The Grading Podcast

152 – David’s reflection

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David Clark: Being familiar with it, uh, number one, makes it much easier to introduce to those students ’cause they’re, they’re ready. They’re like, “Oh, okay, I get this idea of having standards for your assessment or having specifications or whatever.” Um, and so that makes that introduction simpler. But I think actually the best thing in that case is when you have some students, you know, sort of a critical mass of students in a class that have had some alternative grading before, they tell the other students about it. They help the other students understand.

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

Sharona: And i’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach, and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K-12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello, and welcome to The Grading Podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me, as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m doing well. This is a little bit interesting because I’m actually not recording from where I normally record, but I brought my full setup. So I’m all the way across the country at the moment, at the time of this recording, in New York helping my son move into his new apartment. So I’m in a hotel room. It sounds a little different, but I brought my full kit. So I’m excited that this was more portable than I expected.

Boz: All right just so our audience knows, no, I am not such a evil partner that I am forcing her to record while she is trying to do this move across country. We’re doing this because we’re not alone in the virtual studio. So who are we with today, Sharona?

Sharona: So we are so excited to welcome back again to the pod Dave Clark. Dave has so many connections to this world. So if you’re a longtime listener, you might have heard him on episode 100, where we got the original organizing team back together for the conference. He’s a associate professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University. He is on our board for the Center for Grading Reform. He is one of the authors of the Grading for Growth book and blog, and he just came off of backpacking for two weeks, and he’s a board gamer, and he has a textbook. Just all around amazing guy. So Dave, welcome back to the pod. So excited to have you. Thank you. I’m

David Clark: really glad to be back here. And yeah, Sharona wasn’t kidding. We literally got home yesterday from this backpacking trip if I sound funny on this recording, it’s ’cause my brain is out in the woods somewhere still.

Sharona: Which might be just as well as other places.

Boz: So where was it that you guys went backpacking?

David Clark: We went to a place called the Porcupine Mountains, which any of your listeners who know what actual mountains are, it’s not that. But this is this is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s a wilderness area. It’s it’s just gorgeous. It’s on the shore of Lake Superior, so yeah, it’s a lovely place, and we try to do a sort of a cleanse from the semester every year in late May.

Boz: That’s actually interesting because the reason we are asking you to come back on was really to talk about your last post, which was on reflecting about your semester.

David Clark: Yeah, absolutely. And I, yeah I know you got questions for me, but I… If I am ringing one bell over and over, it’s that as teachers, we’ve gotta be reflective, right? We gotta take the time and sit back and think about what we did and how it worked, and take notes about it to help us improve in the future, and that’s something I try to do really hard. And doing it publicly on the blog is like a super intimidating way to do things, right? And then in audio form here on the podcast, even worse. So it’s great practice. I hope everyone else maybe practices, reflecting to themselves. You don’t have to do it in public.

Sharona: And I wonder if having take– I know you said your brain’s still in the mountains, but maybe that clarity, that, that clear mind of everything, now when you go back, maybe it’ll be even the same as what you wrote or even a little different. I’ll be curious to see how that goes. Yeah, me too. So can you start by explaining the style of reflection you did? Because that’s one of the things that I know with our students, when we ask them to do reflections, they literally are lost.

David Clark: Yes.

Sharona: They don’t know what to do. And I have a feeling for faculty who are not trained, they also don’t know how to do this. So I think the structure you used was really interesting. Can you share a little bit about that?

David Clark: Yeah. So this structure, it’s called a three by three, and I completely ripped it off from Robert Talbert, and I don’t know if it’s his originally or he, got it from somewhere else. But the idea of a three by three is you structure the reflection into three groups of three things each. And in my case, the three groups were three things that surprised me about the past year of teaching, three things I learned about the past year of teaching, and three questions I have going forward from this point. And of course, you could adjust those for whatever’s appropriate for you, different amounts of questions. But those three prompts the surprising, learning, and then looking forward with questions, I think were really helpful

Sharona: And I think we’ve heard him do it a lot in the start, stop, continue structure, right? So three things students want us to start doing, three things students want us to stop doing, three things to continue doing. That’s another one of those-

David Clark: Absolutely … and I think and those are good faculty reflection, self-reflection structures. I think they’re probably except in a few circumstances, they’re a bit over the top for what we would ask students to do. And I know, for example, if I’m doing some sort of reassessments, I do ask students to reflect, but I ask, one or two very straightforward prompts on that. And that’s, I think, helpful for getting students moving on, okay, what does it mean to reflect? What helps? And I do push back on them if they’re not really actually responding in a reflective manner. I might go back and say, “Okay, I need to hear something more from you in this direction or this way.”

Boz: Yeah. And I have to admit something because, in, in my new role as an instructional coach I work with both groups of, people like departments and PLCs, but I also work with individual teachers. And this time of the year, I have been doing our final coaching session of the year. And after reading this blog, I stole this format. I, now I have found that I have had to modify mine to a two by two.

David Clark: Sure. Yes. Oh- … I totally understand. So let me tell you a little about the process of writing this post, because I was looking around for a good reflective structure, and I think having seen this used many times, I thought, “Oh, this is great.” And I was, … So in early May, I was starting to write this, and we had, we were doing a bit of traveling and some flying and stuff, so I was writing this in airports. And in the airport on the way there, I had these outlines, and I had about two in each item. And on the way back, I was like, “Okay, man, I gotta figure out a third thing for each of these.” And it, it took me a while to actually be able to piece those together. So yeah, if you’re doing live coaching sessions, that would be intimidating to do three, three, and three.

Boz: Yeah I tried it on the first one, and then a- after that went to a two-by-two-by-two

Sharona: And I think the most important thing, though, is the three things, right? So y- a one-by-one-by-one still has three categories. A two-by-two-by-two has three categories. So I like having three categories, like start, stop, continue, or surprise, learn, grow, whatever. But yeah, however many in each, you don’t have to be locked into that.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I do wanna dive into these, though. So let’s start with the surprises. So you said you got two pretty easily, and then a third one. Share what surprised you, ’cause I love the first one.

David Clark: So now I’m wondering, yeah, which direction did I … Which ones were the ones I had trouble on? I should bring up my draft, ’cause I just had this huge list of things that I was, spitballing. But yeah, my first thing that surprised me I do know this was an easy one for me to come up with, because it was I have finally cut down my standards list as far as they can go. Which I know we, you, ev- anybody who helps people learn about alternative grading, and if you’re gonna use a standards-based setup where you have a list of standards you’re assessing it’s so easy to just throw everything but the kitchen sink into your standards list. And I know, everybody who’s done this has a story about having, teaching a class with a list of 90 standards, and it’s impossible to assess them all, and you’re just buried, and your students are revolting. And so we tell people, “Cut it down. Keep it simple.” Re- “Merge your standards. Reduce your standards. Do you really need that one specific thing, or does, can it just be left out?” And I seem to have hit the opposite end of that, which is I’m specifically here thinking about a Calculus 2 class that I just got done teaching. And I’ve taught this class many times over the years, and I keep cutting down the standards. And I did even some cutting at the start of this semester. And Every time I do that, every time I start a semester and I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna cut these standards down. I’m gonna keep them simple.” And it’s really hard to do ’cause you’re like, “I don’t know I can’t see cutting any of these. These are all essential.” I always find oh yeah, you know what? This could go. I could remove that. And then by the end of the semester I’m taking notes and saying “Oh, no, you know what? We didn’t need this one standard,” or, “You could get rid of that one,” or it was, “Rework this one, it’s hard to assess.”

But this semester I was writing down, “Oh, you gotta add this one back in. You should not have cut that one down. You need to split these two back out because they’re too different from each other and you got a double-barreled hard to assess standard.” And I’ve never had that problem before. Like literally never.

Sharona: And that was going to be my question is how did you know that you’d gone too far? Yeah. What was the evidence for that? Yeah.

David Clark: A couple of things. So one of them was I had I’m thinking of one particular standard where I was like, oh this is, we use the term in the book double-barreled, as in it’s just got two different focuses, right? I had combined two things together that really it didn’t make sense to assess them. They were independent of each other more or less. And so a student could like kinda do one but not the other and they get frustrated ’cause then they didn’t earn credit for the standard because they only did one of the things. So they didn’t do everything. But they were like, “Yeah, but I did this other thing really well.” And so that was one aspect of it. And the other was as I was working through, actually teaching the class, I was like, oh man, there are these things that students are struggling on and they’re important, but when I was setting up my standards early on I was like, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna cut this out. I think this is beyond where we’re gonna be able to get, and I think it’s beyond what I want to assess. And I totally had time and space to do that. And so I was I wanted to be able to assess that.

And so yeah, those are the types of things I was noticing where I was like, oh, I, this matters in the moment. I wanna leave myself a note to add that back in later. But you gotta be careful about adding it too far back in, right? And getting a huge list again.

Boz: I wanted to point something out, ’cause you point this out in the post. ‘Cause you started this by saying, you always tell people, w- Sharona and I, pretty much anyone that works with people on trying to help them do this, we always say keep it simple. It took you 12 years to get to this point.

David Clark: Yes.

Boz: A- and first the fact that you have been teaching this course and still refining and reflecting on it for at least 12 years, first it says something about you as an educator, but it is something that I don’t think Sharona, you and I have ever completely left a course alone. And th- that-

Sharona: You actually make fun of me for that.

Boz: I make fun of you when we make big changes but yeah, that reflection is, like you said it really is a key for an educator because even if you have a perfect class, which no one’s ever had, but you have a perfect class, a perfect semester, everything is absolutely as planned, it goes off, it’s all rainbows and unicorns that semester, the next semester is a different group of students.

David Clark: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Boz: Our students are changing. The students, the makeup and just the background of our students that I had 10 years ago is very different than what I have now. So even if you had that perfect class, the need to reflect and the need to think about is still there because yeah, the math’s not changing, but our students are.

David Clark: Absolutely. A- and I think there’s an important thing also in what you’re saying where there’s this danger of you’re always fighting the last battle. If I’m looking backwards and saying, “Oh I wish I had this different list of standards this past semester,” I also need to be looking forward and saying okay, what is it I’ve noticed about my students that’s changing, and how is that affecting my assessments,” right? And it’s not necessarily, oh, this past group would’ve benefited from this change. But what can I take about that I think is actually gonna be valid going forward in the changes we’re seeing and the differences in how I’m assessing and that sort of thing.

Sharona: Yeah. And I’d like to argue even with the statement that the math doesn’t change because the context of our world and the tools available to our students change.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: And so I actually think the math changes as well.

David Clark: Yeah. What we focus on, the tools we can use the types of assessments we wanna use keep changing. Yeah.

Boz: And then I really wanted to talk to you and ask you about that third surprise. Okay. Because that, I think that is, A, amazing, and B, your… first- Okay … what was that third surprise? Yeah. So the

David Clark: third surprise was my students are starting to read and learn about alternative grading. A- and what I had said there was I literally– We have this student study space and I walk into it all the time. I actually, I’m like the manager of the space. And one day I walked in, and I look on like a bench, and there’s a copy of my book on there. I’m like, “What? What’s going on here?”

Sharona: Your book called what?

David Clark: My book, Called Grading for Growth, on there. And I– and there was no one near it. There was like, a pile of student stuff. So I look around and I was pointing at it and “Hey, whose stuff is this?” And we figured it out, and yeah, one of the students had bought a copy of the book and was reading it. And then it had started making its way around the students who are always in that study space. And so a couple different students had it throughout the next few weeks. Which, yeah, that was astonishing, right? Not something I’d ever seen before.

Boz: But, and I’m really curious ’cause you also talk about the fact that in your department y- there are alternative grading, like you’re not the only person doing- Yes … alternative grading. And I’m curious, as students are becoming more familiar and more accustomed to seeing alternative grading practices, has that kind of changed some of the things that you have to do with the students to get them to understand or buy in or get them to just get on board with how you grade in your class over the last, however many, what, a decade and a half- Yeah that you’ve been doing it now?

David Clark: Yeah. It’s, it is very interesting teaching in a department where alternative grading is widespread. It’s not universal, right? I would say maybe half of my colleagues are using alternative grading in some ways in some classes. But that’s a– We’re a big department. That’s 40 faculty 20 of them are definitely doing alternative grading in different places. It varies a lot among which students you’re talking to. So if I’m in an introductory class and I’m teaching that I’m still introducing students to the ideas of alternative grading. But often if I’m teaching something that’s, a couple steps into the curriculum and students have had a class with some of my colleagues, they’re coming to me already having experienced some form of alternative grading. And it’s not the same as what I do necessarily, right? We all are doing our own thing. But being familiar with it number one, makes it much easier to introduce to those students ’cause they’re ready. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, okay, I get this idea of having standards for your assessment or having specifications or whatever.” And so that makes that introduction simpler.

But I think actually the best thing in that case is when you have some students, a critical mass of students in a class that have had some alternative grading before they tell the other students about it. They help the other students understand. And I always take some time on, first or second day, first week sometime, to talk a little bit about grading, do a sample, “Here’s what a student could have done, and what grade would that learn to,” or, “What grade would that lead to?” type thing. And, That’s an important step to have still, but I’ve got enough students in those classes that can help each other out and be like, “Oh no, you gotta remember that, you need to do all the things next to the A to earn the A,” or that sort of thing. And so that’s happening all the time in all but the most introductory classes. The upper level classes that like you get students doing comparisons and critiques like, “Oh yeah, this is just except you do this thing instead. And I actually prefer it when it’s, this way instead of that way.” And I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool. Tell me why,” right? Tell me why you like that and, and I will think about it.” So that’s, yeah. The it’s so it varies a lot throughout the different levels of classes.

Boz: But that, that last one that you were just talking about also goes into that last paragraph of this section and where you were talking about your students, at least some of them that have experienced now probably a couple different courses, are actually starting to think about the bigger picture of what is the purpose of grading.

David Clark: Yes.

Boz: Which I think is absolutely amazing. When I read that, I was just like, wow, that is so cool.

David Clark: And lot of these students I’m thinking about are some of our majors who are– They’re looking at grad school. They know they might be TAs, that sort of thing. And so it’s a front and center issue for them. “Oh, I’m gonna be in a classroom soon.” But yeah, I think a lot of our students who are in education, they are primed to think about those kind of issues, right? What is assessment? What is grading? What are different ways you can do things? Something that I like about alternative grading is that it just presents to students that there are possibilities, right? There are options. And even if a student doesn’t go and do what I did, they know that there’s options out there, right? And that they could choose a different way to grade or assess that might be a little more appropriate for their students. And I love that.

I’ve had that experience myself coming from my undergraduate and grad work. Having the experience of different types of grading, different types of teaching, it gave me a lot more confidence to be able to do those things myself and know that they’re possible and that I could succeed at them. But yeah, these students in particular, I, I had s- you know, s- just lightweight conversations, but just I think what they really realized by seeing that there was this whole book about alternative grading was that it wasn’t just this one-off thing that some of their professors in the math department were doing, that it’s a bigger picture thing, and that there’s like kind of a world out there. It’s not just some weird thing we’re doing right here. And so that bigger picture view, it opens a doorway. Maybe some of them will go through it, maybe some won’t.

Sharona: So I wanna, before we leave this section, ’cause we don’t have to do all three of all three. But which of these was the last one added? Is it one that we already talked about, or is it the one we haven’t talked about? So it’s

David Clark: actually, the last one I added, I’m almost positive, this is a little while ago now, but I’m almost positive it was the one about my students starting to read about alternative grading. And if you look at the post, it’s the shortest section. I had the least to say about it because I’m not really sure where this goes, right? It just a, it was genuinely a surprise, and I’m curious to see what happens from those students. I said, “Hey, keep in touch. Let me know what you’re up to in another year or two.” But

Sharona: So I just wanna mention the third one here. I don’t know if you have a lot to say about it or if you wanna move on to the second section, but you said that the students really liked interleaved deadlines. This is something that I have done for a very long time so it would not have been a surprise to me ’cause my students don’t have an option. But do you have anything in particular, or should people just go read the post for this section?

David Clark: I guess what I’ll say is, yeah, the interleave deadlines are like I, I do a quiz one week and a take-home homework the next, and then a quiz, and then a take-home homework. And s- the goal was to have one big thing due per week. And yeah I think go read the post, but I’m– This is another example of I’m not saying do things this way, but I think the thought that goes into sort of carefully scheduling the deadlines to make sense for students as well as for you in terms of grading that’s an important thing you can reflect on.

Boz: Yeah, and in that part of it, there are some great reflections from students that you got from s- I’m assuming you do a end of the semester survey with your students. And they actually had a lot of really good things to say about that kind of deadline approach that’s in the blog.

David Clark: Yeah. Students are pretty good at actually knowing… they’re good at knowing what they like and what they don’t like and sometimes also at expressing the why behind that, right? And that’s, I think, a useful thing, right? So students will be pretty honest with you if you ask them “Would you like this kind of deadline structure?” And they might say I’m just gonna put that off until the last moment if you give me that much time before a deadline.” They know, right? It doesn’t mean you gotta, you can’t force students to act in certain ways. That’s not our job. But we can set up structures that incentivize good learning good processes for learning, and having, regular frequent assessments is certainly helpful that way.

Boz: Yeah. And, with the new role that I’ve been in for the last year and a half now, a lot of our work is grounded around the New Teacher Project and The Opportunity Makers, and one of the three core foundations that they found was the need for consistency, and the fact that , not just that idea, but that actual word came up a couple times in those student reflections. I was reading that “Ooh, I, I love when my jobs overlap in unexpected ways.”

David Clark: Absolutely. And I think, yeah, consistency if students know to expect a structure, right? They understand your organization, they understand a type of thing to expect, this is what’s gonna happen next week. It just gives them a little more security and a little more freedom to be able to learn within that structure. And I think I had a post long ago about I forget what I even called it, but it was basically flexibility versus rigidity, and, like, how neither of those extremes is really ideal, that you need some structure, you need some flexibility within the structure. And, having a regular assessment structure is one of those. What are you assessing? Ah, that’s gonna vary, but students know it’s coming. Students know it’s gonna happen regularly.

Sharona: Okay, let’s go on to the second part here. So this is three things I learned, and one thing I notice is that this is definitely the longest section- Yeah of the blog. So I’m guessing you have things you learned. So which one would you like to really call out in this section?

David Clark: I’m gonna, I’m gonna go with the first one. So I will start by saying actually that this was one where I was not struggling to find a third item. I had five or six and, I don’t even– I think I may end up smushing some together. But the first one is about the importance of positive feedback. And this is something I know I s- I struggle with this ’cause if you’re giving students helpful feedback we tend to focus, I tend to focus on okay, this is your mistake. This is feedback about what you’ve gotta change or improve or whatever. And that’s not the only kind of feedback, right? That’s positive feedback. “Hey, let me tell you about stuff that you do well,” is also important because students don’t always necessarily recognize that, right? Even if they pass, they pass a standard, they earn a good mark, whatever it is they still need some feedback to help them focus and understand, “Oh yeah, this was a skill that you learned and you showed it, and here’s something about how you did that I thought was really good.” So that’s the big picture idea right here.

Boz: I love that one ’cause you’re right. You guys have talked a lot about it on your blog. Sharona, you and I have, we have full episodes on the importance of feedback. It’s one of the, four pillars of alternative grading, and I agree. I think this is somewhere that I struggle as an educator as well with. But it’s not just positive feedback, and I think, ’cause Sharona, you and I have talked about this a l- in a lot of our feedback trainings that, the whole great job or, thing like that which might sound encouraging and might sound positive isn’t actually what’s really helpful. It’s that specific positive- Yeah … that y- that you really talked about here in the blog that I think is so encouraging and really necessary for us to do. But yeah I’m terrible at it too. I’ll do the actionable feedback, trying to be helpful and the guiding questions to help them think about their mistakes. But oftentimes I forget to do that specific positive.

Sharona: I’m much better at it verbally than I am in writing. Yeah. So I have a specific situation that came up recently. I work for an educational theater company, and I had a girl who was extremely talented and she’d had a big role, and she was really good at it. But we have worried about her. We worry about some of our most talented because they get role after role, and we don’t want them to become entitled. And so she had experienced a major disappointment the previous show. She was very qualified for a role, but she was just a little too young. Major setback, and she bounced back and did this great job. And when I was talking to her and her parents, I looked at her and I said, “Young lady,” I’m not gonna use her name, “I wanna congratulate you. You did a phenomenal job, but here’s what was more important. You took a big setback last time. You came back with a great attitude and an excellent work ethic, and your talent.” And like the girl was practically in tears. The mom was… But I was able to say your work ethic and your attitude because I need her to not develop that entitlement. And so that hit home for me that I was able to do that verbally. So I’d like to try to take that into my writing or, and this is what I’m better at, I’m actually doing it more in class. Like I will look at a student who is struggling and I will say, “I really appreciate you showed up today,” because that perseverance is what I’m looking for. So I don’t know if I can do it as well in writing, but I seem– it seems to come when I’m talking.

David Clark: I like that. And I think that’s an important point, right? Feedback can happen in different formats and in different settings. And if you are good at giving verbal feedback, absolutely, right?

Sharona: And then I liked what you said in here that you gave some feedback as part of your departmental thing, but then your students came back and talked to you about how important that is.

David Clark: Yeah. And yeah, I wanna talk a little bit about that departmental thing because I, this is an idea, I’m sure it’s out there in other places, but I want to encourage it ’cause it’s been something very positive in my department. So we have this thing, we call it recognition letters, recognition emails really. At the end of each semester, I send out a request to every instructor, “Could you fill out this short form?” And we call it nominating. They nominate, I think it’s between two and four students from each of their classes. But the key is it’s not the top, or it doesn’t need to be, shouldn’t necessarily be top grade students. It’s students and I have the quote in here about how we describe it. It’s students who have done noteworthy work, right? So meaning things like recognizing significant growth, perseverance, sense making, asking good questions, skills like that. And then we take that information and we basically do a giant mail merge and just send out emails to those students. And the emails say “We wanted you to know that your instructor so and so in such and such a class thought that you did some noteworthy work in that class, and here’s what they wrote.” And it’s just a short sentence. We have some templates made up. And but it’s things like, “You asked great questions. You collaborated really well with peers. You went above and beyond the requirements.” Things like that.

And students, students love them, right? I do hear informally how students are like, “Oh my goodness this means a lot.” And I had done that for a few of my students as well and they just, they, several of them came and found me during exam week and said “This really meant a lot to me,” for various individual reasons that I didn’t even know anything about. But just getting that positive feedback. We’ve talked a few times in this episode so far at a meta level, right? This wasn’t even really on the level of a class. This is like feedback at the level of almost a program, right? Of students getting big picture, “Hey, you’ve been doing good work. You keep that up.” Or, students thinking about alternative grading at a bigger picture than one class at a time. And yeah, these ideas apply at that level as well. But anyhow, I do wanna say if anyone has, if anyone wants to know how to make that happen, it’s not too difficult to get this these student nominations going. Let me know. I’ll help you set it up.

Boz: Yeah, and but there’s something that you said in– when you were talking about this that I think is incredibly important for all educators to remember, and that was you found out a lot of these things about your students that you had no idea about, and that, were really impactful for them that semester. So this idea that there’s a lot going on in our students’ lives that we don’t know about. So to remember that and to have grace, that’s part of the reason, we do a lot of the alternative grading practices that we do, and it is just as an educator, it’s always important to remain humble and remember, as much as we might love our subject, it might not be the most important thing in our students’ lives at that moment. They do have lives. They do have a lot going on, and in, some environments that’s even more so than others, but it’s incredibly powerful for us to remember as educators.

David Clark: Yeah, said. A-and I don’t wanna create a false dichotomy here, but I think it’s easy to fall into a view of our students are trying to get away with things. Our students are trying to- Yeah … they’re trying to get around or, game the system or whatever. And I find that I personally am a lot happier, and my life is a lot better, and my students are a lot happier when I’m thinking in terms of my students everybody, but my students included, are trying to do their best, right? And they have real lives, and I don’t know what all of it is but they are trying to do their best given whatever that situation is.

Sharona: But unfortunately, I think that in a lot of traditional gaming systems, their best is to– grading systems, I said. Meant-

David Clark: Gaming the grading …

Sharona: in traditional grading systems, gaming the system is their best.

David Clark: Yeah.

Sharona: That’s just the reality is I find the incentives so perverse now in traditional grading that for many students, their best is to game the system. And so when you take that incentive out, you open up the opportunity for these authentic relationships.

David Clark: Absolutely. But also that really it can shake students. If a student is used to thinking in terms of my best move is to, look at this numerical system and game it in some way then if that’s not there, then what is, right? They’re not used to what the new incentive is yet and I think it takes some time and some help to see what that is.

Boz: And that kind of leads into your third one.

Sharona: That’s exactly what I was gonna say, Boz .

Boz: Nothing… i- Yeah … I’m gonna read the bolded part of that. Nothing beats building relationships.

David Clark: Yeah, absolutely. More and more I come back to this and all types of relationships. A while ago I had written some sort of reflection along the line of building solid relationships with students. And part of that is knowing your students as best you can in this, large classroom, high-paced, fast-paced semester type setting and helping them, like understanding what they need and where they are at. But actually what I was reflecting on here was in a slightly different place, which is helping students build relationships with each other within a class. Which also matters, right? It’s not a either/or type thing. And the reflection here was actually that I had a class where the physical setup of the room was not conducive to students working in groups, and many of the classrooms that the math department owns in quotes here but we have first dibs on them. We’ve changed the physical setup to actually have little table pods that make, sit so that it’s easy for students to work at a consistent group and get to know each other and develop relationships that sort of, that supports them in the classroom. And in this setup, I didn’t have that.

I thought I’m gonna do randomizing things and have students, randomize and meet new people, and randomize and meet new people, and they were unhappy with that. Okay, so pick your seat for f- one day a week and I’ll randomize you another. And the one thing that didn’t happen under either of those scenarios was they didn’t get to meet and then get to know new people and establish relationships with new students which I think is the real important part that was missing there, was to get to know each other and to support each other when they didn’t know each other at the beginning of the semester.

Sharona: And I’ve actually struggled with that. Sorry, go ahead, Boz.

Boz: I was just gonna say, I’m curious if this was a class that had younger students in this. Yeah. Is this, a freshman, sophomore level class, or was this one of the higher- Yeah … division classes?

David Clark: This was a freshman, sophomore calculus class. And so that’s also, that’s also a place where I need to be more hands-on in helping students build those relationships with each other and also me building relationships with them. But yeah, the physical setup made that difficult to do, and I didn’t realize until quite far into the class, which element of that relationship building was missing, which was the between student relationships.

Sharona: I was gonna say I’ve actually had the same struggles because I’ve used the visibly random grouping theory. I’m not sure– I do think it works, but in the material I had read, they said change the groups up every two to three weeks. Yeah. I don’t think that’s working in my situation. Now, I know that a lot of that research was done in K-12, where they see each other every single day. So if you’re changing– I’m thinking that’s where the research was done, maybe not in a block schedule. But they’re seeing each other probably every single day for those two to three weeks, so that’s 10, 15 times. In my class, if I change it every three weeks, they might have seen each other six times.

David Clark: Yeah.

Sharona: And so yeah, that was breaking. Regardless, I have some active learning classrooms and I have some traditional classrooms. It doesn’t work in any of them. Yeah. So I think I’m gonna do the same thing where I might just do random groups the second day of class and leave them either for the whole semester or half the semester, or I might redo them as students stop coming. But it, it’s not working as well as when I finally settle down, and when I settle down into groups, they seem to work better.

David Clark: Okay. That’s, that is interesting, ’cause what I was actually thinking of doing next time around on this is that this particular class kind of comes in four modules, four units, and that would mean if I scrambled students around at the start of each unit and then had them stay in that group for the unit, it would be about three weeks at most. And so yeah, what I’m hearing from you is and I think you’re right, they need a little more time to really get comfortable and start working well with each other and building those relationships.

Boz: Yeah. But yeah, talking about physical environments of our classrooms and stuff, it really does make some differences in how we choose our pedagogical approaches. And I know if anyone’s ever listening, you wanna make Sharona happy in a physical setup, just give her roller chair, chairs. That’s all I need. If her room doesn’t have rolly chairs it’s a nightmare for her.

Sharona: To be fair, if it’s already set up in group pods, then I don’t have to have rolling chairs.

David Clark: I’m just gonna say that every single department meeting my department had this past year was in a room with rolly chairs, like rolly desks and no physical tables. And I don’t, it doesn’t matter. You put a bunch of senior faculty together in that kind of room, and we will be ridiculous.

Sharona: And let me be clear. I, the rolly chairs I mean is I just need wheels on the chairs. They don’t have to have the desks- Yeah … attached. I’m like, I can make do with any desk setup, but I’m like, I don’t care if I’m on a chalkboard. You don’t wanna spend the whiteboard money? Fine. You don’t wanna give me a projector? Fine. But I’ve been in some of these really high-tech classrooms that don’t have rolling chairs, and I’m like, “I would get rid of all $20,000 worth of this tech or $100,000 worth of tech if you just give me chairs that move.” Because trying to get groups of students who have a non-rolling desk chair combo into groups where they face each other is a nearly Herculean task. Yes.

David Clark: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Sharona: Yes. I’m all about the rolly chairs.

David Clark: I agree. Yeah. We could probably do, yeah, we could go on about physical environment here for quite a while, right? But yeah.

Sharona: Yeah. I do wanna move on to the last section in case we have any other overall things we wanna take. So three questions. So this is interesting to me. Which of these… did you have three, or was one of them a struggle? And-

David Clark: Heck, you know what? I’m, I am in the background right now pulling up my draft because I know I had a whole bunch of other stuff right here, right? And I wanna double-check what I had for these

Sharona: Yeah. So you have three questions here. I’m gonna list all three questions because they’re– Like, I’m like yes,” to all these questions. So the first one was, how do I make take-home assignments more impactful to student learning, especially in the face of AI? The second one was, how can I make day-to-day practice more meaningful for my students? And the third one you wrote is, how should I approach my next class? And I need answers to those questions for myself right now.

David Clark: Yeah. They’re questions for a reason. I genuinely have each of those. Yeah. Yeah, so this was another area where I was facing a problem of which questions do I put in? And I did pull up in the background, I had other questions. I’m just gonna toss out more other questions.

Sharona: Okay.

David Clark: So here was one. Can I find a feasible way to offer oral exams to students? Because the live, live quizzing aspect is something I love when I do I do offer students revisable options, so they almost succeeded on a standard. There was something small, and I’m like actually Joshua Bowman from Pepperdine, who sa- has a good phrase about this. If I could raise my eyebrow in li- in person and just say, “Are you sure?” That they would be able to pause and figure it out, then that should be successful, right? And so having a revisable mark is that equivalent. And so I wanna be able to do that live instead of having this whole extra, “Oh, come to my office hours and then let’s talk,” type thing. But I have a colleague who genu- who leaned fully into that for final exams, doing tons of oral exams. And she was in that conference room every single day of exam week every hour I was there, and it was too much, undoubtedly.

Another question I had was this– I don’t know how much this matters, but I– Talking to a student in one of my classes who was fully bought in to the alternative grading system, who definitely understood it. This particular student had even created their own grade record in a spreadsheet to help track for themselves. It was like, so this guy got it, right? And I was talking with him one day, and he’s like talking and saying things like “Yeah, I’m glad I had a chance to revise that ’cause I didn’t wanna lose points for this thing.” And points kept coming up, and okay, not a big deal, but it’s clear that’s where their head was still, right? And does that matter? I didn’t correct, I didn’t correct him. But I want your brain out of that mode, and this student who’s really thoroughly brought in, bought in still wasn’t, anyhow, so those are just a couple of the extra questions I had listed here. All of which I think we need to answer. But

Sharona: So what do you ha- do you have any initial thoughts on those three? I mean- Sure … take home assignments. Yeah. And th- I’m particularly concerned because I’ve got another new prep, and this is, your math for humans class.

David Clark: Yeah.

Sharona: Let me call it that. It’s called quantitative reasoning, but it’s literally like these are students who have no defined mathematics they need in their declared majors, none at all. So I’m going to be doing math for humans, which is finances and voting and things like that. It’s gonna be almost all projects and stuff. So how do I avoid just having them ask their questions of the AI and just spit me back something? What’s gonna make this meaningful?

David Clark: Yeah. I, it’s a great question. Something I say in the blog post that I think is absolutely essential is that it amounts to the relationship building, right? Like from that previous item, that students who believe you have their best interest at hearts and the, and that these assessments matter, right? That, that you care about it, that they should care about it. That’s gonna move the needle. It’s not like a solution. Actually, I want something I’ve been thinking about recently is like people are talking a lot about how do we solve this problem of having AI readily available or, anything like that. And I think there’s, there is no solution, right? There’s no one solution. There are things we do to help students see what we care about and incentives to put in place to make it clear that this really does matter. And having a good relationship and understanding and genuinely responding to what you hear from them has gotta be part of it. And I’m saying this to Sharona. Sharona knows this, right? Yeah.

Sharona: No, but what I’m thinking about is because I’m envisioning myself having to have this conversation with my students, and what I’m struggling to articulate is I have certain kinds of knowledge, like I can handle anything with an interest rate. I can, I know the formulas, I can derive it, but I can explain credit cards and mortgages and investments. I have all this knowledge. And I know that many people my age do not understand these things. They do not understand. So I’m looking at these young people who, most of whom do not understand this because they haven’t had a chance to learn it, and I’m saying what question do I ask them that will make it clear to them that even if they take my question to the AI, they don’t know it, and why do they need to know it?” So I’m do I call a couple of car dealerships in my area and tell them I’m gonna send my students as a task to come try to figure out buying a car? I don’t think they’ll be happy with me if I do that. But how do I convince my students that you’re not gonna have the time and the space in some circumstances in your lives even to take the AI? You need some of this knowledge in your head to know when someone’s trying to rip you off or when someone’s trying to persuade you of something that’s not good for you. But then I don’t know how I would do that with calculus because- … you don’t need calculus unless you’re going into certain fields, and since I don’t know how AI is impacting those fields, and our classes are so far behind already in adjusting to the modern world of what calculus is used for and how it’s used-

David Clark: Yeah

Sharona: I don’t know. I’m just like, “Ah, we’re lost.”

David Clark: Yeah. And I’m also, yeah, I am also very much at a loss for this. Although one thing I lean towards is I think it is a danger to try to lean too much into the, “This is the real world, you’ve gotta use this,” because that’s essentially never gonna be true, right? Even if it’s true right now, it’s not true in the future. The more we’re trying to make math in particular practical and useful that’s always a moving target

Sharona: My issue specifically, to be honest- … is calculus, because calculus is taught where it is for everybody but math majors. If we were designing something for math majors, you would not put calculus first.

David Clark: You would not. Yeah. Yeah.

Sharona: You would not. You would put, you would put- Linear algebra … linear al- you would put algebra first. Yeah. Linear algebra and then modern algebra would probably go before you ever get to calculus. So if we are going to teach the majority of our calculus students and never see them again in mathematics, we need to do a better job of working with the people who use the calculus, the biologists, the chemists, the engineers, even if it’s not even for real world, but if it’s, even if it’s just to get through their major classes, we’ve gotta do a better job or we’re gonna lose calculus from from the math department, right? We know how to do it better, and we have a ton of resistance. We know that we should be making it about average rates of change- … and modeling- … and we just don’t do it, so I’m really worried. That’s all I’m thinking.

Boz: But to kinda get back to that original question because it was not just how do we make it more impactful, but how do we make it more impactful, especially in the face of AI. I really do a- and I encourage people to do this I think you said it was a recommendation from someone that made a comment, but that helping and building that AI, that classroom AI policy with the students. Going through, taking some time, as much as, our instructional time is really important and really precious to us, taking some of that time to spend on developing that classroom AI policy with your students. A, it’s, it goes towards building the relationship that you mentioned earlier. But I do think students with more of an understanding of why and where it’s appropriate, and especially why and where it’s not appropriate to use, goes a long way for the students understanding when they can use it and why they shouldn’t.

David Clark: And feeling like their voice is a part of that, right? That they’ve been heard in that as opposed to it being proclaimed from above, imposed. Yeah. Yeah, that I have been pondering how I might do that, co-constructing an AI policy. I do construct policies in other classes with students, and it’s things along the lines of if students are presenting, okay, so how do we act around presenters and around their presentations and supporting each other? And I think maybe that’s a way to pitch it is this is a matter of support, right? How do we support learning? How do you support, how do you support the fact that you’re in this class for a reason? And how does that fit with the AI thing? And have students generate ideas around it. But I don’t know.

Sharona: So one of the things I’m thinking about is there’s some literature coming out about how AI impacts learning. And in professional development and faculty development, we have th- this tool called Literature to Practice, where you read literature about what it is you’re trying to grapple with, and then you work on it. I’m wondering if some of that might be helpful, like to hand out AI and learning articles to students to read in groups in the classroom, even in small bits, and then talk about it before we co-construct these. Because, again, would it have more meaning if students understood the impact of AI on themselves?

David Clark: Yeah. I agree. Yeah. And I bet, I know more and more of that is in the air as well, right? In a number of years ago now, I think I had a a post that involved talking about students and surveying students on AI use, and they are not monolithic in their own beliefs even, and some of them are better informed than others, and some of them have pretty strong moral stances. And I think acknowledging that also, that like students are coming from a lot of different directions, and they know different things, and they’re not blank slates in the, in this area that’s gonna matter as well. If anybody’s got more ideas, I want to hear them, for sure.

Boz: Yeah, that, that’s what I was about to say. I’m curious to, to hear if anyone’s done this- … especially if they’re able to do this in different types of courses. I’m wondering if there’s a difference between doing this in, a freshman, sophomore level class, maybe a gen ed class like you and I teach, Sharona, compared to doing it at a upper division, major specific class. I’m wondering if there’s differences because of why the student is taking that particular class.

David Clark: Yeah, absolutely. And do students see especially in the more introductory classes students are often motivated because that’s a requirement, right? It’s a program requirement, but they may not be motivated by the content. It’s “I gotta check this box.” Absolutely. And yeah, that is gonna be important in that question.

Sharona: And I did see a student panel about a year ago that had a freshman/sophomore-ish student, a junior/senior-ish student, I don’t know their specific grade levels, and a master’s degree student. And at the time, I could see distinct differences about how each of those three types of students used AI. What I don’t know at that time is whether or not that was just a reflection of when AI became available, it was only a year ago, or it was a, was it a reflection of the development of those students through their educational. And I suspect it was a combination of both. But I’m gonna put some links in the show notes to some articles that have come out very recently, one on the impact of AI on students’ academic development, and then another one exploring the impact of AI on student and academic wellbeing. So there’s two sides to this, right? AI’s impact on their stress levels, and then AI’s impact on their actual learning. So I’ll put a couple of those articles in the show notes. Yeah.

Sharona: No. This was the one I saw at the Chicago Math Symposium in Portland, Oregon.

Boz: Okay. ‘Cause we had one at the grading conference as well.

Sharona: Yeah, I wasn’t at that one. Okay. But I’m sure that was, that’s definitely the thing. So I do think that the level of development of the student as an adult learner is going to impact this, so I’m confident in that one. So did you have anything else at the end of this? You said some next steps, David and we are coming close to time, but what do you have to do now that you’re back from your mental break?

David Clark: Yeah. Yes. I have to start planning next year’s classes. So yeah, I have a, I have one new prep that I know of next year. I don’t actually know all of my schedule. And yeah, I have to start thinking about what’s appropriate for those students, how am I gonna fit together some of these things we’ve talked about, especially with AI policy homework, interleaving, those sorts of things. So I approach this by having some kind of daydreaming time. That’s my first step more than anything, is sitting back and just thinking about what’s the feel of this class? What’s the goal of this class? What’s the big picture? And working down to the smaller level from there.

Sharona: I’d like to do that. My summer’s a little too full.

David Clark: Yeah, guarding that time is essential, right? ‘Cause it could be a, “I’m just gonna sit down and write a sem- write a syllabus right now,” and I just can’t do that, ’cause I’ll end up rewriting that syllabus five times before it’s, August.

Boz: All right. We are coming up on time. Dave, I wanna thank you as always for coming on a- and giving us your time and sitting down and talking with us, and also just for all the work that you do with the Grading for Growth blog. We’ve said this many times, it’s one of our biggest sources of where we get some of our episode ideas. We love stealing from you guys, so thank you for

Sharona: And I’m hoping you guys steal from us. I don’t know if you do

David Clark: We do. I think every now and then I mention “Oh, The Grading Podcast just had an episode on,” and so now I’m thinking about. Yeah, thank you for having me on here. I always love talking with y’all. And and yeah, you guys do great work on here. And it’s fun to write for the blog, and I am always ready to hear from people who have questions they want, maybe not answers to, questions for me to think about and riff on. So yeah.

Boz: All right. Sharona, any last minute things f-

Sharona: Not for me. Thank you, Dave. It’s really great to have you on. Thank you. Have a great one.

Boz: For our audience, you’ve been listening to The Grading Podcast with Boz and Sharona, 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.