Modern Grading Reform — Sustaining the Work (Episode 4)

Series Finale: 20 Years in the Trenches

It is one thing to initiate grading reform; it is another to ensure it survives the "implementation dip" and becomes part of a school's cultural fabric. In this final installment of the Modern Grading Reform mini-series, Dr. Chad Lang and Dr. Matt Townsley draw upon two decades of experience to explore the complexities of maintaining momentum in educational change.

Moving beyond technical adjustments, this episode elucidates why effective grading practices require a profound shift in educational philosophy. The hosts tackle the phenomenon of "initiative fatigue" head-on, offering a systems-thinking approach to ensure grading reform isn't just "one more thing," but rather the linchpin of a coherent instructional strategy.

Key Leadership Takeaways:

• The 4 C’s of Coherence: Strategies for building Capacity, fostering Collaboration, enhancing Clarity, and creating a Coherent system that adapts to the evolving educational landscape.
• MTSS for Adult Learners: Why leaders must provide a Multi-Tiered System of Support for staff—ranging from universal professional learning (Tier 1) to intensive coaching (Tier 3)—to reduce cognitive load and prevent burnout.
• Building a Guiding Coalition: How to establish diverse, school-wide teams that foster shared ownership and ensure the longevity of reform efforts.
• Recruiting for Philosophy: The importance of aligning hiring practices and professional development with your grading framework to ensure long-term sustainability.

As this series culminates, Dr. Lang and Dr. Townsley offer a "clarion call" for educators to embrace the complexity of change. This isn't just about a gradebook; it’s a transformative journey to fundamentally enhance the quality of education for every student.

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Welcome to the commons on the Forward Ed Network.

This is Modern Grading Reform, a miniseries with Dr. Chad Lang and Dr. Matt Townsley sharing nearly 20 years in the trenches of grading and assessment reform.

Let's get started.

Today's episode is brought to you by our partners at the Curriculum Leadership Institute.

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It's time consuming, oftentimes disjointed, and if it's not done right, it doesn't actually improve student learning.

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Well, welcome to episode four of the Grading Reform 20 Years in the Trenches miniseries here.

I'm Chad Lang, Matt Townsend with me as usual.

Matt, thanks again for joining me for another awesome conversation.

Coming up.

How's it going?

Hey.

Good.

Just feels like we've been at the proverbial fireplace having some fun fireside chats on a topic that we're really both excited, passionate about, and, you know, 20 years here we are putting it together and, you know, four episodes, kind of sad.

This is the final episode, Chad.

Yeah, yeah.

It's almost like you have to kind of chuckle a little bit because, you know, you talk about 20 years or two decades and it sounds like a lot.

And then you, you look at some of the research or even some of the seminal works that you and I have read, like, what'd you get?

You know, what's the copyright on that book?

1970S, 80s, possibly?

Something.

Yeah, yeah, that.

And that's a great one.

If anybody hasn't.

It's.

It's literally wud ja get is the name of the book.

W I D hyphen J A hyphen G E T. I think Kirschenbaum is one of the authors.

Just an awesome, really, introduction to how long this work's been going on.

So just as a precursor, as we've said in all the other episodes, Matt and I are grading and assessment enthusiasts.

We certainly do a lot of work around supporting grading and assessment and in our own practice with colleagues, friends and the like.

We're not the one and only experts by any stretch of the imagination.

And so when people say those things, it kind of makes me blush a little bit because this work's been going on for a long time and we're just kind of standing on the shoulders of giants before us.

So it's fun to get to do it.

It's a passion area for us.

We know it can make a significant difference when we can communicate clearly about what students can know or do and improve those practices in our schools.

Benefits everybody.

So we're on episode four, so we're working through our own miniseries here.

We could obviously do part due probably at some other time, but we have four episodes.

Shout out to our sponsors, Spaces Edu Curriculum Leadership Institute Great people over at Forward Ed for putting this together for us.

It's been, it's been really nice partnership with them.

Check out their stuff if you want to learn more about what they do and how they can support curriculum, instruction, grading and assessment.

So thanks a lot for, for their partnership in this journey as well.

Matt this episode is going to focus on sustaining the work and if it's hard enough to get it started and you're really thinking about all the efforts that school leaders or educators on this podcasts have pondered, geez, it's a lot of hard work.

Just to get started, what is going to be our thoughts on what has worked for sustaining the reform and kind of keeping that evolution of grading reform going in modern schools?

What are your thoughts about that?

Get us kicked off for this episode?

What are some things that fired up?

Yeah, Chad, for every one school that reaches out with a question, an email, a phone call or zoom that says, hey, can you help us get started?

At least in the past five or six years or so, I bet there's at least two or three that had started this work before and are doing some type of reboot.

And so this, this topic, Chad, of sustaining the work I think is incredibly important.

I mean, you dig into some of Doug Reeves work where he talks about initiative fatigue, and anyone who's been education for a while is like, oh my gosh, we start this stuff, how do we keep it going?

No, you'll hear effective school leaders and educators talk about like, what's our big rocks?

How do we, you know, focus our our limited and precious professional development time to really help educators grow in the right areas.

And so I think this topic today of sustaining grading reform is one that really can pay dividends for educators out there that are listening or watching to this.

And but I think, Chad, that there's a challenge, right?

I mean, I've never talked with an educator who's like, you know what?

We just don't have enough initiatives or changes going on around here.

Usually it's quite the opposite.

It seems like there's Just so much flying down the pipe, whether it's, you know, state mandated things we have to do or other, you know, changes that school districts are making.

Chad, why, why can't grading reform just be one more thing?

I'm sure you've heard that phrase, Chad, why can't grading reform just be one more thing?

Yeah, I think probably for the same reason you don't want anything to be one more thing.

You know, the teacher's capacity, the system's capacity to take systems for school improvement.

And if we really think about grading as the purpose, as we talked about in other episodes, to communicate as a communication device about what a student can know or do related to some courses and content over a long period of time, if they been in your school district or your school community for 12 or 13 years, it's really, really important.

But it's part of a larger system.

It doesn't just live in isolation.

And so what's important about that is to think about what's the capacity for our staff to take on new learning that attaches onto that bolts onto the successful levers.

We already, and maybe some of them aren't so successful, but they work.

We have these opera, we have these, these operating systems, these apparatus that seem to work and in schools are a little bit nuanced this way in terms of their community and their stakeholders and maybe technology.

Just how communication is working or not working.

And then how does your grading reform just dovetail into that system?

I think it's really important to do.

If it's just yet another thing, I could speak as a former teacher who has implemented standards based grading reform years ago, as I mentioned in episode one, it would totally feel like just an additive thing.

I wouldn't naturally, as a teacher understand the dovetailing effect that the grading reform has related to say, PLCs in collaboration or the curriculum work that we're doing around prioritizing standards or even external communication like eligibility or the report card, you know, what's the connection there?

I don't see it.

And so things just.

It's like someone said to me once, it feels like we're just falling down a staircase.

One comes after the other and I have no connection to it.

And, you know, that hurts to fall down a staircase.

And so in this, in this era that we're in, in education, we need to, you know, be very cognizant of, you know, what's the cognitive load that we're putting on to our teacher and not burning them out as well.

And so, I mean, there's There's a plethora of reasons right there alone, but it's, it's so much broader than initiative.

It's really a way of thinking and a way of being in terms of your communication.

So it wouldn't make sense for it to be a standalone initiative.

And it won't be successful either.

You know, have you seen that or experienced that?

I'm sure you have.

Yeah.

What is your advice?

To get yourself out of that?

Yeah, yeah.

So I think, like, what you said is whatever, the solid foundation that's in place is building upon that, or if there's just something else right now that just has a lot of synergy.

Like you mentioned the PLC process.

In my former school district, there was like, no question really that we wanted to pursue this, you know, this collaborative teaming process of really doing, you know, guaranteed and viable curriculum stuff and looking at student, you know, common form assessments and things like that in, in collaborative teams.

It's like no one was really saying, like, that was not good.

Most for educators are saying, like, why weren't we doing that before?

And so I'll never forget the day where, where Jim, one of our high school teachers, like Matt, like, we're doing this PLC thing, we're doing the standards based grading thing.

Like, isn't there some, like, overlap between all this?

So at that moment I was like, oh my gosh, of course there is.

Instead of trying to see these two things as being different, you know, how can we see them as just both going in the same direction and supporting each other?

And so that's where Nathan Weir and I wrote our book, you know, Making Grades Matter, Standards Based Grading and a Secondary plc.

And in the first chapter, there's a visual that, you know, kind of takes the big ideas of a professional learning community and does a crosswalk with some of the.

The concepts of standards based grading.

And so I think that that visual that Jim just like asked me to create for him that ended up in our book is something that as school leaders, we ought to be doing at all times.

It's published in the.

For those of you that are in the SEL world, casel's prominent research journal called Social and Emotional Learning Research Policy and Practice.

And so I think just, you know, trying to figure out ways to say we're not just doing SEL over here and grading reform over here, or we're not just doing The PLC thing over here and grading reform over here.

But these things support each other.

And so when you're doing this work, you're also doing, you know, this other work as well, to take some of that, you know, that, that, that perception of everything feeling like a puzzle that's not yet put together.

Yeah, Chad.

I also, that it's not, I mean, it's easy to say that it's not, it's not always, it's not always easy to do that though, in the midst of all of it.

And so I just kind of feel like we have to put the pieces together for staff.

We also have to help support the heck out of them even when the pieces aren't yet put together.

What's your thoughts on, you know, like, you know, like, is it, is it one on one conversations with staff to make this happen in your perspective?

Is it, you know, creating crosswalks, like Matt explained, like, what's been your experience to help staff see these things as one rather than many?

Yeah, I think one thing you can do, I mean, a lot of folks listening to this episode will be familiar with multi tiered systems of supports for students, right?

Like tier one, tier two, tier three, there's like universal expectations and universal instruction and then building up towards more of a tier two and supporting those individuals just in timely, specific cases.

And then tier three, pretty, pretty intensive.

I think you have to think about building that same system for your adults.

A former first grade teacher, Jessica Jones, and I wrote an article one time about supporting new teachers that way.

And so I think we're going to talk about new teachers a little bit later in this episode.

But just thinking about like programmatically, you don't have to hire more people.

You just have to think about when it comes to grading an assessment reform, who's going to just go to our professional learning sessions or read an article and just get it right?

It's going to resonate with them.

In fact, they may even become kind of a leader and talk through some examples with your colleagues.

And then who's going to be like, it seems like they're doing great and then they really stumble.

And what are going to be those levels of support can't always be the administrators.

Are you going to have PLC structures?

Are you going to have mentors?

Are you going to have instructional coaches?

Are you going to have school counselors or other support staff really, really well trained from the implementation or that initiation phase to be able to have sustainable support so that that level is there when it's needed, just at the implementation originally at the onset, you're going to develop new problems all the time, right?

And we hear this from schools all the time.

And then intensive like what, what could.

From a, from a time intensity and from an availability.

That's the other thing is like, how can we identify maybe that guiding coalition or a super small group of go getters in our building, they're like, listen, we're your grading pastors.

We'll come triage your situation.

Doesn't matter.

We teach third grade and you teach fifth.

It doesn't matter that I teach algebra and you teach chemistry.

We're on the case.

If the coaches aren't available, if the principal's not available, if your collaborative team couldn't help, let us know, hit this button, sort of like the back call, right?

And that has been really successful.

People feel really invigorated to have colleagues kind of come to the rescue.

And there's always been teachers step up to the plate for that sort of Tier 3 assistance when needed.

And I've loved that idea.

It also kind of weaves in examples from the trenches, right?

I mean, it might help if it gets them kind of over a short term problem, but really they want to know.

You're dealing with students that have cell phones, you're dealing with students who have attendance issues just like me right now, maybe even the same students.

And so the fact that that level of support is available, those are some ideas I've seen that have worked really, really well.

Just thinking about varying the amount of availability of support around grade immune assessment, but also just the intensity of availability.

And, and those can be stackable, of course, and then they can come and go as needed.

And I feel like that just being thoughtful and mindful about how that system can be built out with all the people you have basically at no cost, right?

You're not bringing in some consultant flying in or driving in with a fancy briefcase in PowerPoint that will get you so far and really maybe just get you started.

Maybe you need a refresh every once in a while and some new ideas.

But I think you have to build a system of support, as you've said, and you probably have that in place maybe in your new teacher mentoring program or your onboarding program, or maybe not.

But maybe you have in other places within your system that you can say, hey, let's just think about how we could leverage this dynamite idea as far as our Structure, maybe in our grading and assessment implementation, I think you just have to be careful you don't burn out the same people all the time.

Yeah.

So you're tapping some shoulders and really, you know, lifting people up.

Say, hey, is there any way that you, I mean, we've heard a lot of good things or you've, you've done some great work.

Do you think you could jump on this task force for this year or do some sort of rotational basis?

It's a lot of good ideas out there, I think.

One thing I'd add, fantastic stuff.

Chad, I really appreciate that you brought up the idea of tears.

One conversation I had just actually two conversations I had this past week with some school leaders were like, the question that they were asking was a good one, but I tried to help them reframe it.

The question was like, how do we know if our staff are ready to implement standards based grading or what percent of them are?

Great question.

Because they're trying to figure out like how to, how to move forward with this work.

And I encourage them to say, hey, that's a great question.

But instead of thinking about this idea of grading reform as a whole, break it down to smaller components.

All right, how ready are we with high quality task neutral rubrics?

How ready are we with awesome high quality summit assessments?

How ready is our staff to implement reassessments at a high level?

How so?

Like breaking down some of the big ideas of grading an assessment reform into smaller pieces and then having some tool to actually get data.

You know, think of it as like an implementation rubric for adults.

And to find out, all right, let's, let's think about this like we do with, you know, elementary literacy.

Let's give everyone a screener just to find out where they're at at tier one.

And then let's provide with those experts that we have in house that you're mentioning, Chad.

Let's use them to provide some tier 2 smaller group support, some follow up support.

Hey, these teachers need some additional help creating, you know, rubrics, right.

Who do we have on staff that can help out with that?

Right?

And then there's of course like a tier three.

Like, hey, you know, we've, we've, we've dip sticked the person's, not the dipstick.

All right, we sticked with the instrument.

And as it turns out, you're not making, you're not making progress on this component, this aspect of standards based grading.

We've given you additional support in small group setting.

You're still not there yet.

And so according to the data that we have, you're not there.

So now maybe it's a one on one conversation right.

Between the administrator and that person, like what support do you need?

And if they're just like, you know, raw, I'm not doing it, then it turns into a evaluation conversation.

But if they're just like, I just still don't understand this and I need, you know, extra time because I've got seven preps and everybody else only has two preps, like that's where like that tier three, very individualized support can come.

And as I reframe that with these leaders, they're like, oh, that makes a lot of sense because sometimes in our brain we think about like that one teacher or that one team or those two teachers and that two team or two teams that just aren't ready.

But if we think about it like a multi tiered system of support for standards based grading implementation, now we're able to better sustain this over time because we've got an idea where everyone's at over the course of, let's say a couple years.

Yeah.

And obviously to understand that people are always going to be in different places with.

Yes.

I mean we want to promote that idea and understand that idea with our students.

We can fully expect their adults would be in the same boat.

And so just thinking to be a little more agile, that's going to set you up really, really well for bringing on new people.

And that's going to be a big part of our work.

Right.

Like we're going to have people retire and people move and whatever, whatever the reason might be that we're an organization just like any other place in schools and we're human resources driven.

So one of the things that I can share that I've seen been really successful in schools that have led long term sustainability is clearly their marketing that they are either standards based.

Yes.

They're, they're not, they're, they're, they're very proud of the fact that work, they have oftentimes a great website or some great informational items.

But on the job posting.

Put it on the job posting.

Yeah, let's be really clear, like what other organization wouldn't do that?

You know, if you, if you're a construction site and you use only a certain kind of tools like you would probably advertise, hey, if you're going to work for us, these are the tools we use.

Doesn't mean you couldn't work for us.

It just means that might be a hurdle for you.

You may not want to apply.

And I think what's been really, really hard for schools is just with teacher shortages nationally in the last few years, just to feel leveraged.

And I think that's while super understandable and I've been there.

I think you really have to think about the long term play for your students that getting people in, filling a spot or whatever.

If it's not a perfect philosophical match to what it is that you really believe in, your core values, your core tenants, that grading purpose statement we talked about in episode one, it's just going to be short lived anyway and everybody's going to be kind of miserable.

Now we can coach people up and we want to make sure we have a system to do that.

And the thing of it is, is no matter what, even if philosophically you can sort of recruit and hire with people who have sort of a modern grading philosophy in mind, you're still going to need a lot of coaching.

Because when we talk about those tiers of support, I like to think when we have those things in place, make sure we're working with those teams on understanding are we, are these teachers, are these teams needing technical support or like a change?

Yeah, because they just get all interwoven and can be.

I mean there's people that will wrestle with an electronic grade book so much so that they just want to throw everything out and start over.

They just, they're so fed up and they're so tired of dealing with just maybe the nuances of how it works or maybe they're just not real techie as a person and it's like all their frustrations being boiled up in technical considerations, technical problems.

That's really limiting their ability to grow philosophically, you know, and adapt to the professional learning and changes that we've been doing.

So kind of hand in glove is like, do your systems have agility to meet both technical and adaptive challenge?

Fantastic.

At the same time.

Great point, great point.

And then thinking about reaching out and making sure we're bringing on people that want to do the work that we do here.

And I think sometimes when I've talked about that with teacher teams or with administrators mostly is they sort of feel like, yeah, that sounds great, but you know, we really need a math teacher.

And I really try to work with them and just go through the pros and cons and think about if you had someone who's truly staunchly just opposed to the work that you have really worked hard to do in your district or in your school or you're in the Midst of doing just the detriment that that can have on all the rest of the colleagues that they've joined.

Just, it just depends, you know.

And so the trying to ascertain in the interview process, you know, is this person coachable?

I don't care how many years of experience do they have, but are they a coachable person?

Yep, yep.

You know, and I think that's, that's important because it represents characteristics that we're going to expect to want to see with our students when we're implementing more standards based grading type or evidence based approaches.

That's the exact same mentality they're gonna have to turn around and have with our students, which is, no, no, no, we're not gonna lower the bar.

There's nothing you can do by turning in a whole bunch of stuff at the end of the grading period.

What you have to know is what you have to know.

And so, you know, it's sort of like this idea of, you know, if, if I, if I'm coming in with that mindset about how I'm going to approach my work, it's going to be easier for me to translate that into the classroom as well.

So that's sort of what comes to mind too.

Like schools that have just really been thoughtful about recruitment.

And it's very easy to do, as you pointed out, make sure you put it in the job description.

Number one, you can't just put your mission and mission, mission and vision and your core values on a document.

You know, people are applying for lots and lots of different jobs.

When you get the opportunity to connect or maybe call and set up an interview or something like that.

And then certainly, of course in the interview process, there's all kinds of different things you could do to ascertain, you know, the comfortability or knowledge base about, you know, those practices that you're, you're seeking to enhance in your school.

Have you come across any kind of onboarding or mentoring or even hiring practices that you've seen that are similar to that?

Yeah, we, I mean, I remember, I remember our hiring practices at our, at our high school in Solon.

We put on the job description, we'd say we're, we're unapologetically.

We use the phrase unapologetically, but we use the phrase professional learning community, standards based grading.

And we were looking for people that were looking for those words and we would not necessarily ask them about their experience verbatim, although I'm sure we did at some point interview.

But we've just tried to discern like, where are you at with this?

And we're happy to teach you.

We just want the dispositions in a, in a staff member that's ready to get after it in that regard.

So it's fantastic thing also with knowing those, those instruments I was mentioned earlier, by the way, like, if you're listening or watching and you're like, townsley, can we just get a copy or an example of one of those, you know, instruments?

Send me an email, reach out on social media.

Happy to share some of those tools with you to get you started.

Not necessarily that they are the ones you want to use because you want to personalize them for your setting, but happy to share the ones that we used.

And you're welcome to, you know, beg, borrow, steal as educators do.

But we would use some of those instruments early on with our new teacher mentoring to more rapidly support these new teachers.

Like, all right, what do you need support with?

What components of our grading to standards based grading framework do you need more assistance with?

And again, we had some fantastic, you know, people on staff that we just tap on their shoulder and say, hey, can you help this person with this or that?

Sometimes instructional coach, sometimes it was their mentor.

Just depends upon what that need was.

So with you, 100%, Chad, with 100%.

Yeah, this would be good.

Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Nope, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

It just made me think of something you and I have talked a lot about in recent years, certainly months, but in maybe years I think we've talked about this, but I just been fascinated by the idea of generational differences in teachers.

And if we're old, we're old now, Chad.

We're old.

We're the old.

We're cut.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, we straddle the line.

All right, all right, fair enough, fair enough.

So I feel like we're a real good hybrid when it comes to who we can, you know, take heat from or not.

But you know, when you're doing a lot of recruiting and onboarding of new staff, I mean, a lot of times they are new to the profession.

They're not always new to the profession.

They might be coming from another district with lots of experience, so on and so forth, which still requires a great deal of support, mentoring, mind you, it's just a little bit different perhaps.

But what I've really noticed and then I've talked to a lot of, I've been lots of college campuses, done a lot of recruiting that way.

And I just, I just flat out ask them, you know, Even if we didn't have an opening.

And I just want to get to know kind of anecdotally, qualitatively, you know, unofficially, you know, let me take some notes here.

And it was really heavy on support, like mentoring and support and, and will people.

Will, these are people I can ask.

That was a big kind of theme.

And another big theme was, you know, will I have an opportunity to leave?

You know, well, can I, can I be a part of this?

Can I be a part of that?

Right off the, right off, right off the bat, which I thought was really neat.

Now that's not always the case with previous generations.

When you get into, you know, boomers and X and so on so forth, if you do some kind of generalized research about those groups.

So that creates a dissonance between, you know, your teams when people come on board it.

But one of the things that since I know grading is big on, it's, you know, the big thing we're trying to work on is better communication, right?

Like students know where they're at, parents know where they're at.

You know, every.

The teacher knows where the student's at in relation to, you know, hopefully some standards or some learning criteria.

And so, you know, when you juxtapose those, we're bringing in generation of folks who really don't always like to speak to people face to face or on the phone.

Right.

Like picking up and calling someone is not, see, doesn't seem to be quite as native.

Right.

I'm, I'm not trying to create everybody as a monolith here, but that's generally the feedback.

And so one of the things that I developed for a couple of schools actually for the UNI standards based grading conference I got to present at last year on a session of onboarding new staff is just a quick script that you could provide to common grading questions you're going to get asked here because in the first couple of months you might not have the levels of intensity set up to support all the grading and assessment questions that a new teacher has.

Grading reform is a long term shift, not a one time program.

As you listen to Matt and Chad unpack what works, here's a practical question.

Where does the evidence of student learning actually live in your district?

Spaces Edu is a digital portfolio and proficiency based assessment platform that helps districts make learning visible.

Students collect authentic evidence, align it to standards or competencies and reflect on their growth over time.

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Grading.

And so I created this little script that are like, hey, these are the common questions they're going to ask, and these are the common terms that we use to respond.

And if, you know, you're having a call coming up or even a visit, if you want me to help model it for you.

This is old Todd Whitaker principle.

Right, I'll do that.

Or I can have a colleague sit in with you and kind of model it if they're going to have a conversation and you can hear how they use the terminology.

And you know that I think language is super important, right?

I think the words that we use really, really matter.

And so we want to make sure that we're starting to use the language of our organization, of our school right away from the beginning.

We don't want to unfurl talking about points and losing points and percentages and all that, when really what they meant is they're, they're.

They're not at the level of learning, for example.

And so they might have one year of parent emails and phone calls that.

Where they use the wrong terminology.

And what does that do to the whole system?

I mean, it's kind of like a slow leak to the boat.

So we could have prevented that.

So if somebody wants to see that script, it's generic enough for you to adapt it.

Google Docs, shoot me an email, I'm happy to share it with you.

But those are just.

That was just an idea we came up kind of on the fly of like, hey, we need to make sure.

And what was fun about that is that we were able to collaborate to develop that in our school and say, does everybody who's already here use that same language and terminology?

Why we would do that?

Let's check on our grading principles.

Let's check on our purpose statement.

Why would we use the term evidence, for example, versus points?

Why would you.

Why would we use the term practice instead of homework?

Maybe?

You know, and so working through those things, I love to include that in onboarding.

And I think new employees have found it pretty helpful as well, you know, as we.

Fantastic stuff, Chad.

As we continue our conversation on sustaining grading reform, one thing that I just got to talk about, we just have to talk about together, is this idea of.

It's not.

It's not just good enough to know all the, all the right answers about grading and assessment reform.

There's also this aspect of implementation science.

Change leadership, change management, whatever you want to call it.

And as I read the headlines of schools that are, you know, maybe not where they want to be the fires are exploding in their school district.

Those news headlines, it's not often, and I shouldn't say it's not always about the actual grading idea as often.

It's about the way that it was rolled out, the pace of implementation.

And the phrase I use and presentations I do is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Metaphorically speaking.

It's, it's not necessarily that the ideas are bad, it's just the way it's being rolled out.

And so I think the, the remedy, if you will, for that is to really lean into change leadership frameworks.

And so John Cotter's one comes from the business world.

He talks, you know, he's got this multiple step framework.

One of the ideas I think that those listening or watching to this podcast episode should know about is just the idea of establishing a guiding coalition.

I hope you've heard.

You know, Chad, you and I have talked about doing this work together, not just in isolation.

So school leaders listening or watching, establish that guiding coalition.

You know, create that grading purpose statement together.

Don't go in your office and just write one up and present it as written in stone the next day.

There's so many things that we've talked about in these, in this podcast series that should be done with that grading leadership team guiding coalition that we've both talked about.

I know you're also a big Michael Fullen fan though, Chad, so I just want to make sure you get a chance to give a shout out to some of Michael Fullen's stuff within this part of our conversation.

Well, yeah, and of course, I'm a junkie for all school leadership and, and I really appreciate the work of just great leadership gurus out there in general, whether it be John Maxwell or others.

You know, I think we can all appreciate that application to our work.

Michael Fullen being, you know, certainly a preeminent author and researcher in school leadership, I've always appreciated, and I talked about this in other episodes, his thoughts and attention to coherence and alignment.

We talk, we started this episode about systems, right?

Like thinking about systems change.

And what comes to my mind all the time is this idea of clarity, like why are we doing this?

And so I always cringe a little bit when I'm working with schools or taking emails or phone calls or just in my day to day job and people are like really stuck in the mechanics of the work.

Well, you can't do that or you can do this, or you're not supposed to do XYZ and it's like, well let's take like 10 steps back.

You know what the mission of our school is to do, you know, what's the vision that we have for our kids?

Does that even make sense that you would do that?

And you know that that's not reasonable to think that everybody would be working through their day to day and all the thousands of decisions that teachers have to make with that lens.

But I think we do always have to reground ourselves in coherence to the work that we do.

We gotta check ourselves.

And we're grading an assessment reform, particularly with grading reform that needs to be tied back in.

You know, you need to have a system and process for asking those clarifying questions to get really clear about the practices that we do that.

Why?

How?

What inside out approach.

And I like to, I, I don't know, you kind of full onize it to, to school leaders sometimes to just say like could you really think about four C's with your questions with, with your teachers, excuse me, and their questions.

I'm digging it, I'm digging it.

So here it is like four Cs.

It's just sometimes these things are easy to remember this way.

This would be a way to like full and eyes, so to speak, your grading approach for school leaders to increase that clarity and coherence.

One is ask yourself, are we doing everything we need to do to build capacity in the teachers we have?

We obviously want to recruit and retain great folks and when we have them, are we increasing their capacity?

Do we have opportunities for leadership and to learn?

That professional development piece is huge.

Huge.

It can't just be done in August.

And I argue this all the time.

We don't have even nine months with our educators.

When it comes to professional learning and planning for professional learning.

We don't.

August is a blur.

Our minds are in lots of different places.

It's an exciting time.

Mid year is sort of a lull and you're kind of getting worn down.

And so it's like if you start subtracting out all of those things and like the end of the year is the end of the year and you don't have the summer, I mean what does that leave us with?

And so we, we have to find ways to build capacity when we have our teachers with us and really lift up their own professional learning to, to be able to do this work.

So really thinking about that is super important.

And how do you answer that question?

I think that's something we gotta work through.

First C capacity, second C collaboration.

So I Can kind of answer the first by being better at the second, which is we've already talked about collaboration through a task force or a guiding coalition.

You know, get a team within your building, doesn't have to be big and you can be on it as the school leader.

Yeah, heck yeah, you should be on it.

You don't have to be on it, but you can.

And make sure it's really diverse in terms of our Anthony Muhammad talks about like fundamentalists, like I'm not changing and people that are rock stars, like, I got this, I could lead this, I could write a book on it.

And everybody in between.

But also diversity in terms of roles too.

I think it's really, really important to see all the different lenses of the beach ball when it comes to grading in your building.

School counselors, special education ell, every content that you can, you gotta be small enough to be nimble, but you gotta be big enough to be diverse.

And that's something to think about.

So you build capacity.

You use collaborative structures to make sure you can sustain that capacity of learning at various different levels.

And then of course, like I mentioned before, the third C is improve clarity.

What are we trying to do here?

What's our mission and vision?

What is our goal?

What are our goals this year?

And how is grading an assessment going to help us do that?

Okay.

Make sure we have tied that link for our staff.

And then lastly, coherence.

Right.

Our friend Mike Schmoker calls that focus.

How do we bring coherence in?

Those systems come working together and you know what you're going to find out in that fourth question, A lot as you start to ask yourself difficult questions as school leaders is it's not coherent.

This works against us over here.

It's the fourth question.

When you get better in the first three Cs, you start building more teacher capacity.

They start reading more articles, they start reading more books, they start bringing things to light that you never thought of originally in the implementation.

They really dive into the collaboration.

They're doing some inter rater reliability.

They're developing common scoring criteria on their own.

We're really lifting it up.

People are getting a little bit more clear about what we're trying to do.

And while they bring more clarity, the more the higher we turn the lights up, the more things we see left in the kind of crevices in the corners of the room that we didn't think about.

And that's actually a good thing.

But we have to think about coherence and that that means that we might have to cut some of those things and let them go.

Right.

Who's that?

Peter Drucker.

Right.

Add one thing, take one thing away.

And so you gotta have some vulnerability as a leader or leadership team to say, hey, we're seeing that through our first three Cs, that there are some things that are getting in the way of this work, of the reform and the grading work we want to do.

Maybe we need to let that go that's holding us back, you know.

So again, think back to our last episodes.

If that thing is our tradition, make sure we're replacing it with a, with another new one that people can be on board with.

And that comes from, of course, our friend Tom Guskey.

Love it.

One more thing, Chad.

One more thing before we wrap this topic.

All right, so McRell's balance leadership.

Not necessarily new, but I love it.

All right, so one of the things.

Yeah.

So this idea of like first order change versus second order change is a part of their like, like their, their framework.

And I, I guess I, I guess I just want to hopefully assume that anyone that's listening or watching here knows that this work of grading reform is second order.

What I mean by that is you used the phrase earlier, it's not just a technical change, but there's some other stuff to it.

If we're just talking about changing the bell schedule, you know, used to start at 7:55am now we're starting at 7:57am That's a technical change.

Just changing things by two minutes.

No one really has to kind of, you know, reframe their mind a whole lot.

It's just a small little change I can change by 2 minutes type of thing.

But in grading an assessment reform, we're often talk about not just changing the way the grade book looks, but we're changing how we think about what the purpose of school is sometimes.

Right?

Not just compliance anymore, but it's more about learning.

It's not just I taught it, it's did they learn.

It's not about just points, it's about proficiency.

It's not about how much did they earn, it's how much did they learn.

Like all of those, you know, juxtapositions out there that go along with creating reform.

And so it's, it's a philosophical change as well.

And so because it is both a technical and philosophical change for many, not all right, by nature of is what mcrell would call a second order change.

And so what's that mean for those that are listening or watching?

It just means that we have to be ready for an implementation dip.

Like things are going to get worse for a while before they get better.

And so as a result of that, we got to be ready to support people.

We got to stay positive.

I mean, there's all kinds of other great stuff that mcrell talks about.

In the midst of second order change, people are going to feel, some people are going to feel like it's just chaos, like what's going on around here.

And so as leaders, we have to constantly be messaging.

We can never over communicate.

You just can't communicate enough about what we're doing and why we're doing it.

And so again, just like takes us back to episode one, Right.

Like, why do we even have that grading purpose statement to begin with?

It's to be our North Star about the purpose of grades is to communicate, not just to compensate or to sort students, for example.

So consistently going back to that grading purpose statement as a means of creating some level of order is just one way to help work through that implementation dip.

So I guess maybe our message here is there's a lot of different kind of change management frameworks out there to think about.

Don't lose track of those.

Go back to your change management textbooks, articles that you read in graduate school.

Reach out to those school leaders around you that just seem to have a good knack for leading change.

Because even if they don't know everything about grading reform, there's probably something that you can learn from people like Michael Foley.

Right.

McCrell, Cotter, others that just have, you know, they're on the Mount Rushmore, if you will, of what it means to, to help an organization change in a real positive and dare I say, way that's sustaining the work, which is the theme of our episode today.

Yeah.

And it might be a good time for us to.

We haven't really talked about AI much in these episodes, to be honest with you.

And like this isn't.

This is an avenue unexplored for me because I haven't actually done this in a school yet or, or even talked to anybody that has.

But it seems to me this would be a great opportunity for you as you're at some point in the journey of grading reform and you're running into some sticking points that you maybe didn't anticipate.

So just kind of in a closed loop way or anonymous way even, you know, have a chat with an AI tool of your preference and say, you know, considering these change frameworks.

Yeah.

Can you suggest some reasons why and maybe some opportunities to overcome based on the context of the given situation.

I've been thinking about that a lot as just an opportunity to not do the work for you, but really start you on second base.

Right.

Yeah.

I think a lot of the reasons why schools haven't been able to sustain the implementation dip or the fatigue is because they haven't been able to have the agility to support their teams, to support their families.

And it became sort of a lobbying of the volleyball back and forth, and someone eventually had to go do something else.

It's not that they didn't want to keep the active conversation going, but something else changed, something else took our attention.

And so we can predict that's going to happen, which is why we often talk about this idea of distributing the leadership of the, of the.

And then also, you know, the reality too, is, Matt, and I hate to talk about this, but I think statistics are the only thing that we can live upon, which is administrators aren't staying around in one world for as long as they once were.

And so what does that mean?

Well, if you don't want initiative to fatigue in your school, then we don't want to tie programs with people, philosophies with people, and we really want to tie it to our purpose.

Like, what do we stand for here?

The managers can come and go.

They can be big lifters.

They certainly, certainly can be a part of supporting those different tiers of support, different levels of expertise.

All those things can be great and true and enhancing, but when everything rises and falls with one person, I think the teachers feel it, the students feel it, and of course, the families do, too.

And it's, there's really a lot caught in the wash there.

It didn't have to be.

Yep, for sure, for sure, for sure.

I think, yeah.

Just a great reminder, Chad, that when we do this work, well, if it's really, if it's really sustained over time, it's not going to be connected to one specific part person because there's been an intentional effort by leaders in the system to build capacity such that it's not one person's grading reform framework.

It's just the best way we're going to do it.

It's the way we're going to communicate learning to students.

So thanks for highlighting that.

Well, let me ask you a question.

Let me ask you a question.

I, I, I've never asked you this question before, but I want to ask you now as we kind of wrap up our miniseries.

Why would you do it?

Why would you initiate the change?

There seems to be, and we've addressed those, we've tried to be as honest and transparent about what they've been in the past.

Those barriers, those political, social, maybe economical things that are in your way that prevent you from lots of different reform and change that you think is best.

But if I had to ask you, Matt Townsley, you know, why would you still move forward today as a school leader or just as an educator in general?

What would you say to that person?

Yeah, I think because grades themselves.

Mean something.

They've always meant something.

They will continue to mean something.

And so it's incredibly important to get it right.

Not just for the sake of grades, though, Chad, this where it might be a surprising answer here for you, but because I've seen so many other changes not take root until grades get better.

Let me just give you a quick example, right?

We can talk about guaranteed and viable curriculum all day long.

All day long I've been at school.

I visited schools where they've got all the standards prioritized and they've got all the assessments written, all the things, but there it's just sitting in a Google folder somewhere.

But now if we're going to actually have to teach, assess and report out where students are at, now all of that guaranteed and viable curriculum stuff comes alive.

I've been at schools that say we want to personalize learning.

And they're like, but we're still, you know, handing out 100 points for this project.

And kids are like, it's not very personalized.

Right?

So if we're really going to be able to do all these other things, grading reform becomes a launch pad to really doing those other things better, or dare I say even accomplishing those aims.

And so it's, it's almost like the, the linchpin, if you will, to help schools get even better at whatever they want to do.

Yeah, I know that might seem kind of crazy and backwards, but you know, the, the dreamers that I talk with, the people who really want to help school get better, they're talking about personalizing learning, they're talking about comp C based education.

They're talking about, you know, all kinds of other, you know, high reliability schools, framework, all kinds of stuff.

Stuff.

But if we don't get grading right, none of that stuff really.

It's like the plane just stays in the airport.

It's just there, it's landed.

It never actually took off until Grades do what they're supposed to do.

Yeah.

And, and one thing I would add to that.

Thanks for that because I think you said it really, really well.

I would add the, the, the relational aspect of school.

Yeah.

And I, and I, and I mentioned this to a common friend that you and I have, Jim Wishman, and on a recent podcast, in fact, Forward Network.

Yeah, forward at network.

Check it out with Adam Bush there as well, was, you know, we're in the belonging business at school and you know, if you didn't know anything about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you really think about.

I know that can sound like, oh my gosh, here we go again.

But we have a great opportunity and responsibility to make sure that kids feel like school is a place where we can learn.

And in order to do that, you got to have coherence around systems like grading and assessment.

For example, you were just talking about this that don't go opposite of what you're trying to build, which is relational capacity.

21St century learners, great communicators, problem solvers, critical thinkers, yet everything's just kind of black or white.

You either got it right or you got it wrong.

And certainly there are right and wrong answers.

I'm not, I'm not alluding to that.

But in terms of feedback and having conversations and iterative thinking and failing forward and being able to do that, you got to have a grading system that's going to allow you to do that.

So, so often we hear we want kids to be able to do this and we want kids to be able to do over.

Here we have a 20th century system of gradient reporting that actually prevents from doing that.

Fair.

And that's that coherence piece again, coming back to the full and eyes approach I was mentioning and you alluded to so beautifully as well.

Well, Matt, obviously it's a treat.

Just being the, the great privilege of calling you a friend is a treat.

And, and I'm honored to, to be able to get to do that and pick up the phone anytime I want and text or call you or have a zoom and, and of course, to get to do things professionally with you is a great blessing as well.

We hope, of course, that this series of four episodes have kind of been fun and also provocative for you as a school leader, educator, or maybe just as a, as a interested listener in the grading journey and how things have been in the last 20 years.

It's been interesting, but it's been great and we're excited about it more now than ever.

Matt, take us back through the four episodes and kind of put a wrap on this.

Yeah, that first episode is really fun.

We just, we took a real, you know, maybe 50,000 foot view and looked at the.

The state of a grading reform, where it's been, where it's going, why it's still important today.

So that was kind of really a fun episode to do.

If you're listening, if you happen to listen to this one right now, you're on episode four.

Go back to episode one and get the, the big picture perspective there.

Episode two was one, I think, that you and I have talked a lot about.

Yeah.

Which is getting started, you know, all right, you're.

You're listening, you're watching.

Like, how do we get started?

How do we get started the right way?

And so we talk about things like creating purpose statements and, and things like that and getting a good foundation of grading policies in place and, you know, to tap into some of the stuff we talked about today, doing that with other educators in the system through a guiding coalition.

The third episode was one that I know that you and I were really itching to talk about because of our book, which is.

Is, you know, communicating with stakeholders.

I think that there's a ton of great books out there.

I shouldn't say a ton.

I think there's a few good grade book, few really good grading reform books out there, but even the really good ones just, yeah, you know what?

I wrote one of them, just talk just a tiny bit on how to communicate with parents.

And so you and I said, we're going to do this.

We're going to write the book to help administrator, or should say help parents really understand all this work.

And so we kind of took our listeners backwards and said, what do you need to know when communicating with parents?

And so whether it's parents, school board members or others, community members, that's what episode three was all about.

Communicating without drama.

That was probably an episode we've talked a lot about.

The most recent recently, Chad, and of course this one sustaining.

I think it's one that you and I have talked little bits and pieces about over the years, but we've talked more about maybe the past couple months perhaps.

And so it was really fun to kind of put those pieces together for me and for our listeners here today, Chad.

It's been fun.

I hope, I hope that our listeners feel comfortable reaching out, whether it's on social media or via email, whether it's to.

To get some example we talked about today or in one of the episodes or just set up a meeting to, to talk more about this.

That's part of we love talking to each other, but we also love talking to other educators from around the country and around the world as well.

So, Chad, wrap us up.

It has been fun.

Wrap us up, if you would.

Yeah, no problem.

Thanks.

Thanks a lot for taking us through those, those recaps of the episodes.

You can jump right on to forward Ed, you can jump onto YouTube, you can check out any of those episodes in any order.

But we're glad that you're here with us.

No doubt on this one.

We love to have the opportunity to interact with folks and have great conversations.

And one of the things we probably love more than anything is if people reach out and they have a specific question or maybe a philosophical question is to point them in the direction of someone else that we learn from.

And maybe a resource.

It could be a video or an article, a podcast.

Both Matt and I are pretty passionate about curating all those resources.

Matt's done a wonderful job on his website and many, many people know about that over the last few years.

And so I'll let him talk about that.

You can check out previous podcasts that I've done either as a guest or a Host on recalibrated services dot com.

You're welcome to follow me on LinkedIn.

Just Chad Lang there and you'll see my picture.

I'm happy to connect that way.

And if there's anything we can do for listeners or fun collaborations, we'd be happy to do that.

I don't want to speak for Matt, but on behalf of myself, thank you so much for following along.

Thanks for doing everything that you do for kids.

It's a great, noble profession.

We need to continue to keep that at the forefront of our minds.

Matt, how can folks reach out to you for all the wonderful expertise and resources you can provide?

Yeah, probably the best way is just to hop on Google and type in the phrase all things Standards Based Grading.

All Things Standards Based Grading will take you to my website.

Great curated resources on there.

Reading lists, podcasts, examples, blog posts, links to some of Chad's stuff, links to all kinds of people's stuff on there.

All things Seniors Based Grading will take you to my curated website there as well and reach out.

Happy to help.

Well, thanks Matt, for that.

Again, thank you to our sponsors, Curriculum Leadership Institute, our friends over at SpaceSeedu, awesome platform they got going there.

And of course all of our friends over at Forward Ed for putting together this podcast series.

You can check out their great work and other podcasts they have at Forward Ed.

And again, if you need anything, please reach out.

We wish you the best and thank you for listening.

Thanks for spending time in the Commons on the Forward Ed Network.

You've been listening to Modern Grading Reform, a miniseries with Dr. Chad Lang and Dr. Matt Townsley.

Honest conversations, practical insights, and better communication about learning.

Join us for the next episode and find even more on the Forward Ed Network.