16 - Critiquing the Critiques: Two Recent Articles About Alternative Grading

Episode 16 • 31st October 2023 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

Sharona: They say it's just more fraud, fraud dressed up with good grades. So parents won't complain and teachers won't have to tackle the Sisyphean task of remediating what these policy changes, dumbing down K 12 education, have wrought on millions of American kids. So another article that came out just last week that is not on this particular podcast is an article I was quoted in.

And in that article, there's a physics professor from the University of North Carolina, quoted, who says that their class is now more rigorous. That's exactly what I experienced. My classes are not dumbed down. They're actually at a much higher level of mathematical accuracy and understanding than I was ever able to do, and yet my grades are better.

Bosley: 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.

Welcome everyone back to The Grading Podcast. My name is Sharona Krinsky, I'm one of your co hosts, and sitting here in the other co host chair today with me, as always, Robert Bosley. Boz, good afternoon, how are you doing today?

Bosley: I'm, I'm doing really good. I'm actually really excited about this episode. I have been, kind of. Just chomping at the bit to do this and we're finally in a place now where I think we can, and I'm going to be really curious to see how our audience responds because this episode is going to be a little bit different than what a lot of our other episodes have been, which have been really about some of the nuts and bolts of how to do alternative grading and interviewing people about different aspects of it. So this episode? Going to be a little bit of a different slant.

Sharona: So, what exactly are we talking about? You have me a little nervous here.

Bosley: So, we're actually going to be looking at a couple of different articles that are really bashing on alternative gradings. Looking at aspects of it or situations where things have not gone real well.

I think I said this back on one of our first episodes is I wanted to use this podcast to not just highlight alternative grading practices, but to take a serious look at it. Its goods, its bads, its advantages and its disadvantages. So, yeah, I've been looking at this. I have a few of my colleagues that love to send me these as kind of, their way to push back against some of the changes in grading policies as to say, here, see what you're saying is not good. So I've really excited about diving into these articles and let's hit them head on and see what happens.

Sharona: I think that's a really good idea. I think it's going to be interesting to see if the pushback is any different between our two worlds too.

So I think the articles that we're going to look at, today, focus mostly more in the K 12 world. I could be wrong, but I think the examples are more in K 12. I think that's because you just have much higher visibility there. So, let's get into it. Why don't you introduce I think you have an article in your hand, you want to tell us what you're looking at?

th,: 2023

Sharona: And it's published on WeAreTeachers.com, which we will link in the show notes.

Bosley: Absolutely. And we'll link the actual article as well. So a little bit of background about this article. It is a kind of a narrative of what happened in one particular school district that actually implemented a model of alternative grading that was really based off of Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity.

A lot of the policies, and kind of things that he brings up, they tried to adopt. And after a little bit of time with it, they've completely reverted back to traditional grading. So I want to kind of dive into some of this article and look at what caused them to do that. Was it issues with non traditional or alternative grading, or was it something else?

Sharona: Exactly, and one of the first things that this article did that I really liked is they excerpted what's really at the core of Joe Feldman's work, and I thought they did a pretty good job with this particular quote here, and I don't know if you were going to read it, but on... it says, "Accurate, bias resistant, and motivational grading practices are the core of Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity work." so I thought that that was a good sort of general statement.

Bosley: Yeah, I think that is a incredibly accurate not only of Feldman's book which again, we've stated this before, this book has come up several times in several different episodes. If you haven't already read this book, and you're interested at all with this kind of work or going down this kind of path, this is one of the books, one of those top five must read books.

And yeah, I think they do a great job of kind of summing that up. And, I think, really summing up a lot of Alternative grading. Like that's kind of the purpose is to come up with a more accurate, more bias resistant grading system that isn't grading on behavior. It's grading on actual student knowledge and outcomes.

Sharona: Exactly. So what did they do?

Bosley: So they started this work with the new superintendent and this was pre pandemic. So this district, and it's in the article, I'm not going to call out the district, but they came in with a new superintendent that was really fired up, which is great, and tried to implement this top down.

I love it when we have educational leaders that really get motivated and really want to spearhead something, but that can often backfire. And that's a lot of what happened here. This was top down." With some very basic trainings that basically happened in that summer. And I'm going to read a couple of sentences from this article.

"While the intentions of these grading practices were noble, the initial rollout lacked proper training and preparation. Teachers received pre recorded, asynchronous online sessions in July to understand the rationale. But there was zero insight into what the daily practices would look like in our classroom.

We came away assuming formative assessments were zero percent of students grades, and summative assessments would be 100%. It was like flying the plane as you were building it."

Which, by the way, is one of my favorite quotes, I had an admin that used to say that all the time.

Sharona: There, there's so much to unpack in those three sentences. I almost don't know where to start. I actually do. Teachers receiving pre recorded asynchronous online sessions. We've done so much training on this. We've trained hundreds of instructors on this. And we tried to do, actually, a asynchronous recorded. Remember, that was our first rollout when College Bridge, we had that mastery grading course, we did all those videos. I think there's a reason we do it synchronously in person now.

Bosley: Absolutely. But also what you kind of stopped at, not only were they pre recorded and asynchronous, but it was on just the rationale. It wasn't on the daily nuts and bolts. I mean, our first several episodes in this podcast were really breaking down some of the theory, but also a lot of the nuts and bolts.

It's great to have all this theory. If you don't put practice, or if you don't show how practice is put into it, yeah, the theory falls apart. And that's exactly what sounds like happened here. They have these rationale videos that maybe some people bought into, others didn't. If you're walking away thinking that standards based grading, equitable grading, whatever the alternative name you give it, is, at its core, zero percent formative assessment and 100 percent summative assessment, there is something majorly wrong with the training you've gone through.

Sharona: Well, and I think part of the issue here gets to what we've talked about, motivation. There definitely is a lot of language out there that students need a safe place to practice. And that safe place to practice and that ability to make mistakes ,and not have it hurt your grade, is absolutely part of what we're talking about with the system.

Bosley: Absolutely.

Sharona: So it's really hard to picture, if that's the case, then aren't "formative" assessments, aren't the practice stuff, zero percent of your grade? Isn't that true, if you're not supposed to count it against them?

Bosley: Well, not when, if you have just one chance at it. Just one chance at it, which is what this was sounding like. Like, their final was the summative test at the end. It was all on that. And, it led to a lot of issues. In fact, I want to read it from another part of this article about some of those issues.

"One of the big challenges was allowing students to turn in late work for extended periods, leading to apathy and a lack of urgency. With such heavy weight placed on summative assessments, the policy also caused an unexpected increase in student testing anxiety."

Okay, so you and I are from the math world. Testing anxiety ain't nothing new to us. We see it all the time with our students. I mean, you can say the word test and some of our students will start shaking.

Sharona: We had a student this week who accidentally opened one of our checkpoints too early because she was trying to do the practice problem. And literally started crying in class because she thought she had blown it and I had to go in shut the assignment and just reissue it. It was fine, but she was crying.

Bosley: But yeah, if you've got this idea that formative assessments have no bearing, and if this is how your students are feeling? Oh, I couldn't imagine. I mean, I've had a college class where my grade was made up of a midterm and a final. So I had two and that was incredibly stressful. I couldn't imagine, like, one summative assessment.

Now, we kind of talk about, I don't remember if it was with Kate or with Joe, but we talked about how our statistics class is, where all of the assessments are formative until they're not. Until you've shown us, okay, you've known enough.

But it's not that it's all summative and no formative. It's that our tests are done in such a way that it's formative, and keep growing and keep doing that feedback loop and keep improving, until you don't need to improve anymore. And that's what makes it summative is we stop once you get past our bar of what we would consider, proficient in that learning target.

Sharona: Well, and I think the other thing here is we have this dichotomy between formative and summative, which is language I don't like anyways, but we also have this sort of unspoken assumption in this article up till this point that homework is just practice.

And we were talking about it doesn't have to be. You can choose evidence of learning from many different locations, many different styles. So, there's just a lot built in here.

Bosley: And, and that's another, I'm glad you brought up the homework. That's another, I think, misconception in a lot of the articles. Because we actually read quite a few articles prepping for this.

We're not going to talk about all of them right now, obviously, but one of the big misconceptions I think that's out there is what the role of homework is. And in fact in this article it talked about homework was only 10 percent weighted in their scores. Which right there tells me they're still using weighted categories.

They really didn't go away from traditional grading. They might have incorporated some equitable practices that they got from Feldman's book. But they still are doing some sort of traditional averages and weighting average with maybe some more equitable practices. But anyways, my point about the homework is the way we define and the way we look at homework.

There's a misconception that you can't count homework. That homework is just there for students to get better at. And sometimes that is the case. But it didn't have to be. I did this training a few months back at the Pomona Colleges. And it was with some Calc and Calc 2 teachers. And we were talking about homework and this exact conversation came up about if you don't count homework, it's going to mess up how I teach right now.

That some of the types of things that they do in their homework is actually more complex than their assessments. And it's to the point to where it's so complex you couldn't really do it in a traditional sit down test environment. And I'm like, great, count that towards mastery.

If the purpose of your homework is to be able to give extended time to show mastery on a really complex task, I don't care if it's called homework because you do it at home or not. Grade it on mastery and count it. If your homework looks more like most of what my homework looks like, which is, here's some stuff for you to practice what we've been talking about to build towards mastery, then yeah, you look at that differently than you do the calc example, and you treat them very differently in a alternative grading setting, because the purpose of those assignments are drastically different. And they should be graded differently with such different purposes, in my opinion.

Sharona: Well, and I think there's another layer of homework that one of the articles I read, it was not from a math or science perspective, it was an English perspective, where they said if we don't count homework, then they don't do it, which means they don't do the reading that they need for class the next day.

And I'm going to argue that we need to not be calling all of that homework. Yes, it's done at home, but it has different needs. If you need a student to prepare for class, if you flipped your class, or you need someone to do a reading, then yeah, that not only has to be done, it does have to be done on time, or it's going to dramatically impact the student's ability to participate.

So, we need to get a much more nuanced and sophisticated conversation of what work goes on at home and why. You have before preparation stuff, you've got stuff for practicing towards building skills. And then the stuff that goes on in class needs to be a little bit more nuanced, too. Because maybe you need time to practice in class when you have a expert with you to help.

Bosley: Yeah, and that's kind of that flipped model approach anyways. But, no, I think that is absolutely the point. Is that this, what we're calling homework, and what so many of these articles and so many other pushback, they're lumping all of these different things into this, "category of homework".

No, just like with everything else in our practice, especially when we're redesigning for alternative grading, we need to really examine what we do and why we do it. What's the purpose of the course? What's the purpose of these different types of assignments?

And yes, taking that homework group and really breaking it up. Is it something to do as an extended chance of mastery? Is it building towards mastery or proficiency? What's the purpose of it? And define those different purposes in our grading architecture. Instead of calling this all homework and giving it this one big blanket meeting and then crying about how the percentages work.

Sharona: So, we've seen two problems with their implementation that they talk about here. Lacked proper training and preparation. These assumptions about formative versus summative. What else was going on with this?

Bosley: Really came out of this, and again, I'm going to read some of this is from the article. "Absolutely, the 50 percent and equitable grading are two different entities. Teaching kids we don't need to do anything to earn half credit didn't make things more equitable." And I would agree, and I've said this before, the no zeros, the case against the zero, and trying to take missing work and giving it some sort of point value was where I started my kind of grading reform process.

In fact, Joe and I started that together and led a lot of our school PDs to get away from the zero -100 point scale because of the mathematical weight it had. But that's still working within a traditional grading system, that still has all the flaws, and yes, it was a hack. No, that is not the same as equitable grading.

And if that's the only thing you're doing, I still applaud you for trying to make your grading system more equitable. Does it have some potential backfires with, like this article said, the students becoming apathetic of homework and not seeing the purpose of it, and therefore not doing it? Absolutely, you have that danger of doing it.

Now, you and I, in some of our classes, we do have homework. It's not graded on a mastery level. What motivates our students to actually do it?

Sharona: I do feel that one of my jobs as an educator is to teach students how to learn and to help, or not even just teach them, but help them discover how they learn.

So I actually have a learning outcome designed around the things you have to do to get good at something. And I usually break it into three categories. Preparation is the stuff you do before class to get ready for material. Participation is the stuff you do during class to work on it together. And practice is the stuff you do after class.

So, I have a learning outcome that is designed and written to do that. In my case, I kind of cheat the system a little bit. I do it as almost like it's a game. It's a points accumulation, you know, get enough gold coins, called points, and you get what I call sufficiency or proficiency. And it counts towards the final grade.

But that's because I've decided that one of the things I'm trying to teach is how to learn.

Bosley: And you said it counts, but is it 10%? Is it 20%?

Sharona: Well, it's one of my learning outcomes. So for statistics, it's, oh about, 7 percent because it's 1 out of 15.

Bosley: Yeah, but that's the whole point. It's not a weighted category, it's not a percentage, it is one of the many standards that is in your class.

And again, this kind of goes back to what Joe was saying, which if you have not listened to the episode on designing learning targets with Joe Zaccola, you really need to go and listen to that episode. I think how he described his learning targets and how he develops them is probably one of the best I've ever heard.

All of this starts with learning targets. So if it's important to you, and like you said, you teach freshmen in college, helping them learn how they learn is important to you. And as a freshman gen ed teacher, that makes sense. So you have a learning target for it.

Sharona: Well, and to be honest, if I were an English teacher, and I literally couldn't do my class if they didn't do the reading? Reading alone would be a learning outcome.

It just, it would be much more weighty than in my math classes just because of the type of content and the way it works.

Bosley: But that also kind of gets back to separating what we talk about with homework. We're separating that if I'm expecting reading to prepare to do a discussion, to have some sort of Socratic seminar or any kind of open discussion from student to student to enhance the overall pool of knowledge, then yeah, my students have to come in prepared.

And if they don't, then yes, it should have effects on their grade. Should it be a certain percentage? Absolutely not. But, one of the other things that I think we do in our classes, we have natural consequences that isn't necessarily grade consequences to students doing things like not doing some of the prep work or the preparation work.

Those natural consequences are they don't get some of the feedback. They don't get those stepping stones that help them build towards the mastery of the learning target that they're working on. I had this conversation earlier today with one of my colleagues. How do you make some of this stuff important to the students?

Well, first you get them to buy into those feedback loops and how important those are. Once you get the students bought into that and engaging in those feedback loops. You don't have to worry about, Oh, I've got to make homework 10, 20, 30, 40 percent, or my students won't do it. They're doing it for the feedback.

Sharona: Now, there are some hacks. For instance, in statistics, the first couple of weeks, the first couple of practice problems that we do, I do provide feedback as if it were an assessment, and I tell my students, If you do this by this date, I'm going to give you as much feedback as I would if it was your checkpoint quiz.

And they value that, and then once they learn that by doing it, even if they don't get my feedback, it's valuable, then they continue to do it on their own. Because they understand that it's the best preparation for those checkpoint quiz, is our aligned practice problems. And even once they've completed what they have to do to get that one learning outcome, they still continue to do it because they come to me and they say, wait, you mean all the points are done?

I'm like, yeah, you've got that triple P that learning outcome you're done. So here's the thing, and I literally say this very specifically to them, what have you done so far that has made you successful because if you stop doing all of these things something's not going to work and you're going to start having problems on your mastery checks.

And they go Oh, that's a really good point. I need to think about that.

Bosley: Yeah, there's rare occasion that I have students that are getting that triple P learning target that aren't getting it by a landslide. I mean, and right now, heck, half of my class already has it. Does that mean all of a sudden this last week, actually half of them had it a week ago, this week did I have about the same level of stuff turned in? Absolutely, I did. In fact, I had a little bit more, because a few other people were like, Oh, wow, you really are, you know, this is really helping you. Okay. So, my turn in rate has actually gone up, even though half my students no longer need it.

Sharona: And I think that's the key takeaway that I'm taking from this article, but also in general, is it's easy to try to implement these, and yet still be wedded to the idea of grades as motivators. And, well, they're not going to do it if they're not graded. Well, if they're not doing it because it's not graded, then you haven't helped them see why they should be doing it.

Because grades aren't actually good motivators.

Bosley: No, we've seen the research on that.

Sharona: You can get people to be automatons on that, but you can't just take away the grades and go, oh, well, that was what was the barrier for them doing their homework. No, it was probably the only reason they were doing it. Because it wasn't valuable before, it didn't help them get mastery.

But if you can explain to them how it does, but again, that takes training. And that leads me to kind of the final thing that I saw in this. The takeaway that they mentioned in this article.

Bosley: Well, hold on. But okay. Before we get there, well, maybe before we get there, or I just don't want you to steal my thunder. Cause this was my article.

Sharona: That's why I stopped there. The takeaway was...

Bosley: So I'm going to go back to the title of this. And this is actually one of the things that bothers me about a lot of these articles that I'm seeing and that people keep sending me these titles like "Equitable grading doesn't work" and this title, "No Zeros Grading is Sold as Equity Shortcut. It's Not." So these titles are absolutely sound like they're bashing any kind of alternative grading. I'm going to read from this very article exactly what the real issue is.

"We should have had a whole year learning how to implement this. Our teachers needed time to develop our lessons differently, etc., and plan how to meet our students need under this policy." This whole thing isn't about equitable grading or alternative grading being non effective. This whole article is about a bad rollout. And the fact that, and we have said this over and over, this is not something that you can start on Thursday night and plan to implement Monday morning.

This takes planning. This takes time to develop those learning targets. Again, I was doing a training today and I spent a good 15 minutes just explaining to them. A) learning targets aren't your common core state standards. B) if you shortcut this, this is the quickest way to fail. And that's exactly what happened here.

Not only did the district force the teachers to shortcut this by forcing the implementation, by not doing the training well, but not giving them the time even after the training was done to try to develop this. This takes time, it takes training, and it takes support and willingness to let it actually stand for a while.

How long of, how long were we working with the engineers at Cal State before we even tried to implement?

Sharona: It was actually a little short, it was about nine months.

Bosley: Yeah, and that ended up being too quick.

Sharona: Although it's interesting, so I'm looking at the front page of this article. And it's the headline, No Zeros Grading is Sold as an Equity Shortcut, It's Not.

So first of all, the headline's actually correct. It's not an equity shortcut. Did you notice the sub headline?

Bosley: Big Reform Requires Big Support. Period. Absolutely.

Sharona: But I didn't even see that, because it's in tiny little font.

Bosley: Yeah, you've got the title in like 20, what is that, probably 24 font? And that subtitle in like 9.

Sharona: So the point is, they actually buried the lede on this. In a way, it sounds like this article is against alternative grading, but it's actually against the equity shortcut. Which I agree, no zeros and equity are not the same thing, and it's not a shortcut to it. So, and then finally, Go ahead and tell them what the takeaway was in the whole article.

It literally has a subhead at the end of the last page. The takeaway.

Bosley: Yeah, "Takeaway: Reform needs support. I mean, that's the title of the whole last two paragraphs. Which, do we want to read the whole last two paragraphs?

Sharona: I think it's worth it.

Bosley: "Change is constant companion for teachers. And it is not that they oppose change or new policies. New interventions and reforms can hold potential, offering solutions to age old problems. However, as their experience highlights, the success of these endeavors hinge on the preparation support provided to the educators who are tasked with implementation. As we discussed last spring, the concept of equitable Equitable grading practices carries more noble intentions for grading disadvantaged students more accurately, yet is

Sharona: it's assimilation and execution necessitate a transitional period.

Bosley: Of three to five years. Yeah. This takes time folks, and if you are an admin or above, and you happen to be listening to this? First, convince people to do it, you can't mandate it, but second, get prepared to take time.

Sharona: And feel free to hire us.

Bosley: Yeah, because we need more work.

Sharona: The second article we're looking at, which is published on Substack by the Dissident Teacher, "Your Kids Aren't Learning, Mastery Based Learning and Equitable Grading Equals Fraud."

Bosley: All right. So before we get into it, when did this one come out?

th of: 2023

Bosley: Yeah. And I think we're seeing a lot of these articles recently because alternative grading, no matter what you call it, is really starting to get a little bit of momentum going that the pandemic, and having to do remote teaching and learning, really ended up being a catalyst to I think what's going to end up being quite a bit of education change and reform. From the way we do instruction, the way we incorporate technology and it looks like also some of the grading practices, which, if we have to take a silver lining from a horribly gray cloud, maybe this is what we end up getting positive out of the whole thing.

Sharona: I definitely would agree with that. And one thing that's striking me off the bat about this article compared with our last article is that both of them are not just dealing with alternative grading the way we've been talking about it, but they're bringing in the equitable grading practices from Joe Feldman's book, and they're picking up in particular on a couple of things.

So I want to read you this paragraph from this article. They do talk about grading for equity as being policy in many school districts, and he says, "Equity mandates that learners shouldn't be penalized for turning in work late or not at all. It demands that teachers give passing grades to students showing any facility with the skills primarily used in class. It offers students an overall grade based on one piece of work in a skills based classroom. It strongly encourages teachers to allow test retakes until a student shows, "mastery". Which is a more ambiguous label than it might first seem when applied in the typical American classroom."

Bosley: Oh my god, okay, where do we start?

Cause I got about 9,000 things to say about this.

Sharona: I think we should just go line by line. So it says, equity mandates that learners shouldn't be penalized for turning in work late or not at all.

Bosley: Okay, so this really does seem to be a huge misconception. Do you punish students for not turning in work?

Absolutely. I mean, is it ...

Sharona: This is going back to that grades as motivator thing, I think. Teachers seem to think that the only penalty that you can give to a student for homework that is not turned in or that is late is in a final grade and that every mistake made throughout a semester having to do with homework, that's where the penalty belongs.

But as we talked about, there are a lot of things to call homework, and some of them have real life legitimate natural consequences in the classroom if you don't do them on time. And we've talked about some of that. Why do we assume that the only penalty is a grade? Is including it in the final grade?

Bosley: Yeah. And you know, there is natural consequences for not doing homework for most students. They're not ready for the assessments. I mean, that's the point of homework. Let me, the point of the homework that I usually give, which is meant to build students levels of skills towards my proficiency level, whatever that skill might be.

But that's the point of most of my homework is to build that skill up. So if you're not doing it, you're not building that skill up. You're not getting in on the assessments. Now, does that mean I have students that can do some of some of my skills without the homework?

Yes, absolutely. And you know what? If they can do this, if they can do it at a proficient level, then why do I care that they didn't do some of the practice? Like if the point of my grade, and then we've talked about our grading philosophies before, if the point of my grade is to message a level of skills and mastery or proficiency of those skills by the end of my term, then that's what it should be doing.

And if a student has that skill, regardless of if they did all the practice or not, that's the grade they should get.

Sharona: And we did already talk about that extensively in this one. So I kind of want to just put a pin in the fact that this seems to be the number one thing people are fixated on. In these articles is that we're not penalizing students for turning in work late.

And if that is the message that's getting to students, then it's a legitimate criticism because if I'm a student and I'm told, oh, hey, there's no penalty, I'm going to have trouble turning it in. So I just think that there's a messaging issue here that we really need to look at.

I want to go to the second sentence, though. "It demands that teachers give passing grades to students showing any facility with the skills primarily used in the class." I have never given a student a passing grade for showing any facility. And we've talked about this on other episodes. I actually have a higher level of rigor and a higher level of expectation. The difference is I've built support structures to support students getting to that.

Bosley: Oh yeah, there are students, especially in my Algebra 2 class, the last time I did that, or I know in your Linear Algebra, that would have gotten Cs and probably even Bs and maybe higher for work that Would not be acceptable now.

I mean, just plain and simple that you could have been playing the partial credit partial points game and easily done well enough to get a B or C that now just wouldn't cut it at all.

Sharona: I think one of the differences with this article, though, that I do want to be aware of, this is this teacher's perceptions.

And if this is this teacher's perceptions, it might not be an incorrect perception because, as we've discussed, if you're implementing this top down and you're trying to condense what we spend 30 hours training faculty on just to start and you're like, Hey, we're going to give two 45 minute prerecorded presentations.

Then yeah. What are you going to say to teachers? You're going to say, Oh, you can't. penalize them. You have to, if they show any facility, that's good enough. Like this is a dumbing down of the nuance conversation. And I think that's a big part of the problem.

Bosley: Yeah. And if this was his experience, the first part of his article, he talks about visiting a school.

If this was the experience then yeah. Especially that very next line. "It offers students an overall grade based on one piece of work in a skill based classroom." None of my stuff is based off of one piece. And nowhere in any of the alternative grading like philosophies, does it ever say you have to base it on just if the student does it one time, no matter what kind of thing it was, that that has to be acceptable.

Sharona: I just wnat to correct us about one thing. I just realized we're saying his, the dissident teacher is actually anonymized, so we don't actually know if it's a him or a her.

Bosley: So if you read that first line, I think this is written by multiple people because it says equitable grading practices summarized beautifully here by fellow dissedent teacher.

So I don't know if that is just this name that they put is someone that follows the dissedent teacher or it kind of sounds like to me that there might be multiple people that write under the same title.

Sharona: So I think we're going to switch to their. For our pronouns because you're right, if it's multiple people, any one article could be written by one person or multiple people.

So apologies for those of us that made an old fashioned assumption, but let's go ahead and switch to that.

So the next sentence says, "It strongly encourages teachers to allow test retakes until a student shows mastery, which is a more ambiguous label than it might at first seem when applied in the typical American classroom."

I feel this is a very legitimate criticism, in a poor implementation. It is not a fundamental principle of alternative grading that you need to use the word mastery, number one, and that you shouldn't be clearly labeling. What it takes to meet the different criterias

Bosley: Yeah, go pull one of Joe Zeccola's proficiency scales and tell me that there is any ambiguity in what his levels of proficiency are.

Sharona: The other thing I say often in my classes, when I write my learning outcomes, the learning outcome, and the standard that you need to meet to have a successful attempt, may actually be less clear to a student before they've mastered the content because my learning targets are written in such a way that you actually need to understand the math to be able to interpret the learning target. But once they've mastered it, it should be clear to them.

So there's a little bit of, it's not that it's ambiguous, but you're not going to know if I say, explain what a vector space is. You're not going to know before you learn what a vector space is that you can explain it. But once you know it, then yeah, it should be clear to you, as a student, whether or not you can explain it.

Yeah, I want to go on one more paragraph. This is a very strong statement. They say "it's just more fraud fraud dressed up with good grades. So parents won't complain and teachers won't have to tackle the Sisyphean task of remediating what these policy changes, dumbing down K 12 education, have wrought on millions of American kids."

So another article that came out just last week that is not on this particular podcast is an article I was quoted in. And in that article, there's a physics professor from the university of North Carolina quoted who says that their class is now more rigorous. That's exactly what I experienced. My classes are not dumbed down.

They're actually at a much higher level of mathematical accuracy and understanding than I was ever able to do. And yet my grades are better.

Bosley: Yeah, exactly. I would love to see what evidence that they have of that statement. I mean, is this just a personal opinion? If not, what evidence do we have?

Show me that. Show me the dumbing down of K 12 education right now.

Sharona: So, unfortunately, I think I have an example for you from this teacher's experience. Is, that is this issue with credit recovery? So for those of our higher ed educators, could you explain what credit recovery is?

Bosley: So credit recovery is when after a student has taken a course and has received either a failing grade of an F or a D, having some sort of opportunity to make up that grade.

That is not typically in a traditional classroom. Oftentimes these programs are online, self paced, asynchronous type programs. Not always, but usually, sometimes they are more of a, okay, here's a collection of "the core standards of the class". Here's a packet, go and do it and bring it back and we'll raise your grade.

So those are some kind of credit recovery programs, but that's what credit recovery is. It's exactly what it sounds like, some sort of opportunity to increase one's grade after the semester is already over.

Sharona: So is the presence of these programs, a possibility of contributing to the so called dumbing down of the K 12 education?

Bosley: I do not disagree with that at all. And in fact, one of the very last lines of this article, it reads, "A parent of a student at my old site, recently admitted to me, sheepishly, that her son had earned D's in his U. S. history course. He was offered online credit recovery to raise his grade to a University of California A - G compliant A, B, or C.

In three hours on a Saturday, he retook the entire course and replaced his D's with A's. Okay, so is this real? Yes. Do I have issues with this? Yes. Does this have anything to do with alternative grading? Absolutely not. This is a problem with K 12 education and especially 9 12 education. This has nothing to do with the point of his article, having issues with alternative grading.

Sharona: So I'm going to play devil's advocate on this for a moment. I'm going to try to take the argument I think they would take here, which is if students are not being penalized for late homework ,and they don't recognize in time that by not doing the homework, they're going to fail, because we've talked about the natural penalty for some of this is that they don't do well.

Again, if the students are getting the misconception that they don't need to do the work and they find out too late and they fail. Is this incentivizing even more credit recovery?

Bosley: Okay, but you have that now in traditional grading. I mean, not doing homework is not a new phenomenon. It's not something that is unique to alternative grading.

In fact, I am a high school math teacher and have been for 19 years. I've only been using alternative grading practices for, when did we start in the

Sharona:: 2018

Bosley:: 2018

in fact I get more homework turned in now doing alternative grading because I've made my students understand the value of the feedback loop and understanding how the homework isn't there to do it just to do it. It's there to build your skills towards whatever we're working on with that learning target.

Sharona: I think you just hit on the key point though. And this is the point we've made previously in this episode. The misconception, the pushback that we're getting is from teachers who are absolutely convinced that if you don't put a numeric zero in that grade book for that piece of homework that students will absolutely do more late homework or do more not homework.

And that's what we're trying to say. Grades are not the motivator you think they are. Instructors are convinced that if we don't grade it, they won't do it. But there's other ways to motivate and it's that conversation.

Bosley: Yeah and there's all kinds of research out there that shows negative grades do not motivate.

If you take a student that is highly motivated and has intrinsic motivation and they get a C yes, they will be motivated to work their butts off to get the A's that they're more accustomed to. But taking that same kind of mentality to a student that isn't motivated, that right now doesn't see the purpose or point of school or your class and trying to do that same thing actually has the opposite effect. It shuts them off even more.

Sharona: So there's one more thing that I wanted to comment about this article. Which is at the very end, right before the quote that you read, they say.

Bosley: Where I was going to read that too.

Sharona: No, this is my article. I get to read this.

"I would be remiss if I didn't also let you know about test corrections. In this process, the teacher returns the test to the student and allows them to take it home, go over all of their wrong answers and write a short explanation as to why they missed the question. Besides enabling future cheating, unless the teacher is going to revise their tests every year, most teachers don't, this is little to provide the additional practice with the information a student needs to perform the skill or retain the knowledge.

Test corrections turn into another worksheet graded just as cursorily, it's rarely a springboard for reteaching."

I completely, so entirely disagree with everything about this paragraph. I want to burn the paper it is written on.

Bosley: On on about 15 different levels. Do I disagree with this?

Sharona: So let's break it down.

What's the first one? We'll take turns. What's your first thing that you disagree with?

Bosley: Okay, so it's not the one that kind of burns me the most, but it's the one that just popped out the first. "Besides enabling cheating, unless teachers are going to revise their test every year, most teachers don't."

Again, prove that statement. Show me the most teachers don't. Yeah, do some recycle? Of course. Most though? And I mean, I don't know about you, but how many versions of our statistics test do we make?

Sharona: 900 each semester.

Bosley: And we change those, we change those every scenario.

Sharona: Every semester we generate a new bank and or make small edits to the actual questions.

Bosley: So. Not only are our students getting different versions of the same test as their neighbor, they're getting changed every time we do it, and they're getting changed every year.

Sharona: Yes. But I'm so glad you took that one because I desperately need the next one.

Bosley: Okay, what's yours?

Sharona: "Little to provide the additional practice with the information a student needs to perform the skill or retain the knowledge."

Test corrections are the best way, in my opinion, to attempt to learn from your mistakes.

back to Dr. Bloom's book from: 1960

Sharona: Israeli dancing.

Bosley: Okay. The first time you got on the dance floor, were you as good as you are now? Did you mess up?

Sharona: Nope. I was six.

Bosley: Okay. How did you learn? You went out, you probably stumbled around a little bit. You had some people help you. You got some corrections. You practice. You physically ran into a few people. That's how we learn. That's how we learn.

Sharona: By the way, I've never been graded on Israeli dance, just saying. So here's the thing, and you've heard me tell this story, I have two children, they're in college now, and I would ask them when they were in high school and middle school, and my kids went to an affluent school district, rated very, very highly, the math department was supposedly so great, and they would come home, having done poorly on a math test, and I'd say, what did you get wrong?

They'd say, I don't know. And so I'd say, well, do you have the test for me to look at? No, the teacher kept it.

Okay. Contact the teacher. Can I have the test so that I can look it over and discuss it with him? No, I don't release those. Well, I need to see the test. Well, you need to make an appointment.

So I'd have to make an appointment to go in to see the teacher with my student, so they had to get called out of another class. And one time I was like, okay, I have to go over the test with my kid. And I thought, okay, this would be a great time to work with the teacher to see how the process works for reviewing mistakes.

The teacher walked out of the room and I sat with my son during school hours during one of his other classes and literally went problem by problem. What did you do wrong here? And my son was at the age of 13 saying things like, Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I forgot the domain restriction on a trig function, like very sophisticated mathematical knowledge that that teacher could have learned that my student knew.

And instead, I was the one having those aha moments with him. And to this day, it's been eight years. It's still ticks me off.

Bosley: Yeah. This idea that learning from our mistakes is not a springboard for reteaching or for relearning is just asinine. I mean, can a teacher give bad feedback? Yes. We did a whole episode on feedback and what effective feedback looks like.

So can feedback be completely thrown away? Yes, absolutely. That's true with traditional grading too, though. I mean, we, in that episode, I kept talking about how feedback is not anything new. I've been giving feedback on my assessments since day one. This idea of feedback and corrections doesn't lead to reteaching is just, I can't even put words to how ridiculous that is.

Sharona: I completely agree. It's asinine. It really is.

Bosley: All right. And then my turn, I get the next one.

Sharona: Yes.

Bosley: This last line, "how could it be done with large numbers of students who are never properly incentivized to study for the exams in the first place?" So again, huge assumption about students not being incentivized to study and to prepare. Again, that is completely on the teacher and the environment that they've set up in the room that has nothing to do with traditional versus nontraditional grading, A. B, you want to know how this is done in large classrooms are done with large amounts of students. I do think we've talked to people that have done this with classes of sizes of 300 and above.

In fact, in the grading conference for at least the last two, maybe the last three years, we've had sessions on how to do this with large classrooms. And we've had people come in, not in theory, come in with their actual practice that do these with classes up to 300 and above.

Sharona: So, to start to wrap this up, these are just two articles, but I really feel like what I took away from really diving into these critiques is number one, the number of unsupported, extremely strong statements that are being made to critique this really need to be challenged.

If someone says to you, It doesn't work because of X, Y, or Z, let's stop. Don't just go past that and say, Yes, it does. Let's stop with X, Y, or Z and say, Okay, are you really saying what I think you're saying? Are you really saying it works for no one? Are you really saying it always is like this or it never is like that?

I think that's really important. And secondly, let's not confuse alternative grading, which is based on those four pillars, with poor implementations.

Bosley: With not just poor implementations, but also with doing these kind of traditional hacks, where you do something like counting missing work as 50%, or doing away with late policies.

Those are meant to make traditional grading more equitable. I don't disagree with that. That's not what I'm saying. Please don't misunderstand. But, that's still... don't send Feldman. These are most, a lot of those come from Feldman too.

Sharona: Okay, well the case against the, Oh, I guess the case against percentage grades was Guskey.

Bosley: Yes.

Sharona: Okay.

Bosley: But like that one article laid out all these things that Feldman talks about. That's ways to hack traditional grading. That's not alternative grading. So we do need to separate those two things. And definitely none of these articles, and some of the other articles that we may do at a later time definitely confuse those, especially I think the late policy and the zero policy.

Second, really big takeaway from me. That is exactly what we've been saying. This takes time, it takes planning, it takes support. It takes a long time to do this.

Sharona: I have a slight edit to that.

Bosley: Okay. Hit it.

Sharona: If you're trying to do it at a systemic level, it takes a long time. Keep in mind if there is someone out there who's really raring to try it It's not the end of the world to jump off the deep end. You're gonna screw it up, but you're probably not going to do any damage.

Well, come on. I changed in 10 days the first time.

Bosley: Okay but how long did it take us to get it decent.

Sharona: Oh, absolutely. It took several years.

Bosley: It takes time to, I mean.

Sharona: But I don't want people to feel like if you're ready to try, please try and then email us and ask for help. Like, I'm totally good with that.

Bosley: But if this is at a school level or a district level.

Sharona: Or even a PLC level.

Bosley: You know, that's a good point. Even a PLC team level, it's going to take time to do it. If you're willing to crash and burn, you know what, jump in the deep end. That's exactly what you did. And you took a lot of people with you, which was great, but it still, it took us a while of trial and error to get it to where it was something close to what it's supposed to be.

Sharona: And I do want to say that I say that I did it very fast because I did. However, I did it in large part because I stole the hubcaps.

Bosley: Yes.

Sharona: I did already have Kate Owens and Robert Talbert and Dave Clark and Josh Bowman who'd already converted the classes that I was working with. So, I don't want someone to really feel they can go start to finish in three weeks.

That being said, if you're a math educator out there, there's probably a course already done. We can probably get you one. So feel free to reach out on the website www.thegradingpod.Com. We will connect you with people. We know people in English who've done this. We've got some great resources.

Bosley: Great science teachers

temp: Yeah, great science ones individual teachers. Absolutely. We can hook you up. Schools PLCs admins, we've got some great people we can hook you up. It's going to take time.

Bosley: Yep, and then one other kind of last thing that, and you might end up getting mad at me about this, but I do think that also what you were talking about with these conversations with making these statements and then I really think this, a lot of this goes back to some big messaging that Jesse had in his episode and the point of his, he said a big point of his book was you agree with us or disagree with us.

Let's have a real conversation though. Let's have a critical look at this and stop making these broad claims like a lot of these articles do. Let's sit down and let's have some real discussion. And regardless of where you sit, I think that makes everyone's better. Whether you stay with traditional, you go with alternatives.

And that being said, If you know any of these articles, if you actually had any part of writing any of these articles, I'd love to invite you on and let's, not a fight or anything, but have a real sit down discussion and debate and look at these and let's have that critical conversation that Jesse talks so much about that we need in education from K through higher ed.

Sharona: And that's the point is we've now been sitting here talking about this for an hour. We talk about it literally every day of our lives. That's why we have a podcast. We're trying to make the space for these conversations. More than what's put on a piece of paper, in a newspaper article, or a tweet, or a Facebook post.

Person to person, teacher to teacher, teacher to admin, admin to higher ed. Please join us for this conversation because it is so critical and so necessary for our students.

Bosley: So, with that being said, I want to thank everyone. I'm curious to see how our audience reacts to this. I'm hoping it's good and we can.

Sharona: Hopefully they're still listening.

Bosley: Yeah. Hopefully it's good and we can have some more of these because we definitely have a lot more articles that we could talk about.

Sharona: Thank you very much, everyone. We'll see you next time.

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.

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

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