The Grading Podcast

127 – TeachFront_Stephanie Vale

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Stephanie Valentine: I don’t remember who came up with the idea initially, but we just had conversations. Wouldn’t it be great if Canvas could just do this? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that could just calculate these grades for us and show students how their grades are being calculated and let them keep track of things? But we looked and there was nothing like that out there.

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 Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of, your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: As of when this recording is gonna come out, my semester is gonna be done. I am so excited. Also, we have a young player’s performance of Shrek kids that will be completed. We have about 250 people coming to see our 25 little munchkins doing Shrek kids. And then I’m gonna be heading off to see my son commission in the Army. So it’s a really exciting couple of weeks. So I’m like, yay, today. How about you, Boz?

Boz: At the time of this recording, we just did one of my last big PDs that I facilitate for the semester. And this one went really well. Yeah, I’m having a good day. Looking forward. My semester has still got a week and a half, so not quite where you are yet, but not too far behind.

Sharona: And you had a good pd, but I actually did too. And shout out to Michigan Virtual Charter Academy. We had an amazing PD on the next generation science standards, science and engineering practices. It’s a middle school that is all standards based graded across the board. And so we’ve been doing some deep dive PD with them. So I had a wonderful day with them today. So if any of them are listening, thank you guys. That was awesome. But I’m also really excited because we have a guest in this virtual studio today. I always love having new guests. It is one of the highlights of my week. So I want to introduce Dr. Stephanie Valentine.

She’s an associate professor of practice at the Raikes school. I’m hoping I’m saying that Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. And she also runs Teach Front, which is an LMS that is custom designed, I’m gonna say that again, custom designed to make alternative grading sustainable day-to-day. So it helps instructors manage iterative feedback, tracking mastery, tracking reassessments, and flexible grading systems in ways that fit the realities of teaching. I cannot wait to get into this. So welcome Stephanie to the podcast.

Stephanie Valentine: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. It’s such a treat.

Boz: Yeah. Both Sharona and I are really eager to get into this one, but before we do something that we always like to do with our new guest is ask them, just how did you get involved in any kind of alternative grading?

But then I thought about it from their perspective and it was like, yeah, of course this is something that they feel like they can control. Of course it’s what they’re focusing on. So there was this moment where we were having a town hall type event and it really hit a crescendo where the students were talking about this particular assignment that they were struggling with, and that assignment was giving them a lot of stress and I tried to figure out what it was that they needed and they couldn’t really articulate it well.

But I remember specifically one student saying they needed to know exactly what to do to get an A so they don’t waste their time doing more. And I had a lot of feels in that moment. But statement really changed a lot of things for me. And a student offhanded after that said that they were TA-ing for a leadership professor who was doing this cool thing called ungrading, and I should look it up. So that night I did, I looked it up and I read for weeks, and suddenly everything just snapped into place. Like the idea that we could remove the moral judgment from grading and turn it into just assessment and just feedback and growth. It completely changed how I see my role as an instructor. It was one of those, I have moments in my life where I can see even in the moment that this moment is gonna change everything. And that was one of those moments for me.

Sharona: Wow. Wow. Just what a story that a student, have we had ones where a student mentioned it to the professor?

Boz: I think we have. Okay. But I’ve gotta ask, since that changing, since you changed your grading system, have your students had those same conversations where the focus is, like you said, the points or the grade or has that conversation shifted to something else?

Stephanie Valentine: That conversation has shifted immensely. So now it says, I think this might have been misinterpreted. I think that I did this instead of what you said I did. I’m just like, oh yeah, okay, we’ll fix it. And it’s so much less combative and more. The idea. Something that’s important to me in my classroom is that I say from the start, it’s a growth mindset classroom, and that means that we are going to grow through the class. We’re not gonna be perfect. And I say, that includes me. I’m going to make mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes, and we’re just going to deal with them when they come and learn from them. So I’ve found that the students give me a lot of grace as well if I make mistakes because it’s just, it can be fixable, you can grow and it’s not something to worry about.

Boz: But I ask ’cause, and I’ve said this story quite a bit on several different episodes, but my first adventure into any kind of alternative grading did not go well. But what sold me and why I’ve never gone back was the shift of conversations that I had with my students. Because I was a K 12 educator. I still am a K 12 educator, but my conversations are always, around grading time. How many more points do I need to get this next grade? Can I turn in these extra assignments to get these extra points? It was always about the points. It was always about the grade. When I switched to alternative grading, it became, what do I need to show you about descriptive statistics that I haven’t already? What do I need to show you that I’ve learned about using the normal curve and how that’s used in inferential statistics. So that conversation switched from point monering and all about the grade to actually about the learning. So I love that your origin story really came from that same place, that conversation, but I had to ask if those conversations had now shifted and it sounds like they have.

Stephanie Valentine: Absolutely. It changed the tone of everything. That semester, the students were just really downtrodden and there was a lot of trust between the faculty and staff and the students issues with trust. And so this really built our community again. It built us back, which was really incredible to just remove those factors of the students thinking we were being unfair or trying to force them to perform in ways that they didn’t understand. It’s been remarkable.

Sharona: So I’m curious you had this epiphany moment, you changed your grading. How did it go the first semester after you made the change?

Stephanie Valentine: The first change I tried to make. I wasn’t instructor of record for that course, so I had to fight a lot for my redesign. But once it started moving, the students were like, at the beginning of the year, this is a lot of paperwork. We had to decide what it is that we’re gonna do in this semester, but by the end, it had, the students were definitely on board. I think that particular assessment, we’ve outgrown it at this point and we’re gonna move to something different, but it was exactly what we needed at the time. So that was a capstone class that I was working on, but I primarily work with the intro to programming courses. So CS one and CS two and I was able to make a lot of changes there right away. And gosh, students were not all about it at first. They were like, I don’t know what this is. I don’t know how to calculate this. I didn’t know how to explain it to them well enough for them to understand. It was hard to keep track of all of the different things and which objective and which reassessment and which TA was in charge of grading that again.

It was a lot, but

Sharona: I think though that you’re underselling how hard it was, and I really want you to be honest here because you did something remarkable because of how hard it was. So can you like, dive in a let’s be honest, because literally I had a conversation today with someone on the Slack about they just did their first redesign and the students absolutely hated it.

So how hard was it at the beginning?

Stephanie Valentine: At the beginning it was a lot. And at that time in my life, I had a four month old and I had a 2-year-old and I was up three times a night pumping, and I was tired, so I wasn’t coming in at a hundred percent for sure. But after I had that sort of ethical epiphany, I couldn’t go back. So I had to try this thing and I threw it together in three weeks trying to redesign my whole course and figure out how it was gonna go. And I threw it at the students on syllabus day and said, I’m trying this new thing and. We’re gonna learn from it. And if I make a mistake and I fix it, I’ll make sure that the fix only improves your grade and doesn’t reduce it.

And so they at least trusted the process. But the first couple of weeks they were like, what is this? And it’s so hard to communicate what is a grade on an assignment. When I was using standards grading at the time so I had created my own number system. Like we had a four level, we call it mastery level schemes. A scale. Yeah. So I would give them their grades back as four digit numbers. So the first digit was the number of exemplaries and the second digit was the number of satisfactory. And so they would get a grade like 6,032, and they needed to understand what that meant. It was a mess. But by the end of the semester, the idea that they could resubmit assignments and improve their grades they, they laughed it up by the end and that became their safe place, and they would complain about all their other courses instead of mine, which was great.

Boz: Yeah. We and part of the reason Sharona is pushing you on this is we have talked to probably what a ratio of 10 to one of how many educators the first time they did this. It went well, like including Sharona and I like the first time that we did this. So

Sharona: 10 where it didn’t,

Boz: yeah, 10 that it

Sharona: to one where it did one to clarify that ratio.

Boz: It, especially if you’ve done this more than five years ago, ’cause there is a lot more resources out there now. But yeah, it’s hard and we make a lot of mistakes and like you said, part of the growth mindset is, we learn from mistakes, but as an educator it can be very frustrating to be like, I know I need to do this. It’s not working out quite the way it’s supposed to be, or it’s difficult to do this. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. But yet so many of us, even with those bad first, semester or two experiences never go back. Like regardless. Yeah.

Stephanie Valentine: I’m excited to talk about that. So I was drowning in spreadsheets. So there was one spreadsheet that kept track of the student, the reassessment or like which assignment they wanted to reassess within that they wanted a specific objective to be reassessed. We had to keep track of that plus the ti who was in charge of grading that thing. And then you’d have to go back and change the grade on whatever grading software we were using at the time, which was grade scope. And it just. That part was difficult. My course has a lot of moving parts. We do a lab every single day. They have to do required readings at the beginning of class or before class to prepare. So there’s about a hundred assignments for my course, and that means that my spreadsheet that took or tried to calculate their grades was it had at least 100 pages to it or 100 worksheets on it. And trying to keep track of that and make sure that my, like equations that were calculating it with 100 different pieces, that they weren’t wrong and they were wrong all the time. It was just a logistical nightmare. It was so amazing to see the change in my attitude and the student’s attitude in their achievement because I kept raising the bar and they kept reaching it with flying colors and that was really inspiring, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t see over my spreadsheets. And so I had my head TA at the time. I have undergraduate TAs, so my head TA at the time mention, I don’t remember who came up with the idea initially, but we just had conversations. Wouldn’t it be great if Canvas could just do this? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that could just calculate these grades for us and show students how their grades are being calculated and let them keep track of things. But we looked and there was nothing like that out there. And we decided that. Okay we’re software engineers, right? We’ll just build it for ourselves.

And I started, so I built a basic LMS where students could submit assignments, we could give them feedback on them and it would calculate grades and keep them up to date so students could see where. Their skills were growing and how they were doing on the different standards. We figured out a way to communicate those grades in a way that didn’t involve numbers at all, which was great. So we came up with a little graphic as a way to communicate different skill levels on different standards or objectives. And so I built it for myself, for my classroom, and we called it Teach Front at the time because what we wanted was a beach front property. We just wanted to take all of the stress out of grading and just sit on a beach. So teach front is what it became. And.

Sharona: So wait, let me just reiterate that. ‘Cause we’ve talked to so many people. We’ve seen Python scripts and we’ve seen the Google Scripts and we’ve seen Excel spreadsheets. You built an entire LMS system. To deal with this.

Stephanie Valentine: We did that, yeah.

Sharona: That’s amazing. Kudos to you. I’m just, I’m like in awe.

Stephanie Valentine: I’d love to take credit for that, but a lot of it was, the setting of the story that I told, I was the only faculty member in the school. I didn’t have someone down the hall to tell me about the Python scripts that they were using. I was just in my little Hogwarts island trying to make this work in my classroom. And so I didn’t realize at the time that it was cool.

Sharona: But with a bunch of Hermiones who gave you some of the ideas, right?

Stephanie Valentine: Yes. Wow. And then after, it was after my second semester, maybe my third semester, I don’t know, one semester when I was finally going to bring it into the classroom, there was a student that came to my office and was like, I’m really bored in your class. And I was like, I mean outside of school, but I have a project for you. And so he joined me and he then afterward became my TA and he would get his grade and his class and then go back upstairs and be like, okay, that didn’t work. And he would go and fix the code and change the way it works so that it was effective from all of the different perspectives from the instructor. Okay, this is what makes sense. And from the student, he was going back and changing the student perspective. So it really working with him. And then some of his friends came on board and we’ve grown and shrunk our team over time, but. Those students have certainly brought into perspective what is needed in the classroom. This was built in the classroom by faculty and students, for faculty and students. And eventually we decided that it was too cool not to share with the world. Teach front is now being shared with the world, which is just incredible.

Boz: But you’re teaching a intro computer programming class. You identify a real problem. You and your, a couple of your students starting off with just this one advanced student that, like they said was bored. So what are we supposed to do? We’re supposed to do some advancement. We’re supposed to challenge differentiation. And you guys actually created a solution to a problem you were seeing in a class that is supposed to be teaching students how to create solutions to problems. I, I.

Stephanie Valentine: Absolutely.

Sharona: We, I just, I we’re both speechless right now. Yeah. Just living in this moment of hearing you talk about this.

Boz: And we’ve heard so many other times where, you know, professionals will talk about the gap between someone leaving Academia and going into the real world and those processes and knowledge gap between that. And yet, here’s an education setting where, like you created exactly what you were supposed. I’ve just, it’s absolutely amazing. I love this.

Stephanie Valentine: And part of that is just the environment of that, that little Hogwarts our Rake school. We are, we have very entrepreneurial values and we just, if we see a problem, we train the students, this is how you fix it. And so we just did that. And that’s normal in our community. I remember the times that I was reading the book UNgrading and as I was going through all of my literature review, I guess at the beginning of this project, there were so many chapters on how do you hoodwink your LMS to make this work? And I was getting so frustrated. I was like, I don’t wanna hoodwink anyone. I just want it to work.

Sharona: And I call it hacking the LMS, but yes, the same thing.

Stephanie Valentine: Yeah. I just was like, why isn’t someone doing something about this? There has to be a better way. And then when no one came to my rescue, I was like, alright, I’m not gonna be a damsel of distress, I’m just gonna fix it.

Boz: But the amount of times that, like Sharona was just saying we’ve actually done some of it in our trainings of how to hack your LMS to, because most of them aren’t, traditional grading has been around for a while and computers and algorithms are really good at finding, percentages and averages and converting that into a letter grade that it’s all over the, that is such an easy thing to do for a computer system. And these LMS, especially nowadays like you, there is, I can’t imagine at least in this country, going to an educational setting and not have an LMS system that is integrated into your parent communication and your student communication. If you’re a K 12 educator with the student communication, if you’re a higher ed educator, like no one does on hand grade books, enroll books anymore. It is done through LMSs.

Sharona: Nobody posts their grades on the door of their office. Yeah. With some sort of code that they came up with. ’cause they’re not legally allowed to use your social security number anymore, which is what, when I went to college, that was what was up there. Was your social security number.

Stephanie Valentine: Yikes.

Sharona: On the door.

Boz: But yeah, this, the amount of time and we’ve done we’ve got a whole episode or two talking about the importance of utilizing the tools that we have available to us as efficiently and as effectively as possible. Because there is some things about alternative grading that can be time consuming and difficult if you’re not using your tools. And like I said, we’ve got a whole episode of two or two about this. We’ve had at the grading conference, we’ve had whole workshops on different tools and a lot of those were different types of whether it’s a spreadsheet or a Google Doc or some sort of grade tracking, like what you were talking about at first. None of them were as complex as what it sounded like you had at first with a hundred different assigns, like 0 3 2.

Stephanie Valentine: I didn’t know any better. I was doing the best I could with the random ideas in my head.

Boz: But this is such a big need and most of us in the alternative grading world don’t have an LMS system that works well with ours. Sharona and I have said multiple times canvas is the best one we have seen and it’s still okay.

Sharona: Actually, to be honest. We say that can Canvas is terrible. It’s actually just much better than anything else. And then I’m sorry for the Canvas people, ’cause I’ve worked with them, but yeah. I, so I do wanna dive in though. I agree with everything that Bosley says. These tools are so critical, but I wanna try to get some details to our listeners about Teach Front specifically. So there’s a couple things I wanna ask. If you could go into a little bit of detail about how it actually manages it. One of the first ones you mentioned was iterative feedback because as good as Canvas is at certain things, iterative feedback is challenging. So what does Teach Front do? What did you guys do to enable iterative feedback?

Stephanie Valentine: Yes. So the process that we built is iterative from the outset. So students get to submit their work and then it gets assessed for the first time based on the objectives and the scale that’s being used. And then they get their feedback and on the same page, they get their feedback right next to the little icon that shows them their proficiency. I had. I mentioned before that you could see , the graphic of the grade. So right next to the graphic of the grade says request reassessment question mark. And so they can submit the request right there. That triggers a notification to the instructors that they should re-look at it. The students do have to explain what it was that they changed and why they think that they should receive a higher rating now than they did before. After the instructors reassess, that goes back to the student where there’s another button they can see their original graphic. It’s a little shell. If you think of a scallop shell with the different spokes or tines on it. Each spoke represents one of the standards or objectives, and then how tall that spoke is and how colorful it is determines how proficient we have assessed their work in that standard. So you can see the full history of all of their attempts at their work, all of the next to each other, getting more and more colorful and beautiful over time and still, right next to that is the reassessment button. So they’re continuing to get feedback. They’re iterating with their instructor to say, okay, I’ve made this improvement. And then the instructor can say, okay, I’d like you to see you go farther. Or they could say, great, I’m glad you did that. And then they can stop. None of it is required for the student to improve, but in my experience, they’re very motivated to do so because they can see something about that shell and giving it more color is, it’s a little gamification, just a little bit. They just wanna see it at full in full color.

Sharona: So in other words, they submit an assignment, is it usually, it can be anything. It could be a video, an audio, a spreadsheet, a scan of a handwritten, lots of different formats. They submit it, they get commentary back with their proficiency scale, and then they upload a revised whatever.

Stephanie Valentine: Yeah, if that, a lot of my assignments are, the students turn it in on GitHub. So what they turn in is a link to their GitHub repository. So it’s not always uploading a new version. Sometimes it’s just explaining or in some other way resubmitting their work in a way that makes sense to the instructor and the student in the situation. But yeah, so it just goes back into the queue to get reassessed and then get sent back to the student. And it’s all the same interface, all color coded every standard as the same color across the whole site. You can really keep track of how a student is doing on any given assignment. The grade book is very colorful and the students can always keep track of how their grades are progressing because it’s automatically calculating for them and including all of those miscellaneous calculations that can seem so complicated. You need 17% exemplaries and all of these things. It just takes care of that and shows the students their progress over time. And instructors too. It’s very helpful.

Sharona: So can I, as an instructor, let’s say I have a project and I have four standards, but then I have a bunch of things that I would call yes no specifications. Like you did do this, you didn’t do this, you put a cover letter on, you didn’t. Things like that. Can I set the lines in my rubric with different mastery scales for each of the pieces of the whatever it is.

Stephanie Valentine: Yes. So you can have as many mastery scales as you want, and you can associate any of your mastery scales with the standard that you are including. So if you wanted to have a standard that was specifically for formatting of their documents, and a specification under that would be, did you have a cover page? Did you have that? You can assess that in a, using a binary scheme if you wanted to. We’ve just added the ability to have those check boxes for specifications. I’m really excited for that to go into the next release. Absolutely. It’s very flexible for whatever your flavor of alternative grading is because as we’ve done interviews with people all around the country, there are a lot of different ways that alternative grading can be implemented. And so we’re trying to make room for all of that and to support all of that because if even just one more classroom uses mastery grading then we’re doing something right.

Boz: Yeah. And that was interesting that you brought that up ’cause I was going to ask about that. ‘Cause we’ve talked to hundreds of people and Sharona, you and I joke, you get two alternative graders together in a single room. There’s probably five different ways that they, that. Grading is done just between the two of them.

Stephanie Valentine: At least,

Boz: Yeah, because I, Sharona is absolutely guilty is every single class that she teaches has a different, what we call grading architect. My classes little bit more similar to each other than hers are, but still very different. Last time I taught a Algebra two class, I had a lot of, spec and standard-based kind of mixed in together. So there are so many different ways and that’s why we’ve seen so many different Tracker sheets and Tracker tools developed because none of the LMS systems, even if some of the ones that do have, like Canvas does have a mastery grade book now and they’ve had it for a little while. But it’s very limited. It’s set up, I think, really well for standards based or equitable grading. It’s not set up really well for some of the others, but this sounds like you’ve got a lot of that variability, a lot of that customization that is missing from anything that I have, even the stuff that has been developed by practitioners themselves that I’ve never seen. Am I over exaggerating this? Do you really have that kind of flexibility in your system?

Stephanie Valentine: Yes. Short answer. We’ve done a lot of work to share this with lots of different styles and trying to figure out what’s important and vetting it in my own classrooms with not just my own, but others at my university trying to get different styles and figure out how things work for different people. And really, the teach fronts. I don’t leave my growth mindset at the door of my classroom. It’s very much how Teach front is built too. We’re so eager to explore and add and figure out how we can make it work better for instructors and students around the country. So we’re very eager to learn and to grow. And as we find new ways, we’ll incorporate new ways and be inspired by that. And they can be inspired by us and. It’s very freeing just to grow.

Sharona: I wanna know what’s in the water at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, because we just had Wendy Smith on the pod not six episodes ago who is also at University of Nebraska Lincoln and in the teacher prep program. So I’m hoping, I don’t know if Wendy, but you need to go trott over to her class and make sure she’s trying out this stuff.

Stephanie Valentine: After I heard that episode, I made an appointment with her and we had a really good chat. The the subject line was geeking out over alternative grading of our meeting invite. It was really great. She is, that’s amazing. Fantastic. But I didn’t know she was there. We were having these sort of parallel journeys without interacting with one another. So I’m really glad I have that connection now.

Boz: See, and that’s the one thing that I still I don’t understand. And we keep hearing this, like these really great stories of people that are in very similar locations, if not the same. And yet paths not crossing. And that’s the thing that as a community, if we’re going to really move this needle and get it past happening in these different pods, we’ve gotta figure out a way. And I, sure or not, you’ve said this several times, that, some of the things like Slack and some of the other communities, but also some of the spoken word that, whether it’s the conferences, whether it’s the podcast. But it’s amazing, both of you guys are doing some just amazing stuff and now that you guys are connected. I imagine that is going to explode. And as much as I hate tipping my hat to Nebraska, ’cause I am originally from Oklahoma the Nebraskan.

Stephanie Valentine: Neither of us are from Texas. Yeah, it’s fine.

Boz: Yeah, but Nebraska was I grew up with Nebraska being a huge, rival manager. Yeah. Football

Sharona: wise.

Boz: Yeah. I love that. And I am I am really excited to see if you two are now connecting to see what happens with how she takes your stuff and introduces it in her world. How you use her as a resource to even, make teach front even more diverse and more powerful of a tool. But yeah, there’s some good things going on in Nebraska.

Stephanie Valentine: And good things going on this podcast. I am. You guys brought us together Wendy and I, and you made that possible. And I’m hoping that this gives us a whole new world of inspiration of anyone who’s listening to us right now and wants to join the conversation.

Sharona: And that’s the point. And one of the reasons that we chose to do a podcast instead of write another book or an article, no Shade to people who write books and articles. I, my hat off is off to them. I, it’s not a task that I really wanna do, but I prefer to talk and which, okay, you be quiet. But I prefer to talk to people and I think that grading is so personal that all the data in the world and all the stories in the world are not enough. Until you can hear your tone of voice. Because I think if you had written what you told us today, it would not have been as powerful because what’s in your voice about the need to solve this problem? And when you said you’re not a damsel in distress, like that’s powerful. So I’m hoping that people will take advantage of the opportunity to hear from you, to check out Teach Front, and to connect with you if it’s a solution that they might be looking for. Because I think it’s holding a lot of people back. Oh, absolutely. The lack of support and tools.

Boz: Yeah, especially the LMS. ’cause like I was saying, the LMS is such a integrated tool now. 20 years ago maybe not. But now there is no setting in, at least in education in this country that an LMS is not a crucial piece of your tool set. So to have this available now to where we can really get away from the mathematical mechanics that so many other LMS systems is built on. It is incredible. So how does those that are listening and now are like, okay, we you’ve teased us enough. Tell us how do, like where do we find this? Where can someone look into this? If they wanna try it out, where do they go?

Stephanie Valentine: Absolutely. So if you go to teach front.com, there’s a Connect with Us button at the top of the screen and that opens a page that allows you to select a time on my calendar and we’ll just have a chat. We’ll talk about it. I can give you a demo of Teach Front and we’ll figure out. What works for you in your classroom? And it’s such a exciting time for me because I get to be inspired by all of the different things that people are doing all around the country and they get to explore the new tool that could, save them from drowning. It’s a little life jacket and I think, I’m just really excited. I’m excited for that to happen. We also have a YouTube channel at Teach Front. We’re still a very new little thing. We have one video up right now, but it’s a webinar that we did about how to use Teach Front , and why mastery grading is important, or alternative grading is important. You can check that out as well. You may be able to post these things in your show notes, perhaps.

Sharona: Yes, we will link your website and your video. Definitely both of those things will be linked in the show notes. I did wanna ask you another question though, which is, how is it evolving having teach front itself, so not just alt grading, but now you have this tangible product, this solution. How is it engaging your students in an ongoing basis and you do you have a little company that they can participate in or like, how does that work?

Stephanie Valentine: Yes, so we are a standalone little tech startup. We are not affiliated with May University. And it’s an interesting thing. Building software inside of a university setting, especially something that touches student data.

So my university is very protective and risk averse. And they, I preferred that I was not using teach rent in my classroom until we could have a full contract in place that meets all of the compliance requirements for every other software that they encounter. And so that really allowed us to raise the bar and become a real thing getting.

Security, compliance things. And anyway, so we did a bunch of work and as of Friday which is irrelevant because when everybody was a Friday, and it was a really exciting Friday because the contract officially came in and I will be able to use it in my own classroom with my own students again after 463 days.

So I’m very excited to use it again and see how my students are able to work with it again. And another piece with that is I have been living without teach rent for months and months at this point. Growing it and running the business and seeing it succeed all around the country, but just not in my own classroom for the last few months several months.

And so that has really re-grounded me in the turmoil that is not like living without teach run. I am. I am in that mess right now. I am in that swamp with the spreadsheets and trying to calculate things with the Python scripts and I am there. So I am hoping that in the next semester, now that we have official approval moving my current students, the, our R school is a cohort model.

So the same students that I have right now, I’ll have next semester, same class, same classroom just different course number. I am really excited to see the difference of yes, mastery grading, but no teach front. And now moving into having Teach Front and me being able to track their grade progression over time and being able to see when they’re starting to struggle or they’re not turning in assignments on time in order to catch them sooner.

I really think it’s gonna make a huge difference. And I know that it has in other experiments like this, like when I didn’t have Teach Front at all and then Teach Front existed. But I’m excited to see it happen again. The little Cinderella moment where it just solves the problems.

Boz: Okay. I have to ask ’cause this is just, I didn’t know that part of your story.

Like I didn’t know that you had developed this and then because of forces outside of your control, wasn’t able to use it in your classroom and now you’re gonna be able to again. Which one was more frustrating when you first started and you’re like, oh my God, this is so crazy and there’s nothing like you, you said you looked for a solution, you looked for a life jacket and nothing was there.

Or was it more frustrating recently when you’re like, not only do I know it’s there, I developed the damn thing and yet I can’t use it. That had to be frustrating.

Stephanie Valentine: Yeah, definitely. The second one when you know that there is something better when you know that there is a life jacket, like literally inside your computer, like the one that you’re running the presentation off of and you’re not allowed to use it it was extraordinarily difficult and I am coming off of a long time just.

Like letting my passion for this project give me any energy to continue to fight and send another email trying to be like, Hey, do you remember this thing that you’re supposed to be doing? And trying to get my dean involved, trying to get someone involved to, to help the pro process move forward.

So it was doubly frustrating. It was frustrating that I couldn’t use it in my classroom, that I saw every pitfall that you could this current semester has been. A nightmare trying to get all of the things working and communicate to the students. And I gave them a Excel file where they could calculate their own grades if they put ’em in.

And I got a question in October are you gonna share that file with us? It’s been on the syllabus page, it’s there. But just no one understood what was going on. And then on top of that, trying to get myself out of what someone at the university called approval purgatory, just trying to get through the bureaucracy to get this back in the classroom so that my students can experience the ethical way of grading.

And, it was built out of my own experience. Like it is very fine. It’s flexible for everyone, but it is very fine tuned to the way I operate. And so it was like taking away the whole backbone of my course. It.

Boz: I am so happy to hear that, that it’s coming back. ’cause that, oh, I couldn’t imagine.

I like that just seems like it would be mind-numbingly frustrating.

Stephanie Valentine: It has been really great though, to reconnect with, the people that we’re reaching right now with those scripts or the spreadsheets. I am in your soup right now. I understand what is happening and how you’re feeling right now, and I promise there’s a better way.

Like I built it. I know it’s there.

Sharona: Okay, so I think we’re getting close to on time. Is there anything that we haven’t asked about Teach Front that you would really like to get out there? Or anything about your experience or your story that you would like to share before we start to wrap this up?

Stephanie Valentine: Yeah, one just little piece of teach front we haven’t talked about is that it can connect to Canvas, it can connect to other LMSs. So if you’re required by your university to use Canvas, that doesn’t preclude you from using Teach Front, you can use it as well to do the assessment and it will feed the final grade back into Canvas for you automatically.

Wait, does it feed into the Learning Mastery Grade book? We use the LTI framework, which is the same as every we have not.

Sharona: That is, no, because Canvas hasn’t turned LTI ON for the Mastery Grade book as far as I know. I can look into it.

Stephanie Valentine: Growth mindset. We can figure it out.

Boz: There you go.

Stephanie Valentine: Same.

Sharona: I would love to request, request sent.

Stephanie Valentine: I’ll make a note of it. I feel like working with Canvas and other existing LMSs, it does it, you are so far away from those people. Do they really exist? Does anyone reading those messages? But me, I’m right here and I’m eager and I am thirsty for this kind of feedback and I have the same feeling of growth mindset that you do. So let’s make it work.

Sharona: And to be fair to in structure, they actually sent representatives to the conference. They did a poster presentation slash demo of version 2.0. So they did actually listen to us specifically. We were meeting directly with their product team and I got to put some input in, but it’s.

The one thing that Canvas does that I have not found anyone else to do, although I suspect yours does, is you can actually turn the numbers off. You can actually tell it, do not show the numbers that Canvas uses behind the scenes to calculate. Its proficiency scales. Do not show those to students.

Everyone else I talk to, like I’m working with some different projects and things and I’m like, and they’re like, and here’s how you do the points for this, and here’s how they do the points for that. And then they’ll sometimes have a proficiency scale and I’m like, great, can you turn the points off? And they’re like, what?

I’m like, could you just not display the points? I don’t need you to not use ’em. Just don’t display them. They’re like, excuse me. And the answer is no. It is so embedded because I literally had someone tell us we’ve done all this research and the only way to get them to do these things is to give them points for it.

I’m like. And what does that tell you about whether or not that thing you want them to do is valuable?

Stephanie Valentine: Yeah. So Teach Friend is built a little bit on the opposite way. Like I suppose you could use numbers in your scale if you really wanted to, but Teach Friend is not gonna calculate those as point values.

So it will do the calculations of, you got 17 exemplaries. And it will use that to calculate your A, B, C if necessary. But there are no numbers anywhere.

Sharona: Yeah. When I say that Canvas can hide the numbers, like in order for them to know did you meet mastery enough to get the green square?

It asks you to numerically define behind the scenes what is good enough and to put those definitions in your proficiency scale. ’cause the computer can’t read your emojis very well. So I have. I have sympathy for the computer programming nature of it. And as long as I can hide it from the students, that’s fine.

Boz: Yeah. ’cause as soon as the students see it, they’re gonna wanna do some sort of math that either isn’t good and isn’t a good representation of actual learning, or it’s actually not what our architecture is built off of. ’cause our architecture grading architecture isn’t built off of averages.

But you give students, three assessments and they look at the proficiency scales and they got a 2, 3, 4, first thing they do is average that to a three. And we’re like, no, that’s a mastery there. That’s, a proficiency. Yeah. That’s a and

Stephanie Valentine: I think one of the things I’m most proud of with TeachPoint is that we were able to remove the numbers because I feel very deeply that points are insidious to learning and they have just been poisoned by the morality that we have attached to them. And so removing that was something that was very important to me. But I still think that it’s important for students to understand holistically how they did on a particular assessment, even if it has multiple standards involved.

And so that is what our shell can do. It can communicate it to them. And I hear students all the time how’s your shell? Is it full? Do you have a full shell? And so that is the conversation instead of, I got three points and I missed a point for this. Or at, will I lose points for that? Just like points is a four letter word to me.

I just, it’s like fingernails on the chalkboard. I just, I don’t allow it in my classroom personally. And there’s no, no translation from. Mastery or alternative grading. I keep using the wrong word, but you don’t have to translate that into the traditional grading world in order for your grading system to make sense.

It’s as if alternative grading is the other, and it needs to be translated into traditional grading, which is the standard, and I don’t like that even instructors have to do that. They, I don’t, I’m a bit rebellious. I don’t wanna play that game. I’m not gonna do that.

Sharona: The reason, the history behind the word alternative is that we want to make it obsolete.

So eventually we want alternative grading to just be what you mean when you say grading. But until that happens, it’s alternative to the traditional weighted average. Absolutely. But.

Stephanie Valentine: And like many other traditional things like the a horse and buggy, for example. Hopefully we move past that.

Sharona: Right? And there’s multiple layers too, because there’s the traditional grading of the weighted averages, but then there’s the multi-level letter grades at all. And that’s a whole different level. So most of us in the alt grading world are not yet at the let’s get rid of A’s B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s. We want to but end more are we allowed to at the whole different level?

Stephanie Valentine: Yeah. But there are ways to convert alternative grading scales into reasonable letter grades. And there’s a lot of different ways, as they have found out. But there’s still a way to communicate those to students in a timely, effective way that doesn’t cost you time and drown, drowning. That sentence didn’t make sense, but you get me.

Sharona: I do.

Boz: I am really looking forward. I went to the website and I’m looking and I saw that there is a, whatever you call it, a light version or a

Stephanie Valentine: Yes. So it’s a light plan. A free plan, yeah.

Boz: Yes. The light pass, which is a free pass to just test it out.

’cause I am just so curious to see what this actually looks like now. I could see what you were talking about with your seashells proficiency visual. Yeah. So I love that. We are coming up on time. This has been such a fun conversation. Stephanie. Thank you for coming on here. And

Stephanie Valentine: I’m so grateful for this opportunity. Thank you.

Boz: And I really, and I don’t think I’ve ever done this before on the podcast, but we need you to come to the grading conference. We need a presentation. We need a workshop. So we’d love to see you.

Stephanie Valentine: I’m there. Yeah, let’s do it.

So watch your emails, watch your inboxes, listen to us. In the next few weeks, we’re gonna be opening up submissions for presentations, talks, workshops, and posters.

Boz: Yep. All right. Thank you again, Stephanie. And to our listeners, thank you for listening. This has been The Grading Podcast with Baz and Sharon, 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, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website.

The Grading podcast is created and produced. By Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

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