– Welcome David and Robert and I am looking forward to talking to you today about “Grading for Growth”, your book about feedback and assessment practices. So there’s been a lot of recent research and writing and faculty members talking about alternative grading practices. Maybe it began and, y’know, the first big publication was Susan Bloom’s book in 2020, and so now it’s been a few years now and I feel the conversation’s still exploding. So tell me, what do you think is sort of driving this interest in these kinds of alternative grading practices?

– Well, Jim, I’ll go first on that. I think there’s just a widespread dissatisfaction with the way that grading has always been done that’s finally percolating to the surface, I believe, catalysed by the pandemic. It’s been going on even before Susan’s book. I mean, Linda Nilson had a book in 2014 about specifications grading, and in our book we trace it all the way back to even the early ’40s and ’50s, when the sort of pushback against traditional grading began. But the pandemic really brought a lot of things to the surface about student care and making sure students are actually in a position to grow when they’re in such pressure and such awful circumstances surrounding them.

People began to realise… I mean, that was during a period where everything was on the table, right? I mean, we were doing things completely differently. So much change happened in one year, just motivated by unprecedented circumstances, and I think grading was one of those things that was on the table and people started changing the way they did it, and they liked it. They liked the way that it felt for them and the way it worked out for their students. And now we have this, as you say, ongoing conversation about how to keep this thing moving forward, and that’s what our book is really about.

– Excellent. So anyone that looks at your work, whether it’s in the book or is it your Substack, these ideas also come out in the Substack as well on a regular basis, they will know that you sort of base your work on these four pillars, so tell me about those four pillars.

– Right, so I can take this. The four pillars are sort of our way of distilling what is it that works and what matters when it comes to thinking about grading practices that enable students to take part in a feedback loop that helps them learn. So grading practices that support learning in the way that humans actually learn. And the key things that anybody who learns anything really needs are, they need a clear sense of what it is that they are trying to achieve. So we call that clear standards, some statement of what matters, what you’re trying to do, what about it is important. And then, to help them engage in that, engage in learning that thing, they need helpful feedback.

And that can be in the form of writing or verbal or it can literally be a coach, y’know, helping adjust what you’re doing, but the key there is helpful feedback, something that actually helps you make adjustments and improve so you can try again. If you’re going to have grades at all, and one thing we say is you don’t need to necessarily give grades on individual student work, but if you do, it’s more useful to put them in terms of a student’s progress towards meeting those standards. And so we call that one of our pillars, excuse me, we call that one of our pillars, which is marks that indicate progress. So, instead of points or partial credit, we say something like, “you are successful in meeting this standard”, or “you need to reattempt this” or, y’know, “you’re almost there” or something like that.

And then finally, the thing that actually lets people learn from their mistakes, try again, and improve are reassessments without penalty, which means another chance to try in which you’re not penalised for having to do that. So we’re not going to average in all of your earlier attempts, but rather we’re going to look at in terms of those clear standards and count only that, right? “You have achieved the goal, even if it took you several attempts or the whole semester to get there.”

– Right, so when I was reading the book, you know, one of the things that kind of kept occurring to me was that some of these practices are ones that you can sort of do without, or without adopting, like, a full alternative creating system. For example, you could just, and actually, you know, I attended a workshop with you all and really you emphasised this idea that you can just pick a pillar and use that pillar to sort of make a change to your practices and try to move forward a little bit. So, tell me a little bit more about why you sort of make that argument for these sort of partial adoptions or just focusing on a pillar as I’m trying to think about my own grading practices.

– Sure, well, Jim, I think we will know we live in the real world and we can create some really strong, compelling moral arguments for a complete repeal-and-replace approach to grading practices, just burn it all down and start over, but in reality, most people aren’t in a position to be able to, or even wish to, do such a thing. They want to start small, test the waters out. Or maybe you’re in a highly constrained environment, for example, you’re a contingent faculty member and you’re a little concerned possibly about student pushback or you’re teaching a large lecture course and there’s certain things that are just not feasible for you, and we’re never going to come along and suggest a wholesale replacement. We, we totally suggest a wholesale replacement, I mean, in the book, but we’re never going to do that and also say, “you must do it this way”. It’s not a religion, it’s a mindset.

And so, what we say is it’s totally okay to have small wins and if the only thing, the best that you can do for now is just pick one of those four pillars that David mentioned and do one thing, like, just give more helpful feedback or write out all your learning objectives for your course or just for the exam you’re given, or, y’know, build in some kind of limited, test-the-water attempts without penalty process on one thing, if you can pick one pillar and make one step, then that’s a small win, but it’s a win for you and your students and it’s a kind of a gateway into doing more things. And the important thing is to do right by your students and work with what you’ve got. And if you’re in a situation where a full, for example, a full on ungrading implementation is just not in the cards for you, you shouldn’t feel like you can’t do anything, okay?

There’s always something you can do and we just encourage you, and everybody listening and watching to this podcast, to, y’know, read the book and see what we’re saying and what other people are saying too. It’s not just us. We have 17 case studies throughout the book that are kind of like the heart of the book, in my opinion. And everybody’s doing something. It’s not always a full-on implementation of specifications grading or whatever. It’s often sort of a hybrid or an amalgam. They’re working with what they’ve got to do right by their student, and we just encourage everybody to do the same.

– I’d like to add that one thing we say a lot of in the book is to keep it simple. That alternative grading is something where when you get that bug, you might want to blow it all up and then create a very complicated, hard-to-understand system, and that’s really not going to help anybody, right? If your students are confused, if you’re even confused by what you’re doing, that may not lead to a better outcome. So starting small helps you keep it simple. See what works for your students and your situation and then, if you want to, you can make more changes from there or you can decide that this is the right thing for you. But starting simple is a really critical first step.

– So, folks who want to find out more about, y’know, your particular approach to this, they can find the book, but also, where can they find it online? So where can they find more things, not only from you, but where would also people could sort of look for new ideas to go on down these pathways?

– Well, from us, we try to keep it simple too. Everything is just called “Grading for Growth” , so the book’s called “Grading for Growth”, and our blog on Substack is called GradingforGrowth.com. And that’s a good place to start. It’s not the only place to read, though. We’ve been really pleased lately to start featuring monthly guest posts from different faculty members and instructors from all over the place and all over different kinds of disciplines. We’re doing that…

David is posting once a month, I’m posting once a month, and we have a guest poster once a month, and then it’s sort of dealer’s choice for the remaining Monday. But every Monday, you’ll get something in your inbox that’s hopefully useful and inspiring and gets you thinking differently about your grading. And I think if you start following what some of these other people are doing and recurs your way through the bibliography in our book, you’ll find a lot of good information. You mentioned Susan Bloom’s book on ungrading, and I mentioned Linda Nilson’s book on specifications grading, and there’s many, many more where that came from. And David, I don’t know if you want to add to that or not.

– No, I think you’ve got all of these things… There are lots of resources for many, many different fields out there. Take a look for what other people have done. And we have resources in our books, but you’ll also be able to find things online, on social media linked through our bibliography. There’s a good chance that whatever you want to do, somebody else has done something similar in a similar setting. Look for that and don’t start from scratch.

– Excellent, so for folks who are curious, there’s a lot of stuff out there and I’m looking forward to seeing the conversation continue to unfold in general, but also from you all as well. So thanks very much for your taking the time with us today.

– Thanks a lot, Jim.

– Thanks. It’s good to be here.