Please enjoy this replay of episode 20 from November 2023.

Coming to you from the California Mathematics Council - South annual conference, Sharona and Bosley sit down for a wonderful conversation with Dr. Sean Nank. Sean is an adjunct professor at California State University San Marcos, a full professor at the American College of Education, as well as a high school math teacher in the Oceanside Unified School District. Sean is also a recipient of the Persidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

In this incredible conversation, we talk with Sean about the human impact of assessments on our students and the important conversations that can be had once we really start to examine the impact of our grading systems.

Links

Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Clicking on them and purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!

• seannank.com
• How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards, Ken O'Connor

Resources

The Grading Conference - an annual, online conference exploring Alternative Grading in Higher Education & K-12.

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

• The Grading for Growth Blog
• The Grading Conference
• The Intentional Academia Blog

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

• Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
• Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
• Undoing the Grade, by Jesse Stommel
• Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

The Grading Podcast publishes every week on Tuesday at 4 AM Pacific time, so be sure to subscribe and get notified of each new episode. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - @thegradingpod. To leave us a comment, please go to our website: www.thegradingpod.com and leave a comment on this episode's page.

If you would like to be considered to be a guest on this show, please reach out using the Contact Us form on our website, www.thegradingpod.com.

All content of this podcast and website are solely the opinions of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily represent the views of California State University Los Angeles or the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

Country Rock by Lite Saturation is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

94 - Interview with Sean Nank Replay of Ep 20

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Bosley: Hello and welcome to the podcast. If you were listening last week, you know that my co-host, Sharona Krinsky, recently lost her mother. So to give her the time that she needs to take care of herself and her family, we will be replaying a previously recorded interview this week. Next week we will be back with new materials.

Sharona: As a community to do about all of this.

Sean: As honestly as possible, and as raw as I can be, I want to make sure that nobody ever makes anybody feel like my daughter did in her first grade classroom, with assessments. She's a wonderful, amazing person, actually majoring in math now in college. But in first grade, she was told with timed testing, traditional assessments on mathematics, the teacher ranked all of the people in class, and all the boys were on the top, and all the girls were in the bottom half.

And she said to the class, the girls, in order to do better at math, you need to think more like the boys. And she came home in tears. And I think to myself, that's horrible.

Sharona: You would have ended up in jail, Bosley.

Bosley: Oh my gosh.

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.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. We're really glad to have you here. As always, I am Sharona Krinsky and with me today in the co host chair, Robert Bosley. How's it going, Boz?

Bosley: You know, it's good. Really nice. We're actually trying something different. This is the first episode that we are recording in a remote location.

We are actually in Palm Springs right now. We're here at the CMC South math conference where you and I presented earlier in the conference. And this is kind of different, so we'll see how it goes.

Sharona: Well, and this is the first time that we're going to have our guest today who is live with us.

Bosley: That's right. So why don't you tell everyone who we're here with?

Sharona: So we're here with Sean Nank. We met Sean here at the conference and saw his presentation earlier. You are a faculty member at Cal State University San Marcos, and you also, I believe, teach in high school, but I want to let you do a little bit more introduction yourself.

Sean: Hi, everybody. I'm Sean Nank. I do teach at Cal State San Marcos and American College of Education. I recently re entered the classroom in Oceanside Unified. I also work for various organizations throughout the year different curriculum writing companies. I've written curriculum, professional development, created professional development for the companies to bring their curriculum throughout the nation.

Worked for other entities too, like the NSF down to the California Commission of Teacher Credentialing, and a few places in between.

Sharona: Yeah, I was listening when you were sharing your bio yesterday, and I was like, I want to work at half of those jobs, at least. I think, did you work for the White House or something at one point, or Department of Education, or?

Sean: Yeah, with a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. It all started through The Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Once you're a recipient of that, they do a good job of finding really high quality teachers and, for lack of a better word, using us because they understand that nobody knows what it's like to be in the classroom unless you're in the classroom.

It's a different perspective.

Sharona: That's really, wow, weird.

Bosley: So where were you teaching at the time when you got that award and then started this kind of national level pathway in your career,

Sean: I was teaching at El Camino High School in Oceanside Unified. I had been nominated and I remember when I was nominated, I thought to myself, what is this award?

I've never heard of it before. And then I found out that a person who recently retired, who I absolutely adore, Jeff Lesher. He was my department head and he won the award two years prior. And I remember thinking if that's the type of person this organization values? Sure, I'll go through a couple of hundred hours of recording myself in the classroom and writing a reflective paper.

Bosley: Wow, that's really interesting.

Sharona: I am so envious. I'm so envious. But we had the chance to go to your talk yesterday, which was lessons learned from, I believe, seven years of working with standards based grading. So those people that have been listening for the pod for a while know that we ask this question, which is, how'd you get started with this crazy journey we call alt grading?

And what we didn't predict though, was the single biggest factor was creating online, formative, randomized assessments. So what happened was for every assessment item we had, we would digitize it and randomize it so every time a student took a test, they would have a one in 100 chance of getting the same question again.

It was fully aligned. It wasn't any more or less difficult, but that allowed us to not have to constantly regrade, to program impartial credit, give them hints as they went. And students were able to take assessments as many times as it took for them to show me that they gained mastery. And that was a extreme game changer.

Started doing that with the warm ups as well. When we did the formative assessments with the warm ups and the cool downs, at the beginning of class, the conversation turned from, what was the answer for number three? 17. Okay, I'm done. They couldn't do that anymore because there were a hundred different iterations of question number three on the warmup.

So it turned from what answer did you get to how did you get that? And then they had the mathematical conversation needed for them to be successful. And after about five years of doing that program. I finally had, for one year, 100 percent of my students pass all of my math classes. And that was at a school that had, depending on the teacher, anywhere between a 40 and 87 percent failure rate in math classes.

So it was huge. And I tracked the students for years after, and they were as successful or more successful than anybody else. And that's what got me started with Alternative Grading.

Sharona: So you weren't even really looking to change your grading. You were just trying to go digital.

Sean: I was looking to go digital, use apps on the iPad, and let them use technology to think about math in a different way.

And then I thought if there was any one thing that please don't take away from me in this experience, it was the digitized assessments. We thought it would be an overlay. But as soon as we saw what it could do, that's where we spent probably 95 percent of our time.

Bosley: Yeah, that's one of the things that we changed during pandemic out of necessity, we had to start doing assessments online because everything was online.

And yeah, we came across a way to program in questions that then could generate 900 versions of similar type questions. And I'll be honest since coming back from the pandemic and using that, I don't even take time in my class to do those kind of assessments anymore.

That's done outside of the class because I'm not as worried about the cheating and I'm using instruction time to do instruction. So I've gained a lot of actual instructional minutes back from. Having to do assessments and then using more of a flipped kind of classroom model and doing those outside.

But that's interesting, that was your launch into alternative forms of grading. That's kind of cool.

Sean: Yeah.

Sharona: So when did you actually start to hear about or look at like the formal name? When did you realize there was this thing out there called standards based grading? Did you know about it when you started this or not until later?

Some people hate it. Want to join the group? And I thought, I've been wanting to do this, but I'm wise enough to know to not do it alone. Because it's a lot of work if you do it alone. So here's my group. You found me and I didn't even know that you needed me. And I jumped right on board with it.

And we had been doing that. So here's the thing that best predictor of future behavior is pertinent past behavior, unless you do something or something happens to change it. So what happened eventually was two of the people left the school to go work elsewhere. And then eventually it was a matter of, well, everybody else is doing traditional grading, so we really should do it as well.

And I'm an amiable person. So my first thought process was, okay, I'm a team player. I'll do it. But then three days later into my third year of doing it, I went back and I had said, I have to apologize. I can't, I can't do this to the kids anymore. I saw the results that standards based grading gave the kids and I can't let it go.

So I continued to do it. And now the good thing is this year, me and two other colleagues, a couple of them jumped back on board and it's, I got to tell you, it's the best thing because if I can say it as succinctly as possible, our relationships with assessments are dysfunctional at best and abusive at worst.

There's a lot of pain that we as teachers and our students suffer at the hands of assessments. And I, and I have to ask the question, how many of our students are failing math classes because we're not assessing them in the way that we need to assess them. And we're not giving them the chances because the best thing you can give a student is hope and the worst thing you can take away from them is hope.

So with standards based grading, or other forms of alternative grading, as long as there's retakes and we're well, so the mistake I made was you can retake it as many times as you wanted and everybody kept getting the same grade.

Sharona: Yeah, we've made that mistake. We don't do that one anymore. Everyone listening to the pod, we are not talking about unlimited retakes. We've told you before, after the third chance if they haven't gotten it you need an intervention.

Sean: It plays a role in every realm, but one of the things that I, at the university level for my undergrad credential, master's or doctorate courses, there came a point in time where in my education, and it was the master's and the doctorate degree, where people stopped giving tests.

And I think once people stopped giving me formalized tests, like undergrad tests? I think they knew me better and I think they understood what I understood better. So at the college level, I don't give any formalized assessments anymore. At the high school level, K through 12, we're required to. So this is, I think, the next best thing to moving entirely away, not from grades, but giving them paper, pencil, here's a couple of pages I'm going to test you on the last three weeks of work.

So the way I can say this best is you need to know your purpose, you need to know why you're giving assessments, and then that's going to determine what types of assessments you should give. So now for me, all of my classes K through 12 are standards based grading. They have two requirements in order to do retakes.

If it's not built into the test, what they have to do is come to get help from me. And then get help from anybody else so they get a different perspective. And then once they do that, they can take a retake. But I'm spiraling it in all of my assessments.

So if you have standard 1 in unit 1, there's usually a couple of standards per unit, but if you have two standards in unit one, if you're using the right curriculum, then it's going to spiral. The mathematics is going to spiral. It's going to build on itself. So I'll revisit the essential standards throughout the semester. So they'll get built in problems on the next assessment, the next quiz, the next test.

And if they do better, then I can track the standards in the grade book and I can replace the grade with the higher grade, because if they didn't get it at the middle of September, but they understood it at the beginning of November.

Bosley: Who cares? Who cares when they got it. It's do they get it? Do they have it by the end of the grading period, semester, year, whatever, but yeah, that's one of my big things when I'm doing these trainings.

It's just so bizarre to me once I really started looking at it. Why do I care if the student can, graph this linear function after me teaching it to them for a week? Shouldn't I care that they know how to do it when they're going to their next class? Like that's when they need to know it.

It's not this artificial, okay, I'm going to take a week to do this. I'm going to take a few days to review it. And then we're going to test and then we're going to move on. Hope you got it now, which is what a lot of traditional, at least middle school and high schools. I'm not sure if that's always the tradition with math classes and elementary school.

But...

Sharona: So when you say you have one or two standards per unit, are those standards that you are writing or are they taken wholesale from, say, the Common Core State Standards? Where are you getting what you call standards?

Sean: They're taken from the Common Core Standards, from the California framework, built off the Common Core.

But that's tricky, though, because the standards are complex. When the standards first came out, it took me a lot of time and a lot of help from a lot of other people that realized what the standards meant. I think a lot of people would agree with the fact that the standards we have right now, Common Core, K 8.

They nailed it. Nine through 12? It could be better.

Bosley: Especially here in California because one of the things that states could do when they were choosing to adopt common core is they could adapt or add, change, up to like 10 percent. California changed all 10 percent of that in high school math and almost all of it was in Algebra 1.

The high school standards and stuff for Common Core a little bit, not as good as the K 8, but then on top of that here in California they even messed them up further.

Sean: Yeah. And it's part of the thing that I do to try to make it simpler is, if you use standards based grading, and you wanted to grade every single standard, there aren't enough hours in the day to do it.

So you have to cluster and clump the standards together. So like an algebra one class I have, basically, about 12 essential standards, but within that, you're hitting the other subsets of standards.

Sharona: And that's, we do a 30 hour intensive training for faculty. It's held in the course of usually a week, so five days, six hours a day.

And the entire first day we're introducing things, and then the entire second day is on what we call clearly defined learning targets. And we call them targets because other people have taken words like standards and even outcomes. It's like they're not outcomes. They're things we're aiming for. But we tell people they're not actually your common core state standards or your California framework.

That's what informs them. That's how you build them. But these are supposed to be for students. So I love what you say that if it took you as a math instructor months to figure out what these said? They're not appropriate to use directly with students. So I love what you're saying there. Where would you like to see us go?

What would you like us, as a community, to do about all of this?

Sean: As honestly as possible and as raw as I can be, I want to make sure that nobody ever makes anybody feel like my daughter did in her first grade classroom with assessments. She's a wonderful, amazing person, actually majoring in math now in college, but in first grade, she was told, with timed testing, traditional assessments on mathematics, the teacher ranked all of the people in class.

And all the boys were on the top, and all the girls were in the bottom half. And she said to the class, "Girls, in order to do better in math, you need to think more like the boys." And she came home in tears. And I think to myself, that's horrible.

Sharona: You would have ended up in jail, Bosley.

Bosley: Oh my god.

Sharona: He's got two daughters.

One of whom is...

Bosley: I have a similar bad story. A recent one with, with my oldest daughter, but nothing like yeah, I would have been arrested. I mean, I've already been, I was banned from my oldest daughter's elementary school without a admin escort because I'm not shy or I'm not quiet when it comes to math education of my children.

But yeah, my oldest daughter right now is a junior in high school. And because I work both at the K 12 and at the college level, I usually get home pretty late. So it's become this almost as a joke, but now it's a routine where I get home. She spends like 20 minutes taking me period by period through her day.

There's just a funny routine that we started by accident and that become one of the highlights of my day. But about a week and a half ago, she sits down to tell me about it and she just breaks out, not crying, sobbing, just breaking down. And I'm like, Oh my God, you know, bug, what's wrong?

What's wrong? She's like, dad, please don't be mad. I'm trying. I swear. I'm really trying. I'm really trying. I'm like, what's going on? She's like, I'm feeling my math class. And I'm like, wait a second. I just looked at your math class. She's like yesterday I had a 93. Today I have a 58.

She had taken one test. It was a four question test. Missed a little here and there on some of them, but really bombed one of them. It was a sequence in series test and she just, in the moment, didn't see the pattern.

But because those tests were 70 percent of her grade, and was graded with a traditional taking points off for every little thing. Yeah, her 93 percent became a 58 overnight. Just devastated her. I mean, and, oh, I was, I was furious, but I know because I was a high school or am a high school math teacher, but I've been teaching for 19 years. I only started alternative grading about seven years ago.

And I can just imagine how many times I've accidentally done that, to a student. A good friend of ours on the podcast and part of the grading conference, Robert Talbert, his origin story, he talks about a specific student that was just thrilled to death to be in the class.

And then after each test, just, that enthusiasm just died and it was all because this. She just needed like an extra week with the material. She was always getting it., She was just a week behind the test of getting it. And yeah, I hate to think back of how many students I might've accidentally done that to over the years.

Sean: And that's really empathetically reflective of you. Because I was thinking the same thing. See, the thing about what happened with my daughter was that, as horrible as it sounds, that was easier. Because that was explicit. That was identifiable. What about the unidentifiable, imperceptible things that we don't even know we're doing with assessments?

That's causing students to dislike, well, math, assessments, education in general. That's why I think we really need to I don't want to say rehumanize mathematical assessment? I don't like the term rehumanize because I think we don't need to re humanize anything. It's already humanized. We just need to stop dehumanizing things and realize that these are people.

These are kids in front of us and we don't need to do the things that we're doing to them. And the thing that makes it difficult is, so my daughter's first grade teacher? I am 100 percent certain that she did not wake up in the morning saying, how can I mess these kids up? Everybody has honorable intentions, but at the same time, we're people.

And for every person, you have a different point of view. But I think one of the best things we could do, though, in order to make it a conversation that everybody needs to have for equality of assessments, no matter who your teacher is, is it's pretty much boils down to a four step process for me, where first, we need to decide what our assessments are, and we need to have common assessments.

Then after we do that, we need to have a common scoring rubric. Whether it's traditional, standards based, or any other type of alternative grading, we need to make sure that we're correlating grades. Partially because you want people who pass the class to come out of the class with the same general set of outcomes.

But mostly because if you standardize and normalize the comment scoring rubrics, you're going to have conversations. And we're going to learn from our assessments before we even give them. And the third part should be, well, in my biased opinion, it should be an alternative form of assessment. And don't get me wrong.

If you move to standards based grading, there's a lot more work to be done. That's just part of it. We have to talk about the subset of what's within our assessments as well. But then after that, it's the grading for learning. Let them have multiple attempts, but do it in a way where you realize that, teachers have 200 plus kids at the middle and high school level, and there's not enough time to give retake after retake.

So how do we, how do we build it in? How do we make it easier for both?

Bosley: Yeah, how do you get that scheduled in? How do you do the logistics? How do you find the tools, whether they're electronic or otherwise to help make that manageable? Otherwise, you will drown yourself in grading. It is very easy to do.

But no, I love some of the stuff that you were just saying. My education reform didn't start with grading. It actually started with PLC works. Really building off and going to some of the, like the DuFour PLC conferences. And one of the things that they talk about there is this idea of teacher roulette, where the students chances of passing the class has nothing to do with them or their knowledge, it's about which teacher they get and why we need to have common assessments.

And that's one of the things as department chair, when I was department chair at my high school, we brought on very early. It was trying to get those common assessments, trying to do those common grading. It's funny, what do you and I do every Friday night at six o'clock?

Sharona: We get on a grading phone call with 15 statistics instructors from Cal State LA and we argue over what proficiency versus non proficiency is on the student work that's been turned in at five o'clock on a Friday. And we've been doing it for three years.

Sean: Well, that's beautiful. You just took something that has historically isolated us as teacher and turned it into a bonding moment where we're learning from each other.

What if teachers could learn as much from our assessments you write, as the students learn when they're taking it.

Bosley: The first time we led at my school, the ICA English norm grading. I'm sure you're familiar with the ICA, but those are hand scored by teachers. So the first time we got together and actually went through that process, almost all of the people there was like, this is some of the best Common Core PD we've ever been to.

And it wasn't a PD. It was just us going through the process of looking at the rubrics, norming our grading, standardizing our grading, looking at what we thought was meant by the rubrics versus what SBAC and Common Core were actually saying. And yeah, you're right. It can be a great learning process for the teachers and does nothing but strengthen all of our pedagogy and our instruction in the classroom.

It's a great practice. And if anyone's in a PLC and is not doing this, you're missing out one of the biggest parts of the PLC. Like it doesn't make sense.

Sean: Well, the nice thing too is, I think you and I started at about the same time, about seven years ago? There wasn't, PLCs were all over the place, but standards based grading, alternative grading really wasn't.

So now there's amazing resources. Like you mentioned DuFour, the Solution Tree math at work. They've kind of done a lot of the work for you where you can take their rubrics and figure out how you want to do it. I'll be honest, the first thing I did when I started seven years ago, and I didn't find many, but then I did a couple of years ago again, was I just started Googling standards based grading.

And there's a lot of schools who are doing it. And I was borrowing, stealing, their different four point rubrics. What does it mean to them? How do they train? Here's the hardest thing. We're not going to change the system overnight. So I'm in standards based grading where people want their A, B, C, D or F.

And if they don't get their A B C, then they don't know what to do with, what does a 3.2 mean? So I took a lot of ideas from a lot of different districts from their website to see exactly what protocol I have to translate what a 4, 3, 2, 1 is in terms of when the report card has to come out an A, B, C, D, or an F.

Bosley: We call that stealing the hubcaps.

Sharona: Yeah. Yeah. So in our alt grading world, there's definitely a phrase, we steal the hubcaps all the time off of the different grading systems. And then the other thing, when I was listening to you earlier and now , And we may just have hit this at different points, but not only, like, I acknowledge that we need an ABCDF, at the end of the term, at the moment.

I have people in my community who want to break that. I'm like, you go for it and as soon as you successfully break that, I'll follow along, but I want to get to that point first. But we learned the hard way that number one, we don't even use a numeric scale. Like four, three, two, one? Because people will insist on doing math on it, even non math people.

So first we went to words. So it was excellent, sufficient, whatever, different words. We tried mastery, we tried exceeds, we tried all these different words. And everything was argued. Everything was argued. Like, who are you to tell me that I've mastered something? Or isn't that a word that some races are going to have a problem?

I'm like, you name it. And then there's the joke in mathematics. When do you really master something, the first time you teach it? So we thought that maybe that bar was too high. So I've gone to emojis. So I use, and I define them. I say, okay, a check means you've completed the work you need to show me for this learning outcome.

And you have to get a check twice, two different assessments for one of my classes. And then there's one of my classes I do revisions so I have the little pencil hand emoji. And so they know if they get the little hand with the pencil, they have to do a revision.

There's the yellow thinking man, the guy who's thinking like this, and that means you're going to have to retake it. And then there's a red X for you didn't turn it in, you didn't, or it was blank, you didn't give me enough for sufficient evidence of learning. And then, at the end of the day, my translation's very simple, I do a straight count.

So if I have 15 standards or learning outcomes, 14's an A. 14 or 15. 13's an A- , 12's a B. So it's very, very straightforward. So translating the final letter grade is easy, but I am on a quest to get all numbers except zeros out of my grade book. Because then you put in zeros for everything and everybody freaks out and their brain breaks.

And then that's where the opportunity to actually explain the system happens.

Bosley: Although on the flip side of that, we just had another guest, or actually two guests interviewing, what's the name of the school?

Sharona: Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering. So Matt Massey is the president and they do much more similar to what you do.

Bosley: Well, no, the entire school is standard based grading and they've done away with the letter grades, like the entire school. They don't give letter grades. Now they've had to work and explain some to some of the local colleges and what it means. And some of the colleges, not so local when their students go further away, but

Sharona: Because they will give a 3.65 as a final grade.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: And that's interesting.

Sean: Well it's thinking, about the numbers too. And you're right, people think a two is half a four, so it's 50%. So it's an F and it doesn't work that way. So I love your idea because you're taking the impersonable aspect of numbers out of it.

Speaking of numbers and traditional grading, a lot of people tell me that where you place your points is where your value is, which is fine. That's great. And then they start saying things like, your points is your pay. That's how you pay your students. But then I think to myself, well, let's call it as we see it.

Because with assessments, the points aren't paid. The points are more, how can I put this? It equates to, just basically, the lifelong trajectory of our student's financial security and that of their children. I mean, I don't mean to be melodramatic, but the single thing that's going to decide whether or not students move on. is assessments.

And a lot of students aren't moving on because of the way we're assessing them, which means they're falling behind, which means they're not going to get degrees, which means they're going to make a million plus less over the course of their lives. So it's really important that we fix this.

And I love the aspect of your emojis too because it personifies it and makes it personable and it makes it relatable. What is a 2? I mean, I know what a thinking person and a pencil means, but a two can be arbitrary. Even for me I remember fourth and fifth grade for my daughter, they transitioned over to standards based grading.

And on the report card was a four, three, two, and one. I was more confused than everybody else because I didn't know if a four was met or exceeded. And if it exceeded, how did you need to exceed? So I was confused because to get rid of the confusion, to make the conversion, you just need to let people know what it means. What the smiley face means, what the check means, what the three means, and then a lot more people are on board.

Sharona: But what's nice for me about the emojis is because they don't know what it means, so they actually ask. As opposed to assuming that they know what the word proficient means, or they know what the word mastery means, or they know what a three is.

They know that a three out of four is 75. They think that. They think they know. And I love that they don't. I also was really locking into that word, you were talking about humanizing. Because one of the things that happens on our norming calls is when we have conversations about what they got right and what they got wrong, the next step of it is, is it enough right or enough wrong for it to be successful?

And what implication does that have for the student? So we actually have these conversations as part of our team where we're like, well, okay, so usually, this particular situation, they got these four or five things incorrect. We normally would not accept that, but would they really learn more from doing it again?

Are they going to get discouraged? You know, normally we say rounding is so important, but look at all this other evidence. So we have these very, very human conversations about the holistic thing. And I get to help coach my teachers. Because in higher ed, we actually have less of those conversations than I think you guys have in high school about how to treat students.

And my faculty often were not trained in this. So getting to have those conversations.

Bosley: You're at the higher ed, you're much more content experts, not a lot of pedagogy trained behind that, so.

Sharona: So have you seen that happening with the people that you work with? You said you have a couple of people with you. Have you been able to have these conversations?

Sean: We have. And I think the biggest thing, cause there's one person who's doing it with me right now, who's never done it before. And it's that aspect of it's going to be harder until it gets easier. For me, the way I grade now, it actually takes less time and it means more to me, but it took me a few months of getting used to it.

So like one of the mistakes that people tend to make is there's a standard. I'm going to give you one problem. And I'm going to determine where you are at within that standard. I can't do that. You need a mix. Usually for me, for each standard, I have two to four types of problems for that standard, so that I can holistically exactly see what they can't do. And then when I come to the end of grading, it's not a matter of I just gave thousands of points to people. It's a matter of I leave with an understanding, without even looking at the data first, of where they are with each standard. Which lets me, I'm a big fan for intervention, but I think we need to move more towards prevention.

So it lets me know what they know and what they don't know on a more fundamental level, which can help me to predict what they're going to need as we enter in the next unit of study. And I did not get that when I just gave points.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: Yeah, that word, that's another one of those words when I, like I said earlier, if they don't have it by the third time, they need an intervention.

I didn't mean it in the way he would mean it because he's the intervention coordinator for his school. But for me, I require that they do something, like you said, where they have to go do something to get another chance. And for me, it's usually a correction and reflection assignment. So they have to go and correct a previous set of work related to that that was incorrect and reflect on why they got it wrong. And I actually scaffold very intentionally. I don't want to hear, I didn't study enough. That's not what you did wrong. What you did wrong is you either didn't read, you didn't know, or you made a mistake.

So for me, that's what I would call an intervention. I think that's what I would call for you, your "you have to come meet with me and you have to meet with someone else". Do you do it right around that third time or you said you do it when you don't have something pre scheduled?

Sean: Any type of intervention, prevention, it's more ongoing. I let it be more organic. And some of the students the first thing I do if they don't understand a standard with me, of course they're going to come in for help with me. But I tell them I, I like to say, so I don't insult myself, that I was classically trained in mathematics.

Like there's ways that people think about math right now, where I have to solve it traditionally, like the hangar math, in order to understand solving equations. When I first saw that, I had to solve just a regular math problem and then translate it to what those hangars meant. My brain could not wrap around the visual.

Bosley: Yeah. No, I've had to do that with some of my daughter's elementary school, but yeah, thinking about it traditionally and then going, okay, that's what this is doing. That's what they're okay. This is yeah, that's.

Sean: Which is fine. We all think about it in different ways and that's the reason why I tell them, yeah, come to me for help, but ask somebody else too. Because they're going to understand it and they're going to see it in a way that I'm not going to.

It's frustratingly glorious when it happens. When I'll say something in the classroom, and then a peer will say it, I swear it's the exact same words and then they just get it. Different cadence, different tone, different meaning, different pointing to different aspects of different structures of math, and they understand it because they heard it from somebody else.

Bosley: But also just getting it from a, like you said, a non classically trained math teacher, you know you've been around long enough. You remember the CAHSEE, right? So, CAHSEE was still around when I first started and I became department chair at my school, it was still here, we were still dealing with it.

Recruiting people, we had these Saturday CAHSEE intervention classes and stuff for our students that had already taken it at least once and hadn't passed it. One of my most successful intervention teachers wasn't a math teacher. It was the econ teacher. Because they saw math differently because they weren't mathematician.

They were coming at it from kind of that econ background, a different practical use of it. Yeah, one of the most successful CAHSEE intervention teachers that we had. And he really didn't like math, but like I said, with the history and the econ background he had, he was really good at getting kids past that CAHSEE.

Sean: Yeah. Well, it's interesting too, because this conversation is making me think of, and please feel free to push back because I'm thinking off the top of my head here about different aspects and theories of education, and there's a big push towards storytelling in classroom, especially math classrooms. And it's making me wonder, what stories do our assessments tell about us and about our students? Because I'm thinking about, we're goint o have to quantify it at some time. We're going to have to give them the A, B, C, D, F. But I'm thinking of like 20/20, 60 minutes, Dateline. What do they do?

They start off with the numbers. They hit you with the stats. But then what makes you really understand what's going on? For the rest of the broadcast, they center in on one quintessential meaningful story. So I'm thinking about what that means in terms of assessments because yes, we may have a number or we may have emojis that will eventually move to grades, but what kind of a story does that tell?

Like a student's journey to get a B as opposed to a student who wasn't as successful and what meaning are they making? What is their mathematical story? And I think, I think we overlook how problematically profound assessments are in terms of that story.

Sharona: So I have a metaphor that I use, that he's heard numerous times now, of traditional grading versus alternative grading.

And the metaphor is, I believe that traditional grading is like a helicopter ride to the top of a mountain. Okay. That helicopter ride is the syllabus assignment that you send home and the parent signs the first week and they get five points out of five points and they now have 100 percent in the class. Okay?

You now are at the top of the mountain and you spend the rest of the time trying not to get blown off the mountain. And what kind of an experience is that? Versus alternative grading, which is we're going to start at the bottom of the mountain and we're going to look up and go dang, that's a tall mountain. But there's this like friendly smiling guide and the first part of the path, it's kind of slow and it's a little bit gentle and then you start climbing, you start climbing and sometimes you pass someone else on the path and sometimes someone passes you. And in the meantime, there's guides all the way up the way. And we don't care who gets the mountain first. You just want to get everyone far enough out the mountain, whatever you've defined, to say you've successfully climbed the mountain.

And that's the story I tell of assessment. But then I also, when I went to write my learning outcomes, because I didn't have the Common Core State Standards when I was sitting down to do this with Calc 1, Calc 2, and Calc 3, I asked myself, well, what's the story of the content here? I actually felt like I had to write the plot of a calculus class.

So for me, for Calculus 2, it's the mathematics of three things. It's the mathematics of accumulation, which is integration. It's the mathematics of the infinite, which is sequences and series. And it's the mathematics of motion in space, which is the vector calculus. And that, for me, in my institutional context, that's my class.

So I actually tell my students that. I tell my students that you have these three things that you're trying to learn. The mathematics of accumulation, the mathematics of the infinite, and the mathematics of motion and space. And I try to motivate then what they do, and as they succeed in getting these tools, I try to tie it back to that story.

So I actually feel that there is a story to be had, and it's lost, because we spend all of our time with symbolic manipulation.

Sean: Right.

Sharona: Especially in calculus. It's really bad. And everyone's like, well, we have these great word problems. I'm like, you have these crappy word problems that have been carefully curated to have integer answers.

And I would much rather give much more sophisticated problems that are very hard to solve, that require technology, but that I can learn whether or not you understand. A great one I do, I do a project about curvature, and I tell them, create a curve, pick a point. They're like, which point? I'm like, well, not the point where it's sharp and pointy.

And they go, well, why not? I'm like, good thing to think about. Because curvature requires differentiation, which requires smoothness. So you get to learn these deeper things that they don't remember. And so I love what you're saying. You know, what is the story of our assessments and what's the story of our class?

Sean: Right.

Sharona: What's the story of algebra?

Bosley: Exactly. When we do our long 30 hour training, we start with those well defined learning outcomes and that's part of the process of developing in those. It's like, what is the purpose of the course? Does it fit in a sequence?

If not, what skills do they need? What's the purpose of the story? What kind of students do you have? What kind of a teacher are you? What do you value? So all of that values and purpose and story of the course gets integrated and becomes part of the grading architecture of the class.

Instead of just 90 to 100, 89 to, or 80 to 89 and that personalizes grading and it makes grading not as much of a chore. And we have, one of our guests that's been on several times, a guy named Joe Zeccola that I worked with, English teacher. And he loves talking about how grading used to be, especially for an English, just this horrible chore, all this reading and just a nightmare.

And now, since he's gone to alternative grading and he's really honed in on what he thinks is important for his class, the grading's not this just unbearable chore that it used to be, that it's because he's seeing the students learning. It's not a task that he's going through to give a grade, it's a task he's going through to see what understanding his students have. And it's so much more meaningful. And he doesn't mind grading now cause it used to be just a terrible chore.

Sean: It's a story. It's a journey. And like thinking about thinking about the story and the metaphor of the mountain, what you originally said? I can't help but think about your daughter and hope when she went from the nineties to the fifties, I hope there's a bungee cord attached to get her back up fast.

And, like in terms of symbols, I like what you said about Mathematics being symbols, it reminds me of a saying. It's a Buddhist saying that goes something like, the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. The symbols for mathematics, that's not the mathematics. It's what the symbols point to that's the math.

So if you get too bogged down in the symbols, and we have a lot of symbols with assessments, then it can almost detract from the meaning of mathematics to where people know the symbols and they'll be able to know what to do without having any idea of what the mathematics is inherent in the symbols.

Sharona: The conversation I have with my faculty is we are looking for evidence of learning. We are not looking for evidence of not learning.

Bosley: We're not looking for those points to take away those little dings here and there.

Sharona: So if we can find that in a conversation with a student, if we can find that anywhere, you get to use your professional expertise. We do have to watch for bias.

So there needs to be places where it's not entirely reliant on an individual instructor. Like that's problematic. But, I think the more places you have to allow yourself to look for evidence of learning, like what's the downside?

Sean: Right. And I like that you mentioned that bias too. Because that is one of the aspects of, you can be biased with traditional grading with points, but I think there's a propensity where you could be even more biased with standards based grading.

I make sure that it's blinded grading and I don't look at the students names. Because they call it implicit bias for a reason. You don't know when you're doing it. So I want to make sure that with some students, I'm not thinking, yeah, that's a three. And with some other students, that's a two.

And that's kind of where your colleagues come in, too. Because when we start grading, after we give any assessment, we get together with our papers and say, Okay, this is a four. We all have to look at this. I don't know if this is a three or if this is a two. Let's talk about it. What make what would make this a three if it was a two.

So you have to have those conversations to make sure that that you're normalizing your standards based grading. And I still I can't help think about how we make our students feel. Because it's I'm thinking of another saying that it goes something like, go where you feel loved. And if that love's consistent, stay.

And I'm trying to think, we're not giving our students a lot of love with assessments. Certain students, in terms of biases, certain people are going to want assessments to stay the way they are because certain people do well on the assessments. But there's a lot of people who aren't feeling the love and it's not their fault that they can't do well in the assessments.

Before using alternative grading, I know, definitively, that there were people in my classroom who are failing because of the assessments I was giving and how it was grading them. I tracked it. I saw the grades go up immensely once I went to standards based grading.

Bosley: About Jesse Stommel's book that I really liked so much is just, if nothing else, let's have a critical conversation about assessments and about grading. Even if nothing else changes, having those critical conversations to bring a lot of this unconscious, this unbiased aspects to it, up to the light so we can really examine them. And then if you decide you want to keep doing in the way the things you're doing go with peace, but let's have those conversations.

Let's actually examine some of these practices that are virtually unchanged in almost a hundred years for no other reason than because they've not been changed in over a hundred years.

Sean: And that's the key. You're hitting the proverbial nail right on the head. Standards based grading, alternative grading, it's not going to fix anything.

Like you said, it could make things worse. What it does, though, is it gets us to question what we've always done so we can have the conversations that we need to have in order to figure out how to do things better. That's, I think, the true power of alternative grading, is it goes from here's the traditional grading, here's how it's always been done, and it creates those conversations that we've been needing to have.

And the other thing I think it does too is I'm thinking of Malcolm Gladwell, he has a book called Blink, and in it he talks about the aspect that we're programmed as human beings to make split second decisions. We have to. We bring in so much data on a daily basis that we have to segregate that data and we have to interpret that data in almost an instant.

And we do that with people. So the point he makes in the book is, we're not going to get past that. But what we need to do as human beings is figure out a way that we can then step back and think of all the things to the contrary. So once we have an initial perception of a person, do we then allow for confirmation bias to fall by the wayside and re conceptualize what we think about that person?

I'm thinking about that in terms of alternative grading and how important it is to give them multiple attempts. Because if I judge you based on the first time you took an assessment, it's that mountain you were talking about. Falling all the way down.

I turned in the syllabus, I have an A plus. The first test, I got a 20%. How many 70, 80 percents do you need to pass my class now and build back up? So, who's the real you? The person who was nervous three weeks in, who wasn't into the groove of the school year, who got a 20%? Or the person who got an 80, 90 or 100 on the rest of the tests for the year. So it allows me to literally and metaphorically reconceptualize what I'm thinking about my students and what they're thinking about themselves.

Sharona: I think that's the thing that for me has been the most surprising about the podcast. We kind of started it a little bit on a whim. I looked at him one day and said, I think we should do a podcast. And he actually said yes, which was a little bit shocking. And we thought we were going to have fun.

But what you said is so critical. It's about the conversation. And I love the books. I love the resources that are out there online. But what really moves the needle is the conversations. And there's not a lot of time and space for three people to sit in a room for an hour and have an in depth conversation.

And honestly, some of the podcast technology requires us to actually listen to each other and not instantly respond. Guilty right here. But that's been a joy and being able to talk to people like you out there doing it. And now we're connected. We just had a conversation that's going to be coming up soon with Matt Townsley.

We've got the conversation with Matt Massey coming up. We've had just these amazing interviews. And I'm hoping that people listening to this can feel like they're having the conversation with us or they can listen to it in their PLC and then they can have the conversation among themselves.

Bosley: We are starting to kind of come up on time, but I wanted to bring it back to where we are right now. Kind of wanted to ask you about how's your experience been here at CMC this year?

Sean: It's been wonderful. I mean, you forget how much you bond with the people until you're back here. Just, I love being back. And can I say the pandemic's over? I won't say it. I won't jinx anything, but I will say that the thing that I look forward to the most is the person who I haven't seen in a year, who within five seconds, I feel like I just saw yesterday. The in the hallway conversations leaving the speaker sessions and having a half hour in between them for 15 minutes of that half hour, I'm talking to somebody else and we're, well, we're stealing each other's hubcaps right there in the hallway. It's just getting to reconnect with the people has been amazingly wonderful.

Bosley: And then ours was the 3:30. So we had one in between us, but several of them came. The only thing I really wish is ours would have been flipped. Cause ours was a little bit more, actually a lot more about some of the reason why we need to change how we grade and how we do things.

I think it would have been better. It would have been nice.

Sharona: It would have been fun for people to understand. We try really hard. The goal of our workshop is for people to actually walk away sick to their stomach, like really. We talk a little bit about the alternative side and that there is a better way to do it, but most of this particular talk is not only the problems mathematically, the problems like you've talked about, about people's feelings, especially in a math conference, we go through the just horrible math that's in there.

But then we also talk about the history of the A, B, C, D, F grading system. We bring up the elite institutions, like all of it. And the goal being we need people to really comprehend what you comprehend, is that we are really doing real damage. And yes, there's another way to do it. It's based on these four pillars. Now let's go see people who've done it and implement. So it would have been fun.

It was fine the way it was, but it would have been kind of fun the other way too.

Bosley: There was one group, and I didn't ask them permission beforehand, so I'm not going to say what school they were from, but there was one group that was in yours that also came to ours and they ended up staying and talking with us for like another half hour afterwards.

Sean: Right.

Bosley: And they were the ones that kind of put that in my head is like, yeah, this would have been, coming to ours first would have made yours make a lot more sense of why we needed to do it. But they left really motivated and they had like three of their four team that's here was there. And like I said, we were talking to them for another 30 minutes and it sounds like, hopefully, that they're leaving and really going to try to make some change at their school because they know that they needed to.

Sharona: Well, and then the other thing that's happened at this conference is there were a couple of teachers, and I did not know this at the time, I found out later, but there was one in particular who came to our talk from my kids' school district that, my kids are now in college.

I sometimes tell not so great stories about their school district. And so one of them was there and I was like, Oh, gosh, I don't think I told any bad stories. And then we ran into them. You were talking about the conversations. We ran into the one who came to see us and two of their colleagues at the exhibitor booths.

And one of them was actually one of my kids' former teachers, who we had had a great experience with, and I had handed a book on standards based grading seven years ago too. And remembers me because of that. It was an amazing and it's like, yeah, I keep referring to it. I've been talking about it. I can't believe it's the same person.

So that was really exciting, but it's nice to see the trajectory. You know, we've been doing this 7 years with the grading conference. It's very different, by the way, than this conference, because first of all, it's virtual. It's online.

But because it grew out of the pandemic, it started during the pandemic, we have those side conversations. They're just done in chat. And so there is a fire hose of chat going. And we have the chat turned on for everyone. Like we're the opposite of a lot of places that have it really locked down. It's full blown and we have chat monitors that are like someone asks a question and they're posting links and they're cross referencing people and they're bringing things to the attention.

It's crazy. It is so much fun, but completely different.

Sean: Well, I think when y'all are here next year, we've got the template for what's going to happen. Yes. You go first. I go second. You make them sick. I'll give them Pepto Bismol.

Bosley: Yep. There

Sharona: you go.

Sounds great. I think we should just do a big session on it.

So any closing thoughts before we, anything you want to share with people or how people can get a hold of you?

Sean: Yeah, you can always go on my website. It's my name www.seannank.com. Or you can email me at mathcoachnank at gmail. com. Or reach out on Twitter or Google me or whatnot. And I think the biggest clothing closing thought is, just think about how we make people feel. Think about how we facilitate people feeling and think about the last time that you gave somebody an assessment back and it just devastated them. Or think about the last time you did and think about what the alternative to that is, because under any type of grading, some people will not experience as much success, but do you give them the chance to redefine themselves and experience the success?

Bosley: Well, thank you so much again. It was a pleasure to having you on here. It was a pleasure being in your session, extremely entertaining presenter on top of really doing a great job of getting that message across. So thank you so very much. I hope our paths cross more often.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episodes page on our website www.thegradingpod.com or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website. The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Bosley: 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.