108 - The Importance of Purpose: Getting Unstuck in the Course Redesign Cycle

Episode 108 • 5th August 2025 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

108 - The importance of purpose

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Sharona: And, we do have some outreach to some of the teachers we're gonna get them on. But it occurs to me that one of the things that Doug talked about is how they manage to come to common principles or skills. Their learning outcomes are uniform across the whole school, I believe. And it's because they have a clear purpose that all the courses are supposed to support these fundamental learner development ideas. So it does take time. It does take leadership, and I think this is an area where it may be very different from K 12 to higher ed. Because you have an at least an opportunity to get building wide.

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

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

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

Sharona: Well, I'm wondering if, as people listen to these different weekly episodes, they can tell how tired I am by what it sounds like, because I am very, very, very tired today, but I'm hoping my voice is not reflecting that and I'm tired for a good reason, but I'm still extremely tired.

Boz: Yeah. How are things going at the theater ?

Sharona: Oh, we had this incredible show last night. We produced Legally Blonde Junior with a group of 37, 11 to 17 year olds. 36 of whom were female and one guy. And it was absolutely spectacular. I was working with an incredible dream team of professionals. The kids did a fabulous job, but I am absolutely wiped out. And how about you? You had a big week.

Boz: Well, I don't know if I call it a big week, but Yeah, with my position that I transitioned to last year I'm actually now on B basis, which means my school year started earlier. So I actually have started back already.

Sharona: And you had a whole sequence of really good t-shirts on for this week. I wanna compliment you on the variety of math t-shirts that I got to see this week.

Boz: Before we get too much into today's episode, though we do our audience a little bit of explanation and apology.

Sharona: Do you want me to explain the mix up or are you gonna do it?

Boz: Yeah. 'cause I think you have a little bit better idea of what actually happened.

Sharona: Yes. So typically we get our episodes done and posted about a day before they're set to go live and then our podcast early Tuesday morning starts to push itself out. I did not quite get my part of it completed, so I did get it completed Tuesday morning. But the way that the settings on the podcast worked, when we launched it, for some reason, only 38 people were able to view it and download it. And we didn't realize, even though it was published and live, it was not sending it out to any of the podcast players until, I think Friday morning. Is that when they fixed it or was it yesterday or Thursday?

Boz: No, I, I think it was.

Sharona: No, I think it was yesterday. Was it yesterday? Yeah. So yesterday as of the day we're recording, we realized this was going on. We made some technical settings changes and reset the launch date, and so it did finally launch, but I we're so sorry to anyone who tried to listen to it between Tuesday and this Friday. And I did see a bump in the previous week's numbers, so maybe people were listening to that one. But we're sorry it was late.

Boz: Yeah, so we're talking about episode 107 had a little bit of technical issues on that one, so it was later than normal coming out. We do apologize for that, but we also want to thank all, all of our listeners something that's been going on for the last several months that is just blowing us away. Our last four months, each month has been the best month we have ever had, and we have for the last four months, consistently beat the previous month, even though that was the highest month and for the month of July. Even with that episode 107 having some technical issues, we beat our best month by almost 200 downloads. So even though we've been doing this for a little while now, in fact we've been doing this for over two years. It still just blows us away that people actually listen and the number of people listening and the fact that it's growing. We just, we wanna thank all of you out there that are listening. Any of you that have not only listened but passed the word and spread the word to other people, it's just, absolutely amazing. To see the response and how these numbers are growing. It's, it really is just a great feeling. So.

Sharona: And I wanna add, and I'm gonna speak for myself and then Bosley, you can speak for you. If you hear my voice or you see me at a conference and you're like, oh my gosh, please feel free to come up and talk to me. I'm not like some famous star that wants to have my privacy, especially at if I'm at a academic conference, because that's really fun. I like it when people are like, I feel like I know you. That's awesome.

Boz: Well, speaking of conferences, weren't you just at one?

Sharona: I was, which is why this occurred to me. I was trying to find the entrance to the conference and someone reached out, was like, Hey, do you need help? And I said, yes. And I said what I needed. They're like, oh, you're Sharona, and so that was kind of fun. But yes, I was the last weekend at the Transforming Undergraduate Education in the Molecular Life Sciences conference. It's a conference of the A-S-B-M-B , American Society for Biology and Molecular Biology. And this year it was held at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and I was one of their plenary speakers. So I really had a amazing time and, and that's kind of what's inspired a bit of this podcast today.

Boz: Yeah. 'cause you said there, you know, despite, you know, there were lots of interesting things, including, like you said earlier, some people actually recognizing you by your voice, which, yeah, I've not experienced that 'cause I've not been able to go to a lot of the conferences that you have lately. But that. That sounds like it would've been just so cool that that had to be a great feeling.

Sharona: It was, and I wanna thank the people at TUEMLS, that's what they call it for having me and hosting me, and what a amazingly wonderful group of people.

Boz: So, so about how big of a conference was this?

Sharona: So this was an in-person conference. I think they had about 130 people. So it's a decently sized conference while being on one of the smaller conference sizes. It's not one of those that gets a thousand, 1500. Or even 10,000 attendees at some major convention center. It was big enough to have a very robust discussion while being small enough to really get to meet and spend time with people.

Boz: Yeah, that sounds so cool. And you did, so there was a couple of things that came up. So, do you wanna tell about some of the interesting things that came up as you sat down and talked to some of the other participants at this conference?

Sharona: Absolutely. So first of all, I know that several of you are listening, so thank you for sharing your stories with me. I'm not going to disclose anybody's identity 'cause I don't have permission to do that. So this is gonna be a little bit more high level, but there were several different opportunities to talk about grading that came up in this conference. The conference was Thursday afternoon or evening Friday, Saturday, and a little bit on Sunday, and I gave the plenary talk Saturday morning. But even on Friday, there were opportunities where people could go to these sessions that had alternative grading as their highlight or their focus. So I went to those sessions and I had a number of conversations with people that were very eager to try alternative grading. And a couple people in particular have worked very, very, very hard to try to get their courses set up for alternative grading for this fall. And they were kind of stuck. And so they had asked me and a couple of other people who were acting as mentors in the alt grading world, some of whom I wanna invite on the podcast, you know who you are, and, they were kind of stuck. Like they had done a ton of work, but they were what we would call spinning. Going a little bit in mental circles about they couldn't quite complete their grading architecture and they were struggling to figure out why. And as I sat and talked with them, it really became apparent that there was a real challenge with the very beginning of the course redesign cycle. So I thought I might walk people through what our course redesign cycle looks like at a high level real quick, and then talk about those first three sections.

Boz: Okay. And we've talked about this in more detail on previous episodes, but we really wanted to kind of revisit it because of that interaction that you had and kind of analyze and break that down a little bit. So why don't you go ahead and give us kind of just the 30,000 foot overview.

Sharona: Sure. So as we've talked about a lot, we have the four pillars that are the foundations of an alternative grading system. But the question becomes, in what sequence do you attempt to address each of the pillars? So we came up with a course redesign cycle. We'll link it in the show notes. But basically you usually would enter your course redesign cycle thinking about the content of the course. And by that we mean like the looking at it from a airplane level view. Like if we look at calculus, I'm not thinking about the content as derivatives or integrals or these typical things. I'm really thinking about if I were having to describe to someone who didn't know anything about my course, what my course is about.

So for me, for calculus two, it's the mathematics of accumulation, the mathematics of the infinite, and the mathematics of motion in space. That's the content of my course. And so you start with your content, and then you go to the purpose of your course. So you have sort of a general idea of what the course does, but why are you teaching it where you're teaching it? Then we go from there to developing the learning outcomes. From there, we recommend think about the proficiency scales for those learning outcomes. Then you're gonna go to assignments and assessments and start to think about how you might gather your evidence of learning, how you might then allow for people to retet demonstrating that evidence of learning. And then from there, define what does it mean to complete a learning outcome. Then we would go to, how are you going to track this and maybe build buy-in? And then how you're gonna wrap that up into a final grade. Now, this is not a sequence, it's a cycle. Because as you go through each of these nine steps on our cycle, you go in and out all the time and jump back and forth between them.

Boz: Yeah. And we often refer to the last chunk of that process as the grading architecture. How are you going to assess, how are you going to score those? And we've got several episodes that not only talk in detail about it, but different people on looking at different ways that they do this. And honestly, a lot of the differences between the different forms of alternative grading, specs versus standards based versus contract. A lot of it really boils down to how you do the architecture.

Sharona: Exactly, and I think that what happened, when I was talking to these people, is a lot of times when you're actually redesigning a course, instead of designing a course from scratch, you actually have a lot of content that you've historically used, whether they're assessments or assignments or projects. So you have a little bit of a better sense of that grading architecture. So there's a temptation, I think, to think about how would I use my existing stuff? And I think that that's one reason that people tend to gravitate towards that part of the cycle and kind of get trapped in it and spinning around in it.

Boz: Yeah, and I've talked a lot about this especially with my K 12 colleagues that wanting to jump directly to the architecture. Not just the architectural decisions, but really how you do that logistically, like in an LMS system and trying to take what they already have and modify and slap this paint of alternative grading on it. And that's a recipe for disaster. That really doesn't work. Alternative grading, it's more than just changing your grading. You really do need to start at the beginning. And yes, a lot of this is a cycle. And yes, you'll go and make changes to things previous that you've done when you go to the next steps. But starting with the architecture is a really good way to mess this up.

Sharona: And I have two things in mind, my personal experience, that I wanna share the difference, and I'll just go ahead and bring it up 'cause you already threatened to bring it up instead of me. But I have two different courses that I have gone through the course redesign cycle that I wanted to compare and contrast. One of them is my history of math class, which I had no concept of that class when I taught it. I had never taught it. I had never taken it. I didn't have a really good definition from the materials that were handed to me. I was basically starting from a blank slate. And then there's pre-calculus, which I'm currently attempting to start a redesign process on. Which is an existing running course that has assignments, that has assessments, that actually has some learning outcomes, and that I went through a redesign process this year with. And the difference between those two courses and designing them is in those first three steps, the content, the purpose, and the learning outcomes.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So for when I started looking at history of math. I started with your basic Google search. What's a history of math class? 'cause again, never taught it, never took it. So I'm like, is it a history class? Is it a math class? What am I expected to cover? And then tied to that, what do I want the students to get out of it? What's the purpose? And so it took me like a month to make that decision because it turns out there's entire academic journals, dedicated to the history of math that say, Hey, this could be a freshman level intro seminar. This could be a senior culmination seminar. And your senior seminar, they've taken all your advanced math classes. You might be doing a lot more math. Then a first semester freshman who is just starting pre-calculus.

Boz: See, and, and that that right there is also, and you didn't kind of mention it before, but that is a really important piece. When you're redesigning a a course, when you're looking at the purpose, it's also looking at the audience. Who are your students? Where is this course part of a sequence? If it is, what part of the sequence? Is it the beginning, the middle, the end? You know, like pre-calc is part of a sequence that ends in whatever the last calc classes at your institution, whether that's a calc three, a calc four, a multi-variable calc, whatever you call it. But that's part of a sequence. Those things are another part that is extremely important to look at when you're designing this because you said you've never taken a math history course. I have, as a student. I've never taught it, but I did take it when I was doing my undergrad, getting my Bachelor's of science in math education. It was a junior level course that we had to take it. So we had taken the calc sequence. We had taken a few other courses, but we hadn't necessarily taken some of the really advanced, like the non-Euclidean geometries or the abstract algebras. So it kind lived in the middle of there. And thinking back to that class, had I tried to take your course, 'cause yours was designed differently, I probably would've struggled in your course because I didn't have the math background yet. 'cause when you did it, you did it as a senior level course, right?

Sharona: I did, but it's an elective that a lot of our computer science majors take to complete a math minor. So I actually did not have confidence that any given upper division course was gonna be in their background. So I really actually leaned into the history side and I tried to do more fundamental mathematics, like arithmetic and things like that, and delving into the different types of number systems, as opposed to relying on advanced level mathematics to do the math. So I don't think so. I think you actually would've done very, very well.

And again, it was because I did not have any confidence that any given student had done real analysis, had done modern algebra, had done non-Euclidean geometry, because there were no prerequisites to this course. I don't even think calculus was a prerequisite to the course. So I didn't have that confidence, so I went more history and specifically looking at the history of what I would call fundamental mathematics. Binary operations, bases, when did the Cartesian coordinate system come into existence? Things like that.

Boz: Yeah. So when we're talking about , thinking about the purpose of the course, these are some of the things that we're talking about. Really looking at where it lives what kind of sequence, if any, what kind of prereqs, if any, is it a prereq to any kind of course. That's all really gonna help set that purpose, which will then really help you with the learning targets.

Sharona: And in the case of a couple of the courses I was talking to people about, it was an upper division course in a science. It was for majors, but also for affiliated majors. So remember this was a conference for biology and molecular biology. So even though they're related, they're not actually the same major. And so this particular course was the first in a two sequence, sequence, but the second part was only taken by their own majors. So you had these two big audience, their majors and the affiliated majors. They both needed some core content, but their direction after the course was quite different.

Boz: Okay, see, and again, that's a really important piece to know because those two distinct different audiences or students, they're gonna need something different out of the course. They're gonna need some of the same stuff.

Sharona: Which is one of our big challenges with pre-calculus and calculus is that the path afterwards is different. So that led us to a conversation, well, could you have some core learning outcomes that are sort of the pieces that both groups may need? And then have some differentiated learning outcomes and tell each student to choose one of these two pathways through the course. Or three pathways where you have to get this core group of learning outcomes, but then for some of your more advanced learning outcomes, you could choose to go down a path that is more your major directed. 'Cause they're closely enough affiliated that the content is handleable by the instructor. So they can go down, if you had a lot of, for example, they have a lot of pre-med students, but not everybody's a pre-med student. So you could have pre-med students who want to go down more of a route that might take them towards what they perceive their future career to be. And then if you have a group of essentially research scientist people who wanna go into the research science direction, they could do a different type of project. And both of these projects can meet these advanced learning outcomes just from a different angle. And so that really just kind of got me thinking about how to help people realize that this is where they're stuck.

Boz: So, let's back up just a little bit and again. Mm-hmm. Because we don't have permission to actually give details about their names or anything, which we've gotta start doing. When we're at these conferences and things, we've gotta say, Hey, is it okay if we.

Sharona: Because. Right. But the problem is I don't want people to. Think that every time they talk to me, they're gonna end up on the podcast. Oh yeah. Because that could be weird. So I might, I'll ask specific people, and I'm sure that the person I'm thinking of probably is fine with it, but I don't know. Yeah. But where did you wanna go with that?

Boz: So why were they stuck? Like, what was, because you said they had done a lot of work, but they were spinning. Where did they get stuck? So.

Sharona: What happened is I sat down with another person and we were looking at this document they had prepared that had lots and lots and lots of detail, and I just asked the question. I said, okay, before I can analyze this detail, what's the purpose of your course? What are you teaching? And they were not able to clearly articulate that. Now, obviously I'm not in their major, right? Yeah, but being able to say, well, this content is a major course that has these three big buckets. Or that it's supposed to be in sequence to this next course. Or being able to have that elevator speech, like I do with, with history of math, or the linear algebra course or any of those. I can talk to anybody regardless of their math background and be able to say this two or three sentences. I feel it's pretty important that you have that off the tip of your tongue. This is the purpose of my course. This is what my course is supposed to do. And for whom?

Boz: See, and I would agree with you, it's important to be able to do that, not to actually be able to do it. I don't know how many times you've been in an elevator and had a elevator speech about, you know, algebra two or linear algebra. But it's important to have it, not to have it, but because that is what's going to lead you to really being able to define learning targets, that's gonna meet those expectations, those goals, that purpose of your course.

Sharona: Well, and that's where I wanted to contrast my history of math with the pre-calculus that I'm struggling with right now, because that is the conversation we're having in the department right now among different redesign teams. We did it this entire past year. What's the story of pre-calculus? Because if you ask that to most math instructors, they will tell you it's to prepare students for calculus, which is why it is pre-calculus. Yeah. But there's two problems with that statement. Number one, I personally don't think a course that its entire purpose for being is to get someone ready for another course. Because not everybody goes on. So I feel like if the only point of a course is to prepare students for another course, there's no hook for the students.

Boz: Well, but even with that, even with saying it's to prepare you for calculus, what does that mean? Like what prepare you how in what way? And what do you mean prepare you for calculus? I'm sorry. There are whole conferences on what should be and should not be in calculus. Like this word calculus isn't written in stone, and everyone know exactly what that's supposed to be either.

Sharona: Right? So if you ask that question to someone who says, prepare them for calculus, the next statement usually is, well prepare students to succeed in calculus. How do we define success? A passing grade.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: Okay, so we're back to grading. Lovely. Shock, on this podcast, but here's the other problem, even granting all that. Let's say you actually agree that pre-calculus should prepare students for calculus, no matter what it means, and it should prepare them to succeed in calculus. Here's the problem, statistically it doesn't. It doesn't. Most pre-calculus courses, as designed, are not strongly correlated enough with success in calculus that California, as part of AB 1705, a law on the community colleges has said, unless you can actually prove that students do better in calculus having taken pre-calculus, you cannot require it as a prerequisite.

Boz: Yeah. Which, when I was teaching at Santee, I never taught calculus. Even though I would've loved to, I never did. We only had a couple sections of it and there were lots of other teachers that, you know, felt very strongly about it. But I would rather teach pre-calculus 'cause I thought it was the harder of the two courses. And I always told my students, this might say pre-calculus. This is really calc appreciation. 'cause this class is going to make you, when you go to calculus, go, oh wow, it was that easy. All the stuff that we did in Precalc.

Sharona: But to get back to where we're at, though, I am struggling to get people to agree on the purpose, especially because I don't think that that should be the purpose. When I started doing my research about pre-calculus, there are actually stories you can tell about pre-calculus that both A, make it a valuable course in its own right and B, actually help students succeed in calculus if they understand pre-calculus from this lens.

Boz: And again, gives you that launching point to really be able to define your learning targets.

Sharona: That's where we're playing with this. When you're spinning. My experience, both personally and with the people I'm talking to, is that if you're struggling to, how do I calendar this? How do I do this, how do I wrap it up to a grade? That's the first part of of the challenge is your story may not be clear enough because that's gonna impact your learning outcome design.

Now there's something though that is actually at the end of the cycle, but since it's a cycle, it's also the step right before you start looping the cycle around again, that I also wanted to bring up, is that this also ties into what do you intend to use if you have to, to distinguish a student who got an A from a student who got a B. Because if you don't know that piece , that could also impact your purpose. If your purpose is to prepare a research scientist, for example, there may be a qualitative difference, not just a quantitative difference in how they perform on the learning outcomes.

Boz: Yeah, and like you said earlier, if you're in a situation where you've got distinctive differences in the groups of students taking the course and what they're wanting to get out, or the path that they're going to go after this course diverges into different pathways. Then, like you said kind of earlier, should that be part of the consideration of that distinction between an A and a B? If we're in a course that has a divergent path afterwards, does your A have to mean exactly the same thing as my A if our pathways are gonna diverge afterwards?

Sharona: Exactly. So I feel like the big holes that I'm seeing, people are spending a lot of time from the part of the cycle that is proficiency scales to assignments, assessments to retakes, to completion, to progress tracking, and they keep looping around in that half of the redesign cycle without really delving into those other two pieces. So I think that's really important.

Boz: I've kind of said this before. That's one of the biggest issues I see at the K 12 world. People wanting to shortcut this process either by saying, I already know my learning targets, it's the state standards, or wanting to just take what they do and slap on this feel of alternative grading without really doing this kind of work. And I've worked with some groups last year that really were like, yeah, yeah, we do alternative grading. And then would ask them, okay, what are your learning targets? Well, my learning targets are the seven units. Like, wait, wait, what? And then they were struggling to try to find ways to really assess and reassess without just saying, well, I did this and I'm gonna make them do some practice problems and then they get a second chance at the exact same thing. There was no other creative ways because they really didn't have learning targets. And I've said this before, there was a group of people that took Joe's really well-defined class that I wouldn't say he's perfected 'cause I don't know if we've ever perfected anything but he had got that to a solid place. He'd been doing it for a couple years. He'd made some major adjustments. He had it at a really high functional place and a group of other English teachers tried to pick it up and mimic it exactly. And almost every one of them failed at it. Because they didn't take the time to look at the purpose, and they didn't understand the purpose. They were just trying to mimic the architectural piece. And what was even worse is it was very painful for some of those teachers. Like they had really bad years that year because they were just overloading themselves and it was really frustrating and and sad to watch.

Sharona: Well, and I wonder, because my brain usually stays in the higher ed world, do you think that there might be more or less resistance to thinking about the purpose of your course in K 12? I mean, if you teach English one, English two, or English nine, English 10. Is there just a resistance to, well, the purpose of my course is to teach ninth graders English?

Boz: I think there is, but not for that reason. Okay. I think there's a resistance to do that because there's a lack of time to do that. And I've stated this before, this idea of, okay, we're gonna do an intro PD this Wednesday, we're gonna do a follow up PD next Wednesday and the Monday after that, we wanna see it in your class. I mean, that really is the mentality of a lot of PDs that I've experienced in my 20 year career teaching in L-A-U-S-D. That was the experience that I saw and I've heard from a lot of other teachers. I won't go as far as to say it's universal, but I think that's a large part of K 12 PD kind of cycles is it needs to be done immediately. So we don't really have the time and because of that, that seems like an easy place to shortcut. Like, oh, what do you mean? What's my purpose? My purpose is to teach ninth grade English. So I think that's the resistance, but it comes from a just lack of time and that pace of, okay, we've been trained on it, now we gotta do it on Monday.

Sharona: So I don't know how much overlap you have with any of the English PDs these days, but is any of that under threat because of the AI and those disciplines? Because they can't necessarily trust, I mean, are they going through the "I have to rethink what exactly it is I'm teaching my students to write"?

Boz: I know before I left Santee, we were having some conversations about around AI and basically wanting to make a accepted usage policy. But beyond that, when I did transition to my new position, even though I am an instructional coach, I was asked to focus on math and science. So I really did not spend any time in the English departments of either of the schools that I was at, and other than a couple of personal conversations with Joe and with Mariah, I've not been that actively involved. So I don't know yet.

Sharona: Okay. But this is reminding me though, when you said about the timing, about episode 101, when we spoke to Doug Wilson about their 10 year journey and the visionary leadership. Because I think they very much did go through this process and the whole thing took them years.

Boz: Exactly. And that was one of the biggest reasons I want to get some of his teachers back on to talk to them, because that seems like such a unique process ,in at least my experience in a K 12 world, to actually take that kind of time and that kind of dedication, especially after when they first did it. Did not see a lot of success, actually saw just the opposite.

Sharona: Yeah. And we do have some outreach to some of the teachers we're gonna get them on. But it occurs to me that one of the things that Doug talked about is how they managed to come to common principles or skills. Their learning outcomes are uniform across the whole school, I believe. And it's because they have a clear purpose. All the courses are supposed to support these fundamental learner development ideas. Exactly. So it does take time. It does take leadership, and I think this is an area where it may be very different from K 12 to higher ed because you have an at least an opportunity to get building wide.

Boz: Yeah, I'd say it depends on, I think it could be different depending on how broadly you're trying to do this. Like if I'm an individual K 12 educator compared to another individual higher ed educator, I don't think there might be that much of a difference, but if we're talking about doing this at a department or at a school, which is not easy at K 12, but you're right, it's a lot easier at K 12 than it would be at higher ed. And there is a lot more structures in place, a lot more expectations . It is not uncommon for K 12 educators to be expected to participate in PDs and faculty meetings and things like that where a lot of institutions that would be unheard of at a higher ed world.

Sharona: I do think, however, it may be different at a smaller private college versus a large regional public. I do think that if you're at a university or college that's about the size of some of the LA unified high schools. So if it's a 1500 student with a very clear mission, and those do exist, especially some of the small liberal arts colleges, I think it's absolutely doable. Do I think that the 23,000 student Cal State LA would ever be able to do that? I can't imagine it. Like I literally can't imagine it. I would be stunned and shocked. I mean, the math department alone serves more students in some of those small liberal arts colleges. Yeah.

Boz: But I think it's possible at like department levels, it just, there's a lot of structures that would have to be put in place that aren't normally in place in a higher ed world. Like the expectation of actually meeting outside of just class time. You know, meeting with your colleagues, having PLC or FLC or department meetings that aren't just volunteer, that if some people go to, and they're all logistics actually, meeting and talking about pedagogy and philosophies of education and really having some of those hard conversations that it sounded like they did at Doug's school.

Sharona: So I do think that this may be a little different at an individual instructor level versus at a. Leadership level.

Boz: The process is, the need to do it isn't different. The process might be because, yeah, of course it's gonna be harder to get three people to agree than to get me to agree with myself. And even harder if you're talking about 10 people and even harder if you're talking about 50 different educators in all different subjects. Yeah, it's gonna be harder. It's gonna take longer, but the need for it and the purpose of doing it, I don't think is different in any of those situations.

Sharona: Absolutely. I completely agree, the need is the same. And so I'm hoping that by really looking at these pieces of the course redesign cycle, that there is a sort of fundamental philosophical piece. What distinguishes an A from a B? Not how do you do it. But what is the distinguishing choice? So for me, it's the quantity of information that a student has mastered.

Boz: For you in what class?

Sharona: For me in, in all the courses that I currently teach.

Boz: Okay. But could you see like that is not your personal definition, that is because the courses that you teach all kind of fit that same model. That if you were in a different course.

Sharona: Yeah. Especially I think if I were doing a course for math educators, that was like a pedagogy course. If I were teaching a course on how to redesign your course, that would not be, it would not be quantity, absolutely.

Boz: Well, and honestly, I think if you could have the resources to take a deeper dive into your linear algebra, that might have distinct enough groups of where they're going afterwards, if not at Cal State, at other courses or other universities, that linear algebra is, I think one of those courses that. You, you could have that difference of A's based on pathways that they're going after.

Sharona: Oh, certainly you could do it pathways. I still, for me, think that at the level that I teach, there's enough discreet content. That quantity of content would probably be my primary.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: History of math. It was, it was quantity of content and quantity of completion. So there was sort of two pieces, but it was both quantity. I, again, don't see myself because I can't envision, for example, there's probably like a special topics senior seminar in math class. In that kind of a situation where I was really encouraging students to explore, say, research interest in math or things like that, I could definitely see the purpose of a student who got an A versus a student who got a B not being in quantity. But I just don't have any connection to any of those courses right now, so it's hard for me to envision.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But I do think you need to know that. You need to really be thinking about or are you even going to use Multilevels? I know quite a few instructors in our alternative grading world where either they do a contract with the student or they work collaboratively to look at, I mean, if you're looking at growth. There's all kinds of different ways. I just think you need to know what your distinction is. Or what yours and your students' distinction is.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: If that's gonna inform things.

Boz: And not only you. Your students need to be able to know it well enough that they can clearly articulate the difference. Because if they can't, I guarantee you they don't have the level of buy-in that they would if they could articulate, and they really did understand that.

Sharona: So if you're someone who is currently stuck, I have several pieces of advice.

Boz: Okay?

Sharona: The first one is, if I were to come up to you in a conversation knowing nothing about your discipline, and I asked you what the content and purpose of your course was, can you answer me? Pretend this is me, Sharona. I'm standing in front of you and I say, well, what is the content and the purpose of your course? Can you answer me? Clearly? So that's the first question.

And the second question is, what types of learning outcomes do you currently have in your course? Because there's more learning outcomes than just your content, potentially. We've talked about this before. There's your disciplinary practices, there's what are you gonna do with all the stuff that is not evidence of actual learning. There's all kinds of things you can think about. I know that a lot of people in organic chemistry who use specifications grading for lab. The pass fail point is your safety stuff. So that's another thing. Do you have those, again, disciplinary practices, but now there, maybe there are mechanical lab practices that you might have to think about. Can you answer that?

Boz: And I would add to that, can you also describe and explain how your learning targets are set up to meet your purpose of your course? Because again, and I see this a lot in the K 12, they rush. It's not that they don't have learning targets. Most of them, it's not that they don't have 'em, it's they're using what really should be daily learning objectives or lesson learning objectives. So they have 50 of them. They're using the state standards, like they really shortcutted that process. Again, 'cause we're rushing to try to get it done. They've shortcut it.

Sharona: Yeah. It's not their fault.

Boz: No, no. It's absolutely not their fault. It's the fact that, again, the expectation is we've been trained and now three days later we're expecting to see it. But without those really well-defined and well thought out learning targets, how do you know if your assessments are really assessing those? Are there ways to reassess without reassessing just that material? For instance, an Algebra two example or even an algebra one. Could I use evidence of students being able to show mastery in systems of equations or inequalities as also evidence to previous standards or learning outcomes on things with just linear equations, inequalities, or functions.

Sharona: And that's part of what actually came up this weekend at TUEMLS. And there's a balance between vague enough learning outcomes that you can find evidence in multiple places and enough specificity for transparency to students. So I have a specific example of this for all of our biochemists out there, or our biology people. So this one I know I can talk about because this was said by a listener on the podcast that you know who you are. But there was this struggle in this particular class that we were looking at, that there's just a ton of content and how do you get a reasonable number of learning outcomes, and how do you give a reasonable number of re attempts. So for example, one possible learning outcome is, I can describe the intermolecular forces between two lipids. Okay. But the problem is they have to do that on lipids. They have to do that on proteins. They might have to do that on an enzyme. They have to do it on a bunch of different types of molecules. So what we suggested is we said, instead of doing I can do intermolecular forces on lipids, is that I can describe intermolecular forces between two molecules. And they said, well, isn't that too vague? I said, well, yes and no because you can do your, including, I can do it on lipids and proteins and whatever else, and apologies if I'm using the wrong types of molecules here, all of my biochemistry people. But the point is, you can get evidence that they can do intermolecular forces in different environments, so you don't have to hold a student up. If they don't get it the first time they see it on lipids, then maybe they get it the second time when they see it in a different context. They don't have to necessarily be able to do it in all situations. They just have to be able to do it in multiple situations potentially. And that gives you some built in re-attempts where you're not having to regive the same assessment. Yeah. Even with different problems.

Boz: And that's kind of like what I was talking about, the difference between what really should be lesson or daily outcomes, not learning targets. Because you'll see that, I mean, oh my gosh, how many times I've seen examples of that in algebra and algebra two, especially where they've got a learning target for every different type of equation that they might need this particular skill at. And I'm like, is it really that they need to be able to do it in linear, polynomial, quadratic exponential and a trig function? Or is it that they're able to do it? And sometimes it, the answer might be no. They really have to do it in every situation, and that's fine. But that goes back to really thinking about the purpose of the course to help define those learning targets.

Sharona: And in that situation that you're describing, one of the challenges with having too granular of an objective is it disconnects those concepts from a student perspective. And sometimes we want those concepts connected because the connection is the purpose. Is the reason.

Boz: Exactly. Oh my God. Exactly. And that's one of the big complaints about math education in this country. For a long time, that was the whole idea behind Common Core, you know, that. Education K 12 education, but especially math, K 12 education in this country has been described as a mile wide, inch deep. We cover tons of things, but we do it at such a shallow level. We don't see those connections. But yeah, those connections and that's, that's why those eight standard practices of mathematics, why the next gen engineering standards. Why the anchor standards in English. That's why those are so important. That's the connections that like those eight standard practices of mathematics, they start in early education. It's the exact same standards when they get to algebra two and above. Yeah, the way we do it is more complex, but it's in those connections that's really. The heart and soul of education, that's really where it lives.

Sharona: So I'm gonna try to manifest something right now that is insane. Are we ready?

Boz: Oh god.

Sharona: I want someone, not me, very clearly not me, to rewrite the Common Core math standards for NGSS style. So every learning outcome in NGSS has a content piece, but also has a science and engineering practice and a cross-cutting concept built into the standard. Like every standard says, do this disciplinary content thing, intermolecular forces, whatever, in a modeling situation using patterns or whatever. Like they have these science energy practices and they have these cross-cutting concepts, and they spent the time to write every learning outcome to include all three of these things. And I'm like, I want that for math, I want that for math. So I'm telling all of the big mucky-muck, politicians and visionary leaders out there in the world, please go rewrite and get adopted. Ha ha ha. The common core state standards in NGSS style.

Boz: All right, so we are kind of starting to come up on time, so I kind of wanna put a capstone on this. If you are in the process, or maybe you've even been using alternative grading for, a course or two, a year or two, and you're finding yourself stuck. What's the advice we're giving? Two things. Go back to those first steps. Go past and before the grading architecture. Look at the purpose. Look at your learning targets. 'Cause if those aren't hard as bedrock, that is going to affect everything else. It's like building , a castle on sand, it's gonna fall apart eventually. So if you are spinning, if you are stuck, if you're not seeing results like you will want to and thought you might see based on other people's experience, go back to those. Go back to those pre-planning steps.

Sharona: And also join the alternative grading Slack channel and post where you are. There are people on the channel who are willing to take a look at your design and help you figure out if that is where you're stuck. So utilize that resource.

Boz: And for those that aren't, we've said this before, this part of what makes what you and I do so enjoyable, Sharona, is that the community that we're working with, this alternative grading community, is such a giving community. I've not met anyone that isn't willing to share almost anything that they've ever designed or sit down and talk with you about okay, what issues are you having? Yeah, here's some of the mistakes and some of the issues I've had. Like it is such a just caring and giving community. If you're not using it, use it. We really are. There's no one is in this community that is unwilling to help. So whether it's Slack, whether it's you know, writing into to us and letting us talk about it on air. Whether it's going to some of the conferences, like there's a lot of ways to be involved. Get involved in. Don't be afraid to ask. 'cause we've all struggled. We've all made mistakes and like I said, I've not met anyone in this community that is not thrilled to death to help someone else get involved in it.

Sharona: Speaking of getting involved, I have one last plug before we leave. I was just at TUEMLS. Next week I am gonna be at Math Fest. So if you are still listening at this point in the episode and you're gonna be at Math Fest, message me on Slack. Find me. I'm gonna maybe try to get a recording session together. I don't know, I haven't completely decided. I would love to talk to you if you're gonna be at Math Fest in Sacramento next week.

Boz: All right, well, 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 featured topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

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

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