The Grading Podcast

143 - Barrier or Breakthrough? Course Coordination and the Future of Grading with Deb Carney

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz are joined by Deb Carney to explore the complex role of course coordination in the adoption of alternative grading practices. What emerges is a nuanced tension: coordination can act as a barrier when individual instructors lack autonomy, but it also offers one of the most powerful levers for large-scale change when coordinators embrace reform. Deb shares her journey into outcomes-based grading and reflects on how collaboration, community, and shared structures made that shift possible. The conversation highlights the importance of communities of practice, either through formal coordination or PLC-like structures, as essential spaces for sustained instructional change. Ultimately, the episode argues that meaningful grading reform is not just about individual instructors making different choices, but about building systems, support, and collective momentum to make those choices viable and scalable.

Links

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

Resources

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

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

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

Music

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

142 - Please Harvard! Don't get it wrong this time!! What's wrong with a cap on A's - a discussion with Dr. Stephanie Valentine

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this follow-up to their earlier conversation about Harvard and “too many A’s,” Sharona and Boz welcome back Dr. Stephanie Valentine to unpack Harvard’s proposed new grading policy, which would cap the number of A grades in each class and layer course-based ranking on top of an already troubled system. Drawing on Stephanie’s powerful “Points Are Insidious” manifesto and her experience teaching high-achieving, perfectionistic students, the episode explores how policies built to force distinction can intensify anxiety, undermine risk-taking, discourage collaboration, and ultimately work against the very innovation and intellectual curiosity elite institutions claim to value. Together, the three of them critique the mathematical and ethical flaws of ranking students against one another, examine the gap between top-down policy and classroom reality, and wrestle with what it would mean for faculty to live with integrity under a policy like this—while also reaffirming that the real alternative is not inflated or meaningless grades, but grading systems genuinely grounded in learning, growth, and student wellbeing.

Links

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

Grade-inflation panel says updated plan focuses on reining in A’s, restoring integrity of system, freeing students to follow curiosity
The “Points Are Insidious” Manifesto, Part 3: Perfectionism Is Not Excellence, by Dr. Stephanie Valentine
Grade Caps Fail the Game Theory Exam, from The Crimson Tide (Harvard Newspapr)
The “Points are Insidious” Manifesto (Part I), by Dr. Stephanie Valentine
The “Points Are Insidious” Manifesto, Part II: Assessing at the Boiling Point, by Dr. Stephanie Valentine
Yes, Grade Inflation is Real. But Is It a Real Problem?, from NEA Today
Advice To Our Students, from the University of Texas - Austin
Episode 127 - An LMS Designed from the Ground Up for Alt Grading? Tell Me More! With Stephanie Valentine
Episode 138 - Too Many A’s Or Too Much Confusion?

Shameless Outside Plug for Sharona's Theater Production Company

Chalomot Productions

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

141 - The Ungrading Spectrum: From Compliance to Student Ownership

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz welcome back Chris Sarkonak to explore his powerful concept of the ungrading spectrum—a framework that maps the evolution of grading mindsets from traditional, compliance-driven systems to collaborative, student-centered approaches. Drawing on his classroom experience and professional journey, Chris unpacks how educators move from “this is how it’s always been done” toward systems that prioritize student agency, reflection, and ownership of learning. The conversation dives into the hidden inconsistencies of grading (including how the same student can receive vastly different results depending on grading structures), the role of student voice in creating more valid assessment systems, and the real-world constraints educators face when trying to shift practices. Along the way, the hosts wrestle with their own tensions around student input, rigor, and readiness, ultimately highlighting that while no system is perfect, rethinking grading through a lens of collaboration and purpose can dramatically expand who succeeds in our classrooms.

Links

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

The Ungrading Spectrum, by Chris Sarkonak
Learning INSPIRed: Student Power Summit
Episode 136 - Grading for Physicists, Not Point Collectors – with Chris Sarkonak
Reliability of the Grading of High-School Work in English, by Daniel Starch and Edward C. Elliott (Published September 1912)

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

140 - Beyond Labels: Specifications, Standards and Designing Better Grading - with Adriana Streifer

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Sharona and Boz are joined by Dr. Adriana Streifer, Associate Professor and Associate Director at the University of Virginia’s Center for Teaching Excellence, to explore how specifications grading, course design, and institutional culture intersect with the broader movement to rethink grading in higher education. Adriana shares how her early experiences teaching writing led her to question the fairness and meaning of traditional grading and ultimately adopt specifications grading as a way to better represent the complex, process-based nature of learning.

The conversation dives into the practical differences between specifications and standards-based grading, lessons learned from facilitating the Alternative Grading Institute, and how instructors can assess their readiness for grading innovation in light of institutional constraints and professional risk. Along the way, the discussion examines the difference between procedural and conceptual rigor, the ways grading systems shape pedagogy, and how identity and institutional culture influence the pushback instructors may experience when they change grading practices. The conversation wraps up with a look toward the future: designing grading systems that align with values, support real learning, and perhaps eventually move beyond grades entirely.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

139 - Using Your Values to Design Your Grading with Dr. Lindsay Masland

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz talk with Dr. Lindsay Masland about how meaningful grading reform starts not with a particular system, but with intentional choices grounded in values, context, and care for students. Lindsay shares her path from questioning her teaching practices through universal design and course redesign work to fully rethinking grades after a powerful experience with a student in crisis. Together, they explore how alternative grading can open the door to deeper conversations about what we actually want students to learn, how we want them to feel in our classes, and whether our current practices align with those goals. The conversation also highlights the Alternative Grading Institute, the role of context in shaping what is possible, and why examining the assumptions behind traditional grading can create the productive dissonance needed for real change.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

138 - Too Many A’s Or Too Much Confusion?

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In “Too Many A’s,” Sharona and Boz revisit a popular media narrative about “grade inflation,” starting with a Harvard-focused story that treats “too many A’s” as a crisis—while quietly mixing two incompatible purposes of grading: ranking/sorting and communicating learning. They argue that if grades are meant to report mastery, “more A’s” isn’t a scandal—it’s the goal (with the important caveat that the bar still matters). From there, they dissect a recent viral article claiming “easy A’s” harm students’ long-term outcomes, and they do what they teach: go to the original research, separate correlation from causation, and interrogate definitions—especially a math-heavy “lenient grader” metric that depends on standardized tests and other inputs that may be misaligned, inequitable, or just plain bad proxies. Along the way, they call out how quickly commentary slides into storytelling (“the mechanism is not difficult to imagine”) and how often alternative grading gets blamed without evidence—ending with a clear takeaway: we can’t evaluate “too many A’s” until we’re honest about what grades are for, what evidence they should represent, and what data we’re willing to treat as trustworthy.

Links

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

One Solution for Too Many A’s? Harvard Considers Giving A+ Grades. (NY Times Gift Link)
Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation, Denning Et Al (Not Yet Peer Reviewed)
Easy A’s, lower pay: Grade inflation’s hidden damage, New Article referencing the above article
The True Cost of Grade Inflation at Harvard, article in Harvard Magazine
Episode 88 – Unearned Grades: Remaking the Conversation about Grade “Inflation”, The Grading Podcast

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

137 - Mild, Medium, Spicy: Gamifying Mastery in Grade 7 Math with Gabriel Despatie

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Grade 7 math teacher Gabriel Despatie (Ontario) shares what happened when he tried to “overlay” standards-based grading onto nine years of refined tests—and why he ultimately scrapped his assessments after realizing they were packed with filler that measured rounding, formatting, and test-taking more than the actual learning goals. Gabriel walks through the system that finally clicked: a weekly “Learning Carnival” where students work one standard at a time with three backwards-compatible performance levels (mild/medium/spicy), two questions per level, and unlimited retakes that count as mastery whenever they happen. The conversation dives into practical logistics (tracking sheets, retake flow, managing chaos), the surprising motivational impact of gamified mastery markers (smiley faces and fist pumps), and what changed when he temporarily hid percentage grades—only to see retakes drop as soon as the numbers returned. Along the way, Gabriel connects alternative grading to Building Thinking Classrooms, shares how Open Middle tasks improved assessment quality (without punishing reading comprehension), and reflects on why meaningful grading reform takes time, iteration, and community support.

Links

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

Building Thinking Classrooms, by Peter Liljedahl
Modifying Your Thinking Classroom for Different Settings, by Peter Liljedahl

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

136 - Grading for Physicists, Not Point Collectors - with Chris Sarkonak

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Chris Sarkonak—high school physics and math teacher in Brandon, Manitoba and a PhD student in educational assessment—joins Boz and Sharona to describe his winding journey from traditional grading to standards-based grading, back again, and ultimately toward a student-centered, skills-focused, largely ungraded approach shaped by COVID-era conferencing, Building Thinking Classrooms, and the “ungrading” ecosystem of ideas. Chris shares how removing itemized grades reduced competition and unlocked real collaboration, how he structures learning with labs-first experiences, vertical whiteboards, “note-making” instead of note-taking, and spaced, skills-based check-ins, and how students co-create a “What does a grade look like?” document to anchor end-of-term self-assessment conferences with real criteria—not vibes. The punchline: his expanded, more diverse physics program isn’t “watered down”—students match (or beat) prior exam averages, earn strong AP Physics pass rates with minimal traditional test prep, and even crack provincial top-10 rankings in elite national-level contests, prompting colleagues to ask how to make their classrooms work the same way.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

135 - The Interaction of Alt Grading, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, & Pedagogy of Kindness

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Boz and Sharona explore how trauma-informed pedagogy and “teaching with kindness” intersect with alternative grading, especially through the often-overlooked impact of syllabus tone and classroom language. Sparked by Acacia Ackles’ “Teaching Through Trauma” post on the Grading for Growth blog and Cate Denial’s work on kinder syllabus design, they unpack how common “control” policies around devices, academic integrity, and participation can communicate suspicion and unintentionally amplify student anxiety. They connect key trauma-informed principles, such as safety, transparency, support, voice and choice, collaboration, and resilience, to familiar alternative grading practices like feedback loops, multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning, clear expectations, and structures that normalize help-seeking. Along the way, they wrestle with tensions like cold calling and behaviorism, arguing for approaches that reduce surprise, offer opt-outs when needed, and build environments where students want to participate. The episode closes with gratitude for a community willing to be vulnerable about what’s not working, and a reminder that shifting grading can be the “thread” that unravels deeper, more humane teaching practices.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

134 - (Replay) Exploring Alt Grading in Physical Education (in more detail) with Josh Ogilvie

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Due to unexpected technical difficulties we were unable to record a new episode for this week. We will be back with new episodes next week! In the meantime, please enjoy this incredible conversation and deep conversation about alt grading in Physical Education, including the details! Join us as Sharona and Bosley talk about alt grading with Josh Ogilvie, a listener and a 22 year high school PE teacher in Canada. (Originally aired December 10, 2024).

Links

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

Contact Josh Ogilvie:

@joshogilvie4 on Twitter
@joshogilvie.bsky.social on Bluesky
Josh Ogilvie on LinkedIn
www.jogilvie.com

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

133 - To Display (Grades) or Not To Display (Grades) - That is the Question!

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast, Boz and Sharona dig into a 2025 longitudinal study that tackles a surprisingly practical question: should we show students the numeric grade on an assignment, or give feedback without displaying the score? Using a well-controlled design, the research tracks both academic performance and emotional responses as grades are introduced, removed, and reintroduced alongside written comments. The results complicate a lot of common assumptions while also highlighting how quickly students adapt to whatever grading environment they’re in. Along the way, the conversation connects the findings to feedback quality, Control-Value Theory, and the bigger takeaway the authors land on: consistency matters, and if grades must be used, students need explicit framing that links grades to learning outcomes.

Links

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

Impact of Displaying Grades Vs Not Displaying Grades on Academic Performance and Emotional Outcomes While Delivering Feedback Comments: A Longitudinal Study, Panadero, E. and Sánchez-Iglesias, I., 2025

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

132 - New Semester, New Grading: Building Trust Before Content

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 04:00:00 -0700

A new semester is days away—and Sharona is stepping back into teaching precalculus for the first time in about a decade, this time with today’s alternative grading practices (and one big new twist). Before the “math content” really ramps up, Sharona and Boz make the case for spending serious time up front on what actually makes the semester work: trust, collaboration, and shared understanding of how learning will be evaluated.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

131 - Why Now? The Urgency of Grading Reform in an AI-Saturated Era

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Grading reform has been a decades-long effort—but in this episode, Sharona and Boz argue that it’s now urgent. They explore what’s changed: post-pandemic student disengagement and distrust that grades reflect real learning, the way AI has shifted the conversation from “cheating” to “purpose,” and growing institutional pressure to demonstrate educational value. They frame grading as the linchpin that can either support or sabotage other reforms, then name what’s standing in the way—misconceptions about reform (“no deadlines,” “lower standards”), backlash from top-down policies without training, and the uncomfortable truth that traditional grading can let systems avoid accountability for actual learning. The episode closes with a call for listeners to help crowdsource next steps by emailing ideas to info at centerforgradingreform dot org

.Links

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

119 – When Flexibility Isn’t Enough: Alternative Grading and Neurodivergent Students – A Conversation with Emily Pitts Donahoe and Sarah Silverman

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

130 - Rubric or Scoring Guide: Why Clarity Matters and How to Build Effective Rubrics

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz discuss the recent grading controversy at the University of Oklahoma and use it as a launching point to focus on why rubrics matter so much to grading integrity, consistency and student learning. They reflect on how loosely defined criteria invite subjectivity, create wildly different grading outcomes for the same work, and leave students guessing about what “counts” as quality.

Rather than debating the specific incident, they dissect the difference between scoring guides and true rubrics, the importance of clearly defined performance levels, and how rubric design shapes whether grades function as feedback or as punishment. The conversation emphasizes rubrics as communication tools—meant to make expectations visible, learning improvable, and grading decisions defensible.

Ultimately, strong rubrics are not about compliance or point allocation, but about aligning assessment with learning goals, supporting revision and growth, and reducing the hidden curriculum that traditional grading too often creates.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

129 - (Replay) The Results are IN! Traditional Grading and Alternative Grading Went HEAD TO HEAD!!! What happened?

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Happy New Year! We are taking a small break this week from releasing new episodes, so please enjoy our most popular episode from 2025. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode!

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley share some of the top line results of a direct comparison between traditional grading and alternative grading. In a tightly coordinated course with many instructors, sections and students, half of the sections used traditional grading and half used alternative grading. This is a fascinating dive into what does "traditional" grading mean, and how do those impacts show up in the classroom.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

128 - (Replay)Visionary Leadership: Culture Change through Asking Questions - A 10-Year Journey to Building-Wide Grading Reform

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Happy Holidays! We're taking the week off from recording, so enjoy this replay about visionary leadership!!

In this episode, Sharona and Boz interview Doug Wilson, principal of Avondale High School in Michigan, about his advice on implementing building-wide grading reform. This discussion touches on ways of being a visionary leader, how to move towards culture change around grades, and advice to administrators (and teachers!) on how to question our practices with an eye towards improving kids' learning. Join us for this fascinating conversation to move forward with grading reform.

Links

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

Materials from Doug Wilson supporting Grading Reform (Google Folder Link)
Building Thinking Classrooms, by Peter Liljedahl

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

127 - An LMS Designed from the Ground Up for Alt Grading? Tell Me More! With Stephanie Valentine

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Dr. Stephanie Valentine (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) joins Sharona and Boz to tell the origin story behind TeachFront—a grading-and-feedback platform she and her students built after getting buried in spreadsheets trying to make standards-based / ungrading-style systems work at scale.

They dig into what shifted when grades stopped being “points to litigate” and became feedback for growth, what went wrong (and what finally worked) in those early semesters, and why most LMS gradebooks still force instructors to “hack” systems designed for averages. Stephanie explains how TeachFront supports iterative feedback, reassessments, flexible mastery scales (including specs-style checkboxes), and clearer student-facing progress visuals—without putting points front-and-center.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

126 - AI-Aware Teaching, Mastery Quizzes, and the Future of Grading with Derek Bruff

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 04:00:00 -0700

What happens to grading when AI can do so much of what we’ve traditionally asked students to do by hand? In this episode, Boz and Sharona talk with educator, author, and podcaster Derek Bruff about his three-stage journey into mastery-based assessment, from early test corrections to coordinated mastery quizzes to rebuilding exams in a cryptography seminar—then zoom out to the upcoming Alternative Grading Institute at UVA, where faculty will redesign courses around specs, standards-based, and collaborative grading in response to pandemic-era lessons, public skepticism about higher ed, and the rise of generative AI.

Links

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

Agile Learning - Derek Bruff's Blog on Teaching and Learning
Intentional Teaching Podcast Interview with Robert Talbert and David Clark
Intentional Teaching Podcast Interview with Eden Tanner
The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching (forthcoming)
The UVA Teaching Hub
Cheating Lessons, by James Lang

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

125 - Five Steps to Redesign Your Course in the Age of AI

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Boz and Sharona take on a big question: What should we be doing to our courses, right now, in an AI-saturated world—without losing the human relationships that actually keep students in school?

Sharona shares her own urgency as she prepares to return to teaching precalculus for the first time in a decade, while hearing college students (including her own kids) question whether higher ed is “worth it” when AI can do so much of the procedural work. Together, she and Boz lay out five concrete steps instructors can use to rethink their courses immediately.

Along the way, they connect AI, course purpose, practice standards, assessment design, and in-class activities back to what the research keeps telling us: students stay when at least one adult clearly cares that they’re there.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

124 - Extinguishing the Fires in Grading Reform (Replay)

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Happy Thanksgiving! We're on a break this week so enjoy this replay of episode 46!

On this episode we welcome back the "sportscaster" of Alternative Grading, Dr. Matt Townsley, to talk about his new book Extinguishing the Fires within Assessment and Grading Reform. As Alternative Grading practices grow and take shape throughout the United States, efforts to resist these reforms are also growing. This incredible new book offers practical guidance to navigating the complexities of transitioning to alternative grading architectures and how to address the seemingly inevitable pushback that many of us are now experiencing. Based on the lived experiences of the authors, this book is a MUST READ for anyone concerned about advocating for grading reform.

Links

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

Extinguishing the Fires Within Assessment and Grading Reform, Garth Larson, Becky Peppler, Don Smith, Matt Townsley.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

The Grading Podcast publishes every week on Tuesday at 4 AM Pacific time, so be sure to subscribe and get notified of each new episode. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - @thegradingpod. To leave us a comment, please go to our website: www.thegradingpod.com and leave a comment on this episode's page.

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

123 - Discovering Your Teacher Assessment Identity

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz dive into a concept new to many educators — Teacher Assessment Identity — and explore how teachers’ beliefs, experiences, and professional contexts shape the way they design, interpret, and use assessments.

Sharona introduces the idea after hearing about new research connecting assessment practices to teacher identity, and then leads Boz through a live, on-air reflective interview designed to help him uncover his own “assessment identity.” Together, they model how teachers can ask deep reflective questions about the why behind their assessment choices — revealing that grading and assessment reform are inseparable parts of the same professional journey.

What follows is part self-assessment, part coaching session, and part exploration of how personal, disciplinary, and institutional identities influence assessment ethics, feedback, and student learning.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

122 - From Just-In-Time Teaching to Ungrading: A Conversation with Dr. Sharon Stranford

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz follow up on episode 121 and sit down with Dr. Sharon Stranford, Professor of Biology at Pomona College, to explore her journey from traditional grading toward ungrading and collaborative grading in STEM. Sharon shares how her experiences as a first-generation college student, a long-time practitioner of just-in-time teaching, and a pandemic-era educator led her to reimagine how feedback, mastery, and motivation intersect in the science classroom.

She explains how she replaced numbers and letters with meaningful dialogue, feedback, and self-assessment, helping students shift from “What’s my grade?” to “What have I learned?” Along the way, she describes how personal goals, SMART reflections, and one-on-one mastery conversations help students develop agency and persistence—while also transforming the teacher–student relationship.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

121 - Taking the Next Step in Collaborative Grading: A Deep Dive into Student Partnership in a Biology Class

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast, Sharona Krinsky and Robert “Boz” Bosley dive into what it means to co-create grading practices with students—especially in STEM disciplines where structure and sequence often seem incompatible with collaboration.

Sharona shares her plans to implement a collaborative grading model in her upcoming Precalculus course at Cal State LA, inspired by Sharon Stranford’s research on Fostering Student Agency and Motivation: Co-creation of Rubric and Self-Evaluation in an Ungraded Course. The hosts unpack what it means to let students become genuine partners in assessment while maintaining academic rigor and course coherence.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

120 - Learning Takes Time: Dr. Wendy Smith on Teacher Preparation, Ungrading, and Rethinking Deadlines

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast, Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley sit down with Dr. Wendy Smith, Director of the Center for Science, Mathematics, and Computer Education at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Wendy shares how her journey into alternative grading began long before the term even existed—rooted in her own struggles as a math student who learned deeply, but not always “on time.”

From those early experiences in the 1990s to her current work preparing future math teachers, Wendy reflects on how grading policies shape motivation and equity, and how she helps pre-service teachers design classrooms that measure learning, not behavior. Her “no penalty for late work” approach—anchored in neuroscience and compassion—helps future educators focus on what students know, not when they know it.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

119 - When Flexibility Isn't Enough: Alternative Grading and Neurodivergent Students - A Conversation with Emily Pitts Donahoe and Sarah Silverman

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 04:00:00 -0700

n this episode, Sharona and Boz sit down with returning guest Emily Pitts Donahoe (University of Mississippi) and first-time guest Sarah Silverman (Goodwin University) to explore the complex intersection of neurodiversity and alternative grading. Drawing on their collaborative three-part Substack series, Emily and Sarah unpack how different grading structures—ungrading, specifications grading, labor-based grading, and collaborative grading—interact with the varied needs of neurodivergent students.

The conversation dives deep into the concept of “access friction”—the tension that arises when one group’s access needs conflict with another’s—and challenges the oversimplified idea that flexible grading is automatically better for all students.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

118 - Designing Evidence-Based Change: Inside the Alt Grading Institute with Michael Palmer

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast, Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley welcome Dr. Michael Palmer, the Barbara Fried Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Teaching Excellence and recipient of the Bob Pierleoni Spirit of POD Award. Together, they dive deep into the origins of the new Alternative Grading Institute being offered by the Center for Grading Reform, the “grading scheme anatomy” framework under development by Michael and his team, and what it really takes to redesign assessment practices that are evidence based and align with our values as instructors.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

117 - Excuses, excuses: 10 Reasons People Give for NOT Implementing Alternative Grading and How To Reply to Them

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Boz and Sharona dig into the instant reactions that educators often have when they first hear about alternative grading. Inspired by Dr. David Clark’s recent Grading for Growth blog post titled “Kneejerk Reactions,” Boz and Sharona unpack the most common reflexive objections to grading reform and explore practical, compassionate ways to respond.

From “Retakes aren’t real world!” to “It might work for your students, but not mine,” they share stories and examples while dissecting how these quick defenses often mask deeper fears or misunderstandings about teaching, learning, and assessment. Along the way, they connect these reactions to issues of equity, institutional inertia, and the psychology of survivorship bias that keeps the “traditional grading” game alive.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

116 - Growing Student Autonomy and Agency (Without Driving Yourself Crazy!)

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

What happens when we give students meaningful choices in their learning? In this episode, Sharona and Boz dive deep into the role of student choice, autonomy, and agency in both K–12 and higher education classrooms.

They start with a simple question: if nearly every school and district mission statement includes “lifelong learners,” how do our grading practices actually support—or undermine—that goal? From there, they explore how alternative grading practices can not only give students more options but also build genuine agency that empowers learners to set goals, take action, and connect their education to their lives.

Key Topics Covered:

The difference between choice, autonomy, and agency—and why it matters.
Real classroom examples, from multiple-choice homework sets to open-ended calculus projects.
Research highlights, including a Science Advances study on how giving students control over attendance and homework increased their engagement and persistence.
Why students often choose harder work (and stick with it!) when the choice is theirs.
How alternative grading systems like Triple P (Preparation, Participation, Practice), contract grading, and ungrading create space for authentic student agency.
The role of AI and efficient tools in helping instructors offer tailored pathways without burning out.
Practical strategies for weaving agency directly into learning outcomes.

Takeaway:

Student choice alone isn’t enough. To truly prepare learners for life beyond the classroom, we need to design systems that move from choice → autonomy → agency, and grading reform is a powerful way to get there.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

115 - Don't Do This Alone! The Importance of Community for Creating Sustainable Change

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz dive into the essential role of community in grading reform. They reflect on their own journeys—Boz beginning with a supportive colleague and PLCs in K-12, and Sharona starting out largely on her own in higher ed—and how those experiences shaped their perspectives. Together, they explore why building communities of practice is critical not only for getting started and avoiding burnout but also for ensuring sustainability and institutional change.

The conversation highlights:

The importance of professional learning communities (PLCs) and faculty learning communities (FLCs) as vehicles for change.
How shared spaces like the Grading Conference, Slack groups, and disciplinary networks provide support, momentum, and new ideas.
The differences and overlaps between K-12 and higher ed contexts when it comes to collaboration.
Research pointing to strategies such as data use, communication, and professional learning as key levers for culture change.
Why grading reform done in isolation rarely lasts, and how success multiplies when shared across a community.

They also share upcoming opportunities for connection, including the new Alternative Grading Institute (December 17–18, 2025, hosted by the Center for Grading Reform), designed to help educators redesign courses with support and collaboration.

This episode is a call to action: whether through local colleagues, national conferences, or virtual networks, community is the cornerstone of lasting grading reform.

Links

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

Resources

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

The Alternative Grading Institute - a 2-day intensive virtual training to kickstart your course redesign for alternative grading.

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

114 - Grading What Matters: Leveraging Extrinsic Motivation to Grow Students in Multiple Dimensions

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this week's episode, Sharona and Boz sit down with Marc Aronson, Dean of Academics at Cheshire Academy in Cheshire, CT. This fascinating conversations begins with grading what matters but goes into innovation ways of approaching honors classes, using authentic assessments in the form of final demonstrations of learning, and finding ways to use the external motivations of grades to grade things beyond discipline content and practices.

Links

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

Cheshire Academy

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

113 - Experience First, Formalize Later: How switching to standards-based grading schoolwide enabled drastic change in the classroom, with Jen Smielewski

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz sit down with Jen Smielewski, a math teacher at Avondale High School. Jen works with Doug Wilson, the principal at Avondale High School who was a guest on episode 101 about visionary leadership. In this episode, Jen shares the "experience first, formalize later" methodology that the entire math department has adopted through the change to standards-based grading and under Doug's leadership.

From the adoption of Building Thinking Classrooms to the methods of daily assessment of common schoolwide standards, Jen provides detailed examples of the changes at Avondale and how they have unlocked success in her classroom. Join us for this amazing conversation!

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

112 - Squaring the Circle: Excellence vs Expertise with Jeff Anderson

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz welcome Jeff Anderson back to the pod to talk about power, excellence, expertise, and how to work within grading structures that we are no longer comfortable with. This fascinating conversation touches on everything from analyzing the existing power structures within education and how our individual grading policies uphold or challenge those power structures to the difference between excellence and expertise. We discuss what we actually want our students to learn and know in our classes.

Links

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

The Landmark Forum
Capital in the 21st Century, by Thomas Piketty

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

111 - Getting Unstuck from the Grade Wrap-Up: The Importance of Purpose Redux

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz look at another common area where instructors get stuck when redesigning a course to use alternative grading - the fourth decision of the grading architecture: wrapping up into a final grade. From too many choices to the issues with complexity, Sharona and Boz breaks things down and provide concrete ideas when looking at that final part of the grading architecture.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

110 - Developing Your Assessments Through the Lens of Competencies, with Camp from NEIA

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz speak with Camp (Dr. John Camp), the head of teaching and Learning at NEIA, the New England Innovation Academy. NEIA is an Independent day and boarding school in Massachusetts. NEIA's mission is to prepare the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams and shape. In this episode, Camp shares with Sharona and Boz how NEIA uses alternative grading practices to break out of the constrictions of traditional grading and support their core principles of innovation and entrepreneurship by constructing authentic learning both inside and outside of the classroom.

Key to their implementation is using their school wide "competencies" as the guideposts for developing their assessments. Join us to explore the details of how school wide competencies can provide the design guideposts for discipline based assessents from Math to Science to the Humanities and beyond.

Camp Bio

Camp is Head of Teaching & Learning at NEIA. He oversees the development of systems to recruit, hire, support, and evaluate teachers and helps teachers develop and implement the curriculum. He's been a leader and a teacher at a variety of schools throughout his 29-year career: boarding, day, single-sex and college. His experience includes English and writing classes as well as interdisciplinary courses such as “The Art and Physics of Time Travel.” At St. Mark’s School, which bestowed him with The Trustees Chair and the Kidder Faculty Prize, Camp served as the Director of Experiential Learning and Associate Director of The Center of Innovation in Teaching and Learning. A pair of his pedagogical mantras include, “I aim to teach what cannot be Googled” and “I expect you to work hard, so I work hard.”

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

109 - Live from MathFest 2025: Trends, thoughts, and directions

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 11:30:00 -0700

Sharona sits down with MathFest 2025 attendees Drew Lewis, Jennifer Moorehouse, Lipika Deka, Jennifer Narang, and Cory Wilson to discuss what we heard on the ground at this year's conference. From people presenting their experiences to a variety of data and forward looking opportunities, Alt Grading is making the switch to mainstream!

Links

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

21 – Alt Grading in Large Chemistry Classes: An Interview with Dr. Eden Tanner

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

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

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast, Sharona and Boz talk about some common reasons instructors get stuck during the process of redesigning a course. From looking again at the different parts of the course redesign cycle to exploring ways of breaking through roadblocks, join us as we take another look at the course redesign cycle. In particular, they talk about the importance of clearly defining the purpose of our course, and how that purpose impacts all aspects of your course design.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

107 - Transitioning to Alternative Grading Can Take Time to Be Successful: The Importance of Longer Term Metrics

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 06:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz explore a recent article from EdWeek in which a middle school principal shares the motivations behind a switch to standards-based grading as well as the initial failures and eventual successes of that move. Join us as we talk about the tension between short term and long term results, the "why" of the switch to alternative grading practices, and the challenges with proper measurement both inside the classroom and outside of it.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

106 - Reflecting on a six-week summer course with Dr. Robert Talbert.

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Dr. Robert Talbert returns to the pod to reflect on how his six-week summer course in discrete math went. Robert talked about this course back on episode 87 when discussing changes he was making to this course due to the impact of AI. In this conversation, Sharona and Boz discuss how it went, how the various changes worked (or didn't) and what he might keep or change moving forward.

Links

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

Alternatively Graded Discrete Math in Hyperdrive, from the Grading for Growth Blog
Alternative Grading in a Test-Forward Environment, from the Grading for Growth Blog
20 Small Steps to an Intentional Summer, from the Intentional Academia Blog

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

105 - Is Alternative Grading at a Tipping Point?

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley explore the ideas from Malcolm Gladwell's iconic book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. During the discussion, they explore the key indicators of a tipping point and discuss how we as a community might try to intentionally move towards a tipping point into mass awareness and (hopefully) adoption.

Links

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

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

104: Ideas and Recommendations for Iterating Through the Course Redesign Cycle

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0700

It's Summertime! And how to teachers and instructors often spend their summers? Why, reworking their courses, correct? In this episode, Sharona and Boz share their thoughts, ideas, and recommendations for working through the course redesign cycle and iteratively examining your course. Whether you are newer to alt grading or have been doing it a long time, this episode contains questions and ideas to work on your course for the upcoming school year!

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

103 - Themes and Lessons from the 2025 Grading Conference

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz recap some of the incredible things that happened at the 2025 Grading Conference. Highlights from the keynote speakers, student voices, and conversations around the "watercooler". This conference was an incredible capstone to a fantastic year for alternative grading.

Links

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

Dr. Asao Inoue on episode 99
Dr. Eden Tanner on episode 21
Dr. Jeff Anderson on: Episode 55 and Episode 56
Jeff Anderson's Resources: Keynote from the 2025 Grading Conference

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

102 - Critical Digital Pedagogy: Thinking Critically About Grading, AI and How We Decide to Do What We Do, An Interview with Dr. Sean Michael Morriss

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley sit down for a conversation with Dr. Sean Michael Morris to talk about Critical Digital Pedagogy. What is it? How can we think critically about our grading practices? How do we think critically about AI and it's impact on our grading choices?

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

101 - Visionary Leadership: Culture Change through Asking Questions - A 10-Year Journey to Building-Wide Grading Reform

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Links

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

Materials from Doug Wilson supporting Grading Reform (Google Folder Link)
Building Thinking Classrooms, by Peter Liljedahl

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

100 - Getting the Band Back Together! The OGs discuss the last decade of Alt Grading and Where We See It Going Next!

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:00:00 -0700

We made it to episode 100! Join us as we welcome back to the pod, for the first time altogether, David Clark, Kate Owens, and Robert Talbert! With Sharona and Boz we made up the original organizing team for the 2020 Grading Conference. We talk about the journey getting to here, and where we see things going (and what we hope to see) in the next 10 years!

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

99 - Challenging Grading as a System: Labor-Based Grading in Rhetoric and Composition, An Interview with Asao Inoue

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley sit down with Dr. Asao Inoue, the opening keynote speaker of the 2025 Grading Conference, to discuss his use of Labor-Based Grading in the teaching of writing. Exploring everything from negotiating a grading contract with students to intentionally discussing creating a culture of compassion in the classroom, this fascinating conversation is a great opportunity to think about our classrooms in new ways.

Links

Books from the WAC Clearinghouse are free to access in PDF and ePUB formats.

Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, 2nd Edition (from the WAC Clearinghouse)
Cripping Labor-Based Grading for More Equity in Literacy Courses (from the WAC Clearinghouse)
Above The Well: An Antiracist Argument From a Boy of Color (from the WAC Clearinghouse)
Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (from the WAC Clearinghouse)
On Compassion and Brave Space, Asao Inoue
The Greater Good Website
The Science of Compassion

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

98 - Sessions and Topics and Toolkits - oh my!!! Previewing the 2025 Grading Conference with the Conference Organizing Team.

Tue, 27 May 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, many of the organizers of this year's conference join Sharona and Bosley to preview the upcoming conference and talk about some of the community aspects of The Grading Conference. We welcome Ashleigh Fox, Jenni Momsen, Emily Pitts Donahoe, and Melanie Lenahan.

Links

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

In preparation for the conference, please join the Alternative Grading Slack

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

97 - Distinguishing Different Letter Grades: The Three Hurdles Model

Tue, 20 May 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley discuss different ways to look at the grade wrap up portion of the grading architecture as it relates to learning outcomes as well as assessments. They discuss the well known "more hurdles, higher hurdles" metaphor but expand it into three different types of hurdles instead of the two we have used previously. From different learning outcomes, to different proficiency scale levels, to different levels of difficulty of problems on assessment, there are many way to distinguish an "A" from a "B" from a "C". Also, a preview of some of the sessions at the upcoming Grading Conference!

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

96 - Alt Grading and Administrators: Supporting Teachers and Getting Support from Admin

Tue, 13 May 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this week's episode, Sharona and Bosley dive into some of the details, nuances, similarities and differences regarding the role of administrators in the implementation of alternative grading practices. We talk about what administrators can do to support alternative grading efforts, how to talk to administrators, and the similarities and differences in the roles of administrators in K-12 versus Higher Ed.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

95 - Standards Based Reporting and Grading at the Elementary School Level

Tue, 06 May 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley look at some of the challenges that elementary school face when considering standards based reporting and standards based grading. From issues with consistency between instructors to the differences between communicating with parents versus communicating with students. Join us in this discussion as we look at the importance of grading in elementary school.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

94 - Replay: The Human Impact of our Assessments on Students, What story do your assessments tell about a student? An Interview with Sean Nank

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Please enjoy this replay of episode 20 from November 2023.

Coming to you from the California Mathematics Council - South annual conference, Sharona and Bosley sit down for a wonderful conversation with Dr. Sean Nank. Sean is an adjunct professor at California State University San Marcos, a full professor at the American College of Education, as well as a high school math teacher in the Oceanside Unified School District. Sean is also a recipient of the Persidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

In this incredible conversation, we talk with Sean about the human impact of assessments on our students and the important conversations that can be had once we really start to examine the impact of our grading systems.

Links

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

seannank.com
How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards, Ken O'Connor

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

93 - The Importance of Understanding AI as an Instructor in Order to Comprehend It's Impact on Your Students and Your Grading

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Sharona and Bosley sit down this week to talk with Jennifer Martinez-Montes about her work on professional development surrounding AI for instructors. Jennifer is a 9th grade English teacher at Santee Education Complex in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is currently researching the impact of AI on teachers and the opportunities for effective use of AI in lesson planning, differentiation, and other areas of a teacher's responsibilities. In this conversation, we explore the need for instructors to understand AI, its opportunities and issues impacting our work as educators, as we try to determine the impact on students and grading.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

92 - Researching Grading Reform: Building the Evidence to Change the System

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz dive into what research around grading reform might look like. From the types of studies to the areas of interest and some options for focus. We look at what's been done, what's missing, and how the Center for Grading Reform is planning to launch a new initiative to build a national network of researchers focused on grading system.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

91 - Feedback: Improving How We Give It and How Students Use It

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 04:00:00 -0700

This week we welcome Joe Zeccola back to the podcast. In this episode, Sharona, Boz and Joe look at how we give feedback, how students use it, and how we make both the giving of feedback and the student use of feedback easier, more useful, and more in line with our goals for our students.

Links

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

Instructional Feedback: The Power, the Promise, the Practice 1st Edition, by Dr. Thomas Guskey
Grading With Integrity: A Research-Based Approach Grounded in Honesty, Transparency, Accuracy, and Equity, by Dr. Thomas Guskey

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

90 - Building a Community of Practice AND Even MORE Misuse of Mathematics!!!!!!

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this week's episode, Sharona and Boz sit down with Caroline Cormier and Françoise Arseneault-Hubert to discuss the movement towards alt grading in Quebec. Beginning with a description of the CEGEP system (pronounced say-ghep) that serves as a bridge between K-11 education and university/technical tracks we then explore how Caroline and Françoise have built a multi-institutional, multi-discipline community of practice. With over 40 regular participants, this CoP meets regularly to share experiences with alt grading, give best practices, and supporting each other.

Then we dive into some of the intricacies of final grades in the CEGEP system, including nerding out on EVEN MORE MATH that is overlaid onto the final grades at the CEGEPs. You won't want to miss this!

Links

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

Workshops and a community of practice in Quebec for knowledge transfer, from the Grading for Growth Blog
Join the Community of Practice (French speaking but others welcome)
What is a CÈGEP?

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

89 - AI and CheckIt: Tools and Methods for Gathering Evidence of Learning (Making Assessment Writing Easier)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 04:00:00 -0700

This week Sharona and Boz share some ideas, tools and methods for making assessment writing easier including AI, CheckIt (programmable assessment generation) and intentional alignment of content and assessments.

Links

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

CheckIt
ChatGPT
Gemini (Google AI)

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

88 - Unearned Grades: Remaking the Conversation about Grade "Inflation"

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Description

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley tackle the conversation about "Grade Inflation". A commonly used term that is rarely defined, we look at what the "problem" is with grade "inflation", how we would define grade "inflation" (as well as grade "deflation") and how to address it when it is leveled as a potential problem with alternative grading.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

87 - The Impact of AI on Alternative Grading: Talking with Dr. Robert Talbert

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Description

In this episode we welcome back to the pod Dr. Robert Talbert. A mathematics professor at Grand Valley State University, author of books on Flipped Learning and Grading for Growth, Robert joins us to discuss his struggles with the increasing use of AI tools in his alternatively graded classes and how he is revising his courses to adjust. We discuss the threats and opportunities AI poses for an alternatively graded class and consider some thoughts about the future of education in an age of AI.

Links

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

How AI is Changing My Grading Approach, by Talbert, R. on the Grading for Growth Blog
How AI Will Divide the Best from the Rest, The Economist (paywall - sorry)

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

86 - Traditional Grading Revisited: Deficiencies and Beliefs

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Description

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley look at some new(ish) literature about traditional grades in a more professional setting - Pharmacy Education. If the ultimate goal of many degree programs is to get a professional degree or license, what is being done with grading at that level and how might we leverage those choices earlier in the educational system. We explore in different ways the deficiencies with traditional grading as well as the beliefs instructors have that support the use of traditional grading.

Links

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

Deficiencies of Traditional Grading Systems and Recommendations for the Future, by Cain, J., Medina, M., Romanelli, F., and Persky, A.
When is a Number Not A Number?, by Talbert, R., from the Grading for Growth Blog
Learning for Mastery, by Bloom, B.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

85 - Instructor Beliefs and Their Role in the Classroom - with Dr. Patrick Morriss

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this week's episode we welcome Dr. Patrick Morriss back to the pod to discuss how instructor beliefs, about our students, our subject areas, ourselves, impact our classrooms and drive the educational outcomes of our students.

Links

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

https://checkit.clontz.org/
Episode 78 – Looking more at Proficiency Scales – Doing “Bee” Work: An Interview with Patrick Morriss
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond
Rehumanizing Mathematics for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Students, by Rochelle Gutierrez
Arise: The Art of Transformational Coaching, by Elena Aguilar
Visible Learning: The Sequel: A Synthesis of Over 2,100 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, by John Hattie
Mathfest, by the MAA

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

84 - Standards Based Grading in Engineering, A Method for Focusing on Learning - an interview with Dr. Corin Bowen

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Description

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley talk with Dr. Corin Bowen, an Engineering Education researcher and assistant professor in the Civil Engineering department at California State University Los Angeles. We talk about student motivation and engagement, the opportunities that standards-based grading has provided Dr. Bowen's students, and what it was link to come in to a course that had already been redesigned to use standards-based grading as a new instructor. Join us as we talk grading structures, critical pedagogy, the power of undergraduate instructional student assistants and so much else.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

83 - Starting the Conversation About Grading with Others Before They Realize You Are Talking About Grading

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Join us as we explore small ways to open a conversation about grading with other people, without them necessarily realizing that its a conversation about grading. In this episode, Sharona and Bosley talk about 7 ways you can crack the door open on grading. Everything from using the four pillars to finding common ground and discussing why we teach. If we listen carefully, there are more ways than we realize to turn small moments of opportunity into larger conversations.

Links

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

Seven Opportunities to Open Up the Conversation About Grading

Pick a Pillar
Talk About Purpose
Find Common Principles
Discuss What Will NOT Change
Think About Systems
Talk About People
Ask Why We Teach

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

82 - The Impact of Retakes - MORE results are in! Also, get ready for the 2025 Grading Conference!

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:00:00 -0700

We're finally seeing some results from all the work that this community has been putting in! In this episode, Sharona and Bosley dive in to newly published research about the impact of "second-chance quizzes" on students' perceptions of self-determination. We also dive in to the impact of retakes on student success in Precalculus.

Additionally, registration, volunteer opportunities, and abstract submissions are all available for the 2025 Grading Conference!

Links

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

Undergraduate STEM Students’Perceptions of Grading Practices Revealthat Quiz Retakes Positively ImpactDrivers of Self-determination by Tripp, B. et al
Not All Limits are the Same from the Grading for Growth Blog
Episode 41 - Second Chance Grading: How Small, Gentle Approach to Changing Grading Led to Research Into Alt Grading
Episode 9 - Reassessment Carnivals: An Interview with Kate Owens
Episode 70 - A Reassessments Deep Dive with Beck Peppler
Intentional Academia by Robert Talbert
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

81 - The role of DBER in researching the impact of Alternative Grading Practices, an interview with Dr. Jenny Momsen

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley talk with Dr. Jenny Momsen, faculty member in the department of Biological Sciences at North Dakota State University and head of the Discipline-Based Education Research Ph.D. program. Jenny is one of the organizers of The Grading Conference and actively researches the impact of alternative grading on students ability to learn and integrate their knowledge about complex biological systems.

Links

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

Alternative Grading Practices in Undergraduate STEM Education: A Scoping Review
Improving performance and retention in introductory biology with a utility-value intervention, by Canning et al
Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology by Freeman et al
Developing Resilient, Equity-Conscious Teachers
Giving Marks that Indicate Progress - from the Grading for Growth Blog

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

80: The Results are IN! Traditional Grading and Alternative Grading Went HEAD TO HEAD!!! What happened?

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Please note - at the time of this recording we are still dealing with the ongoing fires in Los Angeles. If you are interested in helping, there are links before specifically for disaster relief.

Links

Links this week are just for supporting the LA fire efforts. A few recommended charities include:

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

79 - Reaching Critical Mass: A Schoolwide Implementation of Alt Grading, How Feedback changes Student Interactions, and Other Tidbits from Phil Stringer

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley have a wide-ranging conversation with Phil Stringer, Head of Mathematics at the Crofton House School in Vancouver, BC. From starting standards-based grading with AP Calculus BC to leading a schoolwide implementation of standards-based grading, Phil shares a variety of experiences and things he has learned through helping instructors switch to a standards-based grading model.

Links

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

Crofton House School
Phil Stringer, LinkedIn
Make It Stick, by Peter Brown and Henry Roediger
Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

78 - Looking more at Proficiency Scales - Doing "Bee" Work: An Interview with Patrick Morriss

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 04:00:00 -0700

It has finally happened!! We have found an instructor who uses emoji's MORE than Sharona does!! Join us as we talk with Patrick Morriss, professor of Mathematics at Foothill College about his proficiency scales and grading system in Higher Ed Math.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

77 - Happy New Year! Replay of Alt Grading in Large Chemistry Classes: An Interview with Dr. Eden Tanner

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Happy New Year! On the podcast this week we replay our episode (Episode 21) with Dr. Eden Tanner, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Mississippi. Listen to hear about using alternative grading in the context of a 170 person general chemistry course. Eden has a fascinating take on approaching alternative grading from a research mindset, and how that led her to adopt the principles of alternative grading.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

76 - Happy Holidays! A Replay of Our First Interview with Dr. Matt Towsnley - the Sportscaster of Alternative Grading

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Happy Holidays 2024!!! Please enjoy this replay of one of our favorite interviews with Dr. Matt Townsley!

Dr. Matt Townsley is an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa and a former district adminstrator and high school math teacher. In addition to being an accomplished faculty coach and author of many books about Alternative Grading, Matt also has the distinction of having presented the highest energy presentation ever done at The Grading Conference, earning him the distinctive moniker of "The Sportscaster of Alternative Grading". Join Matt, Sharona and Bosley on this energetic, wonderfully inspirational voyage through Matt's writings, research, and experience working with educators, students and parents across the spectrum on rethinking grading.

Links

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

Comprehensive List of Resources:

All Things Standards Based Grading

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

75 - Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do About It: An Interview with Dr. Josh Eyler

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode Sharona sits down with Dr. Josh Eyler, Director of Faculty Development at the University of Mississippi and author of the new book Failing our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do About It. Join us as we talk about the book, about change efforts at the classroom, department, college and institutional levels, and what individual instructors can do to lead change efforts.

Links

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

Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

74 - Exploring Alt Grading in Physical Education (in more detail) with Josh Ogilvie

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Another deep conversation about alt grading in Physical Education, including the details! Join us as Sharona and Bosley talk about alt grading with Josh Ogilvie, a listener and a 22 year high school PE teacher in Canada.

Links

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

Contact Josh Ogilvie:

@joshogilvie4 on Twitter
@joshogilvie.bsky.social on Bluesky
Josh Ogilvie on LinkedIn
www.jogilvie.com

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

73 - Alt Grading in the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences: An Interview with Annie and Ed Ransom (And our FIRST Alt Grading Love Story!)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Join us for one of the most fun origin stories we have had!!! On the pod this week we interview Annie and Ed Ransom, two K-12 educators who both use alt grading, while being married to each other! Hear how alt grading plays out in middle school and high school science and how it is both the same and different from high school Social Science.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

72 - Off the Mark - an Interview with author Dr. Jack Schneider

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Join Sharona and Bosley as we talk to Dr. Jack Schneider, one of the co-authors of the book "Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)". In this engaging conversation, we explore the origins of the book, discuss the authors' purpose in writing it, and continue to explore the ways in which current grading practices hurt student learning and how important changes can be made to improve things.

Links

Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To) by Dr. Jack Schneider and Dr. Ethan Hutt
Have You Heard Podcast?
Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment
The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual by Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider
OffTheMarkBook.com

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

71 - False Signals: The Mismatch Between Grades and Learning

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley look at what some of the complications are when there is a mismatch between grades and actual learning. Based on some research coming out about grades not matching up with other measures such as standardized tests, we explore the ways in which grading schemes (both traditional and in some cases alternative grading schemes) can unintentionally cause miscommunication between teachers, schools, students and districts.

Links

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

First Education
The STAGR Conference - Join us virtually on December 5, 2024!
California Math Council - South
Episode 20 of The Grading Podcast - An Interview with Sean Nank
False Signals - a Report on Pandemic-Era Grades
Episode 48 of The Grading Podcast - Implementation Challenges and Opportunities with Becky Peppler
Episode 70 of The Grading Podcast - Reassessments with Becky Peppler
Episode 46 of the Grading Podcast - 46 - Extinguishing the Fires within Assessment and Grading Reform: with Dr. Matt Townsley
Episode 18 of the Grading Podcast - 18 - The Sportscaster of Alternative Grading: An Interview with Matt Townsley

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

70 - A Reassessments Deep Dive with Becky Peppler

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Becky Peppler from the STAGR center returns to do a deep dive on how she did reassessments in her high school chemistry class. Everything from how many, when, and what students need to do before doing the retakes is discuss in great detail. If you've been looking for the steps to handle effective retakes - enjoy this wonderful conversation! And make sure to check out the upcoming STAGR conference!

Links

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

The STAGR Conference
Teaching More by Grading Less or Differently, Jeff Schinske and Kimberly Tanner

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

69 - Thinking Critically about Homework’s Role In Alternative Grading

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Let's discuss the role of homework (or other effort pieces of learning) in an Alternatively Graded course in more depth. In this episode, Sharona and Boz look at a recent research study about the inclusion or exclusion of a "homeworK' grade in the grading architecture of a high school geometry class and the impact it had on student completion of homework as well as their final grades. We distinguish between "product", "progress", and "process" grades and discuss their potential roles in different types of courses.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

68 - Busting 4 Common "Myths" about Alternative Grading

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0700

We've all heard them! The "criticisms" about alternative grading practices that don't seem quite "right" but are hard to debunk in the moment. This is the episode where Sharona and Bosley take on some common myths and misconceptions about alternative grading, as well as look at some of the history driving how the things behind the myths came to be a part of our grading systems.

Links

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

The 4 Common Myths about Grading Reform, Debunked by Matt Townsley and Sarah Morriss
3 Common Myths About Standards-Based Grading by Kendell Hunter
Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To) by Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt
Artificial Scarcity: Reflecting on Artificial Limits in our Classes by David Clark

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

67 - "Hybrid" Alternative Grading Systems: The Interplay Between Assessing Discrete Skills and More Holistic Skills

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Joe Zeccola joins Sharona and Bosley to discuss the interplay between discrete skills and more "holistic" skills, primarily in the discipline of writing. Utilizing some questions asked by Dr. Emily Pitts Donahoe in a recent blog post about Rhetorical Analysis, Joe, Sharona and Bosley explore the balance between assessing discrete individual skills and assessing more holistic processes and how that might play into the design of an alternatively graded course.

Links

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

Teaching Reading and Analysis with…Standards-Based Collaborative Grading? by Dr. Emily Pitts Donahoe
Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle & High School by Randy Bomer
Reading/Writing Connection, The: Strategies for Teaching and Learning in the Secondary Classroom by Carol Booth Olson
The Reading Apprenticeship framework
Point-Less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More Meaningful Grading
Developing Assessment-Capable Visible Learners, Grades K-12: Maximizing Skill, Will, and Thrill (Corwin Literacy) by Nancy Frey, John Hattie and Doug Fisher

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

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

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

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

Music

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

66 - Perseverance as a Critical Skill for Student Success in Alt Grading

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley discuss student perseverance and how we might effectively help build it in our students. Looking at several research articles and providing concrete examples of ways to build student skills, join us in exploring what we can do to help students understand how they can help themselves succeed.

Links

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

On Perseverance in the Classroom, by Eric Toshalis, Ph.D.
Persistence Makes the Biggest Difference to School Grades, Study Finds, from Forbes
Social and Emotional Skills of Students in the Houston Independent School District, a study by Rice University
Brief 5: Agreement between Student and Teacher Ratings of Students’ Social and Emotional Skills
Recognizing, supporting, and improving student perseverance in mathematical problem-solving: The role of conceptual thinking scaffolds, by Joseph DiNapoli and Emily K. Miller
How Much Can You Win, activity for building student skills
Make Me: Understanding and Engaging Student Resistance in School, by Eric Toshalis

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

65 - Alt Grading in Physical Education, Canadian Grading Reforms, and Technology-Integrated Assessment: An Interview with Colin Madland

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode Sharona and Bosley sit down with Colin Madland, a listener of the podcast from Canada. Colin wrote us in response to a request on a previous episode to learn more about what is going on in Canada. In addition to sharing about the state of Alternative Grading in Canada, Colin also shared his expertise as a Ph.D. candidate in education technology whose research is in technology integrated assessment. He is also a former high school physical education teacher, so we get to explore alt grading in a discipline that was new to both Sharona and Bosley.

Links

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

About Colin:

Colin's Publications:

British Columbia Education Reforms:

Colin's Ph.D. Committee:

Valerie Irvine - University of Victoria: https://www.uvic.ca/education/curriculum/faculty-staff/faculty/about/experts/profiles/irvine-valerie.php, https://valerieirvine.ca/
Chris DeLuca - Queens University Ontario: https://educ.queensu.ca/people/chris-deluca, https://research.qut.edu.au/c4ie/people/chris-deluca/
Okan Bulut - University of Alberta: https://apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/bulut, https://github.com/okanbulut

SAMR Model - Integrating Technology Into Teaching

The Six R's of Indigenous Education and Orange Shirt Day

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

64 - What Doing Alt Grading is Like as a Brand New Teacher: An Interview with Mariah Muller

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley speak with Mariah Muller, an English teacher at Santee Education Complex in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Mariah works with Bosley at his school and is in her second year of teaching. In this interview, we explore what it is like to start your teaching career from the beginning using alternative grading practices, and what Mariah's experience with grading has been like as she adapts to being a new teacher. We also thought that this would be an interesting contrast with last week's episode about a long term teacher who teaches new teachers!

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

63 - Alternative Grading in a Math for Elementary Teachers Course: An Interview with Dr. Mary Reeves

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley interview one of their former students. Dr. Mary Reeves took the MAA OPEN Math intensive training on "Redesigning Your Course for Mastery Grading" in the summer of 2023. Subsequently, she redesigned two of the math content courses for future Elementary and Middle School Math teachers. Join us to hear about Mary's experiences working with, and impacting, future teachers.

Links

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

[00:00:00] Mary Reeves: I was like, in 35 years I've never seen a student knock it completely out of the park on the very first try the way Isabella just did. And I'm not saying the rest of you didn't do a good job, you did, but this is amazing. And I want you to appreciate how incredible I think this is after doing this for years and years. Afterwards I told her, I'm like, this is going to be an assignment. I'm going to go ahead and put Mastery in your guidebook. You do not have to do it. Because you did it so beautifully the first time. Focus on something else. You've already accomplished everything that I wanted you to accomplish. After class she stayed for a few minutes and told me that was the first time she'd ever been singled out in a math class for something positive. And I'm not going to say that we both cried, but that's entirely possible.

[00:00:57] Boz: Welcome to the Grading Podcast, where we'll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We'll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success. I'm Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

[00:01:23] 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.

[00:01:51] Boz: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts and with me as always Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

[00:02:00] Sharona: I am doing well. I have a theme for this semester for myself. This is the theme of Exam generation semester, because with the new job I have, I'm writing a lot of exams and it's really making me aware of how much I've enjoyed my alternative grading over the last number of years. Because I haven't had to write exams in probably six years. And now that I have to do it as part of my new job, it's proving to be a little challenging.

[00:02:32] Boz: Well, but give a little bit more detail about that. Cause you're not just writing exams to give. What's going on with your new role that you're having to do that?

[00:02:43] Sharona: So in my new role, I have nine different courses that I coordinate of those nine, seven of them are in a traditional grading format, which means that five of the seven are not standards aligned. So they have learning outcomes, but the work to align the teaching with those learning outcomes hasn't happened. And in those I also have numerous, numerous sections. So I'm having to create exams that have a lot of problems on them. They're all mathematics So they're all having formatting issues. I need many many versions. So it's challenging, because you're working with me on this and you're asking me, so why am I asking this problem? And I'm looking at you going, I have no idea other than it's a section in the book.

[00:03:35] Boz: Well, but you're and the kind of the point I was hoping you would go to is these are all coordinated courses. So you're not writing test for a class. You're writing test for like common assessments. So that is kind of the first step that you've taken with all of these new courses that you're coordinating is you're at least getting common assessments in there as you know, you, and rightfully so, probably couldn't have jumped straight to alternative grading with all of these different math courses that you're now coordinating with six days in advance before the semester started getting the job right.

[00:04:13] Sharona: Exactly. Although I will say that yes, I'd say that the entry points that I have had with this sudden adjustment back into more traditional grading, I'm still me. I can't let things go unchallenged. So I'm very, very pleased to report that a couple of the fundamental features of alternative grading are creeping in right away. So I'd say the first thing is the idea of retakes. Almost all of my classes are offering some form of retake, even if it's not to the degree I would like. And the instructors very much want that, especially because they don't have to generate the exams for the retakes. So that's helpful. And everyone is cooperating to allow these common assessments. So those have both been really helpful very positive steps. We're also using some form of proficiency scaling because we're trying to do common grading. And so we're starting down the baby step paths to all that.

[00:05:09] Boz: So, and that's a key component, and one that I'm actually kind of surprised you're pulling off as well as you are, is anytime you have common assessments, the point of common assessments, you know, is to have kind of a equal measurement through the different instructors. That doesn't happen if you're not also calibrating your grading, which, like I said with as little time as you had and as big as teams as you have and as many that you have, the fact that you're pulling that off is also an incredible feat.

[00:05:43] Sharona: Well, and I have to give a big shout out to my instructors because they're the ones that are open and allowing this. And we have some people more skeptical and some people less skeptical, but everyone's at least willing to listen. And think about what we're asking. So that's been really good. But I am spending a lot of time head down in LaTex code and the things that make mathematics formatting happen.

[00:06:08] Boz: And we're not alone today, are we? So you want to introduce our guest today?

[00:06:14] Sharona: We are very happy to have with us in the virtual studio today, dr. Mary Reeves. Mary is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. She specializes, her little niche, is elementary and middle school math for teachers, so working with a lot of future teachers on the fundamentals of teaching math at those levels. She has her PhD in education from Louisiana State University. Welcome Mary to the pod.

[00:06:47] Mary Reeves: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

[00:06:49] Boz: One of the things, Mary, that we always like to ask our new guests when they first come on is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

[00:07:01] Mary Reeves: Well, it was 100 percent a coincidence. I was flipping through my email and I saw a message from MAA about the courses that they were offering for the following summer. This would have been fairly early in the spring. of 2023 so about February, and I just, I don't have anything to do right now, I thought, and I'm just going to take a look and see what the titles are. So I was expecting, and found, a lot of things that were clearly aimed at mathematicians who do different work than I do. Some very content focused workshops that were going on, but the very last one was enticing and intriguing and I don't remember exactly what the description said, but it really spoke to me about some things that I'd been dissatisfied with about my course.

[00:08:00] I taught elementary methods for decades, then I switched into mathematics, still teaching the same population, but at a different point in their studies. But I had been experiencing dissatisfaction with the amount of time I spent talking with students about their grade versus the amount of time I spent talking with them about what they had or had not learned in the course. So they would take exams, they would do not as well as they would have liked and then they would come to me and they were concerned about how they could score more points and get a better grade because they're required to attain at least a C or better. So they have to pass the course or they have to retake it. So I had those conversations that I think anyone who teaches mathematics has had. What do I do? How do I improve my grade? How do I accumulate more points? In a system where once they'd taken the test and we'd moved on, that was sort of finalized and their period for learning was over.

[00:09:04] So in reading, the description of the summer workshop. I just felt like this was something that I'd been kind of searching for. How can I shift my focus away from grades to learning? While still maintaining standards. So it was just a series of I clicked here, I clicked there, and saw it and I immediately went and told my husband, I'm going to be doing this workshop in July. I'm signing up for it right now.

[00:09:36] Sharona: And so that name of that course, I believe, was Redesigning Your Course for Mastery Grading through the MAA Open Math program and that was in 2023. That was the one that Bosley and Kate Owens and I facilitated, I believe.

[00:09:54] Boz: I don't think I realized when you were there that you hadn't had some introduction to it already, because most of the people that come to that workshop, the two years that we ran it, they had at least done some reading or they'd had some experience. So I don't know if I realized that course was your first kind of experience with it. That's kind of cool.

[00:10:18] Mary Reeves: Yeah, it was very interesting. And engaging with pedagogical topics, how to construct a lesson, how to design assessments, that's all part of my background as an educational professor, but it was very refreshing to work with content area people who were so interested in teaching and learning. So that was really exciting.

[00:10:43] Boz: Yeah. I remember working with you during that workshop and in that workshop, we do a lot of small group stuff, even though it's virtual, and everyone is planning their learning targets and they're dealing with calc issues and they're dealing with linear algebra and we're working with you and you're working with, how to teach how to simplify fractions.

[00:11:06] Mary Reeves: The basics of place value and the difference between tens and tenths. Yeah, that's where I spend my days.

[00:11:13] Boz: But it was very fun and interesting because yeah, the math that we were doing at that course, most of it was at least calculus and then we'd work with you and we're doing third, fourth grade math and I had a daughter at the time that was, and still is, in elementary school. She would have been in, I think, second grade, going into third grade, over that summer, and looking at your stuff, and just knowing what I'd worked with her over the past year, I was like, I wish her teachers had some of this.

[00:11:51] Mary Reeves: Well, that's really what led me to it. I started off as a high school teacher. And found that my students did not know things like basic arithmetic and multiplication facts that were a clear impediment to them learning the algebra that I was prepared to teach them. So as a new teacher, when I realized that some of my kids didn't, for example, know what 6 plus 5 was, it's hard to figure out what 6x plus 5x is if you don't know what 6 plus 5 is.

[00:12:19] And they didn't know that and I didn't know how to teach that to them. I had no idea how they'd ever learned that. So that's what really drove me in graduate school to focus on what I was focusing on. Because the foundation for the work that all of us do is what happens in those lower elementary grades, in those upper elementary grades, and that transition from middle school to algebra. That sets the stage for calculus. When we lose kids there, we're never going to lose them in calculus because they're never going to show up. So my question was, well, my assumption was elementary school teachers don't want to teach math badly. They don't want to inflict math trauma, but they do, because they don't know any other way than how they learned. So it seemed to me that rather than looking for who to blame, which is a game we often play to our students detriment in education, high school blames, middle school blames, elementary school blames parents. So that doesn't help. So, I looked at what I was doing and thought, how can I be part of the solution? Where would I step in? What would I want to do to help elementary school teachers know more math, understand it better, and then help children to learn math in a more efficient and less traumatic way?

[00:13:42] Boz: Yeah, and that's such an important idea and concept, cause I know when I was in school, when I was getting my undergrad, I basically paid for my last two semesters tutoring two groups of people, the sociology majors that had to take this action research class that was nothing more than advanced statistics. And then all the Multisubject candidates that had to pass the math part of the Oklahoma qualifying test called the, OGET, Oklahoma general educators test, I think. And I know how many just absolutely despise the math part of it. And I've also read several different researches and studies that, basically say it takes three to five great teachers to make up for one bad math teacher. If you have that experience as a student with a math instructor at a primary grade, like it really does. It, takes so long to try to make up for that and get caught back up. It's ridiculous.

[00:14:56] Sharona: And Mary, I just wanted to say that you're going to make me cry right now because what you are saying is what I spent my formative years listening to my mother say. So my mother had a master's in pure math, a PhD in education with a cognate in math and worked primarily with K through eight teachers. And she was the content specialist. Yet, she was very pedagogically minded because she had herself been a junior high school math teacher. So she was saying the same things. And she talked about that blame game, and you said high school blames middle school, middle school blames elementary, elementary blames pre K, and then they all go back and say then they blame the teachers, and the teachers blame their graduate advisors, then who blames the undergraduate, who blames the calculus, so it becomes this cycle, this circle. And my mom used to say the only way to make change in math education is you have to break the circle at every single one of those points.

[00:15:57] So for me to have found alternative grading as one of the linchpins, it doesn't do the work for you, but it removes this huge impediment. So it's amazing to hear you say the same things and be addressing it. My mom spent her life's work really working with things like cooperative learning, which we now call active learning, which has started to really embed itself. And so the fact that we're doing this work in alt grading is just exciting. So I'm so happy that you found the course. So I guess my question is when you, when you showed up, what happened when you showed up to the course?

[00:16:36] Mary Reeves: Well, we began to dive into the literature and get some definitions for some basic ideas, like the four pillars.

[00:16:46] Sharona: I was thinking more about what was your reaction to like, what happened? You showed up the course. What happened for you?

[00:16:52] Mary Reeves: Well, I was, I thought the course itself was great. It was, like I said, it was so exciting to engage with content people who were so devoted to and interested in improving their practice in the classroom and their experience with students and what students were, were We're walking away from the course with, so that was really interesting. It was not surprising to me that so many people were looking at math at such a different level. I expected most people were going to be mathematicians teaching upper level math courses.

[00:17:29] Looking back on it, I found the conversations around student buy in to be very interesting. But I wasn't really expecting them to be particularly relevant. And as it turned out, they weren't. So that's one of the things that I've learned is how easy it is to get students to buy into an alternative grading structure depends very much on how much the current system has rewarded those students. So people who end up in math major courses are people who've been rewarded for being good at the way the math education game is played. So they have always gotten good grades. They've always responded well to traditional instruction and traditional assessments. They are unlikely to have high levels of math test anxiety which contrasts significantly with the bulk of my population.

[00:18:30] I won't say that all of my students are math phobic or highly anxious. Every semester I have a few who tell me math is my favorite subject, I can't wait to teach that. I don't tell them this, but I actually worry about them for my course more than the students who tell me that they're afraid and concerned and weak and they hate math and math has always been their worst thing. But, in the three semesters now that I've introduced alternative grading to my students, I first ask them what they've heard about the course. This semester, the overwhelming consensus was we've heard that the course is really, really hard, but that you're easy to work with.

[00:19:12] And it's like, okay, well, that's that's probably fair. Because I think we have to take the content very seriously. I certainly do. There's a lot they need to learn. Some of them know procedures very well, but they can't really tell me much more than a fraction is part of a whole which is a problematic definition that we don't have to go into, because seven fourths, for example, is not part of a whole. Or it's not, you can't have seven out of four.

[00:19:41] So, they may know some of the surface level skills, but the deeper understandings, what is the structure of our place value system? And how can you help a child to build a complex and nuanced understanding of place value as they're going into working with the operations in place value? That's those are not questions that anyone has ever asked them. So I've always focused on those kinds of things and I've tried to ramp up...

62 - Listener Questions: Learning Outcomes, Interim Grades, Effort, and Why we do this?

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we explore several questions sent in by listener's of the pod. From Interim Grades, creating learning objectives for high school science courses and how to track effort to why we even put this podcast and our work in alt grading out into the world, join us as we delve into the things that YOU are most interested in learning more about.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

61 - (Replay) Interim Grades with Joe Zeccola

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Due to technical difficulties we were unable to record a new episode this week. Therefore, please enjoy this timely replay.

Many institutions require instructors to provide "interim" or "midterm" grades. How does this work with an alternatively graded class? In this episode, co-hosts Sharona and Bosley are once again joined by nationally board certified English teacher Joe Zeccola to discuss the practice of providing middle-of-the-term grades to students and other stakeholders. In addition to interim grades, we also discuss how redesigning your grading practices can have a profound impact on teaching practices throughout a classroom.

Links

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

Specific links here.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

60 - The Role of Depth of Knowledge (DOK) in Aligning Assessments to Learning Outcomes: An Interview with Erik Francis

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Today on the podcast Sharona and Bosley sit down with Erik Francis. An international author, educator, presenter and professional development provider, Erik has over 30 years of experience in education. He has written a number of books and blogs on Depth of Knowledge, Inquirying Questions, and other topics. In this conversation, we take a deeper look at Depth of Knowledge and how it might be used to allow us to better align our assessments with our Learning Outcomes.

Links

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

www.MaverikEducation.com
Deconstructing Depth of Knowledge: A Method and Model for Deeper Teaching and Learning, Erik Francis
Now That's a Good Question!: How to Promote Cognitive Rigor Through Classroom Questioning, Erik Francis
Inquiring Minds Want to Learn: Posing Good Questions to Promote Student Inquiry , Erik Francis
Next Generation Science Standards
Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools, Diane Ravitch
The Report of the Committee of Ten, James Mackenzie
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, by The National Commission on Excellence in Education, April 1983
Cognitive Rigor & DOK Focus Area, Dr. Karin Hess

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

59 - Leaning Into ROI and Communication in Leading Grading Reform: An Interview with Dr. Chad Lang

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley interview Dr. Chad Lang, the Assistant Superintendent of School Improvement at Glenwood Community School District in Iowa. Through our conversation we explore the various ways in which communication plays an important role in the impact grading reform can have on a community, a school, and a student population as well as how intentionally aligning hiring practices to your institutional values can support these efforts. We then explore the ROI of

Links

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

Glenwood Community School District

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

58 - Authentic Assessment in the Age of AI: Diving into the Literature on Authentic Assessment

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0700

The introduction of easily accessible large language models has reverberated through academic at all levels. For practitioners of alternative grading this has impacted in two major areas:

Are the assessments we are asking students to do providing legitimately valid evidence of learning? (Or do they reflect students utilizing an LLM or other outside resource such as Chegg or Brainly)
We are seeing student engagement levels drop precipitously in both higher education and PK-12.

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley explore some of the research about how to make assessments that engage learners in both developing and demonstrating learning of key skills as well as providing instructors with valid evidence of learning.

Links

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

Authentic Assessments: How to Assess Students in a Way That Actually Matters, podcast episode 103 of "It's Not Rocket Science"
Assessing Student Learning - Northern Illinois University
Course Based Assessment Handbook, Stassen Et. Al.
Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe
Development of Authentic Assessments for the Middle School Classroom
Performance Assessment Bank
Mathematics Assessment Project
Keeping Assessment in Social Studies Real

Research Literature

Rethinking Authentic Assessment: Work, Well-being and Society, McArthur, Feb 2022
From authentic assessment to authenticity in assessment: broadening perspectives, Ajjawi, Et. Al., Oct 2023
Rethinking Student Assessment: Recognizing Authentic Evidence of Learning, January 2023

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

57 - LIVE from Mathfest! Discussions of how we get to a tipping point in Grading Reform.

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0700

It's another first here on the pod - a LIVE recording! A group of us came together to discuss what we were seeing at Mathfest and what we think needs to happen to get to a tipping point with grading reform. Thank you to everyone who joined us!

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

56 - Alternative Grading as a Healing Process Part 2 of 2: Exploring the Harmful Wordviews that Undergird the Letter Grading System, an Interview with Dr. Jeff Anderson

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In part 2 of our interview with Dr. Jeff Anderson, we delve deeply into ideas about the connections between grades, behaviourism, and anti-democracy. This is a conversation that goes well beyond the "how-to" of alternative grading and explores the WHY of grades and how they connect to some of the biggest challenges we currently face in our world.

Links

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

About Behaviorism, B.F. Skinner
Beyond Freedom & Dignity, B. F. Skinner
Punished By Rewards, 25th Anniversary Edition, Alfie Kohn
Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Classroom (The Perspectives on Writing), Asao Inoue
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson
How Learning Works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, Susan Ambrose, et al
Wealth Supremacy, Marjorie Kelly
The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind, Jonah Berger
Talking About Leaving Revisited (downloads PDF), edited by Elaine Seymour and Anne-Barrier Hunter
No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane McAlevey

Resources

Writings and Interviews by Jeff Anderson

Jeff Anderson's Hosted Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

55 - Alternative Grading as a Healing Process Part 1 of 2: Exploring the Harmful Wordviews that Undergird the Letter Grading System, an Interview with Dr. Jeff Anderson

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this, our first two-part episode on The Grading Podcast, Sharona and Bosley speak with Dr. Jeff Anderson, a community college math professor who has been thinking and writing about alternative assessment practices since at least March 2021. This interview was so interesting and nuanced we just couldn't fit it into a single hour! Join us for a in-depth personal and professional journey about the impact grades had personally on Jeff and how he utilizes his lived experience to work towards a more just educational system and changes to our grading practices.

Links

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

What is Good Mathematics? Terence Tao
The Harmful Worldviews that Undergird the Letter Grading System, blog post by Dr. Jeff Anderson
A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value in the Most Common Education Measure, Brookhart, et. al
The Happiness Lab: Making the Grade, podcast episode
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram Kendi
Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

54 - Reflections on the 2024 Grading Conference with Ashleigh Fox and Drew Lewis

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Now that we are a few weeks out from the 2024 Grading Conference, Sharona sits down with two of the organizers (and repeat guests on the pod) Dr. Ashleigh Fox and Dr. Drew Lewis. Hear about some of the highlights of the conference for each of them, as well as what they hope to achieve with next year's conference.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

53 - Reflections on One Year of The Grading Podcast: Lessons Learned and Goals for the Upcoming Year

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode Sharona and Bosley reflect on one year of The Grading Podcast. From memorable moments and guests to

Links

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

Grading Podcast Episodes mentioned in this episode (in the order they are mentioned):

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

52 - Progress Tracking: Communicating with Students to Encourage Learning and Promote Buy-In

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0700

A common pushback that practitioners of alternative grading get is that students "don't know how they are doing". In this episode, Sharona and Bosley take a hard look at progress tracking and communicating progress to students. We include a variety of examples of progress trackers provided by several different alternative graders and talk about the ways in which progress tracking is important, regardless of the grading system in use.

Links

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

Progress Trackers

Tracking Mastery Worksheet Math 1090
Example of MTH 210 Grade Record sheet W23
Example of 85-310 grades checklist - spring 2024, by Abigail Noyce
EGI Grade Check_Zeccola AP Lang, by Joe Zeccola and Robert Bosley
Example CS 120 Learner progress tracker, by Dave Largent
Sample Grade Sheet - by Abby Noble

Other Resources Mentioned in the Episode

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

51 - Reflecting on Standards-Based Grading with Joe Zeccola and Ashleigh Fox

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Joe Zeccola and Dr. Ashleigh Fox join Sharona and Bosley as we look at a critique of standards-based grading written from someone in the trenches, already working in alternative grading. We discuss many of the main points of the article as a way of self-reflecting on our practices as we explore this world of alternative grading.

Links

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

We Need to Talk About Standards-Based Grading, Grow Beyond Grades Blog
Effects of no feedback, task-related comments, and grades on intrinsic motivation and performance. Butler, R. and Nisan, M. 1986, Journal of Educational Psychology

Previous Episodes for Joe Zeccola:

Previous Episodes for Ashleigh Fox

Episode 15 - Alternative Grading as a Classroom Practice and a Dissertation Topic

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

50 - How we quadrupled our pass rate: Lessons learned from Redesigning Precalculus, An Interview with Dr. Latrice Bowman

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley speak with Dr. Latrice Bowman, a mathematics faculty member from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Latrice took the MAA OPEN intensive training on redesigning a course to use alternative grading and is back to talk about her first two times running the redesigned course. She shares lessons learned and changes made. We talk about reducing the number of learning outcomes, progress tracking, students conferences and so much more. Oh - and the result? A quadrupling of the pass rate from pre-calculus through first semester calculus.This is another great example of the process of course redesign.

Links

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

MAA OPEN Math Project

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

49 - Teaching and Assessing Writing - Ungrading, AI and a LOT of Rethinking: an Interview with Emily Pitts Donahoe

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley talk with Dr. Emily Pitts Donahoe about teaching writing in a world where ungrading is the system and AI exists. Emily is the Associate Director of Instruction Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning as well as a lecturer in writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. She is also one of the organizers of the 2024 Grading Conference. This conversation explores some of the research on grades and motivation, and then continues our exploration into the new thinking that many of us in the alt grading world are doing as we consider the impact of generative AI models on our courses. What is the purpose of teaching writing if an AI can do most of the things we need writing for? (Or can it?)

From helping our students find purpose in our classes to rethinking the types of writing and assignments we give, join us as we continue the conversation about authentic assessments, grades, and the impact of AI.

Links

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

Grades Can Hinder Learning: What Should Professors Use Instead, Becky Supiano
Effects of No Feedback, Task-Related Comments, and Grades on Intrinsic Motivation and Performance, Ruth Butler and Mordecai Nisan (PDF download)
Unmaking the Grade, a blog by Emily Pitts Donahoe
A start/stop/continue for the Ungrading Community, Grading for Growth Blog
Visible Learning: The Sequel, John Hattie
Prompt Engineering Specialization, course on prompt engineering from Vanderbuilt University delivered via Coursera

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

48 - Implementation Challenges and Opportunities: A Conversation with Becky Peppler and Don Smith on Working with K-12 School Districts to implement Alternative Grading

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we talk with Becky Peppler and Don Smith from First Educational Resources, an organization dedicated to providing K-12 school districts in North America with affordable options for professional learning to support social emotional learning, instructional coaching, professional learning communities, and grading reform efforts. We discuss their experiences with supporting grading reform efforts in thousands of districts across North America, the challenges, the opportunities, and where we go from here. We also talk about the STAGR center and conference. STAGR stands for "Standards, Targets, Assessment, Grading, and Reporting". The STAGR conference, a 1-day virtual event held twice a year, provides a platform for K-12 educators to come together to understand the landscape of grading reform, identify strategies that reduce complexity and enhance understanding of reform efforts, and work to implement effective changes to grading systems.

Links

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

The STAGR Conference
Extinguishing the Fires within Assessment and Grading Reform, Garth Larson, Becky Peppler, Don Smith, and Matt Townsley
Fair Isn't Always Equal: Assessment and Grading in the Differentiated Classroom, Rick Wormeli
Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (An Actionable Guide to Implementing the PLC Process and Effective Teaching Methods), Richard DuFour
College Bridge
Repair Kit for Grading: (3rd Edition) 15 Fixes for Broken Grades with Discussion and Repair Guide, Ken O'Connor and Rick Wormeli

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

47 - Taking Alternative Grading With You: An Interview with Dr. Rachel Weir

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we talk with Dr. Rachel Weir. Dr. Weir is a Professor of Mathematics at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. She has been the Director of Faculty Development at Allegheny College for the past few years and is currently (as of when this episode was recorded) the new interim Associate Provost at Allegheny College. We talk with Rachel about her journey into alternative grading, how that has impacted her work as the Director of Faculty Development and how she is thinking about the impact of alternative grading from the perspective of her new job as Interim Associate Provost.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

46 - Extinguishing the Fires within Assessment and Grading Reform: Welcoming Back Dr. Matt Townsley

Tue, 28 May 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Links

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

Extinguishing the Fires Within Assessment and Grading Reform, Garth Larson, Becky Peppler, Don Smith, Matt Townsley.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

45 - Exploring the schedule for the 2024 Grading Conference

Tue, 21 May 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Join us as we explore some of the sessions at the upcoming Grading Conference! Sharona and Bosley share some details of the newly released schedule for the Grading Conference, as well as discuss which ones they would really like to attend.

Links

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

The Grading Conference

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

44 - Artificial Intelligence And Alt Grading: Challenges and Opportunities

Tue, 14 May 2024 04:00:00 -0700

If you base your grades on "authentic assessment of student work", then what do you do when technology catches up to the point where AI can do BETTER work than your students? And what about AI that can help the instructor do better work? Better feedback, easier workloads?

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley share some initial thoughts and resources on how AI is going to impact the Alt Grading world. Come help start the conversation about authentic assessment and look at the potential benefits of AI as well.

Links

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

Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning, by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson
Thinking With and About AI - Episode 517 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, with C. Edward Watson
AI Teaching Assistant Pro - an AI powered app for instructors
AI Tutor Pro - an AI powered app for students
Bloom's Taxonomy - a guide by the Vanderbuilt University Center for Teaching
How to Use Norman Webb's Depth of Knowledge Framework
Chat GPT 3.5
Prompt Engineering - Get better results from large language models
GPT 3.5 vs GPT 4: Biggest Differences to Consider
American Association of Colleges and Universities: Essential Learning Outcomes
Khanmigo by Khan Academy
NCTM Position Statement on AI
The Homework Apocalypse (Great Prompts in this article)
AI Education and AI in Education - from the National Science Foundation
Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT
From AI to A+: Prepare Your Students for Using ChatGPT and other AI
Machine Learning and the Five Big Ideas in AI

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

43 - Alt Grading as a Team: Course Coordination, PLCs, course teams - how to do this together!

Tue, 07 May 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley discuss some of the details of how to manage doing alternatively grading as a team. Given the extremely personal nature of grading, what are some of the steps needed to allow for personalization in an environment that is designed to have all the course sections be closely aligned.

Links

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

Learning by Doing, 4th Edition, Richard Dufour, Et. Al.
PLC+: Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design, Fisher, Et. Al.
Course Coordinator Orientations Toward their Work and Opportunities for Professional Development, Martinez, Et. Al.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

42 - Metacognition, Power Structures in the Classroom, what is reasonable to expect of students? An Interview with Dr. Theresa Gaines.

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Boz sit down with Dr. Theresa Gaines (Gath) to talk about how they think about metacognition and power structures in the classroom. Having introduced ungrading in their previous institution, Gath shares how they are using ungrading and the principles of ungrading to address power structures in the classroom in their new institution. We also talk about metacognition, the level of work it is for students, and ways in which we, as instructors, might help students learn to effectively think about their own thinking.

Links

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

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, Donald Schoen
Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure, John Sharp and Colleen Macklin
The ICAP Framework: Linking Cognitive Engagement to Active Learning Outcomes, Michelene T. H. Chi and Ruth Wylie

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

41 - Second Chance Grading: How Small, Gentle Approach to Changing Grading Led to Research Into Alt Grading

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley sit down with Dr. Brie Tripp and Dr. Rob Furrow, both from the University of California, Davis. Brie and Rob share their fascinating foray into introducing "second-chance grading" into their classes. They also share how this introduction led them into a research project with very interesting connections to Self-Determination Theory as a theoretical framework for evaluating the impact of Alternative Grading Practices.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

40 - Data-Driven Instruction: Using Learning Outcome Data to Talk with Students, Instructors, and Administrators

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley go into more depth about how tracking student progress on learning outcomes can provide a wealth of data to use in supporting students, improving course designs, and communicating with administrators.

Links

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

How Alternative Grading Helps Me Support Struggling Students, by David Clark

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

39 - Systemic Change - A Look at how Los Angeles Unified School District developed their new grading policy, based on Equitable Grading practices. With Joe Zeccola

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In February 2024, with very little fanfare, Los Angeles Unified School District introduced a new grading policy, the first update since 2005. Based in Equitable Grading and Instruction principles, this new policy recommends that teachers to use equitable grading practices and states that grades should reflect student proficiency in learning outcomes. In this episode, Joe Zeccola joins Sharona and Bosley for a look into the process that went into crafting this new policy. This conversation provides some opportunities for reflection for school administrators thinking about doing this at a systemic level, as well as teachers who want to be change agents for their districts.

Links

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

Los Angeles Unified School District Equitable Grading and Instruction

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

38 - Twenty+ Small Steps to Get Started with Alt Grading (Inspired by the recent blog post at Grading for Growth)

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0700

A recent post on the Grading for Growth blog sparked this interesting conversation about different entry points to starting down the alt grading path. Sharona and Bosley share their favorite choices out of the twenty shared on the blog post as well as discussing some other options of their own.

Links

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

Grading for Growth - 20 Small Starts for Alternative Grading, Robert Talbert

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

37 - Introducing The Keynote Speakers for the 2024 Grading Conference plus What We're Reading!

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley introduce the three keynote speakers for the 2024 Grading Conference. They then share some of the new(er) and upcoming publications in the realm of grading reform. If you are looking for something new to read and a conference to attend, this is the episode!

Links

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

Keeping Receipts: Thoughts on Ungrading from a Black Woman Professor, Dr. Laila McCloud, Grand Valley State University and keynote speaker at the 2024 Grading Conference
The Tyranny of Content: “Content Coverage” as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It, Professor Jeff Schinske, Foothill College and keynote speaker at the 2024 Grading Conference
Grading for Equity, 2nd Edition, Joe Feldman
Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings and Rankings Undermine Learning, Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt
Human Restoration Project Podcast Interview with Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt
Implementing Mastery Learning, 3rd Edition, Dr. Thomas Guskey
Standards-Based Grading: A School District's Pillar to Student Success: Matteson Elementary School District 162's commitment to student success by ... and high expectations for all students.
Failing Our Future, How Grades Harm Students and What We Can do About It, Josh Eyler
Grading Reform That Lasts, Eight Steps to Transforming Your School's Assessment Culture, A Roadmap to Navigating the Complexities of a Standards Based Grading System, Tom Schimmer, Megan Knight, and Matt Townsley
Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, Dr. Susan D. Blum

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Undoing the Grade, by Jesse Stommel
Grading for Equity 2nd Edition, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

36 - Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently) - an Interview with Jeff Schinske, 10 years later

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley sit down with Jeffrey Schinske, author of the article Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently). Jeff is a professor of biology at Foothill College, a California Community College. In 2014, Jeff co-authored the article mentioned above, which has since become a foundational article for many people who are beginning their alternative grading journey. In our conversation, we touch on why Jeff and his co-author, Dr. Kimberly Tanner, chose to write this article, how the concepts in it have played out in his own teaching over the subsequent 10 years, and where Jeff sees alternative grading going today. Jeff is also going to be one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Grading Conference, to be held June 13 - 15, 2024.

Links

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

CBE-Life Sciences Education, Editors-in-Chief: Jeff Schinske and Kimberly Tanner
Content Coverage as a Persistent Exclusionary Practice: Investigating Perspectives of Health Professionals on the Influence of Undergraduate Coursework, Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner, January 2024
SEPAL: The Science Education Partnership & Assessment Laboratory

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

35 - An Interview with Dr. Joshua Bowman: Alternative Grading for over a decade, the Importance of Blog Posts

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this week's episode, Sharona and Bosley sit down with Dr. Joshua Bowman, mathematics professor at Pepperdine in California. Join us as we explore how the seeds sown through a blog over ten years old has had lasting impact on faculty and students, as well as our entire grading reform community.

Links

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

Blog posts about Alternative Grading from Joshua Bowman:
The audience for our grades, June 2022
My One Goal for Teaching Next Year, July 2014
A Reflection on Course Structure, and Standards for Calculus, August 2014
Other Blog Posts on Alternative Grading:
1 Standard Per Day, Andy Rundquist, July 2014
Computational Data Science Capstone Class, Andy Rundquist, January 2023

Other interesting links that have inspired thinking about our courses:

The Tyranny of the Curriculum, TEDx talk by Shawn Cornally
Assessment Idea for Calculus 1: Near Final Draft, blog post by Bret Benesh, August 2014

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

34 - Standards-Based Grading and Specifications Grading: Their Similarities and Differences

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode Sharona and Bosley go deeper into the comparison between standards-based grading and specifications-based grading. Looking at the four grading architecture decisions, what looks the same and what looks different between these two systems? Join us for another great conversation about grading. AND! Registration for the Grading Conference is open. Please join us virtually in June for the 5th annual conference!

Links

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

American Society for Engineering Education, CoNECD conference
What is Specifications Grading? From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center on Transformative Teaching
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilson
How an Alternative Grading System is Improving Student Learning, from Chemical & Engineering News
Specifications Grading: We May Have a Winner, by Robert Talbert

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

33 - An Interview with Dr. Thomas Guskey: A Journey through the History of Grading Reform Efforts

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 04:00:00 -0700

We are so very excited to be joined this week by Dr. Thomas Guskey, one of the pioneers in the area of grading reform and a huge inspiration to so many of us in this community. Join us for this extremely fun episode where we talk with Dr. Guskey about studying with Dr. Benjamin Bloom (of Bloom's Taxonomy fame) and his early work with Mastery Learning in the Chicago Public Schools. We also explore the last five decades of research into grading reform efforts, and what it takes to get people to change their grading systems.

Links

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

Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education, Kirschenbaum and Simon
Reliability of the Grading of High-School Work in English, Daniel Starch and Edward Elliott
On Your Mark, Dr. Thomas Guskey
Off the Mark, Jack Schneider and Ethan L. Hutt
USC Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

32 - Active Learning and Alternative Grading: When Intentional Pedagogy and Intentional Assessment Truly Align

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 04:00:00 -0700

On this week's episode, Sharona and Bosley speak with Dr. Theron Hitchman (TJ) about his experience with "accidentally" changing his grading while intentionally changing his classroom pedagogy to bring in Inquiry-Based Learning. Dr. Hitchman is a mathematics professor at the University of Northern Iowa. He teaches a variety of courses from upper-level Mathematics courses for majors to courses for future teachers, biologists, and physicists.

His story of intentionally and transparently changing his pedagogical practices by getting colleague and administrative buy in while simultaneously changing his assessment practices "under the radar" provides an interesting look at how pedagogy and assessment intertwine to allow each to become more effective.

Links

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

Mentioned in the Episode:

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

31 -The Role of "Effort" or "Work" in an Alternative Grading Architecture and the Relationship with Due Dates

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Two of the most frequent questions that come up when introducing instructors to alternative grading are "What about homework/effort?" and "What about due dates?" In this episode, Sharona and Bosley look carefully into both of these questions. From rethinking all the "work" in your class and grading it not on time, place and manner but rather on intent to marrying that intent to your due date structures and late policies, this is another episode where we take the time to talk and think deeply about some of the unexamined components of our classrooms.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

30 - Listener Request - A Deep Dive into the Weeds of our Grading Architecture

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 04:00:00 -0700

By your request! A listener from New York City wrote in asking us to talk in more detail about our grading systems, what we have done right, what we have messed up - so we did! Sharona and Bosley talk in detail about some of the things they each tried and what worked and what has not. Keep those requests coming!

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

29 - The Current State and Future Wishes for SoTL in Alt Grading - with Dr. Drew Lewis

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Let's discuss SoTL research! What is it, what are some of the things that have been done to apply SoTL research to Alt Grading, and where do we want to see it go? Dr. Drew Lewis returns to the pod to share his experiences with SoTL research in his classrooms. Sharona and Bosley also share some of their experiences and perspectives. If you are curious about SoTL research, we go deeper into some of the choices that we can make to do useful, effective research in support of alternative grading practices.

Links

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

Dr. Drew Lewis
Impacts of Standards-Based Grading on Students' Mindset and Test Anxiety, Drew Lewis
Applying a Standards-Based Grading Framework Across Lower Level Mathematics Courses, Drew Lewis and Jay Elsinger

Resources

The Grading Conference - an annual, online conference exploring Alternative Grading in Higher Education & K-12. Registration for 2024 now open!

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

28 - Developing and Using Technology Tools to Author Assessments - with Steven Clontz

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0700

In this week's episode, Dr. Steven Clontz returns to talk in more detail about creating and using open source tools to support aspects of alt grading such as authoring assessment banks to support the reattempts needed in many alt grading systems. Join us as we look at how CheckIt, Dr. Clontz's open authoring tool for assessments, developed and what path forward he sees to developing the sociotechnical infrastructure needed to better support instructors and students in the work of implementing alternatively graded classes.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

27 - Developing Your Course Calendar

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley take a detailed look at what goes into developing a course calendar for an alternatively graded course. How do we schedule all those "reattempts" into a term? And what impact does that have on our organization and communication with our students?

Links

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

We recommend checking out the various discipline based repositories for more detailed information on what other folks have done:

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

26 - Active Learning and Alternative Grading: An Introduction to Team-Based Inquiry Learning with Dr. Drew Lewis and Dr. Steven Clontz

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 04:00:00 -0700

Welcome to 2024! In our first new episode of the year, Sharona sits down with Drew Lewis and Steven Clontz to discuss their Team-Based Inquiry Learning project as well as other parts of the growing open resource community. We look at the integration of Alternative Grading with active and inquiry-based learning, learn about TBIL, and also delve a little bit into some of the other NSF projects coming along to support instructors in the areas of assessment, instructional design, and enhanced classroom activities.

Links

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

The Team-Based Inquiry Learning Project (tbil.org)
The PROSE Consortium
CheckIt Assessment Tool
TBIL Linear Algebra
TBIL Calculus
Drew Lewis
Steven Clontz
Do the Math!: Challenging, Fun Math Puzzles for Kids, by Steven Clontz

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

25 - Happy New Year 2024! Replay - Getting Buy-in

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 04:00:00 -0700

It's the last of our replay episodes as we finish out our holiday break. As we start to think about next semester, we felt it was a good time to think about how we will begin building buy-in from the very beginning. Enjoy as we discuss options for getting buy-in with students and others.

Links

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

Whatever it Takes, by Richard DuFour
The SAFE Approach to Earning Buy-In, Robert Talbert
Alabama School of CyberTechnology and Engineering Interview (Episode 17)

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

24 - Holiday 2023: Revisiting Gathering Evidence of Learning and Developing Proficiency Scales (from Episode 7)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 04:00:00 -0700

As we continue to enjoy the holiday season, Sharona and Bosley revisit their own grading architecture decisions and discuss some things they are thinking about for the next semester. From rethinking how we collect the evidence of learning and considering how our proficiency scales impact the design of our grading architecture, semester breaks are often spent tinkering. Enjoy revisiting Episode 7 with us as we take a break from the usual day-to-day work of educators.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

23 - Holidays 2023: Replay - Developing Your Grading Architecture

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 04:00:00 -0700

We're heading into the holiday break, so over the next few weeks we'll be replaying some previous episodes while adding some thoughts as we conclude the Fall semester of 2023. So enjoy your holiday break!

In this episode, we describe the four decisions that make up the "Grading Architecture" of an alternatively graded course.

How will you assess your learning targets?
What type of proficiency scale(s) will you use?
How will students show proficiency for a specific learning target? (I.e. how much evidence and of what kind to they need to provide)
How will you wrap up into a final grade?

After introducing the four decisions, we explore some examples of common options used for each of the decisions. This includes:

What types of evidence of learning will you accept?
Exploring three common types of proficiency scales - 2 level, 3 level and 4 level scales
Describing different methods for determining proficiency on a specific target (the Guskey method, N times, and decaying average)
Evaluating options for rolling up grades, including the simple count method, the bucket method, and the "good to great" method with multiple levels of proficiency.

Links

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

Implementing Mastery Learning, by Thomas Guskey

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

22 - Equity, Inclusion and Alt Grading in Biology: An Interview with Katie Mattaini

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Dr. Katie Mattaini is an lecturer in Biology at Tufts University. In this episode, we talk with Katie about how to think about equity and inclusion when designing a course using alt grading. Katie uses a range of alt grading practices from standards-based grading in into biology to collaborative grading (or ungrading) in an upper level Cancer Bio course. This wide ranging conversation touches on the fundamentals of course design, the need for deep thinking about the use of due dates with different student populations, and concludes with some advice for alt grading practitioners to think about when considering inclusion and equity in their courses.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

21 - Alt Grading in Large Chemistry Classes: An Interview with Dr. Eden Tanner

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 04:00:00 -0700

On the podcast this week we speak with Dr. Eden Tanner, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Mississippi. Listen to hear about using alternative grading in the context of a 170 person general chemistry course. Eden has a fascinating take on approaching alternative grading from a research mindset, and how that led her to adopt the principles of alternative grading.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

20 - The Human Impact of our Assessments on Students, What story do your assessments tell about a student? An Interview with Sean Nank

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Links

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

seannank.com
How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards, Ken O'Connor

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

19 - Thanksgiving 2023: Listener Feedback - Entering our Own Feedback Loop, Our First Replay

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This is the first holiday we have taken since launching the podcast, so on this episode we're doing things a little differently!

Our first segment is a response segment to some thoughtful, effective feedback that we were given from a listener. We really appreciated the time they took to write to us and we learned a lot thinking about the feedback! Also, to give us all time to take a breath and do some catch up, we are re-running our episode about the problems with traditional grading. This is a good time to re-listen to this episode and evaluate in preparation for next semester, are we avoiding/repairing as many of the problems with traditional grading as we can, given our own time, resources, and institutional contexts!

So - have a wonderful holiday, we'll be back with new episodes next week!

-------------------

From Episode 2 - The Problems with Traditional Grading: Before we can explore how to change our grading to be more effective, more humane, more inclusive and to better support student learning, we need to begin by examining more closely what is wrong with what we currently do. In this episode, Sharona and Bosley take a deep dive into the problems with the traditional points-and-percentages grading system. During the episode we explore:

What do we mean by "traditional grading"?
What is the purpose of a grade in a class?
The lack of consistency and clarity in points-and-percentages grading
The misuse of mathematical averages
The inequitable nature of category weights
Does traditional points-and-percentages grading do what we think it does?

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

18 - The Sportscaster of Alternative Grading: An Interview with Matt Townsley

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Links

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

Upcoming Conference in Iowa:

Standards Based Grading Conference: A Collaborative Assessment Conference for Iowa Schools

Comprehensive List of Resources:

All Things Standards Based Grading

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

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

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Today we welcome to the pod the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering. A public residential magnet high school in Alabama, this school was built from the ground up around the principles of alternative grading. In this episode, Sharona speaks with the President of ASCTE, Matt Massey, and the lead English Language Arts teacher Jessy Bryan. Join us as we discuss many of the experiences they had in launching this school, how they do alternative grading, and what recommendations they have for schools and/or districts wanting to work towards adopting alternative grading methods themselves.

Links

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

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

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

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Alternative grading is getting more and more press coverage. Some of it good, some of it not so good. In this episode, Sharona and Bosley look carefully at a couple of recent articles about alternative grading and discuss whether the critiques contained in them are valid or questionable.

Links to the articles discussed, and some others:

No Zeros Grading is Sold as an Equity Shortcut. It's Not.
Your Kids Aren't Learning: Mastery-Based Learning + Equitable Grading = Fraud
Debunking Myths of Standards-Based Grading
Schools are adopting mastery-based grading. How does it work? (includes citations from Sharona Krinsky)

Links

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

Specific links here.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!):

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

15 - SoTL: Alternative Grading as a Classroom Practice and a Dissertation Research Topic - an Interview with Ashleigh Fox

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0700

On this episode we welcome Ashleigh Fox. Ashleigh is a writing professor at Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, and is doing her dissertation on best practices in Alternative Grading in Higher Education. In this conversation, we discuss successes and "not yet" successes in her courses, her dissertation research into Alternative Grading, as well as her experience attending the (mostly STEM focused) Grading Conference in June 2023.

Links

Ashleigh Fox on Linked In and at Community College of Allegheny County

Asao Inoue, Arizona State University

Blog
Grading Writing is a Racist Practice In Statement Magazine

Ungrading, edited by Susan D. Blum (Amazon Associates link)

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading (Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Clicking on them and purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!) :

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

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

14 - Undoing the Grade: An Interview with Jesse Stommel

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0700

On this episode, Bosley and Sharona speak with Dr. Jesse Stommel about his new book Undoing the Grade and about all the conversations about grades that we should be having. We touch on everything from 1000 point grading systems and the impact of Learning Management Systems to ChatGPT and seeing students as human beings. We question the very foundations of the system we call grades.

Links

Books mentioned in the episode:

Undoing the Grade, by Jesse Stommel
How Children Fail, by John Holt

Contact Jesse Stommel

www.jessestommel.com
@Jessifer on Twitter, @Jessifer.bsky.social on Bluesky

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

13 - Interim Grades: What do we do when we have to report "grades" in the middle of a term? With Joe Zeccola

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

12 - Getting Started Part 7: Building Buy-In

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Bosley and Sharona discuss "Buy-In" - what it is, what exactly we are trying to get people to buy into, who we need to get buy-in from, some ideas about how and when to get buy-in, etc. Continuing the exploration into our unexamined grading practices and the similarities and differences between the K-12 and higher education worlds, we invite you to join the conversation!

Links

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

Whatever it Takes by Richard DuFour
The SAFE approach to Building Buy-In by Robert Talbert
Building Trust by David Clark

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

11 - Getting Started Part 6: Feedback - Giving It and Getting Students to Use It

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Feedback is one of the four core pillars of Alternative Grading. In this episode, co-hosts Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky discuss what elements are included in effective feedback, evaluate what it takes to teach students to use it, and share specific tips and barriers such as where feedback appears in LMS systems and different types of feedback including self-reflection, peer review, and instructor-to-student feedback.

Links

Seven Keys to Effective Feedback
Planning for Growth: Fleshing Out the Feedback
Why I Give (Almost) All of My Assessments Back to My Students, by Sharona Krinsky
What Learning Looks Like (Clean) Youtube video
What REAL "Learning" Looks Like (Explicit) Youtube video
Teaching More by Grading Less, or Differently, by Schinske and Tanner
Effects of no feedback, task-related comments, and grades on intrinsic motivation and performance, by Butler and Nissan
Gradescope - www.gradescope.com
TextExpander - www.textexpander.com
Grades Versus Comments: What Does the Research Really Tell Us? (Opinion)
5 Research-Based Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

10 - Artificial Scarcity and Doing Alt Grading "Right" or "Wrong": An Interview With David Clark

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, co-hosts Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley talk with Dr. David Clark, an associate professor of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University and co-author of both the new book Grading for Growth and the Grading for Growth blog. Join us as we explore Dave's journey through alternative grading, what his impetus for writing the book was, and his thoughts about the concept of "Artificial Scarcity" as it relates to grading. We also have a fascinating conversation towards the end about some of the ways the media is trying to describe doing alternative grading the "right" way as well as some of the ways you can do it "wrong".

Links

Artificial Scarcity: Reflecting on Arbitrary Limits in Our Classes by David Clark, on the Grading for Growth Blog.
David Clark, Grand Valley State University website and contact information.
Behind the Scenes with the Grading for Growth Book

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

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

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

9 - Reassessment Carnivals: An Interview with Kate Owens

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley talk with Dr. Kate Owens, a math professor at the College of Charleston, about her journey into Alternative Grading, how she handles assessments and reassessments in her classes, and what her top tips are for instructors considering switching to Alternative Grading.

Links

A Beginner's Guide to Standards Based Grading by Kate Owens
An Interview with Kate Owens by Robert Talbert
Kate Owens, College of Charleston
How We Moved A Conference Online by Kate Owens, Sharona Krinsky and David Clark

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

8 - Getting Started Part 5: How to Determine When a Student has Completed a Learning Outcome and How to Roll it All Up Into a Final Grade

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, our hosts Bosley and Sharona take a thorough look at the third and fourth decisions of the grading architecture of an alternatively graded course.

How will a student complete a learning target?
How does an instructor roll up evidence of learning into a final grade?

In traditional grading, instructors don't usually determine if a specific learning target has or has not been completed satisfactorily. There are numerous ways, based on assessment methods and other factors, to determine when the learning target is complete. From a holistic approach to specific numbers of demonstrations of sufficiency, several of the ways of completing a learning target are discussed.

Once individual learning targets are developed and proficiency criteria decided upon, then its time to roll all of it up into a final course grade (assuming the instructor needs to give one). Ranging from a simple counting up of successes to utilizing a more nuanced approach, instructors will be introduced to some additional options and methods for approaching final grades.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

7 - Getting Started Part 4: Gathering Evidence of Learning and Developing Proficiency Scales

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Join Sharona and Bosley as we delve into the details of the first two decisions needed in designing your grading architecture. We discuss the different types of assessments and evidence that we can use to measure student learning. Everything from traditional style exams and quizzes to the use of portfolios, student conversations and even "homework". Then we dive into proficiency scales. What are they? How are they used in alternative grading?

Additionally we begin to touch on the labels used in proficiency scales. Whether your LMS system requires the use of categorical numbers as labels or you have the flexibility to use words or even emojis, labeling your proficiency scales impacts the meaning and usefulness of them.

Resources

Assessment Resources

When is A Number Not A Number? blog post by Robert Talbert

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

6 – The Anatomy of a Learning Outcome: An Interview with Joe Zeccola

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Join hosts Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky as we talk to Joe Zeccola. Joe is a National Board Certified English teacher and an Equitable Grading and Instruction mentor in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He primarily teaches AP Literature and AP Language classes.

In this conversation, we talk to Joe about how he developed the learning targets that he uses in his classes. From his initial discovery of the problems with traditional grading through his journey of self exploration and understanding of what he values as a teacher, Joe provides a fascinating insight into the process he used to align his learning targets with his core values as a teacher and how he built his grading system to reflect those values.

Links

The Case Against the Zero by Douglas Reeves
Revisiting The Case Against the Zero by Douglas Reeves
National Board Certification for Teachers

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

5 – Getting Started Part 3: Developing your Grading Architecture

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode, Sharona and Bosley describe the four decisions that make up the "Grading Architecture" of an alternatively graded course.

How will you assess your learning targets?
What type of proficiency scale(s) will you use?
How will students show proficiency for a specific learning target? (I.e. how much evidence and of what kind to they need to provide)
How will you wrap up into a final grade?

After introducing the four decisions, they explore some examples of common options used for each of the decisions. This includes:

What types of evidence of learning will you accept?
Exploring three common types of proficiency scales - 2 level, 3 level and 4 level scales
Describing different methods for determining proficiency on a specific target (the Guskey method, N times, and decaying average)
Evaluating options for rolling up grades, including the simple count method, the bucket method, and the "good to great" method with multiple levels of proficiency.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

4 – Grading for Growth: An Interview with Robert Talbert

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast we interview Dr. Robert Talbert. Dr. Talbert is a full professor in the mathematics department at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, MI. Dr. Talbert is the author of Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty and the newly released Grading for Growth. Dr. Talbert has been using alternative grading in his courses since 2016.

In this wide ranging conversation we talk about Dr. Talbert's initial experiences with Alternative Grading, why he has stuck with it, and what motivated him to write his newly released book, Grading for Growth, with co-author Dr. David Clark.

We also explore the interactions between alternative grading, flipped learning, and active learning. Join us for this amazing conversation.

Grading for Growth by Robert Talbert and David Clark
The Grading for Growth blog by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Flipped Learning by Robert Talbert
Behind the Scenes with The Grading for Growth Book

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

3 – Getting Started Part 2: Alternative Grading Defined

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode of The Grading Podcast, co-hosts Sharona and Bosley introduce the four pillars of Alternative Grading:

Clearly defined and measurable learning outcomes
Helpful, actionable feedback
Marks indicate Progress
Reattempts/redos without penalty

Each pillar is introduced and defined, along with common misconceptions and myths.

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

2 – Getting Started Part 1: The Problems with Traditional Grading

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Before we can explore how to change our grading to be more effective, more humane, more inclusive and to better support student learning, we need to begin by examining more closely what is wrong with what we currently do. In this episode, Sharona and Bosley take a deep dive into the problems with the traditional points-and-percentages grading system. During the episode we explore:

What do we mean by "traditional grading"?
What is the purpose of a grade in a class?
The lack of consistency and clarity in points-and-percentages grading
The misuse of mathematical averages
The inequitable nature of category weights
Does traditional points-and-percentages grading do what we think it does?

Resources

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

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

1 – Introduction – Welcome to the Pod!

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Welcome to the launch of The Grading Podcast with your hosts, Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Grading Podcast, a show dedicated to exploring everything related to grading student work in the context of the educational system of the United States.

Grading is a largely unexamined component of the classroom experience for most instructors and students. Until the fifteen years or so, important research into grading practices and their effect on students was often ignored by instructors, administrators, and institutions in favor of a "traditional" points-and-percentages based grading system. However, over the last fifteen years there has been a growing awareness of the destructive nature of our current grading system and an increasing push for reform.

As classroom mathematics instructors, faculty development professionals, users of alternative grading systems and co-organizers of The Grading Conference (now entering its fifth year) the co-hosts Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky bring their depth of expertise and experience into the podcast arena to provide an evidence-driven, research-informed practical podcast.

Listen to this episode to hear where they came from, and what they hope to provide with this podcast.

Resources

The Grading Conference

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

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

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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

Trailer - The Grading Podcast, Launching July 2023

Sat, 20 May 2023 06:00:00 -0700

We believe that Grading is an extremely important and largely unexamined piece of the classroom puzzle that can significantly help or hinder student success. Whether you work in higher Ed or k-12, are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator this podcast is for you.

At The Grading Podcast we will take a critical lens to traditional grading, alternative grading, equitable grading, ungrading or any other method of assessing student learning. We believe in using grading practices to help students succeed and learn. Our goal with this podcast is to provide you with the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class at your institution.

Please join us as we explore the impact of grading on student learning. Our first episodes launch in mid-July 2023. To receive all our launch information, please follow and subscribe to this podcast. If you would like to submit a topic request or are interested in being a guest on the show, please visit our website, www.TheGradingPod.com, and use the contact us form to send us a message. See you in July!

Music:

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

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