How do you lead grading reform without causing a systemic meltdown?

In Part 2 of this four-part mini-series on The ForwardEd Network Commons, Dr. Chad Lang and Dr. Matt Townsley shift from the "Why" into the practical "How." They tackle the "seductive detour" of gradebook mechanics and explain why the first deliverable of any successful reform isn't a new scale—it’s a Grading Purpose Statement.

Curriculum and assessment reform is a complex, multi-year journey that requires more than just a single academic year of effort. Drawing on the organizational change management principles of John Kotter and Bill Hall, our hosts discuss how to build a Guiding Coalition of educators, administrators, and community members. This inclusive approach ensures that modern grading practices are not just implemented, but embraced and sustained.

In this episode, we explore:

1. The Grading Purpose Statement: Why your school needs a co-created "North Star" to ensure alignment with broader institutional goals.
2. The Guiding Coalition: How to foster a culture of shared responsibility that outlasts leadership turnover.
3. Systemic Interdependence: Why grading reform is a team sport that must involve Athletic Directors, Nutrition Departments, and Transportation teams.
4. The Iterative Approach: Using pilot initiatives to test practices, mitigate resistance, and facilitate a smoother transition.

Special Thanks to our Sponsors: We are proud to partner with CLI (Curriculum Leadership Institute) and SpacesEDU. Both organizations share our mission of assessment reform and helping districts implement systems transformation with thoughtful, student-driven tools.

1. CLI (Curriculum Leadership Institute): Empowering school leaders to build systemic clarity and essential curriculum improvement. Learn more at https://www.cliweb.org/.
2. SpacesEDU: Helping districts capture durable skill development and digital portfolios to make learning visible. Discover how to transform your assessment tools at https://spacesedu.com/en/.

Key Takeaways:

1. Sustainability: Grading reform is a protracted process requiring a multi-year commitment.
2. Clarity: A Purpose Statement is the foundational element that guides all subsequent grading policy.
3. Collaboration: Effective communication is essential to foster trust among educators, students, and the community.

Watch Part 2: https://youtu.be/oA_AtSmPRck Subscribe to the Series: https://the-commons-forwarded.captivate.fm

1. #EducationLeadership #ChangeManagement #GradingReform #K12 #ForwardEd #Assessment #SpacesEDU #CLI

Today's episode is brought to you by

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Welcome to the commons on the Forward Ed Network.

This is Modern Grading Reform, a miniseries with Dr. Chad Lang and Dr. Matt Townsley sharing nearly 20 years in the trenches of grading and assessment reform.

Let's get started.

Well, welcome back everybody, to the Modern Grading Reform mini series.

I'm Chad Lang with my good friend Matt Townsley.

Matt, how we doing?

Great.

Doing great, doing great.

Good to see you again, Chad.

I know it is awesome.

Well, we dove right into this miniseries last time we got a chance to do episode one.

Kind of set the stage for our backgrounds and what we hope this series is able to provide our friends and listeners out there with grading and assessment reform.

We're really excited about today, going to jump right in and like getting started.

What have we seen work, work well and just share some good ideas over the next amount of time together.

So thanks for everybody that jumped on episode one.

Thanks to our friends over at Forward Ed for helping us put this together and of course, thanks to our sponsors.

As always.

Matt, what's on your mind?

When people talk to you, they're thinking about getting started.

A lot of times people reach out to you.

You have such a prolific website and you curated so many great resources that the next step is they send you an email and say, hey, I've been reading some of those articles or some the of someone gave me your name.

Where do we begin?

What?

Well, how do we do that, Matt?

Yeah, sometimes it's these, you know, down in the weeds questions that are really important at that moment because of something that they've read or something that they've happened.

For example, it's like, hey, maybe we've had this inconsistency in how we've weighed the grade book.

And so they ask, you know, hey, I read this something or I heard about this school.

Should we do an 80% summative, 20% formative grade gradebook or ask a very specific Question like, hey, can you point me in the direction of somebody who's using this electronic grade book?

Because we want to set their grade book in this perfect way.

And so the, the conversations sometimes start with these very, you know, important details.

And it's hard for me sometimes to discern, like, is this, you know, the 30th question that they've asked somebody or is it the first question that they've asked somebody?

Now, if it's the 30th question, then it's a different, you know, kind of conversation moving forward.

But oftentimes I just will assume it's the first question because it's their first question to me.

And I don't know their, their background.

You know, Chad, you've been involved in a variety of different schools.

I'm sure you've seen some different starting points.

You know, hey, we went to this conference, we read this book.

You know what, what's been kind of your experience in, you know, schools reaching out, having conversations with teachers, administrators about, you know, how to get started with grading reform.

Yeah, I think my own experience, I've been absolutely blessed that I just happened to fall into what I think is a terrific model.

And certainly grading reform is organizational change.

So, like, going slow to go fast is important.

I know, I think I mentioned this on the first episode.

Our assistant superintendent at the time is a person by the name of Cheryl Hogan.

Really, really great curriculum director and leader.

Pulled together a team to study grading reform.

A couple of leaders from every building in the district K12 and taking a 10,000 foot view at practices.

And I remember being asked, and I don't even know why I was asked.

I guess I kind of give off this learner vibe as a teacher and I was like a young head coach and I was really busy and I was teaching all kinds of different classes.

And I think I was just energetic to do stuff in our school.

And so I got to be a part of that.

And it was awesome.

It was no pressure.

It was like, this year we're going to meet eight times all day and sub you out and just get a chance to learn with people that are all kind of like, minded in this sort of guiding, I guess today we would call it maybe like a guiding coalition from Bill Hall's work.

And at that time we were just a pilot group to study grading reform.

And we were, we were watching those Rick Warmly videos.

We were reading some things from Chris Tovani and, and Rick Stiggins and Sue Brookhart and obviously Dr. Gusky and others, and.

And just in a real structured way.

And we challenge all these assumptions, you know, what should be included, what's everything that's ever been included in a grade.

And we did post it, note activities.

And that actually set us up to kind of emulate some of those activities with our board.

When we were bringing this idea to our board of education.

And they really appreciated, like, when's the last time we've used a year to study this potential change?

But that actually was just year one of three.

And so that.

That.

That opportunity to learn led to sort of dissemination amongst our staff.

They're like, why are you getting a sub again?

Where are you going?

What are you doing?

And people didn't feel this, like, I guess, dynamic feeling, like, oh, we have to change everything by, like, next semester.

There just wasn't any timeline.

It was like, we're just studying practices, we're learning.

And then, of course, naturally you were excited about things you were learning and sharing.

And so it was just sort of grassroots, like spill out.

And other people would say, well, if they ever need somebody to try something, I'd like to look at that.

You know, whether it was about reassessment or, you know, like you mentioned the balance between summative and informative or weighting categories or something like that.

And I thought that was a great model.

But that's not always what people ask.

Sometimes that's not the answer they want to hear.

You know, three years either sounds really short or really long.

But really I frame the question back to them is like, what are your goals?

You know, and let's kind of work backwards from your goals.

And how expansive do you want this to be?

Is this going to involve our board of education, our parents, our stakeholders right away from the jump?

Or you want to do some internal learning and think about change management within your organization?

Because you got to understand the dynamics of organizational change.

It's not just about grading and some of the emotion that comes with it.

Think about any sort of, like, organizational change and do a little research on organizational change.

That's another thing I would share.

Yep.

So those are kind of like both my experience and just some of the things that we have conversations about early on with school leaders.

Two things I want to just tease out to highlight from what you said, Chad.

One is that, you know.

Yeah.

Bill hall, building a Guiding coalition.

Great solution tree book there for kind of the PLC Guiding Coalition movement.

I think some of that comes back from old John Cotter and the Harvard Business School really, that his organizational change framework and this work shouldn't be done.

You know, there shouldn't be.

There has to be somebody leading it, no doubt, but it shouldn't be just one person's idea.

And so I loved hearing what you said about people getting together, doing activities, reading, asking each other questions to really dig into it.

And the second thing I love that you mentioned there was like, not just reading a lot about grading, but also about, you know, what change really looks like and how to do that.

So I'm, you know, I'm a professor.

Professor talk here for just a second.

Right.

Like, I teach classes for aspiring school leaders, aspiring school superintendents, and like, very few changes, if any are ever going to be successful long term if they're just a voice of one person.

There has to be a group of people getting together that they're owning it to help, you know, really overcome those implementation speed bumps, hurdles, all those things along the way.

There just has to be a group of people together that are building their capacity.

And so I think really one of the first steps is to develop some type of, you know, grading leadership team, grading task force, whatever that might be.

And I know of one school district here in Iowa, like, they, their task force, like, they spent a whole year just reading about all.

Like, we're going to buy, you know, six different grading books and do kind of like a jigsaw over all of them just to get a whole bunch of perspectives.

Then, to the surprise of the team, they spent the second year just learning about change management.

And some people are like, what's going on here?

Well, the curriculum director, like, they knew that this was going to be a complex change.

And so let's really build the capacity of our staff to really understand not just we're moving away from and towards, but how to get there as well.

So having a team in place I think is fantastic.

But I think, Chad, there's also a connection to what?

All right, well, you've got that team in place.

You've read the books, you've done the sticky note activities, you've gone to the fancy, fancy conferences.

I think there's a deliverable, you know, and there's awesome people that talk about what this deliverable ought to be.

You know, in your experience, as you've read the Subro karts and Tom Guskis of the world.

What's that?

That deliverable, that first deliverable that that guiding coalition or grading task force ought to be working towards.

Yeah, let me go back to people reaching out to us a lot of times And I've experienced this way.

Surely you have as well.

But sometimes when leaders or even teachers connect with us, they tend to be oftentimes really into the mechanics of ref.

Oh y.

Agreed.

So we're really thinking about something around homework, and maybe that is a good entry point for them.

But if you go back to that Simon cynic, you know, starting with the why, that golden circle, why, how and what instead of what first and be, it's a little bit of a trap to do that.

Although that might be a good entry point, like some of the mechanical issues.

Maybe it's your information system, maybe it's your report card, maybe it's homework, maybe it's reassessment, maybe it's the percentage scale, maybe it's zeros.

You know, those are all kind of seductive detours to get you to some conversations.

But if you isolate and focus on the what, you'll really lose people in the why.

And so in order to help teams and schools do that, I think we really need to hone in on some guiding principles about what it is that we believe grades are supposed to do here at our school through a grading purpose statement.

What a great deliverable.

What a great deliverable.

And I mean like mince over every single word.

Because our friend Ken o' Connor says, and I love how he says, like a grading purpose statement, like identifying your grading purpose statement becomes your compass and your compass orients your actions.

So it's really easy to say that as you're trying to develop actionable steps related to your purpose, you can just assess them to the compass.

Like, you know, we said that we believe that all kids can learn at different rates, but then we have deadlines for reassessment that are super tight, like five days or something like that.

So it's like you were on the right track before you didn't have any reassessment, but you're not really fully aligned with what you said.

You are.

And if you want people to build relational capacity and trust the work that you're doing, that looks different.

And when I say people, I'm talking about kids, but also their parents.

You gotta be able to follow through with what you said and people can be on board.

You know, you think about all the high performing organizations and companies out there in the world, the ones that are the most successful.

You may not love their products, you may not even be a fan of their company or their food or whatever, but you know exactly what they stand for and how they deliver, and it develops that sort of organizational trust.

That customers have.

And I think our students, our families are our customers.

So if you have a purpose statement that's clear enough for people to and broad enough to make sure it hits what you're looking for, then you can develop action steps or stop doing actions that aren't aligned to that.

Have you had some experience with grading purpose statements?

Yeah, I think for those that, you know, tuned in in detail to episode one, we kind of teased out the, you know, why schools are changing the grading practices.

We talked about, you know, consistency, clarity and equity as being those kind of those three big ones we see out there that could be a starting point for a school as they develop their grading purpose statement is we want to be more consistent and clear.

Right.

Like, you know, embedding some of those phrases or just choosing the one that's most important to them.

Right.

I've seen schools that just say communication is the most important one for us.

And so our grading purpose statement is the purpose of grades at XYZ school district is to communicate students levels of learning based upon state academic standards.

That's why we're doing what we're doing.

We believe that grades are communication, not compensation.

And so that's why we're, you know, making these other changes.

And so I think, Chad, just to, you know, use a phrase you mentioned earlier, is that rather than getting too focused on the mechanics first, like what our gradebook's going to look like, how it's weighted and so forth, taking that step back with the guiding coalition, the grading task force, and co creating this grading purpose statement is definitely one of those first deliverables that, you know, not just Matt and Chad think, but we can anchor that in a variety of others that have written things before us.

But that's not the end point.

It's certainly the starting point, Chad.

You know, but schools still are like, but how should we handle homework?

You know, how are we going to communicate learning in the grade book?

You know, how should we handle reassessments?

And so there's got to be something else.

And I'll, and I'll tee it up for just a second.

I was doing a workshop once where, you know, like, hey, do it.

Do an introduction to standards business grading.

Townsley.

So I come and do this workshop and this very kind teacher met me at the first morning break and says, Dr. Townsley, I just want to let you know you keep using this phrase, standards based grading, but everybody here has an entirely different definition or they don't even know what it is that you're talking about.

Here it's not been clearly defined to them what this grading change is all about.

And so it was just, it was hard for them to have a collective understanding.

So I think that's where this next step really comes into play.

It unify, it begins to unify everyone as to what we're doing based upon that grading purpose statement.

So, Chad, talk to us about, you know, policies or principles, however you want to phrase it.

Yeah, I'm happy to do that.

I think I want to talk about something that's a nice bridger between these two.

And this is a cautionary tale about being really locked into naming the reform.

We've heard it all.

I mean standards based grading, standards reference grading, competency grading, ungrading, standards based assessment reporting.

I mean you could list 10 more probably.

And while there's probably a good reason to do that, one of the things we can say about the stickiness of grading reform is that's not an initiative.

You're not going to go out and find this, the seminal book or video series or methodology that's going to solve whatever problem you have.

Because remember, this is a communication issue and it's about validity of communication.

It's about the quality of inputs of communication and what it means to the people that want to know and need to know, which is parents, students, maybe other stakeholders, colleges, universities, the military, whatever.

And because we have this long history of using oftentimes like an omnibus, single solitary score or grade to try to represent all kinds of different purposes and never really isolating on what our actual purpose is at the school and being clear about that.

And people just sort of make up rules of their own and then they go out looking for sort of branded, you know, systems.

And, and while it's certainly system changing, the cautionary tale is putting a brand on it.

And I know that you and I have talked about this a lot and we really tried to refer to like an all encompassing umbrella movement just to say it's modern grading reform.

Like we're just trying to modernize the opportunity and that really can bring it under a more broad umbrella.

Maybe it doesn't seem so

antagonistic.

Yeah, I think sometimes people feel like it's a canned thing when it has like this sort of formalized brain pick

up this, we would pick up this book and do it exactly how they tell us to do it.

And that that immediately turns people off because basically it's like saying, you know, well, it's like a plug and play solution.

And this, this work is more systematic and reforming.

It's Sort of like it's sort of like picking a weight loss program and saying, you know, well, that didn't work.

Well, we know that that's just emblematic of a larger system change.

Like it's your diet and your sleep and your, it's, it's more than just what the program can do for you.

But yet when it does work, we blame the fad or we blame the brand and we just shift on.

And that organizational change has a heavy consequence on your employees and your students.

Yep.

So if you can just say, you know, hey, these are our principles, these are our values of what we believe about grading and reporting and get rock solid on those, then you'll be able to internally develop policies and procedures that are perfectly aligned to those and you won't have to try to pick like that brand of rules and because you can find stuff out there, I mean, there's no doubt about that.

But I think that's certainly a challenge.

It's not the only school improvement type methodology or, or systems change that, that has, that, that has that challenge.

But, but we think that's been.

And, and I know I've heard Dr. Gusky talk about that in others.

And so one of the things I would just sort of intermediary challenge people to think about is like, I wouldn't spend a ton of time thinking about the naming of the work, but I would just try to jump right more into what's the purpose of the work and the action steps.

What's the same?

What's different?

I know you and I have talked about that.

I mean, what would you add to that?

Matt?

Yeah, I'm with you.

It's not really about, you know, standards based standards ref competency based or, or, or just using somebody else's playbook.

Definitely that's not what, what I think either of us would advocate for.

I think though that, you know, having a grading purpose statement is a great first step, but then we need to anchor ourselves just a little bit more in the weeds on some of the common grading reform shifts.

Right.

Like this idea of we used to, you know, somehow put points and percentages in the gradebook.

Now we're going to communicate students current levels of learning based upon standards using a, you know, four distinct performance categories or something like that.

Grading reform is a long term shift, not a one time program.

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Explore how@spacesedu.com grading so when I think of, you know, all right, this grading purpose statement is like the overarching, you know, why are we doing what we're doing?

And now we're going to get into a little bit more to the what.

And so, you know, school district leaders out there, you can envision like a one pager where you've got your grading purpose statement at the top, and then underneath of it, it's like, what are we going to do for reassessments?

Right?

We're going to allow students multiple opportunities to reassess.

However, teachers will be provided the ability to, you know, teach them correctives and so forth.

You put a qualifier on there, right?

So that becomes one of the grading policies or principles.

Extra credit will not be permitted in our school.

That's another of those, you know, policies or principles.

We will communicate, you know, you know, using the following performance categories in the grade book.

One represents this, two represents this, and so forth.

The way I think about it is like, we have to start to define and outline what the grading reform is.

And we begin to foreshadow this idea that at some point in time we're going to be onboarding new staff, right?

Mrs. Smith retires, or we're growing as a school, whatever it might be.

This school that reached out to me actually back in the pandemic from Kansas, this high school, they actually had this experience.

They're like, matt, we've read the books, we've gone to the conferences, like, can you just, you know, virtually work with us and help us develop, like, our grading, you know, like the beginning of our grading playbook.

And so we started grading purpose statement.

And I think they end up with four grading policies.

And then it's like, you know, what we're learning?

We're talking more about that.

We're building our capacity.

What's this mean for us?

What's that not mean?

And that's the beginning of the playbook.

And they start to say the reason that we're doing this because is because we know we're gonna be hiring Mrs. Smith's replacement next year.

And we gotta onboard Mrs. Smith's replacement to understand, you know, the what and the why of our grading reform.

And so I think that's, you know, it's got to be written down.

It's Got to be institutionalized.

It has to be revisited.

I mean, anybody can do this, by the way, but if it just sits on the shelf or in a Google Doc or in a teams folder, it's not a living, breathing and active document.

So it has to be something that we're constantly referring back to.

But then I, you know, Chad, you know, I talk about this, right?

I know that you're very much of a, you know, a systems thinker.

You're always like, hey, we just can't make this change.

It's going to have this domino effect over here and all that for sure.

What, what type of, you know, like, systems do you have you observed, you know, of that are also going to have to have, you know, plenty of attention given to them once we start to make these grading shifts.

Well, I'll give you a couple, and some might not be so obvious.

One MTSS intervention.

What's our ability to.

Now that we have an opportunity to communicate maybe more clearly, perhaps in a more valid way, hopefully that's true in a more reliable way, it's going to tell us more about our students internally and what are going to be our systems to support from a systems lens.

Amen.

Is it an rti?

Is it an mtss?

What does that look like?

And I'm talking to the school leaders out there and is it set up to address and communicate and talk the same language?

And so, like, I know I've worked in schools and I, and I talk to schools all the time about tears.

Like, they want to talk about tears.

And I always get nervous when they're like, yeah, once they hit a certain grade, then they go to this intervention.

I'm like, are we talking, are we talking about like a summative grade or a formative piece of feedback?

Because, you know, specific and timely interventions, you know, a holistic, like, summative grade that might be a little late, you know, and, and they hadn't even, like, considered that.

Right.

They're like, we're just trying to help students that are struggling.

I get that.

But remember, how we communicate at different points in the journey tells us some different things.

And let's just not assume that all of that is, is saying the same thing.

Right.

And, and so that's been a point here.

Here's another one.

Behavior systems, like, behavior interventions.

What's the interplay between, like, consequences?

You know, I, I know schools that have to consider, are we going to require people to make up things during in school suspension or out of school suspension or, you know, you and I both Heard you don't get to make up any work when you're suspended.

And it's.

And of course, that just flies right in the face of what everybody else is trying to do, which is to get students to do practice.

And, you know, hopefully, you know, what if they're suspended during an assessment?

And are there schools that are like counting that against students, you know, and that, that's that mixture piece of behavior in academics, they're like, well, we don't count homework for a grade.

We don't do that.

But then again, they're not even looking at, you know, what is their behavior management system or protocols.

And then lastly, like, what about your extracurriculars?

Yeah, this is a big piece.

You know, I used to be an athletic director, so I have a special place in, in my heart for athletic directors.

And a lot of athletic directors, excuse me, were teachers and coaches within organizations.

But you know, some of them maybe weren't at that school or they're.

It's been a long time since they've been involved in grading, assessment or anything like that.

So thinking about, like, if you're going to have a reassessment policy and you're going to require, I know districts that require reassessment or remediation at certain levels or certain grades, and they're expecting them to come after school and are we going to allow them to miss practice?

Is that a consequence for missing practice?

How does that fit with your behavior management?

Like, now you're bringing in three systems.

I think it is a huge link.

And I know that in a lot of schools, 60 or percent or more of students are involved in extracurricular activity.

What about eligibility?

You need to make sure that there's a coherent way.

Because if, if we're not providing, for example, I know we.

There's a lot of schools that want to be able to do remediation, reassessment for students that are really needing that support and not treating it as if it's a consequence, like you're in trouble.

But if that's going to require them to miss the first 10 minutes of basketball practice and they're going to have to run line drills or they won't get to start, you know, you're sending a difficult message to that student that, you know, does your.

I thought your school really valued this process.

I mean, that this is what we were going to do.

But you know, the left hand's not talking to the right.

Maybe the head coach isn't a teacher in the building or they don't Understand, you're really putting the kids in the middle.

And so that's just something that we can think through by having a lot of different stakeholders in your task force or your grading guiding coalition.

I mean, there's a lot of things to do, but there's a lot of ground to cover there around systems.

Have you seen anything that involved extracurriculars that way?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'd say a couple of things.

One thing I was going to say is extracurriculars, Right.

Like, sometimes it's, it's the.

How are we going to handle eligibility now?

Because the information we have is different.

The information we're getting at different is different.

Right.

It used to be we're just basing it upon, you know, how well did a kid do at the end of the quarter, I've seen, or the end of semester, are they going to be eligible?

Sometimes the state has a specific rule.

We still got to abide by it.

Sometimes schools have more like preventative, you know, policies as well.

Like, hey, if you're not passing at the end of three weeks in a class, then we're going to put you on this, like one week of probation so you can get your grade back up.

But if that evidence that was being used before was just, you know, practice points before and now we, do we really even have any evidence of learning that's summative to put in there that would contribute towards a grade?

So it really creates these new kind of peel back the onion type of questions that can get in the way of extra credit, extracurricular eligibility.

Yep.

Here's two more that, that as I, as you were talking, I was thinking about them.

One is, I was talking to a administrator, I think it was two weeks ago, and he's like, you know what?

We're really thinking differently now about our summer school.

It used to be, you know, we'd offer, you know, these credit recovery things where if a student, you know, failed this class, they take it over again this summer so we can try to keep them on track to graduate.

Now we're rethinking it.

Like, is it really about them failing the class or is it more about what standards does this student not yet understand?

And actually making this summer school experience more appealing and probably more instructionally appropriate because the kid maybe understood, you know, whatever those standards were, they just didn't understand these over here.

And that's what's contributing to, you know, the final grade in their, you know, high school system.

And I think one of you alluded to with intervention systems is you know, just the master schedule.

Right.

Like some schools, they already have kind of a good like wind time, tiger time, that type of thing.

And they start to kind of repurpose it.

And others are like, oh my gosh, we need to figure that out in our master schedule.

And so their challenge is trying to figure out how to get that in their master schedule, let alone how to use it appropriately.

And I think that the big picture, I hear you saying is, is if you're a high school out there, we're trying to just move away from, you know, just run the DNF list and doing the same old thing over and over again.

There's a better opportunity out there within this grading reform to really understand by the student, by the standard where they at and what does that mean for us as a system and how do we refine our system to better respond to those blurs?

Yeah.

And, and we say all that not as a matter to like, if you jumped on this series, you're like, okay, I, we really want to do this, baby.

You're giving me a lot of things to think about.

That's coming from a good place of our 20 years in the trenches.

That's why we're doing this, Right.

That's why we're providing this opportunity to have a conversation about things we've learned, things we're seeing.

I mean, I could go further, right?

Like what about technology?

What about access to the student view of their scores?

And is the technology department on board?

Technology, Transportation.

I know some schools that do intervention earlier in the morning.

And can we do it before students are required to be there?

Well, that's not equitable.

And so there's transportation.

Transportation.

What about the drop off schedule?

And I mean there's just so many things to think about.

Nutrition, Nutri.

You know, you're gonna, most of the time you're trying to do intervention or support learners.

You're trying to find minutes in the day to do that in your schedule, as you alluded to.

And we want students to have social time and recess and all those kinds of things.

So you're going to want to bring in your nutrition folks and talk about this comp.

It's complex.

They're all interleaving.

But the thing is, is the time to consider that is up front in your implementation phase and bring those folks in and say, hey, you know, lunch is really important to us.

It's a great time for our kids day.

You guys do such a great job.

We want to know, we want you to know that there's Gonna be some things going on.

Like our friend Tom Shimmer has always advocated for this idea of catch up lunch, you know, in his book Grading from the Inside Out.

Well, you wouldn't want to do that in isolation of your nutrition department supervision.

Right.

And safety.

So, I mean, there's just some things that you can think through on the front end that, you know, what you can predict, you can prevent.

Right.

All good administrators would have a good sense of what those things would be.

We're just highlighting that, you know, nothing happens in isolation.

And even though grading is a form of communication, it has implications across your system, which is maybe why it's complex.

But I think we could learn from others and try some different ideas that have been pretty successful.

I mean, every.

All good educators steal good, great ideas from one another.

It's part of what makes our industry awesome in the, in the vocation.

So try not to scare people away from the world.

Well, yeah, well, you know, that's, that's why we're doing this podcast, Chad, like you said, just to share, you know, our years of experience.

Put it out there in audio, video format for others to say, all right, this is where we're at.

What's our next step with, yeah, you know, getting started or refining grading form.

But we haven't laid it all out there.

I think there's one more step that, that viewers and listeners need to hear, Chad.

It's all right.

We've got the grading purpose statement.

We've got our list of three to five grading policies.

We're talking about the master schedule, the intervention systems, the extracurricular applications, all those systematic things.

Can we get this done in one year?

We just got, you know, just like roll it out in one year.

It's going to be great.

Chad, I know that again, you've been involved in schools that were refining this over, you know, five years later, seven years later, and that's my experience as well.

Chad, is it fair to say that a school, a district needs to commit to this implementation over multiple years?

Is that, is that fair to say?

Yeah, I think we can safely say that now.

There's obviously exceptions to every kind of.

It's not even a rule.

It's just thinking about school reform.

In my years of school improvement, just in my own practice professionally, you know, one of the things I've observed is the seasonality of our work.

You know, a lot of administrators work 12 months, but the people on those committees and guiding coalitions and so forth, they don't.

So when you design implementation, most organizations can take a 12 month outlook, 24 months, you can do that if you want to, but you're not going to have all the players at the table and you're not going to have all your customers there to start implementation right away.

And so I think you need to take that into consideration.

Really.

You have much more of a, of a reduced timeline to actually make some changes in some communications.

You can communicate all you want June 30th to your parents and stakeholders, but they're not focused on that at all.

And in fact, it's a little bit disingenuous to do that.

And then on the flip side, you might say, well, we're going to start with fresh start in August.

And then you run the risk of having all this change or communication lost in the shuffle of everything else.

So I mean, those are things you have to think about that over time.

You kind of just need more opportunities and more varied opportunities like parent teacher conferences, if they happen in person.

Do we have many informational sessions?

Do we have tables that are sort of just giving information out?

Because one of the things you can do is just to my point previously, when you are thinking about reforming to some more modernized greeting practices, you can put your feet in the water a little bit.

You can start saying, you know, we're just going to pick on a couple of things that are aligned to the principles we're developing.

It's not even a policy yet.

We're just going to say what would happen if there everybody just did one assignment this week that we just didn't calculate for a grade.

And let's just observe.

Start small, start small.

Just, just what do they do?

What do you notice?

Because a lot of times we just need to do a little bit of action research of our own myths and misconceptions.

That takes time.

You just can't speed up trust either.

Like reform requires trusts and trust between your organization, your students because it is a communication device and it holds some intrinsic and extrinsic value for different stakeholders.

You're talking about, like it or not, a system of currency for a lot of families and schools that, that feel like that currency and that transactional nature of grades is being pulled out from underneath their feet.

So you're going to need some Runway for that.

And again too, one of the things you want to be able to do to fight against that sort of implementation program like implementing is systems aren't done that way.

Systems change require time to build any law over time.

So I mean, I think that's, that's why that that staggered implementation and we, I don't say there's a magic number.

I mean, I, I think I've seen districts that are really becoming a pandemic was tricky because it sort of interrupted or kick started different, different pieces.

I don't know how many districts I talked to Matt that are like we were on this great path and then it interrupted our work.

Right.

Then Covid.

Then Covid.

And I think that's just a reality that every.

Everybody has to deal with.

That was in that in some instances it's inspired and kickstarted a lot of modern grading reform because it exposed a lot of flaws from distance learning and in capturing what kids actually can know or do themselves.

And we don't know who's doing the rest and also some inequities.

But for the most part, you know, it's an evolution so that you are living on a timeline that is good for a variety of stakeholders on that continuum of change.

And it gives you an opportunity also to develop an onboarding system.

You talked about onboarding faculty.

I think it's important to have a great onboarding for students and families who are new to your community.

Yep, that is a big, big.

And because most likely the first time they're going to learn that standards based grading or whatever grading reform you're doing is different is when something goes awry from what they're used to and that's not a good experience.

Yeah, I don't want to get too far ahead.

I know that in episode four, we're going to talk about really kind of the sustaining element of all this.

That's right.

Yeah.

Right now for those that are listening, it's just important to know that like as they embark upon it or get restarted on it, that yeah, it's going to take multiple years.

And I just, you know, give a shout out to one school district I've been talking a lot with and they're just kind of, you know, rolling it up from one grade band to the next and they're just like building the capacity in their leaders.

Even though they're in year one, they're saying we're, we have a tight plan for what year one's gonna look like.

We don't know all the details about what year two.

We've got these ideas and we just know there's going to be a year three.

Think of that institutional commitment.

Right when district level people are saying, we know it's going to take multiple years.

That just gives confidence in staff, in community members, all that stuff.

I know we'll talk more about, you know, what all that can look like.

Even next episode is going to be a good one, Chad.

I know that.

Yeah.

Hot diggity dang.

No, we can dig into our book and all that good stuff of communicating with parents, but I want to give all those good details away.

You want to wrap us up, Chad, or.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's all good stuff.

I mean, you said at the, at the end of episode one, this is gonna be like going to the ice cream shop.

We're gonna get a little bit of sampling and see and I, I just had to dive ahead to Rocky Road or whatever it might might be.

That's your favorite flavor of learning around this work.

You know, we, we love the work.

It's not without challenge, but we hope that we're able to share some nuggets with folks who bring their own level of expertise and experience.

There's just so many folks out there.

We're just one of few, two of you that, that have continued to have the opportunity to share and there's so many, many others.

We want to thank all of you who have joined us so far.

We hope you're really enjoying it.

Again, big shout out to our sponsors and of course Forward Ed and all the great folks over there putting this together.

And if you need anything from us, we're available on LinkedIn and X.

You can check out Matt's website, of course.

And we just thank you for being great friends and followers.

We look forward to episode three and four and with that, we wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

Matt, I'll see you next time.

Sounds great, Jay.

Looking forward to it already.

Thanks for spending time in the comments on the Forward Ed Network.

You've been listening to Modern Grading Reform, a miniseries with Dr. Chad Lang and Dr. Matt Townsley.

Honest conversations, practical insights, and better communication about learning.

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