the length of the path the drone’s gonna fly to find out if you have enough battery power? Kind of important.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: That is kind of important, yeah, yeah. So I’m really,

Sharona: I’m, I’m grappling with the balance between, I, I don’t know if there’s just no point to symbolic algebra anymore, completely. Like, I don’t know if I want to go that far or is there a point to

Dr. Patrick Morriss: I don’t know if I want to go that far either, yeah. Yeah, not yet.

Sharona: Is there a point to somehow emphasizing the idea of pattern and structure? Or is there just not a point to any of this unless you want to become a math teacher? Like I, I’m really struggling with people have these beliefs.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Well that means you need to perpetuate the stuff we’re trying to interrupt

Sharona: right now. Right. So what it, you know, we have. All these beliefs and sometimes I don’t even know how to answer the instructors when they put this thing in front of me. I have this belief and I firmly believe it and I’ve been teaching for 20 years.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: And it’s been confirmed every time I’ve looked for confirming evidence, right? Yeah, absolutely true. Absolutely true.

Sharona: But how do I put a crack in that belief? What do I do to crack that open and have an honest conversation?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: You know, I love young people because they ask questions like that. I don’t, I don’t ask questions like that anymore. I’m not, I’m not gonna change anybody’s belief. I’m not. That’s a lifetime journey. Yeah,

Sharona: but I have to work with them day to day and they have to fall into my, I either have to railroad them into my beliefs, which I have done before, and it’s one way to go about it.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

It turns out

Sharona: that after seven years of railroading them, you get some of them.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Get some money. Ah, that’s, that’s a hard one. What I, you know, what I believe about my students when they walk in, am I telling a deficit story? Am I telling an asset based story? That drives everything. That drives everything. If I’m, if I’m convinced that students have an academic deficit, and I’ve got this 300 page document of Curriculum that I’ve got to cover every topic on it, right, then my teaching and assessment is preordained. There’s no way off of that ramp, right? If I come in with a belief of deficit, student deficit, and that the objectives are closely tied to my, to my, to my curriculum, which is enormous, then I’m, I’m locked. There’s no way to get out of that. Because I’m, I’m locked in on my beliefs. I have this huge belief about how important every little detail in my curriculum is.

Like I have to cover this in class. Otherwise, I’m, I don’t know, education without practice or something. I want to take that because covering material or the need that is the desire to cover material is huge in what it expresses about our beliefs about our students and our own curriculum. And I want to offer a different way to think about that. It’s like, Hey Boz, you said I’ve got 36 weeks. I’ve got to spend three weeks. I’m dragging people every day. What if I spent three weeks, three whole weeks? And I heard a colleague do this one time. I’ve been teaching for three weeks. I haven’t taught a damn thing yet. Right. Well what have you been doing? You’ve been creating a learning environment, right? Where pe you, you’re creating an environment where people can learn. And then once you set the fuse, then all those 36 weeks get covered in about 24 and you’re looking around the room at the end. You know, you’re six weeks left at the end of the end of the school year and you’re going, what am I gonna do with these people? ’cause they’re done with my stuff. Right?

Covering material. I like to think of it as, as I I’ll tell a story. I had a, I was in Washington DC several years ago and I went to the National Portrait Museum and my partner at the time, we had four of us were there and she connected with a postdoc from the University of Virginia. in art history who came up to be a docent just for the four of us. So there were actually six people, including this postdoc art history major from the University of Virginia, who are going to take us on a tour of the National Portrait Gallery. I thought, damn it, that’s a good idea. Okay. So in the, at the, in the entryway, there is this enormous, I mean, wall size portrait. And I got to think of the actor’s name. I know he’s no longer in favor. Kevin Spacey, he played President Frank Underwood, was it House of Cards? I don’t know, some show. There is this portrait of President Frank Underwood, totally fictional character the entryway and this postdoc has a stand in front of this portrait and we look at every little detail because it’s totally, you know intentional and deliberate every detail look at look at the glint on his on the pupil of his left eye now. Look at where he’s got his fist on this on the arm of the chair, and you see that glint on his ring, and now look at the toe of his polished shoe. You see that little glint?

And we’re looking through at this. We’re deconstructing all of the power projection in this portrait of this fictional character, and I’m looking at my watch. It’s like we got three hours with you, and we’re spending A half an hour looking at a fictional, sorry, I dropped it. Sorry. A fictional president, you know, do you understand that in this building are the portraits of like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington? Like, can we go see them? It’s like, no, we looked at, we looked at Frank Underwood for a half an hour. And then he said, okay, let’s go look at Andrew Jackson. And we walked down this long hall and there are portraits lining, lining all of, like, we went past a hundred portraits, turn a corner, go up the stairs, and there’s Andrew Jackson’s official presidential portrait at the top of the stairs. And I’m coming up the stairs, and I slow down, and I’m going, damn, look at all, this is not a photograph, y’all. This is a portrait. It is meant to project political power. Look at every little detail in this official Andrew Jackson portrait. It was amazing. Okay, so what happened? He set me up. He spent his time setting up a learning environment. And when I walked up the stairs, it’s like it went

BOOM!

It’s like, you know, I can talk about portraiture now. I understand a little bit more about it. His content, all of his topics, were all those paintings that we walked past. Right? And now I’ve got an experience. He created an experience for me. From this enormous volume of, of material at his, at his disposal. He created a learning experience for me where I get, in three hours, I understand portraiture. Like, I can really talk about it. I know something because of the, what he set me up, all those paintings, that entire warehouse, that’s my curriculum. I want to, in my classroom, create, curate, that’s the word I want to use. I want to curate a learning experience from all of that content, including interval notation including trigonometric substitutions for definite integrals. Including all of that, I want to curate a learning experience that allows a student to see in themselves the mathematics that I’m sharing in the way that I saw in myself the understanding of portraiture. Let’s just create a learning experience, y’all.

And then get out of their way.

Sharona: So, okay. Go ahead, Boz.

Boz: I was just going to ask, have you ever read anything from, Elena Aguilar, I think is her name. Any of her, like the Art of Coaching or Arise?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: No, those don’t sound familiar to me. I’ve read a lot of books, but not,

Boz: I know you don’t do. I know you don’t do coaching, but I think if you ever had, you know, a little bit of freedom or a little bit of free time, which I know with most educators, that’s a laughable matter, but just reading it, I think you would connect with some of the, some of, you know, her ideas on behavior, you know, comes from. Beliefs was come from perspectives and how to, you know, you can’t coach on behaviors without looking backwards into their beliefs.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Beliefs, right there, right there. Beliefs drive behaviors, behaviors drive outcomes. We’re talking about equitable outcomes. Let’s back up into the beliefs. Yeah, exactly. That’s it. And you described that in context of coaching. I’m not surprised. I always look at that in the context of teaching.

Sharona: Well, and what I’m grappling with right now is there is It’s another belief that so many instructors, not just in mathematics, hold, and it is so deep. Because you said, create a learning experience. What do you predict that I’m going to say that so many of my instructors think a learning experience looks like?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: I don’t know, one to 37 odd.

Sharona: Well, it’s more like, what is the teacher doing? In that moment when they think that they are creating a learning experience.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Oh, there you go. There you go. Yeah. Talking?

Sharona: Yes. Because one of the things I hear all the time is that I must tell them this before I ask them to work on something. Cause if I don’t.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Oh yeah. I couldn’t ask them to work on something.

Sharona: And I keep using the analogy. I’m like, please stop tying their shoes for them. Please let them try to tie their shoes.

Boz: They just listen to the way I do it and watch me do it a hundred times. They’re going to know how to do it because that’s how we learn everything, right?

Dr. Patrick Morriss: That’s a, I’m going to just label that as, as a false belief that if I, if you can watch me do it, then you’ll know how.

Sharona: Why is it so pernicious? Why is it so, I mean, it is so there.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Are you ready? Are you ready? Why is that so? Because we gain status. Because mathematics is difficult and therefore those of us who do it are smart. That is a social construction. It’s based on beliefs. We can prove to you that we’re smart. I can prove to you that I’m smart. Because students can’t pass my class.

Sharona: But this goes way beyond math.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Say more.

Sharona: Way beyond math. Well, I have a certain someone who shall remain positionless in my world who is in a social science field, who very much believes that if we just put 400 students in front of him and he taught them,

Dr. Patrick Morriss: taught them,

Sharona: that they would all succeed. So it’s not just that math is hard, I think it’s more pernicious to teachers.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Academics.

Sharona: Particularly the higher up the education spectrum you get,

Dr. Patrick Morriss: because

Sharona: I don’t think this is what elementary teachers think at all. I could be wrong.

Boz: There’s probably a better chance of you pulling a random elementary teacher compared to higher ed that doesn’t hold that belief. I would not say it’s a universal truth.

Sharona: Right.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah. I like to say that, you know, I’m a. I’m a college professor, kind of, I guess, whatever, I teach, I, I’m in a classroom at a college we’re selected, I, I’ve been selected for mostly self regard, and loving the sound of my own voice, right, I’ve, and here we are. If, if I am, if I believe that my voice is, wonderful, then I’m going to want to hear it and I will believe that it will have the positive impact on others. And I just heard you describe that. Personally, I’ve found that, you know, if I’m talking, ain’t nobody learning. That’s my classroom. It’s like, y’all go.

Boz: That’s the, you know, one of the, the essentials of John Hattie’s work. You know, when you look at making learning visible, that was one of the big findings. Whoever’s doing the talking or writing.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah,

Boz: they’re the only ones in the room doing the learning, like they’re the only ones doing the thinking.

Sharona: So the problem, the problem with that, as you said, talking or writing. And so most people think that note taking is writing and

Dr. Patrick Morriss: I talk, they write,

Sharona: you got to be a little careful with, with that, because although we had a conversation with English teachers recently, and I asked them how often they wrote. And they said never. And then one person said, well, I guess I write my grocery list. And they literally meant the physical action of writing. I was talking to them about teaching writing and I said, well, how often do you write? What do you write? And they’re like, never and nothing. And I’m like, You never write an email? A text message? You like, so that was a little bit weird that for some reason they don’t see

Boz: their own What was their response when you said that? No, I don’t write it, I type it.

Sharona: Yeah, pretty much and I’m like, but wait a second, weren’t we just talking about teaching writing and you’re in middle school? I don’t think you mean letter formation with a pencil is teaching writing. So somehow when I asked them that question It suddenly shifted from the art of writing as a discipline to the physical action of hand writing. And I think when you do the Hattie’s Visible Learning, they do the same thing. They switch from talking or writing, where writing is actually meant to be putting on paper your thoughts. And it could be your math thoughts.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Sure.

Sharona: They flip that to, oh, they’re writing, they’re taking notes.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Taking notes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good one. What’s the difference between taking notes and say discussing a situation or problem and trying to compose your own thoughts about it? Right, so the note taking is receiving, right? That’s like a passive reception, and then I move my pencil, but it’s not like it’s, it’s not coming from me, right? Like it would be in a group activity or a writing activity in that writing class, you know, three minute, right. Just, just write for three minutes. Here’s a prompt, whatever that’s that student generated. So I don’t, I don’t know. I wanted to get the name of that author. Did you say Hattie?

Sharona: so I’m definitely gonna link Hattie’s visible learning the sequel in the show notes I also actually dropped it in the chat Just now, if you guys want to, if you want to look at it, Patrick I’m also going to put the link to Elena Aguilar’s stuff and Rochelle Gutierrez’s stuff. So all these links will be in the show notes. I guess where I’m so frustrated hearing this conversation is. Because there’s so much of this. You’ve got Peter Lilla Jowell’s creating thinking classrooms in mathematics. You’ve got Rochelle Gutierrez’s stuff on rehumanizing mathematics. You’ve got Hattie’s visible learning stuff. I can’t get some of these people to even crack open a summary of these books and these studies.

And so this going back to beliefs. Where do you, if anyone has any ideas and wants to write into the show, where do we, where do we insert the crack? How do I get the tiny little wedge? Because I would love to have, you know, these, I get thrown at me, it’s super important that we prepare our students for every possible career they might have. And I’m like, yes, I completely agree. That’s why we need visually impermanent spaces. That’s why we need, you know, active learning classrooms and alternative grading systems. And, but yet what they really mean is these beliefs that I hold so tightly. Yeah, I’m 100 percent convinced is the only way to do this, despite proving for decades that it doesn’t work.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Evidence. Evidence won’t change that belief, sharona. Evidence will not. Data doesn’t change people’s minds, you know, and stories

Sharona: that told us that. Guskey I think said you actually have to change the behavior first. So when I talk about railroading, that’s what happened in our alternative grading system in our statistics class. So we came in, we redesigned the course. We told the instructors, Hey y’all, you’re teaching this way. Trust us for a little while, check it out. And they did. And we fought over it. For probably seven years with some of the instructors who taught with us. And last semester we had an instructor on his way out the door who’d been fighting with us over this for years. And he had to teach in one of both of these types last semester, the traditional grading and the mastery grading. And on his way out the door, he says, That traditional grading is garbage for the students. You have to go with the mastery grading. And I’m, this is a guy I’ve been fighting with for seven years and I got him, I got him, but we changed the behavior first.

And I don’t have the same exact opportunity in pre calculus that I did in statistics because they kind of, There was a little bit of a carrot and a stick. You want a job? You want to teach this class? You got to do it this way. And people, it was new to them the way we were teaching it. So everyone was like, all right, whatever. This might fall flat on its face, but whatever. People feel much more strongly about precalculus and calculus than they ever did about that statistics course.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Yeah, that’s the STEM pathway, that’s the that’s where our status comes from, right? That’s to protect the boundaries of our, of our status. Pre calculus is going to be more more tightly guarded than, than statistics or math for the liberal arts or quantitative reasoning or any of the general ed courses because it leads to STEM and it leads to calculus, which is, you know, the little bulwark of our of our status as smart people.

Boz: Yeah. It’s, it’s our gateway into the elite. The calculus is that.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: That’s exactly it. That’s it. That’s exactly it. It’s the gateway. And if everybody can do it, if everybody can do calculus, then I lose status.

Sharona: Well, and I think I have to remember, because I do have a lot of instructors who I believe that they think that they believe that they want everyone to succeed. And then I have other people who really, in their heart of hearts, they know that they don’t think that everyone can do this. And distinguishing between those two people, because the ones who really think that they believe it, I think are more open to being shown a way to succeed at it, but some other people who are just, their own identity is so wrapped up. It’s.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: You just said it, you just said it identity. If identity is closely tied to beliefs, when, when something I believe turns out to be not true, then I’m not the person I thought I was. And that’s hard. That’s hard anytime, any, any point in life, that is, that’s a really difficult message to, to just take in. Yeah, I, I don’t know what, what to, what else to say about that. That’s identity. Yeah. You we’re, we’re, we’re attacking when we, when we question beliefs, we’re actually questioning identity and we have to keep that in mind, like, what is the identity that I’ve formed as a mathematician, as a teacher, as a person.

Boz: So, and, and I, I really think that’s the heart of why any kind of reform in education, not just grading, not just assessment, but any reform in education. Is so difficult because again, the ones that are leading it are the ones that were successful in the old model. And our identity is tied to that. So when we change the model, it’s challenging our idea, whether it’s, you know, us elite mathematics, mathematician and math educators or any educator. It’s not just, you know, math and STEM. Every educator has, you know, at some level we were successful in the traditional systems and challenging that challenges some of, you know, who we are.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Sing it Boz, yeah, what you just stumbled on is how the system perpetuates itself. Exactly. It’s created, you know, I, I can, if I keep doing it, I’ll maintain the status that I’ve attained. And Oh, by the way, as a college math instructor, I actually have some authority to define what it is that mathematics is, including to the level of detail, like interval notation, right? I have that power because I’m in charge of curriculum and I’m in charge of of.

Departmental or even in, academic field wide pedagogical norms and assessment norms. That’s what you’ve been working on for years. You know, can we change the norms about assessment? Well, if we do, then we’re threatening, right? We’re threatening the status that comes from being where, where I am, honestly, where I can keep the, I can keep the status, but I have to maintain the intimidation, the notation that, that puts people off, I need to maintain, the the assessment that does not get to learning, but actually calls me an assessment back to showing what I know in a way that the instructor is willing to accept, right? I gotta, gotta hold tight to all of those.

And we call it, and we’ll put the label on that as mathematical rigor or academic standards when really it’s a, in my, you know, I’m just going to say it, it’s a way to hold on to the status that we’ve been granted as academics that we’ve, we’ve gained. It wouldn’t even say that, you know, we earned this, right? I worked hard and you did, right? And now we’re in charge of keeping it the same way it was that benefited us when our students. are living in a different time, so they’re different. They need different math.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Let’s let’s meet up. Let’s break some bread and?

Sharona: Say you coming to math fest, Sacramento this year,

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Mathfest? I’ll look that one up.

Sharona: Oh, you haven’t? It’s the Math Association of America’s big education conference for higher ed. And a lot of us we’re doing a whole series on alternative grading. So, and inquiry based learning. It’s a great conference.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: That’ll get some that’ll get some exposure. Right? Yeah. New ideas. Yeah. I’m gonna, I’m gonna say the same as Boz. I love chatting with you, Sharona.

Sharona: I love chatting with you and thank you for the therapy session for me for dealing with my instructors.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Dang, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to do that.

Sharona: No, that’s what I wanted. That’s, that’s the point.

Dr. Patrick Morriss: Community, y’all. The only way we’re going to get through and remain sane is in community. We got to talk to folks, right? And I really appreciate having this chat with y’all. This is good. This is good for me too. Thank you.

Boz: Well, thank you again for, for our listeners. I hope you guys have enjoyed this as much as, as I know I have, and I’m pretty sure that Sharona has, so, and we’ll see you next week.

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

If you would like to suggest a 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 hosts and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.