In this episode, Sharona and Boz sit down with renowned mathematics education researcher Peter Liljedahl to explore the often-overlooked connection between classroom pedagogy and grading practices. Best known for his influential work on Building Thinking Classrooms, Peter shares his own journey into alternative grading, from questioning traditional percentage-based systems to developing approaches that prioritize meaningful feedback, student growth, and competency development. The conversation examines why so many educators embrace active learning while leaving grading unchanged, the philosophical shift required to move from “point gathering” to “data gathering,” and why multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning are fundamentally different from traditional retesting.

Links

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

• Building Thinking Classrooms (Website with Resources)
• Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (the book), Peter Liljedahl
• 136 – Grading for Physicists, Not Point Collectors – with Chris Sarkonak

Resources

The Center for Grading Reform - seeking to advance education in the United States by supporting effective grading reform at all levels through conferences, educational workshops, professional development, research and scholarship, influencing public policy, and community building.

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

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

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

Follow us on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram - @thegradingpod. To leave us a comment, please go to our website: www.thegradingpod.com and leave a comment on this episode's page.

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

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

Music

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

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Pete Liljedahl: I think part of it is logistics. Part of it is a cultural hangover from retesting, right? Multiple attempts is not the same as retesting. Retesting has all of this sort of structural complexity to it and policy wrapped up in it, and the students aren't working hard enough, and they're just trying they're not trying harder, and I have to do all the extra work, and it ... I gotta give up my time. And like, there's all of that hangup around retesting, and I think retesting is what they're, the lens that they're thinking through when you say multiple attempts. And plus, policies around retesting are, like, capping how much you can grow.

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

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

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

Sharona: I'm doing well. I'm a little bit discombobulated because I'm leaving for New York tomorrow morning, and I'm traveling for a couple weeks as both of my kids are doing graduation move across the country stuff, and I'm going to help them, and we're recording at night, which is a very unusual thing for us. So I'm a little bit off my game, but hopefully not too badly. How about you?

Boz: I am actually doing really well 'cause I'm really excited about why we're recording at night. So we are recording at night because we do have a very special guest with us. Sharona, you want to do the honors of telling our audience who we have with us?

Sharona: I do, especially 'cause one of the reasons I'm discombobulated is I'm a little starstruck, so very excited. Peter Liljedahl is with us today. Peter's a former math teacher and current professor of mathematics education, and he is really well-known in our community for his work in the development of Building Thinking Classrooms. One of the reasons we wanted to have Peter on is the number of people that we've had on the podcast who've talked about this book as part of what they do. He has a passion for fostering deep mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills, and he's dedicated his career to reshaping classroom environments. The work involves collaborative learning, problem-solving, and student engagement, and he continues to inspire educators worldwide, and he is coming to us from Reykjavik, Iceland right now. So welcome, Peter, to the pod.

Pete Liljedahl: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me, and thanks for staying up late so that I could get up early and do this with you.

Sharona: Yes. I'm so excited.

Boz: We have so many things that we want to talk to you about that we'll never get to all of them, but a tradition here on The Grading Podcast, anytime we have a new guest, we always like to ask just how did you get involved with alternative grading?

Pete Liljedahl: So for me, I think my journey into alternative grading started long before I actually started doing alternative grading. As a high school math teacher, I started to become aware that I was doing things that was, I wouldn't say it was unusual. I think many teachers do this. I was working in a setting where we had we had to report out a percentage, and there was-- we got to create our own weighting. Quizzes were worth so much, and tests were worth so much. And h- I'm-- you've heard this story, right? It, that sort of typical thing, and then a digital grade book that calculated it down to two decimal places. And but this was in the days where it wasn't an open access grading platform where parents could log in and see what the students were doing at any one time. It was, but it was still, I was tracking their points throughout the term. And there were two things that started to dawn on me as I was doing this.

One was that as I was getting to report card time and I had put in my last bit of data and I'd hit that equal sign and it would do the calculation, the first thing I would do is I would look at the percentage and then I would look across the line to the student's name and I'd go yeah, that makes sense. And then I'd go to the next one and I'd look at that across a line and go, "Yeah, that makes sense." And I'd go to the next one and I'd go that doesn't make sense. This student is better than that. They come in for a lot of extra help." And then I look across a line and I find some places where I can increase the numbers until the percentage reflects what my impression of this student was. And I realized I was doing this, and it just felt like a totally natural thing to do. But then it dawned on me that then what was I doing with these points, right?

The second thing that started to dawn on me was that because of this system, I was somehow, in some way, burdening my students with my grading throughout the entire term, so that when it was time to report out the grade, my job was easier, right? Like that moment where I had to hit the equal sign was easier because I was making them do all of this work where everything was organized in such a way that they carried the burden of grading throughout the term. And these two things started to feel wrong for me.

Then I left the classroom because anybody who knows this origin story of Building Thinking Classrooms, I went off to do my PhD. Building Thinking Classrooms started to emerge. I became a professor. But long before Building Thinking Classrooms had taken on a form that we could call-- Like it before it even had a name, right? While it was still just some research off the side of my desk and so on, I started working intensively in something province was big on at the time, which was numeracy. So numeracy assessment. Some of you know it as mathematical literacy. This was a new idea in our curriculum, this idea that it wasn't only about the math, it was also about how well they could apply it in real world context, complex context. So it wasn't about number sense, right? It was about can they use their mathematics in real world context. And I was starting to work with a lot of school districts around this idea, and we were constructing these amazing numeracy tasks that we were having students do. And these were almost project-based, but they would fit within a lesson. There was collaborative components, there was individual components, there was ambiguity. We created tasks that, we had 50 different possible answers to, but they were all right because they were all real life context. And the only way to grade these things, because they were so complex and the student output was so rich, was to start using rubrics. And then so I dove into the world of rubrics, and these rubrics were just unwieldy. And I was in, in these classrooms where we were doing these numeracy assessments, and then we were sitting there, for six hours highlighting on these rubrics. And every assignment or every numeracy task graded by two different people and, it smelt like stale coffee and highlighter, and we were just working intensively. And then I'd be in the classroom when the teacher would hand these back, and the students would look at these rubrics for less than five seconds. And it had-- it it had our hearts and souls in this, right? And this just didn't seem right. So I started interviewing students and started to understand how unwieldy this thing was for them and how they weren't able to extract information from it, and yet it seemed so clear to me. And I remember having this one conversation with a grade eight student, and I said, "So I noticed you didn't really look at the feedback." And he s-- And I said, "Why is that?" Most of them just said, "I don't understand. It's too busy," and so on. But this student said, I used to look at the feedback." But I stopped because I don't really know how to go from mostly to usually and I think anybody who's ever looked at those four column rubrics with that really dense language knows exactly what I'm talking about, right?

And so that sent me down the rabbit hole of, okay, so what's the point of all this assessment if I can't, if I can't communicate to the students? And that started this whole sort of holistic journey into alt-grading, playing with it in my own university courses, playing with it with districts out in the world. And then when I was doing the Building Thinking Classroom research, I was really motivated to not do anything related to assessment. Like Building Thinking Classrooms was supposed to be about the thinking and the learning in the moment and in the lessons, and I was trying to avoid the assessment because I was far enough down these rabbit holes to know that this was messy. The teachers I was working with weren't gonna let me get away with that, so they said, "No, you're-- Like, look, you've taken us this far, you gotta take us the rest of the way." So that started a whole project around, okay, how do I pull all this together and push into assessment in a way that doesn't just make sense for teachers, also makes sense for students. So that's my origin story.

Boz: Okay. So first, I think that's hilarious 'cause that actually brings up one of the things that I wanted to talk about, and that's the amount of people that I know that have read your book, use your book it is a major part of their classrooms now and their pedagogy, but almost ignore chapter 12. In fact back on episode 136 we had a physics teacher from Canada, Chris Sarkonak on, and he was talking about how this, this book changed his classroom completely. He read "Building Thinking," "Classrooms." He was teaching math and physics at the time. Ended up incorporating a bunch of the same ideas into his physics and just revolutionized the way he taught physics. But he said for the longest time, he acted like chapter 12 didn't exist. He just didn't... A- and the amount of people that I know that are the exact same way. So I think that's hilarious that you were actually doing a lot of the grading stuff before you even started the research for the book.

Pete Liljedahl: And, and-

Sharona: And chapter 14 also. It's like both of them.

Boz: Yeah.

Pete Liljedahl: But can I just talk a little bit about chapter 12?

Sharona: Yeah,

Pete Liljedahl: please. Because there's been a revolution in that, in the Building Thinking Classroom space. So chapter 12, for anybody who doesn't know, is called Evaluate What You Value, and it was the culmination of this journey into rubrics. And it was this idea of how can we strip down rubrics so that we can actually start to evaluate what we value, because one of the big results of the Building Thinking Classroom research was students don't listen to what we say. They listen to what we do. So you can say all you want that you value collaboration, but how are you showing them you value collaboration? You can say all you want you value risk-taking or perseverance or communication, but how are you actually showing them that you value these things? And that's where this idea of evaluate what you value, because evaluation is a double-edged sword, right? When we evaluate them, they evaluate us because what we choose to evaluate shows the students what it is we value.

So that took me down that rabbit hole of rubrics and how do we sort this out, and how do we co-construct rubrics that are not just useful for teachers but useful for students so that they can start to self-assess themselves on these sort of, let's call them competencies. I always thought chapter 12 was really powerful. And chapter 12 sorted out a lot of the classroom management issues people were having with Building Thinking Classrooms, right? We're gonna send kids to the whiteboards to work in random groups of three. We're releasing a lot of control. We're giving over a lot of autonomy to students. Students don't always use that autonomy for good. Some of them use it for evil. And now, so like how do we rein this in? And chapter 12 was the answer to that. But the problem was chapter 12. It comes way late in the book, and in the implementation model of Building Thinking Classrooms, it's in the fourth toolkit, meaning that, you're doing everything else before you get there.

Last summer I started analyzing some quantitative data. Now it's performance data. It's not my favorite thing to do. But I was looking at the effect that Building Thinking Classrooms has on student individual performance on standardized assessment. All right? And I think this audience is sophisticated enough to know that there's problems with that, right? Like thinking is a necessary precursor to learning. We know that, right? And it's that's from psychology. If the students are thinking, they're learning. If they're learning, they're thinking, right? These two things go together, right? Learning is not necessarily a necessary precursor to performance, right? Like we, we can create a lot of performance without actually having the students learn things in meaningful ways, right? Mimicking and mnemonics and just having them memorize stuff is ways that we can increase performance without actually increasing learning. So I know the pitfalls of looking at performance data, but nonetheless, policymakers like performance data, and I had the data. So I started looking at it, and I was looking at it, in very blunt ways, do we see improvements? And the answer was yes, huge increases. And surprise, the more you do Building Thinking Classrooms, the bigger the improvement. The more of the practices you use, the bigger the improvement. All right?

But then I started to wonder which practices actually have the biggest impact? So it was kinda hard to pull this out of the data, and there was noise in that. But the result was the practice that had the biggest impact on student individual performance was chapter 12. And like what the result of that is, how well we can get students to collaborate in particular has the biggest impact on how well they perform individually. Now, like we can talk for hours about trying to make sense of that, but the upshot of this was chapter 12 can't be wallowing in chapter 12 anymore. It cannot be the 12th practice we implement. If it has such a big impact on student learning and it sorts out our classroom management issues, how do we implement it on day one? So for the last year, I've been working on even stripping chapter 12 down to a speedier, racier version that we can use on day one, and we call it a single indicator rubric.

So the single indicator rubric is, for example, the first one we always use is I'll draw an arrow at the top of the board, and on the left side, the side we don't wanna see, I'll put turn-taking, and on the right side I'll put collaborate. And then I'll ask the students what's the difference between collaborating and turn-taking? We talk about this 'cause there's huge differences, right? But it turns out that about 95% of our students believe that turn-taking is collaborating, and it is not. So then we send them to the boards. They each put this arrow on their board. They get to work, and then we start interacting with them through this arrow, where, "Okay, everyone hold up a finger. Point at the arrow. I'm gonna make a mark. How are we gonna improve?" And we're using this self-assessment along with teacher discussion. How are you gonna improve? And we're working group by group, and we see absolutely massive changes in the way they're collaborating, right? Then we can go, we can do other things like rushing versus going slow. Going slow is a good one, right? Excluding students versus including students. Relying too much on the teacher versus relying on our peers. Like focusing on the product versus focusing on the process. Like these single indicator rubrics are radically changing the way classrooms look. And what we're doing is evaluating what we're valuing.

Sharona: I have so many thoughts. So many. I really resonate with you saying chapter 12 can't be chapter 12 because in all of the PDs we do, which, we have really focused in on grading-

... and grading architecture. I grew up with a math educator, a mom, who was at the forefront of what was called then collaborative learning back in the '80s and '90s. She was at the forefront of the math wars in California. I was literally, from the time I was 12, I'm being told that collaborative learning is the way to go in a classroom, and I get into a classroom, and it's fine. It's okay. I'm decent, but I'm not having this knock-it-out-of-the-park experience until I change the grading. So I know there's a ton of people out there that have been doing the work that you do and the work that that so many other people do to bring active learning in the classroom. I 100% believe in it. But until I did the grading change, it didn't work.

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah.

Sharona: And so I now focus very much on the grading, and when we are doing grading PDs, we go all the way back to why are you giving a course grade? We start even before you get to the course. So I don't know. I resonate with that.

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. And my line on that is when I work with teachers, I said, "Look, you do what you want in your classroom. You close the door. You-- It's your domain. You do whatever you want. But three times a year, you're gonna have to dock with the mothership, and you're gonna have to output this grade. And it has to look a certain way, and we don't get to decide that." So that launches us into this conversation about how can we make the grading look as authentic to the other 197 days that we spend in the classroom with our students, despite the fact that this mothership is requiring us to dock in a certain way.

Boz: I really resonate with what you were saying about, we evaluate what we value what we value. And, you were going through that long list, and I've brought this up many times that, for years I had posters in my room that said math stood for mistakes allow thinking to happen. And that has always been my core belief. But my grading practices absolutely told my students something different because when I was using, traditional grading practices, and students were getting punished for the mistakes they made on week two, regardless of what they were doing on week 16 at that point- Yeah it, it completely told my students that my core belief wasn't my core belief- Yeah ... 'cause my grading was completely contradictory-

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah ... to that. And this was the eye-opener for me too, right? Like- how do we actually shift that, the grading, that, that sort of turning that all the work that the students do into a performance standard, a letter grade, a percentage, whatever it is, how do we do that in such a way that we maintain the integrity of our values?

Boz: And like you said in, in your book going into chapter 14, talking about, the tension that if you make all these changes that you talk about in in chapters one through 11, and do all these changes but keep your grading the same, you've got, these tensions, and it's both with the educator and with the students- Yeah because you're doing 21st century pedagogy and 20th century grading and record bookkeeping.

Pete Liljedahl: I think that's an optimistic look. I would say it's 19th century, but- Yeah.

So I have a question, though. So when did Building Thinking Classrooms as a packaged product really come out and start, and you started going out and doing around the world- Yeah whatever? 'Cause y- I saw you at an Olsume sem- seminar, or at least I saw the recording. I don't think I was there in person. So when did it really start to go out into the world?

Pete Liljedahl: Of course. ...

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. ...

Sharona: are you seeing any difference in that area?

Pete Liljedahl: So certainly. It, but it cuts across certain demographics, right? So I'll give you some examples. If I'm doing a grading workshop, so and a grading workshop can either be a standalone thing or it could be like the third or fourth in a series of Building Thinking Classroom workshops. And I got primary teachers in the room They're just like-

Sharona: Oh, they're so far ahead

Pete Liljedahl: "Yeah, this is what we do," right?

Pete Liljedahl: And it's "This is how I do it. I've always done it. I didn't even know there was another way," right? Meanwhile, the high school teachers are like, "What are you talking about?" "This is just so contradictory." So I love having that mixed demographic in those situations. So I think, and I think there's some really interesting reasons why that is. So for example, one of the consequences of let's call it traditional grading.

Sharona: Yeah, we call it traditional here.

Pete Liljedahl: Is this sort of we pray at the altar of synchronous assessment, right? This idea that, okay, we're gonna give a test and everyone's gotta write at the same time, and they get the same amount of time. And there's all of this hangover from this idea that we're gonna compare the students, which is it is a cultural hangover 'cause we don't compare students. We're supposed to compare students against the curriculum, not against each other. But we have to make everything equal and fair, and I think that traces way back to the IQ tests work. But there's all of that sort of cluttering up the space. And primary teachers are like, "Yeah, that doesn't work." Because one of the things I'll do when I'm in these workshops is I'll say, "Who's the primary teachers in here?" And they'll put up their hand. And I say, "Okay, so you gotta assess students on reading." And they're like, "Yes." And I said so what you do is you have all the students read to you at the same time, right?" And they're like, "No, that doesn't make any... what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. They, I can't, right? I have to have them read one at a time." I say, "Yeah, but okay. Okay, that makes sense. But you do it all on the same day." And they're like, "I don't have time for that." I say, "But they, but at least they all read the same passage." And they're like, "No." , And it's like it just blows up this idea of synchronous assessment. And I think primary teachers have really blown that up already. And until you actually psychologically and philosophically recognize that synchronous assessment is actually one of the things that's holding you back then alternative grading can be problematic, right?

So there's that piece. But I'll give you another demographic. So I was just in Norway. So Norway has a very competency-driven curriculum as opposed to most of the rest of the world is very content-driven in math. What's interesting is in language arts, for example, I used to teach language arts as well, it's a competency-driven curriculum as opposed to a content. Now how-- what's the difference between these two things? So one of the big differences is I can say to a math teacher, I say, "So at the end of the school year, how do you know if your students are any better at math than they were at the beginning of the school year?" And they're like yeah." Like you can't actually know. Like they know more math, but they're supposed to know more math, right? If I take my, if I take my kids pick to, to the forest to pick blueberries, they're gonna have more blueberries at the end of the trip than they did at the beginning of the trip. That's expected, right? So if I take kids into a math class, then they're gonna know more math at the end of the year than they did at the beginning, but are they any-- do they know-- are they any better at math?

Whereas language arts teachers, I can say, "Are any better at language arts?" And they're like, "Oh yeah." And I'll pick something in particular because in math, we assess the thing that changes all the time. But in language arts, we assess the thing that stays the same all the time. And that's the difference between a content and competency-driven curriculum. So in math, I'm gonna assess, we're assessing solving one and two-step equations. Now we're solving-- we're assessing their integer ability. Now we're assessing fractions. Now we're assessing can they do word problems? Can they do order of operations? And we just keep changing the thing we're assessing all the time.

In language arts, it's I'm assessing reading for information. I'm still assessing reading for information. But now we're doing it in short story. Now we're doing it in essays. Now we're doing it in newspaper articles, right? So at the end of the year a language arts teacher can say, "My students are better at reading for information," right? And these are the differences between a content and a competency-driven curriculum.

So Norway has a competency-driven math curriculum, which means when they write an exam at the end of the year, they're not grading for whether or not they followed the correct three-step process. They're grading on reasoning, ability to articulate your reasoning representation. They're grading on the visuals that they're using. They're grading on all of these different competencies. So if you give a final exam that has six questions on it, they're looking across those six questions to see if a particular competency has been demonstrated. They're not-- And they don't need to see it in all six questions because no one question can demonstrate all the competencies, right? So it's a very different way of thinking about it, right? So I see differences demographically as I move around the world. So I don't do, I don't do grading, I don't do assessment workshops in Northern Europe typically because they're like, "Yeah, got it. We're doing that already."

Boz: But, isn't that model and that idea what the eight standard practices of mathematics that are supposed to be taught from grade K through grade 12? Isn't that what it was supposed to try to get at is-

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah ...

Boz: the model- modeling with mathematics using precision. Yes, how we looked at it might change from a third grade to an algebra one. Of course, the math is more sophisticated and has gone to more abstract ideas. But the idea of, finding patterns and using the- is the same. That's what the eight practices are s- are supposed- Yes ... to be. And you're right. One of the things that I have done a lot of work in the last year and a half 'cause I, I'm at a new position where I'm a instructional coach instead of an in-class teacher, and I've been working with the schools that are really small, that have one algebra one teacher, one geometry teacher. So how do get these to work and look at any kind of PLC type of model with them? And that's one of the things that I was trying to do with them is okay, we can look at common assessments not with common math, but the common mathematical practices.

Pete Liljedahl: Yes. So the standards of mathematical practices behave like the competencies, right? But there are two problems with them, and I'm a huge fan of them, but there are two problems. One, they don't have a great developmental model, meaning like what does it look like in grade three versus grade eight, right? So like we're gonna engage with different math content, but- yeah what does it actually mean to for example, reason in third grade versus eighth grade? The other challenge with it is coming back to evaluate what we value. We put the standards of mathematical practice in there. We talk about it. We maybe promote it. But what is it that gets graded at the end of the year? What gets tested is the content so what are the teachers hearing? What are the students hearing?

Sharona: And that's a lot of what we do, 'cause we do pretty much, like I said, only grading workshops at this point-

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. ...

Sharona: With some authentic assessment thrown in there. And one of we have a whole workshop on learning outcomes, and we really challenge them. And again, we're working, even though Bosley and I go across the whole K to 16 spectrum right now our audience that has asked us for professional development is much more at the university level, which is shocking because universities almost never do faculty development. But we have been challenging faculty where say, how do people write in your discipline? How do people argue in your discipline? What are people supposed to be able to do coming out of your class that they currently cannot do?" You need to write a learning outcome for that. Yeah. So we're actually going in just a few weeks, and I don't know relative to when this episode's gonna come out, and we might be there. We're going to McMaster University in Hamilton because the engineering accreditation, Engineers Canada, is going to competencies. Yeah. So a lot of the accredited engineering people are looking at competency-based education, and they were doing competency-based testing, and then they ran into this issue with grades and they're like, "What?" "Okay, we need to take it past testing-

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. ...

Sharona: To grading."

Pete Liljedahl: And you need to take it past assessment to feedback, right? Like the whole purpose of a learning outcome isn't just to be able to evaluate whether the student has met the learning outcome, but it's also to be able to provide feedback on the journey so that they can actually improve on it.

Sharona: Exactly, and that's why we teach, I don't know if you've seen the four pillars structure from Robert Talbert and David Clark- ... from Grading for Growth. But we teach on those four pillars. So the learning outcomes, the feedback, the multiple attempts at demonstrating proficiency, and the eventual proficiency being, or marks indicating progress.

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah.

Sharona: We redesign based on all of those principles.

Pete Liljedahl: Nice.

Sharona: But it's all driven from we, we ask the question, what is the purpose of grades? Because you said something earlier that- I don't think that everybody, certainly not at the university level, not everybody agrees with, which is that we're not supposed to be comparing students to each other. There's a very strong group of people who absolutely believes that grades are for ranking and sorting, and they were actually designed originally-

Pete Liljedahl: Oh yeah, they were. They were originally. And there are some places in the world that still output that, where you'll see a grade-

Sharona: Harvard.

Pete Liljedahl: And then y- you'll see a grade and it'll say three out of 24, right? And but that's not what our reporting mandate is. In most places, look at your reporting mandate and it almost always says you have to report out on students' attainment of the curriculum, period.

Sharona: So it's interesting to say that, so when we teach this, we start with that question. If you're an individual instructor, what's the purpose of your grades? What are your, what is your grade, your personal grade supposed to do? Is it supposed to mean an A means they know 90% of the material?

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah.

Sharona: If that's what it means, then can you prove it? Yeah. 'Cause I can make all kinds of funky things happen with the math.

Pete Liljedahl: I often do this also, this thought experiment. I say, so a student comes into you, you've- they've written the first midterm, okay? And they got whatever. Let's say in a traditional grading system they got 73%, they got a B, they got whatever, right? They got something, it's not the highest. But this student comes in and they're not coming in to grovel for grades, right? Like they're not, it's not that. They're not trying to game you or ask for bonus points or anything like that. They come in and they're very sincere and they're honest and they say, "I got this. I got a B on this midterm. I wanna improve before the next midterm or before the next whatever. What do I have to do to get better?" And so you look down at your grade book And what can you say, right? And this works well with university professors because, they have 300 students sometimes. So this person is just as anonymous as anybody else. But if it's a high school teacher or something, I'll say, "The kid comes in and they have a paper bag on their head," right? So you don't know who it is. Or the point is, can you look at your grade book and actually then say something to the student that's meaningful, or do you just kinda fall back to the yeah, study more."

Boz: Yep. Do more homework problems.

Pete Liljedahl: Make sure you do all the- Yeah ... assignments. Come in for extra help, right? Which are these very generic statements which mean-- they basically mean if you wanna do better, be better, but it also has nothing to do with what that student has actually shown you so far. So can your grades actually tell you enough as a teacher about what they need to do to improve, or do you just say "Be better"?

Boz: The amount of people we've interviewed on this podcast that their origin story has some element of that in it-

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah ...

Boz: where they've, talked about a student that's come into them and, generally wanting to get better, and them looking at the assessment and the grade book and I can tell you get a 74." And that's about it. Yeah. It is it really is. I would say a good 50%, if not more, of our origin stories have some element of that in their story.

Pete Liljedahl: Nice.

Sharona: I was gonna say, I wanna go back though to something you said earlier where you saw this improvement in this performance data, and you tied it to specific things. How are you using, or how do you think you can use that data, to continue to enhance people's willingness to adopt some of these alternative grading practices? Like how important is that now- Ooh ... as the part of where you're going?

Pete Liljedahl: So this is this is that's a great question. So I have a friend, Isabelle Stevenson, she's at Partners for Educational Leadership in Connecticut. She does this thing called the coaching letter. It's great. But one of the things she always says is you can't talk someone into a new mindset, right? Like it's, I and I think we all know this is true. So like I can show data, and if you think about the Building Thinking Classroom book, so just th- think about how we engage with that. So it's got data in it. It's got stories in it. Those data and those stories might motivate you to try building a thinking classroom. But what's actually gonna sustain you in building a thinking classroom is your data and your stories, right? And I'm a firm believer in that. W- the real shift in mindset, the real shift in practice doesn't come from me trying to talk you into it. It comes from you experiencing it and then deciding you want more of this, and then seeking that out, right?

So, in answer to your question, I'm hoping that my data can motivate people to try something or to question themselves, but it's gonna have to be their stories and their data that's gonna sustain them. Because we know this is not a trivial journey, right? It's not turn the corner. And the thing with grading is it's very philosophical, right? And I think this is one of the challenges I run into all the time. I call it the two-headed monster. But it's basically this. So if we-- I call it point gathering versus data gathering, okay? So that's how I differentiate between the two. Point gathering is a traditional assessment. Data gathering is the alternative assessment.

Point gathering is what we've all experienced. It's it's quizzes are worth 20% and so on and so forth. Alternative grading, this is-- it-- we can call it lots of different things. We can call it outcome standards-based. We can call it mastery. But nonetheless, I'm gonna look at the data, and I'm gonna see how the student's performance against the standard is demonstrated, and then I'm gonna report out on that These are two very different philosophical positions, right? This is not a different practice. This is a different philosophy.

And I tell teachers, "Don't-- do not go into this chapter 14 unless you have done the philosophical work." You have to turn that corner yourself. You have to make the philosophical shift because otherwise it's like wearing bad-fitting clothing, right? Because if your mind is still in a point-gathering paradigm and you're trying to do some data-gathering assessment, everything just fits badly. You have to have made that philosophical turn. And when you make that philosophical turn, everything becomes easier. It is so easy. The teachers who make that turn said, "I've never had such an easy time doing grading," right? "I've never had such an easy time producing a report card." But you gotta make that philosophical turn.

Sharona: Grade tracking ...

Pete Liljedahl: there's this bipolar nature to leadership in this way, in that-- And I think that it happens partially because there's more than one leader in a leadership structure, but I also think it's because if leadership doesn't understand that these are two different philosophical positions, they think it's just, "Oh yeah, we're just gonna do it this way. Here's some resources." No, it doesn't work like that. It's a different philosophical position. I need to resource you in that philosophical position. I also have to remove barriers from the other philosophical position that are getting in the way. And but I encounter this two-headed monster everywhere I go. And I'm like, "This, these things don't go together."

Boz: See I've said this a few times, especially talking with higher ed people and looking at the differences between some of the higher ed environment and K-12 environment. And one of those is the speed of PD. This paradigm of, "Okay, we're going to do a PD on Tuesday. We might have another follow-up next Tuesday, and we expect to see it in your classroom on Monday." And it, it's gotten to the point, 'cause I'm with LA Unified School District I am a certified EG- what we call EGI, which is equitable grading in instruction, which is what they used to call mastery-based trainer. And one of the first things I always get is, "Okay, we don't need to go through all this stuff. Just show me what you want me to do in the grade book. Show me what the change is." Yeah. And I'm like I refuse to do it." I'm like, "I, I refuse. If you want me to work with you on how to set up your grade book and that's it, I refuse to do it."

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. '

Boz: Cause exactly what you were saying it's not a change of how we produce the final grade. It's not a change of how you set up your grade book. It is a change in philosophy. It's a fundamental change.

Pete Liljedahl: Going back to Isabelle Stevenson and her coaching letter, she had a series last month, or this month, and one of the things-- And it's about scalability, right? LA Unified you're not gonna work with every single teacher. So it's like- Yeah ... the scalability terms like turnkey and all of these things. And when we think about scalability, like one of the things that happens is we tend to, and I'm quoting Isabelle here, we tend to scale form rather than function. 'Cause form is scalable, right? Here's a grade book, I want everyone to use it, right? And I can push that out and everyone has to. But if we haven't actually worked on the function, we're back to this bad-fitting clothing idea, right? So we tend to wanna scale form. Rather than function.

Boz: And you think that's just because it is, it, like you said, so much easier to do?

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. But it doesn't work. It's the same thing with building thinking classrooms, right? An administrator could say, "I wanna see every kid at the whiteboards." That's okay, great, but that doesn't make a building thinking classrooms 'cause you scaled the form. You didn't scale the function. The function is we gotta get kids thinking. We gotta get them talking to each other. We have to have critical conversations. We have to move the thinking to learning. We have to close the lessons. There's so much function that is missing. But I can make everybody work at the whiteboard, right? That's not building thinking classrooms.

Sharona: I have a question that's a follow-on. So c- I completely agree with the philosophical thing, and we have that whole conversation. But there's another component to it that I see really heavily at the higher ed level- .. That I don't know that I see as much as K-12, which is at the higher ed level especially, I work at Cal State LA. We're a Hispanic-serving institution. We're ranked number one for upward mobility, but we're really serving an underserved, under-resourced, underprepared community, right? So there's a lot of talk about equity and trying to, really close the gap for students who are disadvantaged. And I hear a ton of this and most of the people hear it from are really authentic about it. They really mean it. Until you ask them to do some of these practices, like getting multiple attempts at demonstrating competence in, in something. And what I've come to understand is there's an identity problem. They say they want everyone to succeed, but what a lot of professors mean is, "I need to fit you into the way I succeeded because I'm special. I have this PhD. I'm at the top of my-- I have this competence in my discipline." And I feel like I've run into an issue where if you ask them to give multiple chances, like the amount of pushback I get for multiple chances at demonstrating proficiency is unbelievable.

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah.

Sharona: And I think it's because it's a threat to the identity of the professor.

Pete Liljedahl: So-

Sharona: That's something-

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah. Okay. Can I just noodle on this with you- Yes, please ... for a bit? All right. So I think, I don't think you're wrong. And I think one of the things that I often say to teachers is: Who are we? Like we're all these teachers in the room. Who are we, right? We're the survivors. We're the thrivers, right? We're the ones who l- who, who played the game of school well and liked it so much we decided to make a career of it. We are not a representative sample of our students. And I think this is even more true for professors, right? We are the people who've the system worked the best for. But what percentage of university students become a professor, right? It's 0.0 something, right? So we cannot use ourselves as a proxy for what is good for others because we're not them. We're definitely not them. So-

Sharona: But that depends on what you believe your classroom is for.

Pete Liljedahl: Oh, absolutely.

Are you-

Sharona: And this is m- this is my issue with higher ed

Pete Liljedahl: It's-- So I, I think you're right. I think it, it could be this. I also, but I also run into this multiple attempt thing at the K to 12 system a lot, and it-- I shouldn't say K to 12. Let's say 9 to 12. And it's, I think part of it is logistics. Part of it is a cultural hangover from retesting, right? Multiple attempts is not the same as retesting. Retesting has all of this sort of structural complexity to it and policy wrapped up in it, and the students aren't working hard enough, and they're just trying-- they're not trying harder, and I have to do all the extra work, and it, I gotta give up my time. And there's all of that hangup around retesting, and I think retesting is what they're h- the lens that they're thinking through when you say multiple attempts. And plus, policies around retesting are, like, capping how much you can grow, right? If you write the retest, the highest you can get is you can I'll average the two tests. If your grade goes down, it's, it goes down. It's-- and what I find actually, at my university at least, professors are quite enlightened around this idea around multiple attempts in one particular way, which is, "Hey, if you ace the final, I'll give you the grade on the final. That'll be your course grade." They're not hampered by this other stuff. But in the K to 12 system, teachers are also being pressured by administration to count things like homework to soften the impact of assessment, of testing. And al- yeah, I'm meandering here, but the point is, I think you're, I think you're right. There is this identity thing. Part of that identity is, "I didn't need to do that. You shouldn't need to do that." But the other thing is, I had to work really hard to get my grade, and I and if I get you multiple attempts, you're gonna get a grade- that isn't the same. And I run into this with teachers when they're grappling with the data.

So the student who demonstrated mastery on day one on a concept, on a standard, and they kept that the whole way through the unit. And then you have a student who didn't get it, didn't get it, didn't get it, got it with support, got it with support, now has mastered it. And I say what do we give that student on that standard?" And the trouble that people have with s- being able to say they both get the same grade, let's call it, for that standard is stifling. There's so many people, because we have this sort of cultural hangover that no, the student who got it eight times deserves a better grade than the student who didn't get it until the very end.

I always say this, the second student did something that we in the education business like to call learning, and that should be celebrated. But it's these sorts of things, like I got it the old-fashioned way. If I do all these m- multiple attempts, then the grade isn't really telling the same story as my story.

Boz: So the example you were just giving, I, I know in your book you use the same thing that Sharona and I do in a lot of our trainings, which is the parachute packing that we've all stole from Ken- That we

Sharona: all took from Ken O'Connor

Boz: Yeah. But what's interesting is we've done this training now f- this is probably our most popular training. We call it the grading is the misuse of mathematics. And we present this parachute question, and at this point we have literally asked hundreds if not thousands of educators, which of those, like I am putting a gun to your head, we're going skydiving tomorrow- Yeah, who do you want to pack your parachute? It is always-

Pete Liljedahl: Abigail ...

Boz: our s- yeah, it's always our student B. We just call them A, B, and C. It's always B, the one that starts off slow and- Yeah ... progresses the entire time But then when we start talking about grading, it's "No, we can't give those the same, the person that started off. That's not fair to them."

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah.

Boz: I'm like, "What do you mean it's not fair to them?" I- if you've got it at the end, who cares if you didn't have it at the beginning? And in fact, we shouldn't expect our students to have it at the beginning.

Pete Liljedahl: And if we, if they have it at the beginning, then we are inconsequential-

Boz: Exactly to the equation. We don't have a job.

Pete Liljedahl: Yeah.

Boz: I- if they already know all this stuff, we don't, the, we are useless. We are pointless. Yeah.

Pete Liljedahl: The whole point of education is learning. They're learning, not learned.

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: Yes. So we, we are just about time, but one last question for you. So the people who are listening to this podcast, many of them are not mathematics instructors- so they may not be as familiar with your book, but they are very in the grading piece of things. How are you telling people to get started these days if they're interested in both alt-grading, but then also expanding it into the full building thinking classrooms? What's an entry point for people?

Pete Liljedahl: Okay. So my entry point for grading always with teachers, oth- other than evaluate what you value, let's do some competency rubrics and let's get students behaving the way we want them to behave other than that. I always say start with student feedback. Okay? The biggest improvement we see in grading is not how we grade students, it's how they grade themselves, right? And I use this metaphor that in order to navigate, we need two pieces of information. We need to know where we are and where we're going And so if we want our students to navigate their learning, we need to make sure that they know where they are and they know where they're going. So before you start tinkering with your grading practice, the way you're gonna output a grade, start tinkering with how you're gonna make sure that the students know where they are and where they're going. Because all of that work is of tremendous benefit to students.

I always say this. I say, "The greatest inequity in education is not the inequity between students, it's the inequity between students and the teacher." We have such a clear picture of the landscape of what it is we're teaching. We can see where we're going. We can see where all the students are. But if they can't see, then they can't participate in this. They can only be driven by you as drones through the process. So we gotta help students see where they are and where they're going. And all of that work will then really easily translate to the grading practices later when you're ready to make that turn.

I have two statements on that. So one, for me, assessment, this is my definition. Assessment is a gathering of information for the purposes of taking action. That's it. That's my definition. All right? Whether that action is to decide what I'm teaching tomorrow or that action is to output a grade on a report card, right? Like the assessment is a gathering of information for the purposes of taking action. If you're not gonna take action, don't bother with the gathering of information, okay?

Number two, the person who can take the action needs to be the person who's holding the information. So if I want students to take action, they need to hold the information. I can also hold it, but they need to hold it because they're the ones who are gonna take action. So this is where I always say start with formative assessment. Assessment that informs learning. We typically think about formative assessment as the assessment that informs teaching, but lean into formative assessment as learning, because you will then be able to m- use all of the stuff you do to help t- students then transfer over to informed grading.

So that's the starting point for me.

Boz: This has been an absolutely amazing conversation. I hate the fact that we're already at time. Sh-Sharona, I'm gonna pass this on to you to get any last thoughts and to close us out, 'cause I know how special this guest has been for you.

Sharona: Yeah. Just-- I just wanna thank you, Peter. Getting to talk to you one-on-one and share it with our audience is literally a dream come true for me. I've just looked up to you so much, and like I said, you remind me of the work that my mom did. So thank you. Do you have anything last that you want to share?

Pete Liljedahl: First of all, thanks to in-- you for inviting me. I'd love to come back if you wanna have me back. I love these conversations. I don't get to talk grading often. To all the people who are listening, thank you for being on this journey. The mere fact that you are starting to question traditional grading means that you are the kind of professional that we need and I just wanna thank you for engaging in that work, 'cause it's not easy, but it is so important.

Boz: Thank you again. I do wanna give one last message, and that is just for anyone that does any kind of teacher prep program, I've said this before in a couple episodes, this book should be required reading. Any level, any teaching m- mathematics or other subjects whether it's K-12, whe- whether it's higher ed, this should be required reading for everyone. I, I wanna thank you. This has been so much fun. To our listeners, th- thank you. I hope you guys have enjoyed this as much as we've done making this. This has been The Grading Podcast with Boz and Sharona, and we'll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode's page on our website, 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.