17 - An Entire School Doing Alternative Grading? Meet the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering

Episode 17 • 7th November 2023 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

Sharona: How much buy in do you have to get from a new, new to you, teacher before they even come in the door?

Matt: Yeah, I'd like to hear Jesse's thoughts on this, but I would say in the beginning is first you want to create a good culture where teachers want to be a part of it. So you get teachers that want to apply and that kind of thing, but I would say after they apply and then we interview and we say, okay, now let me tell you a little bit about us and how we do things because you might not like this, but this is how we grade.

We grade for learning. We give these marks. There are no A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's. You can give a proficient, you can give a beginning, you can give an emerging, you can give a mastery.

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 L. A.

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.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the pod. My name is Sharona, one of your co hosts. Unfortunately, my usual other co host Bosley is not able to be with us today, but I am really excited because today I have on two people from the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering. Their website is ASCTE.org. And just to tell you a little bit about them, the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering is the nation's only high school focused on the integration of cyber technology and engineering into all academic disciplines. It is a public residential Magnet High School serving students throughout the state of Alabama.

And amazingly enough, tuition is free. So that's exciting. And with me today, I have the president of ASCTE, Matt Massey. And the lead English language arts teacher, Jesse Bryan. So welcome, Matt. Welcome, Jesse.

Matt: Hello, Sharona. Thanks for having us.

Jessy: Hi.

Sharona: No, no problem. I'm so excited to get to talk to you. So could you guys each maybe introduce yourselves and talk a little bit more about ASCTE?

Matt: Sure. I'm Matt Massey. I'm the president of the school. Before this life, I was superintendent of Madison County school system, a school system of 28 schools. And before that, I was a mathematics instructor and taught AP calculus and assisted school districts across the state with kind of vertically aligning their mathematical programs.

Jessy: And I'm Jessy Bryan. I, like you said, am the language lead here at ASCTE. I've been teaching for 15 years at traditional public high schools in Alabama and this is my third year here at ASCTE. I've taught a little bit of everything in English language arts as well as sponsored a variety of all traditional high school club offerings.

Matt: And I'll tell you a little bit about the school. We are in our fourth school year, so we've only existed for three years and three months. So kind of what attracted me to this position was, if we could just start education from scratch, what would it look like? And we really wanted it to revolve around student learning and student achievement and not really about chasing grades.

And so when you kind of make school about student learning, it sort of lets you be pretty flexible. We're independent from the State Department of Education, so we kind of got to forge our own way, but we are a public school. We're funded by the state of Alabama. So it it was kind of a really cool sort of experiment.

And it also, of course those fields of engineering and cyber was just kind of the construct of what we created this around.

Sharona: That's amazing. I'm excited that you're in your fourth year because when we met, for the first time, you guys were getting ready to launch. And the reason we met was we were having our 7 through 12 alternative grading conference, and if I'm correct, you guys use alternative grading in the entire school.

So can you say a little bit about that?

Matt: We did, and we had our teachers kind of dive into that, and it was really inspiring hearing other educators that were able to do this kind of an isolated areas, whether it was individually or within a department, at a school or in higher ed. And we just really wanted to commit to this together really to complete the mission.

And the mission of our school is to ensure all students achieve high levels of learning and in that, the rest of that is in the fields of cyber engineering. But how do you ensure learning in the first to do that? If you're going to ensure learning, you've got to measure learning. And really just felt like the percentage of answers correct on an assessment doesn't necessarily gauge learning, nor does it ensure it.

So it kind of led us a path of Hey, how can we tackle this? And it was really through, a collective effort by our faculty to really come up with a way that works and it works in math, whether it's in cyber, engineering or English language arts.

Sharona: So I'm going to ask you this first, Matt, and then you, Jessy.

Was launching the school your first introduction to alternative grading, or sort of what's your origin story when it comes to alternative grading?

Matt: Yeah, personally for me was when I was teaching AP Calculus, and really the goal was for students, by the end of the course, to be able to know what they need to know to make a qualified score on that exam.

So it kind of changed, what they knew in October really didn't matter if they knew it in April. And so it kind of led towards a growth of the individual. And really what I learned was that through that process is, the learning timeline changes between students. Some pick it up quick, some may need a little bit more time.

And also I went through the process of becoming a national board certified teacher, which really kind of opened a whole bunch more windows of how to gauge student learning and success.

Sharona: How about you, Jessy? What's your origin story with?

Jessy: Oh, I heard about alternative grading at the various AP conferences, but the school system that I was teaching at was not really interested in embracing.

And when I came into ASCTE and I found out that was what we were doing it took a minute to like wrap my brain around, you know, just the differences between like the traditional schools and coming into a mastery based grading system. But I feel like I've embraced it and I feel like the kids are really thriving with it.

And now there's no one size fits all for classes because what works for ELA versus what works for engineering is going to be a little bit different. But I think the kids really respond well to this whole aspect of grading as opposed to like just chasing the A. You know, we talk all the time about the growth.

I'm looking for your growth in whatever learning target that I have. And so I'm seeing some really positive results.

Sharona: That's amazing. And I love two things that you both said. Jesse, you said you heard about it at the AP conferences, which kind of makes sense because at the end of the day, all AP cares about is that exam score.

And then Matt, you said nationally board certified teacher. I don't know if you guys have had a chance to listen to any other podcast episodes, but one of our, sort of, third seats in our co hosting group is a gentleman by the name of Joe Zeccola, who's nationally board certified in English. He teaches AP Lit, AP Lang and he's had some amazing things to say about developing his learning outcomes and things like that.

So that's really exciting to see that that national board certification is opening these doors. So Matt, going back to you, when we last talked, you were just launching. So I was wondering if you'd share a little bit about what it was like to try to get a whole school designed around this?

I mean, again, we've talked to a lot of one off people on the pod. Haven't really seen what happens when a whole school tries to do this. So can you describe a little bit about that? What was hard? What was easy? What did you learn along?

Matt: Yeah, it was what was hard was students wanting a letter grade at the end of a course like did they get a A, did they get a B?

Which we kind of correlated ours to what's equivalent to a four point GPA system. So your final grade in English Language Arts may be a 3.65. And that's not an A, that's not a B, that's a 3.65. The big worry is how are universities going to interpret this as a school on a transcript with non letter grades.

And I was actually really nervous about that. When they say what does a 3.65 mean in English language arts and but overall cumulative GPA, you just average all those together. But again, we were nervous. We had a pilot group that started as sophomores that are in college now, and all 17 got accepted into universities and nationally as well.

We had students get accepted into UT Austin, Southern Cal, Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech. We have a student at Georgetown. All the state schools were kind of on board because we have good representation on our board of trustees from higher education. So that was always kind of the biggest cliffhanger.

What are these colleges going to think? But I was on the phone yesterday, with another university, with my college counselor, and we had to kind of explain sort of how we did the grading and that kind of thing. But once you talk to parents and students and say, Hey, we want to assess your learning, man, they love it.

In fact, tomorrow we're going to have an extra time where kids can come back and pick an E. L. T, and, essential learning target, if you want. We kind of have this little flex time at the end of the day where you can come in and pick an essential learning target and reassess or relearn. And so now we have students chasing learning rather than chasing a 90 or an 80.

Sharona: That's so exciting because, you know, one of the nice things about this podcast, I'm in the higher ed world. Bosley's in the K 12 and the higher ed world. And this is definitely one of the big pushbacks we get from the K 12 world is, but it doesn't prepare them for college and college isn't going to accept this. And I know that there's like different structural issues and different things.

So it's really exciting to hear that you're able to go as far as, because most of the time we don't even try to get people off of that final letter grade for a course. Like we're not even, If you can do it, fabulous, but I'm not trying to do it. Bosley's not trying to do it. Joe's not trying to do it.

That is much bigger. We're working with LA Unified and although LA Unified is very much pro what they call equitable grading and instruction, nobody yet has tackled that final letter grade. So to hear that you've been able to do that and to talk to schools and get schools to accept it. That's really exciting. Like, thank you so much for doing that.

Matt: Absolutely. And we have a little app, in front of me right here are a profile, and we kind of have a little legend in the bottom right corner for universities that need to convert to a traditional. They can reverse engineer our grade to get to that letter grade. But out of the 50 universities we've dealt with, there's only been one that has actually done that.

The rest of them, they understand what we're doing. And, I mean, it kind of helps when we have National Merit scholars and we've got four perfect 36 on the ACT. You know, all of our students are taking the SAT so they can, that kind of helps kind of go, okay, yeah, this is legit. So it's not just willy nilly.

It helps kind of that we've got some outstanding students too. And then we've got this wonky grading system that's based on student learning. Imagine that. And but yeah, they dig it. They like it.

Sharona: That's fantastic. So Jesse, what has it been like in the classroom? What does your day look like?

I'm so curious to see what's the experience of being in an entire school? Like I do this in my class. I know what it looks like in my classroom. I'm in math, but there's nobody else here doing it. Very few. What's it like to be at a whole school where this is happening?

Jessy: I get to teach the incoming students as well as the returning students at different levels.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about like the incoming students because it's kind of like we have a little training session of kind of rewiring our brain into what our grades mean and what we're doing. And so let's just say we have been working on narratives recently in the ninth grade classroom.

And so we've been really talking about what is a learning target? What are we doing? We are interviewing our peers. And then we're going to write a narrative based on those interviews. And then we really look at the learning target to see what their end goal is.

And so a lot of times when we're talking about grades, I'm telling them it's growth over time. So let's say you turn this draft in and you've got an emerging on it, which means it needs some room for improvement. Well, that's not the end grade there. They can always take feedback, redo, we can reassess and it's the growth over time, like I mentioned earlier, that we're really looking for there.

And so that's for any aspect of English language arts, we kind of have at least three assignments per ELT that we're looking at, and I'm never looking at one in isolation. I'm always looking at the student and their ability to learn and grow with that knowledge and then to apply it in different ways.

So, I know I kind of didn't answer the day in the life question, but since we're talking about grades, like, that's kind of been on my mind because we are coming up on the end of our first term here. And so, we've had lots of conversations about, well, you can always reassess anything. The only thing you have to do is ask.

You have to be proactive and ask about, hey, I didn't score well on this ELT. When dealing with grammar, can I reassess this portion? And most of the time, the answer is going to be yes. But it's got to be coming from that student and this new crew that we have in right now, they are really embracing that and asking for help.

We have a WIN time, or whatever I need time, and all of the teachers are there. And so the students have easy access to just say, Hey, I didn't score well on this last week, can we sit down and can we go over it together and can we make a plan for reassessment? And so I think that that, we have a winning solution here for giving students access to not just the ability to retake to show a growth of knowledge, but also to their teachers for that help and assistance.

Sharona: So if you think back to when you were teaching at other schools, the conversations with students then versus the conversations with students now at this school, what's the difference?

Jessy: I think the difference is like the mindset of what the end goal is. At my traditional schools, it was more of, I want the A. I need the grade because the end goal is my GPA. Whereas here it's a little bit more of, okay, I need to know this skill because I know that we will utilize this skill in different ways. Like we've got a big project coming up where we're going to be partnering with engineering and they need to know the skill in language arts so then they can actually do the application piece in engineering.

And so it's much more of a whole picture instead of just a singular focus on I want my Beowulf essay to be an A so that it's boost my GPA and my mom's not fussing at me about my grades. Not to say that moms don't fuss about grades here either. But, you know,

Sharona: And that was actually my follow up question to both of you because that's the other big piece, and we're going to be talking to Matt Townsley here in the next couple weeks about his new book about parents guide to this.

But yeah, what has the parent experience been like?

Jessy: The teacher side fairly positive. I think that at first there is a learning process, just like with their children, of what is mastery grading and what does it mean? I've had lots of parents get really concerned about kids because they don't understand our different components of mastery grading.

And so we've had to kind of reach out and just have a conversation about, "Your kid's doing great. It doesn't look like an A, a B, a C, you know, et cetera." And there've been questions and I think the questions have been pretty valid and pretty important from their end, but also taking the time to have that communication piece, I think it's made the difference of understanding what we're doing here.

Matt: And I would say one thing that we actually added last year it here was we kind of went elementary on it here and we're a high school, but we added an attitude and a work ethic grade that's on a rubric that the teachers and the students came up with, and it's posted in all of our rooms. So, for some parents, they just look at that attitude and work ethic grade, and if those are good, they don't really, the achievement grade, they just let the kid kind of worry about that part. And it also lets those teachers kind of like that kid that doesn't really play well with others or if they turn things in late, but you know, they got it. They can kind of get some like, okay, well at least they got pinged on the attitude and work ethic grade.

And we reward those in different ways. If a kid's a visually low work ethic or low attitude we put them on a watch type system as well. So that was actually kind of a behavior type grade. We want it because we wanted that behavior to be separate from what they know grade.

Sharona: Yeah, that is definitely an area where Bosley and I have talked about the distinction between K12 and college.

You guys, they have to show up and you have to have them. Whereas in my classes, like just getting them to show up is already like 90 percent of the work ethic because that's such a huge thing for college is getting them to actually be there. So I don't have quite the same thing, but what I do in my classes is I turn the work ethic into something I'm trying to teach them.

So I actually have a learning target specifically about what are the things I think you need to do to be successful. And if you do enough of those things, I'm going to count it as ✔️ you got that learning target, but that's different than your behavior, because if you're not behaving, to not behave at a college campus, like the definition of that is "it's so bad I'm calling campus security". If you're talking loud in class or if you're on the phone, I'm just like, "Hey, could you step out?" Because I can do that. Whereas you guys, that's not how it works. So that's definitely a distinction, but I'm a big fan of creating learning targets, which essentially what, what you all did, right?

You have an attitude learning target. It's just not factored into that final reportable transcript grade, but that's good because that's none of the college's business. So I really, I really like that. I spoke to Bosley today about this. He is so bummed that he isn't here. He is so jealous, but I'm under strict instruction to ask you some key questions.

So one of the questions we really wanted to inquire about is the preparation and training that you put your teachers through, either before you opened or if you've hired any teachers since. Could you describe a little bit about that and how long it takes to get a teacher up to speed?

Matt: Yeah, that, I would say that has been the biggest challenge, especially being a new school growing into our enrollment.

Because this is the first year we've actually been fully staffed because we've added cohorts. So we just had ninth and tenth graders the first year. Then we added a new group of ninth and tenth graders. Then we had seniors. So we have grown with our staff and I'll say we probably had eight to ten days of teacher prep before the school year starts.

And it's kind of a lot of training with that, but a lot of it is on grading. But also, we have teacher teams and let teachers really kind of lead that part rather than hearing it from an administrator. Our teachers work in departmental teams, but also the grade level teams are making sure that all of our ninth grade level courses they're being aware of what others are doing.

So you're not going to add a whack kind of math grade comparing to a science grade, so to speak, but with that, but also the vertical alignment. So Jessy, what do you think?

Jessy: So I think that I was hired on in year two. And so I think it took me a good probably six months to like feel really comfortable with it.

Like I don't think it's something that I could have prepped for and come in and feel completely confident. Because it's gotta be like in the moment and kind of seeing what's working and what doesn't work based on the rubrics you're creating to assess this mastery learning.

And so some of the things that I found that I was like, I know this is going to work, it didn't work for me. And so I think constantly reflecting on what the students are producing versus what your expectation is, was important. And I think the other thing, we have a great PLC program here where we can talk to each other and get feedback. And I'm just thankful my first year that there have been people that went through it and they're like, here's what we did last year and how it worked for us.

And then it's constantly kind of having those conversations. Because mastery grading for language arts does not look the same for mastery grading in engineering because we're similar in some ways, but we're different in others.

And so I think that that's important for anybody going in this to know that there's not a one size fits all for what it's going to look like in every single classroom. We've got to take that into consideration because we can bring in all these ideas to our whole department meetings. But when we meet with departments, it might be easier to come up with policies across the board or ideas that might work. And then when we meet with our 100 level teachers and we're talking about things that are working or not working for us it's with the understanding that we're just trying to make each other better. Not say, "Hey, this is what worked for me. It's going to work for you" because it's not going to happen that way.

Matt: And we also have a handful of brand new teachers. And these are ones that have had a career in engineering, and they're coming in to teach engineering or in cyber security and they're coming in to teach. That so one end they didn't have to unlearn kind of some bad habits or have to give up that lesson that they've been doing for 12 years they don't want to let go of.

But it was also they need classroom support on interventions, reassessments. So we ended up having to hire a a teacher coach for them, an instructional coach. And she's part time she worked for me in the school system when I was superintendent, so she kind of retired, she comes back three days a week, and really helps teachers. And they'll tell us, like, hey, I'm really having trouble with this reassessment, how do I change that up? That kind of thing.

Jessy: And I think having the people from industry as part of our teaching staff has been really important with this alternative grading because they kind of bring a different perspective into it that the more traditional teachers who have been brought up and we're kind of looking at it from two different sides.

And it has made a really nice. discussion between like what's the end goal? What do we want? What is the ultimate thing we want for our students and how do we assess that? And so that has been really, really positive.

Matt: And as we get a lot of stakeholder feedback from the stakeholders that come from industry, they almost see this as more applicable to a real world scenario because you've got to get the job done.

You've got to accomplish this. It has to be proficient to meet this standard. If you're making this part or whatever, rather than just giving you a grade on it. I would say for the naysayers of it, they say, Oh, it's not applicable to college or career.

It is very applicable. Like you've got to work until you're proficient in this standard.

Sharona: Yeah. So I'm hearing some common themes that we have certainly said before, but this takes time. That's one thing I'm hearing. This takes support for teachers, and I guess one other question is, on the one hand, you guys have kind of mandated this from the top down in the sense that when you designed the school, y'all decided or some group of people decided this is the way it's going to be here.

So anyone who comes in and is hired in, how much do they know and buy in to the idea that this is what they're jumping into before they get hired? Because one of the biggest questions is, can you mandate this? Can you require a teacher to do this? And everywhere we've seen it somewhere else. I don't know if you guys have heard of other school districts that have tied to do this top down and it has been a colossal failure.

So what do you think about how much buy in do you have to get from a new, new to you, teacher before they even come in the door?

Matt: I'd like to hear Jesse's thoughts on this, but I'll say in the beginning is first, you want to create a good culture where teachers want to be a part of it. So you get teachers that want to apply and that kind of thing.

But I would say after they apply and we interview and we say, okay, now let me tell you a little bit about us and how we do things because you might not like this, but this is how we grade. We grade for learning. We give these marks. There are no A's, B's, C's, D's and F's. You can give a proficient, you can give a beginning, you can give an emerging, you can give a mastery.

And it works like this. And so what questions do you have about it? And are you sure you want to come here? Because you don't grade on a percentage. You don't grade on 100 point scale. You can grade on point scales. There's a lot of flexibility in that, but there are some hard line things where I say, no, if you give a five question test, do not count that as 100 point grade.

All right, you can count it on a five point grade. Or a nine point grade, but don't count it as that. So I would say we try to kind of give a disclaimer about that before we hire folks on. I don't know, Jessy, did you know what you're getting into when you stepped into this?

Jessy: I mean, I just remember thinking oh, they're gonna do that there. Okay. That's interesting. You know, man, let's try it and see and then you get into your like, oh, okay. Let's really see what this is like a bit, but in all honesty, I think that if you don't have a buy in, it is a struggle. And thankfully we have a lot of teachers here who have like come on board and fully embraced this and there there have been growing pains.

Don't let me tell you that there aren't. Especially the first couple weeks for a new person in here that's like, well, this is not how I was graded in college or high school. And so it might take a minute, but I think once you have embraced this system of grading and really taken to heart that it's what's best for the students, like looking at the overall growth, then I think it is almost easier in some ways to grade without mindset because it kind of takes away any nitpicky things, really.

It's like, okay, where are they meeting me at? Did they hit the rubric? What's going on? How can I help them to do any kind of reassessment? And that I think is the big thing. If you have a buy in and you're really here for student learning, then this is very approachable and embraceable and you can really just soar with it.

Matt: And I'll say when I was superintendent we tried to kind of do this through a cohort, like with kindergarten, and then we'll do K 1, and then K 1 2 3, and it was after the third grade, we kind of got to that point where teachers really wanted to give Fs. They really wanted to fail kids. And that's where we hit the roadblock.

grade the same way we did in: 1940

Are we not past that yet? Can we not do better than that? And so, yeah, if you want to be stuck in the forties, that's fine. I did a professional development for a school in Illinois, and I put in their mission and their vision. Nowhere in there does it say the mission of their school is for kids to make good grades.

Nowhere. It's not in the mission of any of that. So why is that the thing we focus on? And but it's a little bit like adopting a child. If that child misbehaves and acts up, it's hard to handle. You can't just go give them back to their parents. You are the parent. You have to adopt this. This is what we're doing, and we're gonna make it work, and we're doing it for the right reasons.

And I do think doing it in a big school system is harder than doing it in a smaller setting. Because we tried to do it, I was superintendent of 28 schools. It was hard to do that. And there were some places that did it pretty well. So, but what we wanted to do is almost kind of be like a lab as well, where like, hey, it can be done.

Maybe it can be done. I think innovation can kind of start in some of those small places, whether it's a department or an individual teacher and when they have success and then students kind of like it and brag on it and parents get it. Then you've got the learning and achievement backs it up, or these kids are scoring well on other standardized tests, and it's not just fluff, then that's when you're gonna see this approach stick a little more.

Sharona: Wow, I have so many questions to try and remember them. Okay, that's incredible. Everything you're saying is so incredible. So my first question is, have you had, as a follow up to that buy in teacher, have you had teachers opt themselves out after interviewing and thinking about this, and say, you know what, I don't think this is for me?

Matt: No.

Sharona: And I'm talking not that didn't take them, but they opted themselves out.

Matt: Now you explain, it's the mission of the school and that kind of thing.

Sharona: And then my second question is, have you seen, I don't want to use the wrong word. So one of the accusations that we get a lot is you're inflating grades.

So my first question is what does your grade distribution look like? Are a lot of your students getting up in that 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 range? And what would you say to someone who says, Oh, well, you have too many of those. Too many students are getting up there.

Matt: I would say the concern is we're not inflating grades enough.

Our neighboring school systems that our kids are competing with for colleges, they're inflating any course that says honors or AP, they're scaling them one or two quality points. So when you can get a six quality points on a four point GPA scale, that's tough. I haven't heard any of that, not honestly, I would say like we focus on the kids that have below a 3.0. That to us is kind of failing, not meeting the bar. So that is the one, we focus on those classes on those kids with that. I don't have those distributions in front of me, but it's kind of turned into that.

We do have some of the super achievers where if they don't get a mastery in every E. L. T. they kind of start to get have a nervous breakdown a little bit. And we say, Hey, look, and we even have like a green around our proficient and mastery. So there's two levels of getting it. There's a red, it's green. To me, it's binary, a one and a zero.

But we have two ways of not quite there yet. That's your beginning and emerging. But no, I haven't heard any concerns from teachers or from parents or students from grade inflation.

Jessy: No, I think that, like you were talking about, there are some students that are still grade driven. Don't get us wrong. Like there are still some that want that perfect score and their AP classes, sometimes that's really hard to do, especially like I teach AP Lang.

So they struggle a little bit at first because they're not earning those masteries right off the board. And so they're at proficiency and that just kind of drives them in that learning a little bit. Yes, they want the mastery, but how am I getting that looking back at the expectations? I think more than anything else here with mastery grading inflating grades, we don't do that, but I think what we do have is we have very clear expectations of how you earn your score.

And that's different than I think from traditional schools of some people use rubrics, some people use a hundred points. But here every child knows, before they take a formative assessment or a summative assessment, they know the expectation is given to them in advance so that they know, oh, this is what I have to do in order to, and it's the clarity piece, I think, that really kind of helps them with that.

And I haven't had anybody talk to me about inflation of grades at all.

Sharona: Well, and it's interesting because when we have these conversations, what a lot of people are complaining about is that our goal is to get every student to proficiency. That's really the bar, right? You want every student to get to proficiency.

So let's say a proficiency is a 3.0. Ideally, you want every student there. That would be what I would call a success. But in traditional grading, what we're actually trying to do is rank students against each other. And so you can't get everyone there because then it wouldn't mean anything, right?

And I'm going to argue that that's a poor reason to be grading students. I have some sympathy to the whole artificial scarcity of college admissions thing? Yeah, we don't have room in college for every single high school student. Should we? Yes. Do we? No. Although I think we do, we just don't necessarily have them at like the elite schools or whatever.

But that's the argument we get is, well, you're giving too many A's. And I'm like, really? Because I'm getting all my students up to them learning all the content. So, if you're not doing that. Maybe you're giving too many A's, maybe you're the ones that are inflating.

Matt: That's the key of when you take the letter grade off the final answer and there is no A, and if you think of it, if a kid is a mastery on every learning target, that's a 4.50. So they can make, we have a 450 point scale from a 0.00 to a 4.50 and when there's no letter attached to the end, that just takes that whole kind of question away. And for our kids that make below a 3.00 we have two periods in our six period day that are electives. We take those electives and you're in a reinforcement class for that course.

You don't have that. So for our kids, we have fun electives. They want those classes. And so that's their drive. And hey, if you don't get it, it's cool. We'll put you back in here. And guess what? You were in that until you get it. And then when you get it, you can go pick an elective.

So there's some kids that are in that fourth period elective. They're in that foundational or reinforcement class and it helps them as they're in that next math class if they need enforcement in the other.

Sharona: That's the thing that some people don't seem to get is you can have natural consequences that aren't built into a grade, right? The natural consequence of you not learning your stuff is you need to spend more time learning your stuff.

And that's true in the real world. And if you have to spend more time learning your stuff, then you don't get to spend more time on your hobbies. That's such a natural consequence. I kind of really love that.

I had another question that occurred to me when y'all were talking. Let's imagine, hypothetically this is a different question for Jessy and Matt. So Jessy, let's say you had to, for some reason, leave the school. I don't know if you're married or not, but if you ended up in a family situation, you had to leave the state, what would you be looking for?

What would you do? Could you go back to traditional grading now?

Jessy: I really think that I would struggle going back cause I feel like it would be going backwards, in a way? Because this just makes so much more sense to me. And it's a lot more focused on the learner instead of just getting grades .

And I'm not saying that there aren't schools that do other grades. I think I would struggle going backwards because that's kind of how I look at it now. Because I bought in. I love this style of grading because I think it really pushes our students, in a positive way, to take more ownership of their learning.

And so, I'm sure I could go back and teach that, but I'd really try to argue for at least my class to go back to like this mastery grading that has just worked so well here.

Sharona: And then Matt, my question for you is, what would be your message to other superintendents who may not have quite as much control, but they're so inspired by what y'all are doing?

Where, where should admin be looking at this and how should they be looking at this?

Matt: The superintendent needs to find a building principal and a principal team that's got the right mission and wants to build the right culture. Because if you don't have the culture, that culture will eat whatever program you try to throw out.

And if you have a culture that's focused on student achievement and believes that all students can learn and their job is to ensure that that happens, this is the right fit to do it.

So how can we assess? The four critical questions, what do you want those kids to know? How do you know when they know it? And then what do you do if they don't know it? And what do you do for those kids that do? So if you've got the right culture of your building leadership team, which are your lead teachers and your building administrators that work, and there's always going to be a few folks that really don't, kind of, fit into it. We had a teacher who was with us and is now working at a high level government job. For us, we compete with teachers from our industry partners. We require physics with calculus for all students. Every student has to have calculus to graduate from our school. It's a graduation requirement.

So that's a really high benchmark for all kids and if you don't buy into that, how do you get those kids that don't really like calculus? How are you going to get them to learn it? So I would say for the teachers that only want to teach the elite kids, that was probably a little bit of the obstacle that we kind of had with that or the toughest case to overcome with that, because it's fun just to teach those kids that are all into it every day.

But how do you teach the high levels for kids that probably would rather be in there doing programming in their cyber class? So if you have the right culture and everybody else around them is on board with it, it's really a mutual accountability between those teacher teams that carries this. And a building principal and a superintendent can't do it by themselves.

But if you can find that right building leadership team and get a good core group of teachers. Yeah, it can, and even the snowball of the culture for students when they know. We had an advisory team. Every adult in our school has six or seven kids they kind of meet with once a week and kind of talk about things.

And I even have a little group and it was some new students and some second year students. And it was like, what would you advise first year students? It was like, go to your teachers when you need help and don't stress about everything. It's gonna be okay. They'll help you through it.

So knowing that those kids hearing them tell each other, Hey, these teachers are here to help you through it. Don't freak out about all your classes, but if you need to reassess, you need to go reassess that essential learning target. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, can I quote this and put it on a poster? But that's the culture that we've been able to do.

Sharona: And it's great for the teachers. It's awesome when the students are the ones that say that.

That's fantastic. I had another question based on something you said earlier, you said that you have different types of PLCs. You have department ones, but you also have grade levels. Do you see that the way you approach the communication, the grading, changes as they go from 9th grade up through seniors?

Is it more about how new they are to the system, or is there an actual developmental difference in the way students approach this by grade level.

Matt: I'll say this and let Jessy chime in. We have one new teacher here that I'll look at the distribution of grades and she had given many less proficients and masteries than her peer group and in her team.

And so I just kind of mentioned it to one of the folks on the team. Hey, why don't y'all collect that data and share it amongst each other? So it's not like me giving it out. And so and there's no benchmark that we have or a quota, but they kind of talk amongst it about themselves with that team.

So to me that is a little concerning. Are junior and senior level classes harder? Are the grades lower? But as long as kind of that team's together, I'll support them with that. So, Jessy, what do you think?

Jessy: I think concerning expectations as we're going from 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, I think that we might be a little bit more communicative with our incoming students to get them on board with everything, but I think by the time they're juniors and seniors, they have embraced it.

And so they feel more comfortable with things. But like Matt said, teachers communicating and noticing like any kind of issue with particular students, that's one of the things we do talk about in our PLCs is if we're noticing one student who might be floundering in classes then, we've all taken ownership of having a conversation of let's keep an eye on this student, something's going on.

Maybe we need to reach out and check on him. So there are all kinds of conversations that we have just most of them center around student support. So I don't know if I answered the question completely because my mind went a couple different places as Matt was talking.

Sharona: Totally fine.

A follow up example for me, you said it's very personal to every teacher that how they do this. I actually take it further. I'm like, it's personal to the teacher in the class. So I have three different main classes I teach. One is an introductory general education class. One is a sort of sophomore level mathematics class, and one is a senior level mathematics.

But it's a history of math class. A very, very different. So my grading architecture changes dramatically between those three classes because my first semester freshman, they're trying to wrap their heads around college, right? So I have to structure and scaffold the class to a much greater degree. It's also a coordinated class.

So like that one, I only do reassessments. I don't do revisions. My sophomore level class, they're getting the point where they're getting math that's hard enough. They have to learn to take their own math and correct it. So I do revisions there, still very structured. My senior class, way less structured.

They're adults. They've gotten four years of college under their belt. They've really made that transition from a pedagogy to andragogy type environment. They're no longer kids learning how to learn. They know themselves. So I have a much, much less structured class. So I guess I was wondering, developmentally, do you see any of that from 9th grade to 12th grade, or are they much more similar to each other?

Than say a freshman in college versus a senior in college.

Jessy: I think that the 401 classes are a little less structured than the 101 classes. I feel like our freshman level classes are so much more structured just to get them used to the school and the grading and we might let up a little bit as the year continued.

I think at first we are on top of making sure that everything is structured and very clear to all those students. And I'm not teaching a 401 this year. So I can't speak for all the 401 teachers. I do not think it's as structured as the 101 classes, but we also have electives. So a lot of our AP classes are electives here.

And so I will say that last year I taught AP lit. Thank you. And so I structured it completely differently than I ever have before and the students kind of thrived with just the idea of , I kind of took away the fear of trying anything. I just, I was like, okay, we're not going to worry about any grades right now in this moment.

We are just going to focus on these skills. And those students just amazed me with the ownership that they took of their own learning. And so that was completely unstructured as compared to my 101 class, which is like every couple of weeks I'm doing something specific. And so I guess the answer to your question is yes, things do kind of change, but I think that also depends on the teacher and the subject area of the class of what they're doing. Because like we've talked about, we've got some traditional teachers here, and then we've got some industry partners and people who come in to teach for us. So, it varies.

Sharona: So as we get towards the end of our recording time, I just want to open it up. What else would you like to share about anything related to this alternative grading journey, either about your school, your personal experience, something you want to get out there.

Was there anything, actually, let me give you one more specific question, then we'll get to that one. What were the biggest barriers that you've encountered and how have you overcome them over the time?

Matt: I would say the final grade not being a letter was actually a big barrier.

So when you're saying that, that resonates. To try to get even our learning management system and our student information system to not give a grade. We actually had to enter 400 numerical values for our final grade to keep it from getting a letter. So we programmed it, the letter to be a number.

So it's like, it was so hard to do it. I had to hire somebody that can basically unprogram. PowerSchool. So that was a big obstacle, actually, is to get

Sharona: Yeah, we call that hacking the LMS.

Matt: Yes. So, yeah, we have our learning management system, which is one thing and then our other grading system because, yeah, it was hard to do that with Canvas and with PowerSchool.

We use both with that. So it is to get kids off that grade, we basically had to reprogram it to give what we wanted it to, whether it's a symbol or a number or whatever.

Jessy: Yeah, I was going to say that what came to mind was the first year that I was here was we did grade slightly differently because we didn't have a system that would work for us.

So I remember like once it was an Excel spreadsheet to make sure that it reflected what we were wanting. And then it was a different program that didn't work for us. And then the next year we tried something else that didn't work. And so that I think was the most frustrating part, just finding what worked with our policies and our grading system.

Other than that, I can't think of anything specific. I did have thoughts about how I'd never missed iNOW so much that first year. And I hated that program when I was teaching at traditional schools.

I was like, God, if we just had iNOW and it worked for us, this would be great. But I mean, now we have a great solution and it's working for us. So hopefully it stays working for us for a while.

Sharona: It's interesting because that I think is something that is under looked at is grade tracking and reporting. Because if you can't tell students where they are, then the stress level goes up.

So they have to be able to see it. Teachers have to be able to see it. Parents have to be able to see it. Stakeholders have to be able to see it. So it's just so all pervasive. So now back to the open it up last thoughts, things that you'd like to share. Where are you guys going next? Any of that stuff.

Jessy: I say that for anyone listening interested in mastery grading, reach out and ask someone who has experience, if you want to learn more. I think it's a great program that we have, a great aspect of our school. And I really think watching the students take ownership of their own learning has been wonderful to see.

And I think our grading policy is a huge factor in that.

Matt: I'll say part of our vision is to be a national model. And I would say that the board members that created it was in those fields of cyber engineering. But for me personally coming over, it wasn't just in those areas. It is in our counseling department and how I do advising for students.

There was a lot in the grading of students and assessing and focusing on student learning. And I will say for folks that are interested in doing this in their school is go visit a school that's doing it, doing it well, then bring another person and then bring an administrator and a superintendent.

And so we kind of created our school kind of be that kind of a lab school that can pilot it out. And we really wanted to build a formula that was easy for another school to adopt and for colleges to understand. And that's why it was so important getting our kids in these colleges. And now they're recruiting every day.

We've got a college in here recruiting these kiddos and to take that whole stigma out of it as well. So yeah, the whole thing where this is not for, it doesn't work for here, it doesn't work for here. So we really wanted to build something that could be scouted out. So if anybody does want, is interested in learning more about us, we've got a whole outreach program that we've actually developed .This is kind of a side part of our school to help other schools kind of do things like this. It's called our Excel program.

So it's balancing cyber and engineering learning, but part of that can be our grading system on that, and it's a separate page on our website. If anybody's interested, they can go to that, click on that, and we'll reach out and kind of connect.

Sharona: Well, and we'll definitely link your website in the show notes for the episode.

I just wanted to thank both of you for taking this time out of your day for your commitment to this work. It is really exciting for me to see how this is going three, four years in from when we started and I just appreciate both of you so much. And everyone who's tuning into the pod. Thank you so much for listening and we'll be in your ears again next week Thank y'all.

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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