73 - Alt Grading in the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences: An Interview with Annie and Ed Ransom (And our FIRST Alt Grading Love Story!)

Episode 73 • 3rd December 2024 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

Annie: Well, how do I change my system? To make it so they won't do that. Or, you know, I mean, so just as you know, you try something and then you can analyze your results and figure out, is this the desired behavior that I want? And if it's not, then it's kind of back to the drawing board and okay, well, what kind of thing can I tweak? Or what kind of thing could I add? Or maybe I should, you know, I love that process a lot.

Ed: It's, it's behavior economics for me. I mostly, I mostly teach Economics, I'm arranging things with the incentives to get the behaviors that I want. That's what I'm doing.

Annie: Yeah. That's right.

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

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

Boz: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts and with me as always Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am enjoying being not in California, although it's cold where I am. I am in New York city. This is being recorded during the week of Thanksgiving and I am here on a Broadway extravaganza trip, so I am definitely enjoying myself.

Boz: You're not there alone, are you?

Sharona: I am not, I am here with my younger son. And some highlights of the week so far. We got to see Robert Downey Jr. in a play called McNeal. And not only did we buy good seats in terms of being towards the front of the theater, but we accidentally bought the best seat in the house. We bought the seat where the light shines on you because Robert Downey Jr. is standing 18 inches from your shoulder during part of the show. We did not know that was going to happen, so that was really exciting. And then tonight we're going to get to see Audra McDonald in Gypsy, so it's really fun. My younger son wants to try to go for a Broadway career eventually. So I'm seeing six shows in six days. He is seeing 12.

Boz: Yeah, that seems like a lot, but I hope you guys have fun and I hope you're able to deal with the weather. Cause I'm sure it is, even though it is kind of cold here in California for California standards, I'm sure it's nothing like

It's

Sharona: been 42 feeling like 37. So I'm on the cold side. How about you? How are you doing this week Boz?

Boz: You know, I'm, I'm doing good. We are recording this during Thanksgiving break, so it's always nice to have a, a little bit of time, although never quite quit working, but. It's nice to relax a little.

istinguished teacher award in: 2020

Annie: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Sharona: And we also had Ed Ransom, you might notice the same last name there. Ed is a social studies teacher and faculty coach. An instructional coach for the Oxnard Union High School District. It's the high school district, correct?

Ed: High school district, yeah.

Sharona: And, I have had the pleasure of working with both Annie and Ed in several capacities. So welcome, Ed. You are a lot less Google able than Annie is.

Ed: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Annie: Not surprising, yeah.

Sharona: Do either of you want to add to your bio before we keep going?

Ed: Is there anything we should add, Annie?

Annie: I mean, not that I can think of.

Boz: Well other than Sharona pointed out the similar last name, you guys are in fact married, correct?

Ed: Yeah, we are. We are.

Sharona: To each other, to each other. Specifically.

Ed: Happily, also, I'll add to that.

Boz: I do want to welcome you both and thank you for joining us during the Thanksgiving break. You know, we usually start off with, anytime we have a new guest asking just how you got involved in alternative grading. But since you guys are here together, I want to add a little bit to that. Did your guys's journey start separate from each other or did they start basically at the same time or even started together?

SS. So our standards were The: 1999

And that was where in the conference I got introduced to the four point scale for the first time, the ideas of retakes and, you know, doing the idea of maybe doing like tiered tests or just, you know, separating things out by, , skill level or knowledge level as opposed to just discrete items and, you know, kind of abandoning the 100 point scale. So that that was my first introduction, and I really liked it. And then I started messing around with it in my classes, and it was going really well. I was getting really good results. I really changed the dynamic of my relationships with my students and how like, I just felt like it gave the biggest change I remember was it put everything back on the students and it was no longer like me making this subjective. Kind of mystery judgment of them. It was really all on what they wanted to achieve and, you know, how they wanted to work. And so about three months into it, I gave a, I was asked to give a presentation at a faculty meeting, which was super intimidating. That was only my second year. And I was. 23, right? I started teaching really young, so that was also made it kind of intimidating. But Ed's story picks up at this faculty meeting, so I'll let him take it from here.

Ed: I thought you tell this part better than I do.

Annie: I don't, no, that's not fair. You have to tell this part, I think. It's your story.

Ed: Yeah, so the she gave a presentation at the the faculty meeting and was I an administrator at that point? I think I was an administrator at that point.

Annie: Yeah. Yeah, it was my second year. Yeah

Ed: Yeah, I was actually, I had been a teacher for a while. I had moved out of teaching I moved Into administration for a few years, which was an ill advised move for me I'm now happily back teaching in the classroom. But she, she made this presentation at a faculty meeting and I don't know the, the idea, the whole concept and, and kind of the way that she spoke about it, it, like it, I was also having pain points as a teacher. And I remember one of my things when I was an early teacher, my first seven years I was teaching and coaching. And so for me, I was always I had, I had jumped into rubrics really early. Because I needed just a quick way to grade things in between practice or, you know, after practice before I got home to eat dinner, like I didn't have a lot of time.

And so I was doing rubrics, but it was still probably like 100 point scale rubrics, things like that, and lots of different variables and things in there. But eventually watching her do this presentation kind of told me like, like really quickly, I was like, Oh, this is a quick way to simplify my rubric. I can get everything down to like a, you know, sometimes I'll do a one or two, sometimes I'll do one, two, three. This was a four point scale. I don't know. It was the, the idea struck me at the right moment at the right time, I guess.

Annie: And come on, you're leaving out the best part.

Ed: Well, this is also probably the first time I ever noticed her.

Sharona: Oh my God, we've got an alternative grading love story! I love it!

Ed: There's your origin story right there.

Annie: Yeah. It's a, it's pretty cheesy, but I was like, so I, the first, I just enamored you with my, with my alternative grading presentation.

Ed: First, first time I ever noticed my wife is when she gave a grading talk.

Sharona: I did not know. Oh my God. That's that's hilarious.

Boz: Yeah. So. Annie, so you started this like your second year of teaching?

Annie: Yeah. But I mean, it was in pieces, you know and it definitely was not as I would say, like sophisticated as I, I would like to think it is now it was, you know, and it was more about shifting the math, I guess more than anything else, right. Just like how the grades were calculated. I would, I feel like the, the shifting of the practices and really being confident in kind of the architecture of everything and how it was laid out didn't really come until NGSS came out because those standards were so much easier to do that with. They just really lent themselves you know, to, to actually having standards based grading because with the old standards, there were no skills involved. So I was, you know, kind of developing different, different skills that I wanted to see for the students.

Boz: So, when was this then?

, this must have been in like: 2000

le that we're doing it before: 2010

Annie: It just made a lot of sense. And and I remember Always getting to the end of the year and looking at my grades and looking at the students and going, these don't match, you know another really big problem in chemistry is the beginning of chemistry is really hard. And it's just like learning a new language. And so kids can start off doing pretty poorly, you know, especially because, like I said, it was before NGSS. So we were doing things. Like that. I just wouldn't do anymore. But, you know, it was like I said, my first or second year, but we were doing things, you know, like memorizing polyatomic ions. And, you know, I would give quizzes for that. And, you know, I mean, there's some things like that are like different, you know, like naming chemicals. They would have quizzes on naming chemicals, you know and I understood at that time that those weren't really that important to me, but like, this is just kind of how we talk chemistry, right? Or that's how all my colleagues taught it. So I understood that that wasn't super important and that kids, You know like you could, I could interact with a kid and know this kid's going to be fine. They just have to get over this, this hump. And you know yes, they didn't do well on this test or that test, but I know that they're going to get it together and we're going to, you know, we're going to be okay. But, you know, these kids didn't want anything less than an A or a B. And so oftentimes they would come in and go, well, I'm just going to drop and go down to CP, or I'm going to just going to drop and go into, at the time we had like standard science. It doesn't exist anymore, but right, they were just looking at way like, because I don't want to get a C in this class. And so then I found myself making all these side deals with kids, right? Like, well, okay, if you do well in this next part, like, we'll just forget about all of this stuff. Right. And so because that's what made sense to me. Why am I going to, you know punish a kid, hold them accountable for things they didn't know four weeks ago when, you know, now they know it, right. That's really what the bottom line is.

And so when I was introduced to to grading like that. It was just like, oh, this is going to make my life so much more simpler because now I don't have to, you know, it'll give me a system to do this from the get go. And they'll see that this is how it works. And I won't have to make these side deals and I won't have to kind of, you know, like buffer my grades to really make it match what, you know, is, is more, is closer to the knowledge the kid actually has. So I had seen my grading as, you know, just really subjective and not actually measuring student achievement. And then when I changed it to using the four point scale and allowing retakes and things like that all of that, it just made it make sense so much. So it, for me, it was it was an easy change. It made my life easier. So that's why I did it.

Sharona: So I want to follow up with Ed then. So you, you have this initial, Ooh, this is intriguing. I can simplify my rubrics. How fast did some of the other changes start to come in other than just I'm going to go from a hundred points to four points because you're in social studies, right?

k into the classroom. I think: 2011

grade book really quickly in: 2011

And so what, what I've actually been really happy about , in the time that I've done as a teacher back in the classroom the second time is now my conversations with kids, because the rubrics, particularly the kids use my rubrics, they'll come back and rather than say, You know, why do I have a 72? Help me get 20 more. The kids will come back and they'll say, can we talk about my evidence? Can we talk about my reasoning? What? Why is my reasoning score at three? And we can go to the rubric and they can talk about like, what's the difference between this score and the higher score. And so that's, that's the thing that's really been, I don't know. I think it's a benefit for me with my students because now I'm not having questions about points and conversations about points. We're having conversations about like their writing or their ability to vet a source or things like that.

Boz: So I've got a quick question for you, Ed. Since you said you had this kind of skill forward philosophy, did you have that while you were still using traditional grading?

Ed: It's, funny because I, I, I'm trying to remember and, and Annie, I've been talking about this for about a week now, and I've been trying to remember where I picked these things up because a lot of these things I picked up in pieces along the way The skill forward thing because I was I was a coach, I was a high school coach before I was ever a teacher. I was a walk on football coach for two years before I got the job as a social science teacher. And you know, the paradigm at the time was kind of like, Oh, you're the football coach. You know, you just, you give them the worksheet, you give them the bubble test, you scan, try on the test, go out and you get ready for practice. But that never, that never really sat well with me. Cause I'm like, no, wait a minute. Like I really like history and I can teach these kids to do this thing. Just like I can teach those kids to catch a football. And, and so as football was a skills forward thing with a command performance every week. I wanted to try to recreate that in my classroom.

There's a, there's a story. I think it comes out of university of Michigan, an ethnographer that was there and the short paper is basically called 17 reasons why high school football is better than high school. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a short little ethnography paper. I don't know. It's about four pages, but basically it's this, this college professor who wanted to go and embed themselves in a high school and kind of see what was going on. And at the end of the you know, the period of time they were there, they come out with basically, they're like, wait a minute, we are not giving high school football enough credit because like it's, it's skills forward. There's a public performance. We can assess them. It doesn't matter what the team did on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, what matters is that game that Friday night game. You know, at the end of the season, you can see the team's record. It's a public thing. We can all acknowledge what happened. And then the next year, a lot of those kids come back and they can try and improve on that record. And then some of the ideas like with this grading comes out of that is like, it doesn't matter what the record was last year, it matters what the record is right now. So like one of those ideas that Annie brought up is like, you know, the kid didn't know what in September. Now we're in October and the kid knows it. I think I'm going to give the kid the score because that's where the kid's at now, right? I want to make sure. So that was, that was something that came to me partly through teaching AP classes as well. And partly through coaching, like it didn't matter to me that in the first week, the kid couldn't catch the ball. He can catch a ball now he's on the field. He's playing.

Boz: But the reason I ask is because one of my you know, core pedagogical beliefs is that we learn from mistakes. So I, I've always joked with my students that math actually stands for mistakes, allow thinking to happen. And this really was a core belief of mine since I started teaching , but it wasn't until I switched from traditional grading, even with all the hacks and stuff I tried to do with it. Alternative grading that I realized that my traditional grading was actually fighting that, like it was contradicting this message that I was trying to give to my students that, Hey, mistakes are cherished here. We love mistakes. We learn from mistakes that traditional grading, because it was punishing those, you know, those early, those August mistakes were still being punished in December those.

So, but I never realized it until I. Left traditional grading and, you know, went to truly alternative grading and then saw that same change in my students. And I'm like, Oh, they realize it too. Like it wasn't just me going, Oh, this, this grading is kind of contradicting it. My students were realizing it, whether consciously or not, because their attitudes towards mistakes and being willing to make those mistakes completely changed afterwards.

Annie: Yeah. That's an interesting I mean, I feel like that is a, like a line in the sand, I guess, when I like work with different teachers and trying to get them to kind of move towards alternative greeting is that if you have that mentality that you cherish mistakes and you see them as valuable and you want your students to grow. Then that argument, you know, becomes stronger. I mean, I've used that before. Like, you can't say I value mistakes and then dot kids points when they make mistakes, right? Those two things don't go together, right? But then, so then if you're a teacher that is agrees with that and thinks to themselves, like, Oh, yeah, that's, you know that's right. I do value mistakes and I am, you know, but right. The points are not helping me. But then you do have teachers that that punishing the kid, or holding them accountable is, more important than facilitating their growth. And that is something, you know, in my work and supporting teachers, that's really hard for me to like accept, get around and navigate through. Cause I feel like it's it's a, it's a core belief that, you know I have a hard time you know, reconciling with the profession, right? Like we're supposed to, that's literally our job is supposed to be here to watch kids grow and to help them grow. And so if you're not really allowing them to make mistakes and an opportunity to fix them, you know, are we really doing that?

Boz: Oh, but, but if I allow them to, Correct mistakes and fix all those mistakes. Then they just won't try the first time.

Annie: Yes. Yes

Boz: Is that not the argument that you get? Because that's the argument me and Sharona get all the time.

Annie: All the time! I know sometimes I go but they're just gonna go home. They're gonna go home and study and come back with all the answers

Ed: Go ahead, Sharona.

Sharona: Well, I was just saying that what I think it's coming down to is that sometimes we, we try to do things at too high a level and you really have to engage at a much more detailed, nuanced conversation with that individual instructor. And that's what I've found. I'm like, let's really unpack what you mean and what structures can we put in place to help the student not phone in the first time.

Annie: Right. Right. Yeah. No, that's a great point. Cause you know, nobody wants that. I mean I use alternative grading with my, with my grad students and it's, they are all there. It's not really that different from teaching high school. That's what I have found. And you know, they have a lot of other classes. They've got student teaching. I mean, their, their plates are really full. So, you know, when I talk about this with other professors, because other professors do not use alternative grading, that's what they say as well. Like, well, then they just don't try. Right. The first time around, you know it's interesting though, because that's also a judgment call. I think sometimes students are trying and they just are really making a lot of mistakes and we kind of discounted as that. They're not trying, you know?

Boz: Oh, because we're such great teachers. And we taught it, they would know it if they're trying,

Sharona: Ed you had something that you were going to say, is it still?

Ed: Yeah. So I had a, I do work with teachers on grade reform. That's one of the things we're doing in our school district right now. And I had an interaction with the teacher back not long after the pandemic and distance learning, but this teacher was a very rigid, traditional grader. And this teacher was very much like, no, that mistake still counts doing a lot of averaging of things. But at one point, the teacher, because he was a little bit he wasn't quite super adept with the technology, and he made some mistake when he was doing some like online gamified quiz the game that kids were doing. And the mistake basically was that the kid, after they finished doing it the first time, they could do it a second time, and then a third time, and then a fourth time, and then a fifth time. And so the teacher normally just wanted them all to go and do it once, and then there's your score.

But he noticed when he undid this, like unchecked a box or something, and suddenly now he had kids going in three, four, five times. And his epiphany was one. He's like, the kids are spending way more time looking at this. And he's like, yeah, the first time the kid went through and got three questions out of 10 out of 10. But the second time they went through and they got six questions out of 10. But the third time they went through, they got eight questions out of 10. And then they went till they got 10 out of 10. And he's like, and what I realized is they're just studying. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you just let them do it again and again. And like, they're like, they're just like, sure, like you can argue, like they're phoned it in on the first attempt. But now that that's making them spend more time on this. And maybe they just need more time. And he's like, and a lot of the kids, they go until they get like 10, but he notices some kids will get to like eight or nine out of 10. And they just kind of give up at that point. And I'm like, yeah, but look at what they did. They went from like two at a 10. Now they're, they're really trying to study your material. He's like, yeah,

Annie: it's interesting too, kids are probably more motivated because they also know there's no risk, right? Like, Oh, I can just keep doing this until I get the grade I want. You know, which is also a, a, a big selling point for me with alternative grading is, yeah, you can keep going until you get the grade you want. That was awesome in parent teacher conferences because of, you know, when parents would say, well, why don't they have a B? Well, because they haven't redone, you know, this assignment, this is, oh, wait, they can just redo it and you just give them the new grade. Yeah, they can come in at lunch. They can, you know, and then all of the, you know, Anger and frustration turns from me to their kid, right? So it's fantastic. The power is yours.

Sharona: But I also think that certainly at higher ed, where I teach, by the time they get to me, they have really figured out how they personally play the game of grades. And so I have to do a lot of conversing and deprogramming. And they will phone it in the first time. And what I explained to them is that what the reason that's not worth it is because they then don't get the feedback they need. And so then the second time is really what was the first, like, but now, because I actually have limited retake opportunities, they're not arbitrarily limited. They're limited based on a huge amount of data that says if a student doesn't get it right by the third try with that, they will not get it right without reteaching intervention. So there's certain limits, and I'm like, why would you cut off your first cycle of this? But then I have to talk about feedback cycles and things like that.

Boz: Well, but that goes back to what, you know, a point that one of our other guests previously brought up is, yes, students will take advantage of things if they don't understand the why. If you just tell me, Oh, I can retake this. Okay, sure. Then I don't need to study. Then it's no, I offer retakes because of this. And this is why you, you know, don't want to just throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. It's, but that's, I think when I hear a lot of people that have complained about, Oh, if I'm giving retakes, then the students just aren't trying. It's because the students don't really understand the reason that you're giving retakes and the purpose of assessment feedback retake.

Ed: Boz, when I introduced the concepts of this to my students, I basically got this kind of routine I've done for about eight or nine years now. Probably the second day of class, and I have class sizes that range anywhere from probably 28 to 38. And my second day of class, when the kids come in, I start trying to call kids by name. And obviously I'm going to make a ton of mistakes. So that's where we introduce the idea of like, mistakes are going to happen. And I record my score up on the board. And I'm like, oh, today I got 11 kids out of 38. And then the next day they come in, I do the same thing again, and I'm like, Oh, man, I keep making mistakes. I'm really sorry. And I apologize. Like, but it's gonna be okay. I'm gonna get your name. And then I record my score. And like the next day, it'll be like, you know, 17 out of 38. We keep going through that. And eventually, when I get to the end of like three or four days, I circled the highest score. And I go, which score matters? And the kid's like, Well, now, you know, like almost all of our names. I'm like, Okay, so does it matter on the first day that I didn't know her name or his name? And they're like, No, okay. That's how we're going to run this class.

Sharona: I love that.

Ed: And we do a few other little kind of modeling things like that early in the, I teach in quarters, but early in the quarter. And, I, my, kids seem to pick it up. And so I, I do hear teachers make this complaint at all. And I'm like, I don't, I don't really see that. That doesn't happen for me. Yeah.

Sharona: When you do that Bosley with the, how many can you win or whatever game?

Boz: Yeah. I

Sharona: didn't realize how far you had taken that to model your mastery system. You want to share that again?

Boz: So I picked up this activity from teaching another class, but yeah, it's, it's kind of a version of tic tac toe, but you know, give the pair of the students up, you know, give them this six by six graded playing board. And they're told that, you know, they have 15 each, so one's X, one's O's. They're going to alternate placing them. And the goal is to try to get as many five in a rows as possible and then set them, set them free. Well, of course, the first time no group gets any of them because they're competing. You know, they nowhere in the directions does it say that you should be competing against each other? It's how many can you get five in a row? And that's it. So no, no one gets it the first time. We have some discussion. We have some feedback. They come back, they reread the directions.

Sharona: And don't you put it, you go and put a mastery score on at this point and they all get not mastered.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: That's a critical piece.

Boz: And I even recorded on the board. And then usually the second time around at least a group or two, Would've realized it and would have gotten mastery. 'cause I'll, I'll tell them. You know, I'll have a, the goal for mastery is three or more, ex mastery is seven or more. So usually I'll have a group or two at least by the second time, and then by the, you know, we do another feedback loop. The third time, almost everyone's gotten it, and now a few groups are maybe getting exceeds. Do it one more time if necessary. By that time, I've got everybody. And then, yeah, we have a similar discussion. It's like, okay, what grades should all the groups get? And some of them will. They're like, oh yeah, these three groups should get the A's because they were first. Oh, this group should get the, the B because they were the first getting exceeds. And, and then usually at least I'll have one or two people who are like, well, no, we all met the goal. So should we all get the A? I'm like, yes, that's exactly what we're doing.

Annie: That's cool. I think one of the things that has kept me doing it for so long is that I see it as a big experiment, right? So, you know, if you're, if, and, and, you know, I'll put out a system, this is kind of like what you were saying earlier, Sharona is like, you know, and if it's giving me results, behavioral results. Or what, you know, that I don't like, you know, like if all my students are phoning it in on the first time and I, you know, it's like, okay, well, how do I change my system to make it so they won't do that? Right? Or, you know, I mean, so just as you know, you try something and then you can analyze your results and figure out, is this the desired behavior that I want? Is this what I, you know, and if it's not, then it's kind of back to the drawing board and okay, well, what kind of thing can I tweak? Or what kind of thing can I add? Or maybe I should, you know, I love it. That process a lot.

Ed: It's it's behavior economics for me. I mostly I mostly teach Economics. So it's like I'm arranging things with the incentives to get the behaviors that I want. That's what I'm doing.

Annie: Yeah, that's right.

Boz: So that actually brings up an interesting question. Since both of you guys started this journey at a similar time. It sounds like going back to the classroom was a couple of years later for you, Ed, but it sounds like you guys started at a similar time. You're obviously have had a lot of overlap and collaboration cause you guys are now married doing this, but you do teach two very different subjects. So how similar or different are, you know, your actual grading architecture in the details?

Annie: I do actually think they're really similar, because I, cause I would approach science from a skills forward place as well. And so you know, in N. G. S. S. We have the science and engineering practices. So those are kind of what make the backbone of the architecture for me. But I mean, Ed and I have riveting conversations at night about grading all the time. Our kids are probably going to grow up knowing all kinds of stuff about alternative grading because they're subjected to listening to us get very, like, have very passionate heated conversations, right? When we come home about different things, but we're able to talk a lot and collaborate a lot. I mean, we've definitely shared rubrics back and forth, especially with some things like making, you know, evidence based claims. And so like CERs, I mean, those exist in science and they definitely exist in social sciences. So there's I would say a lot more in common than not.

Ed: Yeah. So I teach different kinds of social science classes and my, my architecture varies slightly. I've noticed with like. If I'm teaching ethnic studies or history, my grade books tend to look similar. But if I'm teaching economics, which is really common for me, I have a slightly different system. But it's, it's been helpful for me because with any coaching science and having taught chemistry, when I go out and I talk to like science teachers, I'm like, Hey, here's what a sample grade book can look like. Here's how you can use a rubric for this. But you know, a lot of that is the details of what the grade book's going to look like.

And so like my. Economics gradebook is more like discrete items. And we move on to the next one, like a concept or a skill. And then we moved to the next concept and skill, and they're not always directly connected, whereas with history, my gradebook, there's like a through line where there's, you know, we're writing in every single unit. And so every unit they get a writing grade and. I just keep the newest writing grade or we're doing, you know, like I'll call it, look it up, but it's sourcing, you know, we're going to be sourcing and every single unit. And so every single unit they get a sourcing grade and you know, after a while we just start to disappear the first unit's grades for sourcing and writing and the second unit's grades for sourcing and writing because now we're in unit four and five and I want to keep those grades instead. So for, you know, variation there a little bit with a grade book as far as like discrete skills, maybe that's more like chemistry maybe

Annie: in,

Ed: I don't know.

Annie: Yeah, I mean. At this point, because now I support middle and elementary teachers, so I'm not in a, you know, chemistry classroom. So I haven't messed so much with high school chemistry grade book. So my world is a little bit more middle school science and supporting or just supporting teachers and moving to mastery grading in general. So, I don't know, I wouldn't be able to speak on like the details of what a high school chemistry class might look like.

Boz: Well, I bring that up because I know, Sharona, you often joke about if you get, you know, two alternative graders together in a room, they probably have three or four different ways of doing it. So, I imagine between the four of us, there's probably at least six to ten different ways that we actually do it in the detail.

Annie: It is not unappealing to me to think about going back. I mean, I'm a Teacher on special assignment, call them TOSAs, and those jobs are, you know, they're at the district level. I'm a teacher out of the classroom supporting other teachers. And they tend to be, those positions tend to be kind of fleeing with budgets, right? So I always kind of feel like at any time I could get you know, pushed back into the classroom, which is fine. That's exactly where I would want to go, but I would, I would definitely go back to high school classroom. And it does, it's exciting for me to think about how all of that would look now, you know, after being out of that classroom context for a while, but I have a lot of really fun ideas that I would love to try.

Sharona: So what I love about working with both of you, and then we also have Joe, who's an expert, is that amongst the 4 or 5 of us, we hit all of the major, core disciplines particularly in like an elementary or middle school environment. And that's why both of you have come on to work with us on our one professional development. But one of the things that, things that feels different for me, and I want to see if, if you guys think I'm right, is that there have been national adoptions of standards in math, in English, and now in science. But in social studies, social science, history, whatever, I'm thinking particularly at the middle school level, if I'm correct, there's not a particular national adoption, am I correct, of standards?

Ed: There's a lot of, there's a lot of commonality between, for example, Michigan and California. Like, if you go and you look through them, the structure and a lot of the details are the same. But there isn't really a national agreement because every, every state, every region, they want to have their own specific story, their own specific lens. They want to tell history their way. For example, in California, we're required to talk about, like, Harvey Milk. But if you're in Michigan, they're not going to mention Harvey Milk, even if they know who he is. So, you know, it's, there's, there's some, you know, local disagreements, but I would tell you across the majority of states and the majority of standards that I know, there's a lot of agreement and a lot of commonality.

Sharona: So do you have, Sort of the equivalent of like the SDPs in science or the mathematical practice standards in math or the anchor standards in English Do you guys have sort of a cross cutting concept set of standards?

Ed: So there is the C3 framework. And the C3 framework is about like inquiry and research and there's a there's an arc there and that'll come up in places like if you If you look at the C3 framework and then you go back and look at your social science standards for your state, you'll, you'll see the ideas are in there. That's really kind of like the skills of social science.

Sharona: So this is this college career and civic life framework.

Ed: Yeah. So the idea is preparing future citizens. You know, like we're preparing kids to understand how, how the government works, how an economics, how economics works. Like I, I feel personally liable. Like I, like, I feel responsible to teach kids about how inflation works. You know, there's, there's a concept that I feel like is existing, at least in my community, where it's like, okay, when inflation goes back down, the prices will go back down. I'm like, no, no, that just means the prices don't go up as fast. So like, you know, that's a, that's a big deal for me. Like, I feel personally responsible to make sure the kids in my community understand inflation. Right. And that's like a, like, it's like a civic action. As part of like C3 is the ideas. What are, what are the things that citizens need to know? Okay.

Sharona: That's very cool. So I have my next question is, What do your practices look like now? I mean, I know, Annie, you said that you're not in the classroom, but you are in the classroom and university, right? Yeah. So and Ed as well. What are your practices look like now when you are in the classroom? How far have you come on your journey in this whole grading world?

Annie: Well, in my in my methods course courses at the university, everything is all you know, standards based and skills based for, and I've kind of, you know, taken a combination of like the teaching professional standards and also the, like, you know, what kind of skills I want them to leave with as science teachers. And I've had to kind of hybrid those things out. But it's one interesting thing that happens is my students are not used to and are very appreciative of all of the feedback that they are getting. And I will often hear, you know, that they, they are not used to getting so much feedback and they actually feel like they're learning and they understand, you know, how to fix things and everything is very clear, you know, what they need to do to make this thing better. And I, and I. You know, we'll tell them and I enjoy teaching this way is that I can be like pretty I want to say harsh, but I mean I can be pretty critical and have high expectations of them because You know, it's like this is what I think they're capable of and you know I'm gonna we're gonna get there and you know, but it's gonna take multiple times. There's not really any assignment that they just do And then they never interact with again.

And that's really different for them. And by the end, they are excited that they have been able to really see how much they've grown because at, like, the elementary level teachers going into be multiple subject teachers. Many of them have had awful experiences with science, right? I mean, it's kind of, you know, I'm working with a lot of liberal arts majors and, you know, people who aren't like, didn't have good experiences in math and science. Once in a while, I'll get a few that really loved it. But many of them are scared of it. They're in placements in their with their student teaching where they like, don't see science because I love because their mentor teacher is also comes from a similar place and didn't have a good science experience. Doesn't feel, you know, equipped to teach science because they see it all from a very fact based perspective. I don't know enough about science to teach it when really science is not about learning about it. It's about figuring out, right? So anybody can teach. I mean, that's what we do as teachers is we teach kids how to figure stuff out. That's, that's how I see our, our job. So there's just a lot of newness and a lot of, you know, there's a lot of room to grow. So it's cool. I think because of the standards based grading approach, they're, they're able to like measure it and see it and can tell how far they have come from the end to the beginning.

Sharona: Well, and aren't a lot of your elementary teachers walking into a standards based report card environment? Yes. Yeah.

Annie: Yeah. Well, because I would say the end result looks standards based, but how they get there is not often standards based, right? So they get this like standards looking great at the end, but it's all a conglomeration of you got 15 out of 20 on your multiplication math. Test, you know, like your multiplication tables or things like that sometimes is happening or this was your score on the BPST or, you know, like just different kind of they're being measured by non standards based things, but then coming up with a standards based grade at the end, I would say that happens pretty frequently.

Ed: Oh yeah. People mix in a lot of extra things.

Annie: Yeah. Yeah. So we're kind of in an interesting place now because I work in a feeder district to Ed's district. And Ed can talk about more about this, but they, his district during COVID kind of coming, coming out of it has a, they adopted board policies around certain like parameters for alternative grading and It's, you know, I'll let him talk about how that's evolved, but we're finally to the point now where I'm able to get a little traction because I've been planting seeds in my district. This is my fourth year in a new district. I've been planting seeds and been kind of like ignored a little bit or kind of, you know, dismissed because the, you know, well, when they get, that's all great that we can let them take retext, but when they get to high school, they're not going to be allowed to do that.

And I can finally say, Oh no, actually, that's exactly what's going to happen in high school. And they didn't really believe me, but we've been have some Java likes having some Java likes where they're, where our teachers are actually going and walking around classrooms and as district and they're discovering like, Oh, they are allowed retakes and their grading scale is four points.

And, you know, and I'm finally like, yeah, it's like, and. January. I am planning to do a workshop, like basically an introductory workshop. And for the first time, I feel like I will have people there who are genuinely interested because of all of the change that's happened at Ed's district.

Sharona: So, Ed, over to you. Practice now and a follow up to Annie's comments there.

Ed: So I'm again, I'm very much skills forward. So when I think about what I'm gonna do tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, I'm thinking about what are the kids doing? So in social science, when I started years and years ago, the attitude was kind of like, you're going to lecture to him for 20 minutes in the beginning of the quarter, and then you're going to build their tolerance to get them to 25. And then you're going to build their tolerance to get them to 30. And then you're going to build your tolerance to get them to 55 minutes of lecture. And I was always like, They're just sitting there listening, taking notes. And so that's where I was like, okay, maybe I should get them into note taking skills. So I went skills forward and went, all right, I'll lecture and they'll take notes. And it took me a little while to get to a place where I'm like, I don't even really want to lecture. I mean, I don't really like the sound of my own voice that much. So for me, it's what am I going to get them to do? Like, what are they actually doing?

My class period with kids is 90 minutes. And so I usually break it up into they're going to do three things. So I'm going to introduce a thing. They're going to do something. Okay. And then we're going to transition and they're going to do something else. And then we're going to transition and they're going to do something else. And for me, my goal is to talk as little as possible. And if I think about my week as five, three 30 minute sessions with my kids, I might take one and then they are going to have 14 where they're going to be doing something. So for example, in economics, we were working on a question. What are some of the problems with the way we count unemployment? And basically we would, we spent three days just kind of jumping around looking at different things like looking at how unemployment is measured across different age groups, looking at how unemployment is measured across genders. Like the kids were all shocked to discover that men are twice as likely to be unemployed as compared to women. And so we were talking about that. And so we're like, okay, so right there, we found one problem with the way we measure it, like women tend to be more employed.

So we, we talk about some of those issues and, and so as a skills forward thing right there, what I want to measure is, okay, so today it's what's their understanding of unemployment and so I'm going to collect some work. I'm going to give him some feedback and the feedback is typically like I think any was talking about. I'm not putting points or a score at the top of the paper. I'm like highlighting things. I'm putting yes or I'm putting no or I'm crossing stuff out or I'm saying, hey, go back and look at this thing we did and the kids come in the next day. They pick up their papers, they start looking through it and it's like, okay, this is where we're at now. Let's go to the next thing. Let's see if we can figure out and get our knowledge to be a little bit further down the road.

Boz: So I've got a comment and then I've got a follow up question. But you were saying, Annie about how, Oh, your teachers at middle school were saying we can't do this cause that's not going to happen at the high school. And it is absolutely universal and hilarious how much everyone blames down and everyone uses up as an excuse. So, for instance, college professors will blame the high school professors for not teaching them anything high school will blame middle school, but then. We'll also use the others going the other direction as an excuse. Middle school saying, Oh, we can't do this alternative grading. Cause high school does it high school. Well, we can't do it. Cause that's, that's what could have happened in college. Right? I love that. It's almost universal. I, I really think it is.

Ed: I remember an eighth grade teacher telling me that when I got to high school, I would never be able to do anything in pencil ever again. I was like, like, I, like, that sticks out to me, like as a memory from school.

Sharona: Well, and when my kids were going through schools, it was things like in fifth grade, you had to buy this ginormous zippered binder. To put all your school supplies in because they were training you on how to build a binder for middle school. So you go to middle school and in the sixth grade, they kind of still do the binder and by seventh grade, it's gone. Like it was just like the most ridiculous thing. Yeah. So and then your follow up was that included in your follow up Boz? Or did you have

Boz: no okay So I I wanted to ask you Annie, what you said, you, you teach a methods course at the college level. Is that a like science method or is that a pedagogy method?

Annie: Yeah, it's, it's basically science methods. So how to teach, how to teach NGSS is essentially what it is.

Boz: Does, grading come into that or, I mean, directly other than just you exposing them to how you're grading like, Oh, actually,

Annie: Oh, I like do I teach them about mastery grading? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in the single subject we, I devote a whole class to it. And usually and I work with another professor there and we've been working with actually a teacher in Ed's district, who's done a lot in standards based grading in science, so he'll come in and he'll kind of like show off his great book and, you know, kind of like how it works and things like that, but because all of those students those, those student teachers are in Ed's. Well, not all of them, but many of them are in Ed's district. They're already being exposed now to various levels, right? Because even though they have a policy to do alternative grading. We know that that doesn't mean that it's all being done well or, you know in a way that we would want to emulate, but the concept of it is there and it prevents me from having to kind of convince them that this is a thing, you know, that it's not so, it's not crazy. It's within the system, it exists within the system. It's not some kind of crazy idea, which used to be the case.

You know, I don't know. I feel like when, you know years ago, like when I was at my, I used to work at a K-8 charter school and it was small. We had 10 middle school teachers, but it took me about seven years to move them all from traditional to standards based grading. And again, it looks different across, you know, like all of those people, but it's some version of that. But I mean, I had to do so much education around, you know you know, like combating, like, you know, if it's not happening, what happens when they get to high school? And, you know, how we're like, you know, trying to get rid of that argument and just yeah, just a lot of, a lot of education on this isn't a crazy idea, you know, that it it's being done and it works, you know,

ked what probably over two or: 3000

Ed: I like to think of teaching as being in thirds. There's the planning third, there's the actual teaching third, and then there's the feedback grading third. And like my teacher prep program, which I thought was great. I felt really well prepared was all about the planning and the teaching, very little about the feedback and getting back into now go plan again.

Boz: Yep. I would say the same. I had a great you know, bachelor's program that I went to a great teacher prep program. And we talked a little bit about feedback, but not really about theory of grading. Like first time I really saw the inner workings of a grade book was when I was with my master teacher, when I was doing my student teaching. And again, absolute brilliant educator. I learned so much from her and. You know, I, I did, I lifted her traditional weighted kind of category grade book and I used it, modified that for years, but that's exactly where I got it from was just, I picked it up from what I saw her doing.

Ed: Yeah. I think the only thing I got in my teacher prep program was occasional mentions of rubrics and then occasional mentions of you can have your students grade themselves with a rubric. And it was like very little guidance, very little examples, very little instruction about what to do with that. Those ideas I can't. I grew for me.

Sharona: Yeah, we have an hour and a half long talk that we give called grading as the misuse of mathematics and the measurement of student learning. And it's literally deconstructing the math of traditional points and percentages because as a mathematician, I'm actually capable of deconstructing those averages. But most faculty are not. And in fact, we're having a debate in one of the classes that I coordinate this semester that was forced to put back in a quote unquote traditional grading system, and it ended up so convoluted and crazy that literally I have an entire team of mathematics college faculty, and we can't figure even handle trying to tell the students how the different because we we kept a bunch of flavors of mastery grading built in because all these instructors have done standards based grading so it became very uncomfortable as they were building it but we literally can't do the math on the grade book like the the system can but I have not actually sat down and tried to figure out like okay we have an exam coming up It's 15 percent of the total grade, but then the final exam could replace it. So how good do they have to do? Like I can't, I'd have to, I'd have to build a whole Excel spreadsheet that I'm not willing to build to try to figure out. And the instructors were asking me this week, what can we tell the students? Are we willing to, you know, if they do well on the exams, throw out the, the homework that they did.

And I'm like, absolutely not because we were told that the reason we had to do this is students don't understand mastery grading is too hard for them and they understand traditional grading and the fact that we don't require homework is a problem. So now they we required homework We put in a traditional weighted system. It's extremely complex, but that's actually how to finish the pilot

Ed: In coaching high school teachers, I've actually noticed that it's funny enough that math teachers end up having some really weird mathematical things in their grade books, too.

Don't even understand what they did, and it's like, oh, you're like, you're like double weighting things here, and they're like, what are you talking about?

Sharona: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Boz: Well, we are coming up on our time. This has been really, really fun. And in fact, we would love to invite both of you back individually so we could kind of get more into the details. But this has been just an absolute pleasure. Sharona, is there any kind of closing question or comment that you want to make with them?

Sharona: There was one question we didn't get to. So this is my asking you for your 30 second or last answer If you could give one piece of advice to someone who is thinking about starting this journey, where would you have them start? And Ed, I'm going to ask you to go first and then Annie. What's one piece of advice you would like to leave people with?

Ed: I don't know. I guess just stay curious about how to get the behavior from your students that you want, and if you're not getting the behavior you want, then you need to adjust kind of the incentives you need to adjust the way you're doing it. And if you scaffold it early, it'll start to happen for you.

Sharona: Thank you, Annie?

Annie: I would say to maybe take some time and reflect on what you really value. In your class and like what you want kids to truly be better at by the end of a year in your class and to think about how you can leverage those values like what I was talking about with incentives, you know, and devalue some of the things that are still important, you know, but they don't maybe need to be tied to a grade. Just kind of thinking about like what What your values are and because it's my belief that we communicate our values to our students through our assessment like through the way that we rate them right and measure them. That's you know, if we're giving them a lot of points for a certain thing then that's the thing that we value, right? And so I think it's important to kind of be able to identify what those are and what you want to communicate to your kids is this is the, these are the most important things.

Boz: I absolutely love both of those answers. Just we've had several people that have talked about, and we've talked about the, what's great about alternative grading is. It's so diverse and so customizable that you can really put what you value as an educator into it, but you've got to take some time to reflect and do some, you know, looking inwards to see what those really are.

Sharona: Well, thank you guys both for coming on. We will get you back on very soon to dive deeply, especially I don't think we've had a middle school science teacher.

I don't think we've had anybody in social studies at all, or social sciences. So we definitely need to get you back on and let's, and we'll go deeper into your grading architectures.

Annie: That would be great.

Ed: That'd be great.

Boz: All right. And for everyone else, thank you for joining us. Have a great Thanksgiving and we'll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode's page on our website. www. thegradingpod. com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show, or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website.

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

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

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