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How Grades Harm Students & What We Can Do About It w/ Joshua Eyler
4 Plays7 months ago
If education had a Hippocratic Oath - First, do no harm - grades and grading would be among the first practices on the chopping block.
And in the conversation about grades and grading in school, there are any number of books and blogs educators can look to for figuring out how to de-grade, un-grade, Hack Assessment, and so on, to mitigate the harm grading causes. After all, as these books and blogs reveal, it’s a system educators have a surprising amount of control over. But what about parents who see it weighing on their own kids and young people who feel the weight of the grading system themselves? How do we communicate the real consequences of grades and grading, especially on youth mental health, and the need for change to those on the outside looking in? And what can parents do to help kids who are navigating outmoded grading systems?
“Supporting a child who is trying to navigate an educational system that privileges grades and achievement begins, simply, with compassion and love,” my guest today writes, “When children believe that their worth as human beings has nothing to do with the grades they receive, and when they know that the love of their family comes without conditions, they are better able to cope with the negative messages that grades can so often send.”
Just one of many powerful lines from my guest, Joshua Eyler, who runs the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and is a clinical assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi. His latest book is absolutely full of insight for people trying to change the system, we’re talking about Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It, currently available from Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Transcript
Introduction to Grading Issues
00:00:00
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the work of learning is something that is meaningful in and of itself.
00:00:07
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That the grading system that has been superimposed on learning is an arbitrary structure meant for purposes that have nothing to do with learning.
00:00:18
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And so the grade that goes into the book is
00:00:21
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grade book is going to be something that we talk about together and that you yourself as a student feel best represents the work that you have done.
Podcast Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:34
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Hello and welcome to episode 156 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
00:00:39
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My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:41
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Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kimberly Baker, Jennifer Mann, and Kevin Gannon.
00:00:49
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Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
00:00:52
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And we're so proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years.
00:00:58
Speaker
If you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more listeners.
00:01:02
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Critique of Grades and Their Impact
00:01:15
Speaker
If education had a Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm, grades and grading would be among the first practices on the chopping block.
00:01:23
Speaker
And in the conversation about grades and grading in school, there are any number of books and blogs educators can look to for figuring out how to degrade, ungrade, hack assessment, and so on, to mitigate the harm grading causes.
00:01:37
Speaker
After all, as these books and blogs reveal, it's a system educators have a surprising amount of control over.
00:01:44
Speaker
But what about parents who see it weighing on their own kids and young people who feel the weight of the grading system themselves?
00:01:50
Speaker
How do we communicate the real consequences of grades and grading, especially on youth mental health, and the need for change to those on the outside looking in?
00:02:00
Speaker
And what can parents do to help kids who are navigating outmoded grading systems?
00:02:05
Speaker
Supporting a child who is trying to navigate an educational system that privileges grades and achievement begins simply with compassion and love.
00:02:13
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My guest today writes, When children believe that their worth as human beings has nothing to do with the grades they receive, and when they know that the love of their family comes without conditions, they are better able to cope with the negative messages that grades can so often send.
00:02:28
Speaker
That's just one of many powerful lines for my guest, Joshua Eiler, who runs the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and is a clinical assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi.
00:02:41
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His latest book is absolutely full of insight for people trying to change the system.
Eiler's Perspective as a Parent and Educator
00:02:46
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We're talking about failing our future, how grades harm students and what we can do about it.
00:02:51
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Currently available from Johns Hopkins University Press.
00:02:55
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Thanks so much, Josh, for joining me today.
00:02:57
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Thanks, Nick.
00:02:57
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Really glad to be here.
00:02:59
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Well, the book is clearly personal for you.
00:03:01
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You fill it full of interactions, anecdotes, and conversations with your school-age daughter, Lucy, that you have around grades, grading, and school generally.
00:03:10
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Was that tension of sending your kids to face the busted grading system and grading practices a driving factor for this book?
00:03:18
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And maybe more broadly, why this book and why now?
00:03:22
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Right.
00:03:23
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This is a this is a fantastic question.
00:03:25
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So I think, you know, as both an educator and a dad, you see the tensions within the educational system all the time as your own kids are experiencing them.
00:03:36
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And so it's
00:03:39
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This book was very personal in that way, in that seeing Lucy navigate that world of grades, learn about grades for the first time, struggle, have her own triumphs at the same time.
00:03:52
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It, it,
00:03:54
Speaker
gave new kinds of contours and textures to something I experienced as a teacher giving grades.
00:04:01
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So yes, in many ways it has deep personal roots.
00:04:05
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And, you know, not to mention the many personal stories of the students I've interacted with over 20 years in education.
00:04:13
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So that too played into this.
00:04:16
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Why now?
00:04:17
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I think...
00:04:19
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A lot kind of converged to lead me to the topic of grades.
00:04:23
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One was that I just, over the years of grading the same way, very traditionally, you know, I think sometimes people assume that I jumped out of graduate school questioning the orthodoxy of grades.
00:04:40
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And that just was not true.
00:04:41
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I graded, I had been graded, as many educators do.
00:04:47
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And
00:04:47
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Over the years, grading hundreds of papers, I just became disenchanted with it.
00:04:51
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What I found was that I was spending so much time determining whether a paper was a B plus or an A minus.
00:04:59
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And then once I was able to do that, all of my, well, not all, but a lot of my comments were really geared toward justifying the grade rather than coaching students to be better writers and
00:05:11
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which was why I got into education in
Innovative Grading Methods
00:05:14
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the first place.
00:05:14
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And so that disconnect between why I wanted to teach and what was actually happening was a major factor here.
00:05:21
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Around the same time, I was writing my first book, How Humans Learn, which is about the science of learning, and I have a chapter on failure.
00:05:29
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in that book, how failure can be an important tool for learning and was running across a lot of research on how grades set up obstacles to our natural learning process of trying something, making a mistake, getting feedback and then trying again.
00:05:46
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So I saw so much that was coming out and kind of put it on the shelf for that time while I finished that project.
00:05:53
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But then I knew I needed to return to it because it was pointed to some truly significant results, both within and outside of the classroom.
00:06:04
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And then I'd say a third thing that was happening all at the same time was
00:06:08
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I'm part of these communities of educators, yourself and Chris included, Nick, who were all experimenting with new ways of grading.
00:06:16
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I saw Star Saxton's book, Hacking Assessment, very early on and just was astounded by the work happening in this community.
00:06:26
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What some would see is a very niche sort of thing happening.
00:06:29
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to be working on, actually lots and lots of people and lots and lots of institutions were already thinking about it.
00:06:35
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So that it all converged and I really wanted to spend time taking a 30,000 foot view on all of the broad harms that grades cause students
00:06:50
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so that we could bring into the conversation people who are normally kind of just talking within their own corners of this conversation.
00:06:59
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So I wanted parents, educators, policymakers, administrators, students themselves to all have kind of a grounding in what is happening with our grades so that we can make change.
00:07:13
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Yeah, and I found those testimonials from parents, students, and teachers particularly affecting because they're not something that you typically see in an education book around grading like this, right?
00:07:26
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They're always focused on nuts and bolts, how to, or the research, which is something that you lean on heavily, but also bring in the perspective of all of those groups.
00:07:35
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So I'm just really curious, how did you approach those conversations?
00:07:40
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What were some of the key findings in those conversations with
00:07:44
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students and parents?
00:07:45
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Yeah.
00:07:46
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Well, you know, as you said, there are so many amazing books about grades out there already.
00:07:52
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And I didn't want to kind of reinvent the wheel.
00:07:57
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I wanted to add to the conversations of those books and provide perhaps some material and frameworks that people who are already well-grounded in those books could use to make the case for why they're doing what they're doing.
00:08:12
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So, um,
00:08:13
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I knew right away that what I needed was to have a significant emphasis on the personal stories of people who are dealing with grades in all avenues.
00:08:28
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So what did I learn?
00:08:30
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I learned that everyone feels trapped by grades.
00:08:34
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They are parents, teachers, and students alike.
00:08:40
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absolutely do not like what grades do to them, to their kids, to the process of learning, to their relationships in the classroom and outside of the classroom.
Disconnection Between Education Purpose and Grading
00:08:51
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And at the same time, they recognize that we are all operating within interlocking systems that put an amazing amount of emphasis on grades and
00:09:02
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as a currency.
00:09:03
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And so all of them, you know, I think the common denominator of all these interviews was that people are trying their best to mitigate the damage of grades while at the same time acknowledging that they have to work through these institutions that require them.
00:09:23
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And that's really, that's,
00:09:27
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That is not to me what we want education to be about, kind of a cost benefit analysis of what is the least amount of harm that we can manage to incur in a particular situation.
00:09:42
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That what we want education to be is a place that centers on learning above all, and the grades are absolutely just standing in the way of that.
00:09:50
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And then outside of the classroom, the effect on teens and young adults
00:09:55
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in terms of their mental health, their relationships with their families, their interactions in the world, I think they all point to just how many people are struggling with grades.
00:10:07
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Yeah, there is just such an enormous amount of tension that you're pointing to here between the purpose of education and the practice of grading.
00:10:15
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And, you know, you spoke to your own journey there, too.
00:10:18
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It's not like people just come out of school, get into, you know, teaching young people and then, you know, get it right the first time around.
00:10:26
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You know, it takes a lot of trial and error and then wrestling with that tension and shifting systems that you mentioned are all
Grading's Impact on Higher Education
00:10:33
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interlocking.
00:10:33
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You know, it's hard for one person to change the whole institution of grades and grading.
00:10:39
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And that's one thing I'm really curious to hear from you, Josh, is that we often focus how grading practices impact K-12 students.
00:10:47
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And you're working with students at the university level.
00:10:51
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Do I understand that correctly?
00:10:52
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Yes.
00:10:53
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Okay, okay.
00:10:54
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So how do you see those consequences, right?
00:10:57
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Kids who have, you know, been in the system for 13 years or more prior to, you know, reaching your class, how do you see the impacts of grades and grading manifesting in your work with young adults at that level, particularly around mental health, even?
00:11:14
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Sure.
00:11:15
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And I'm glad you're asking about this, because one thing I want to do with this book is have it bridge the K-12 higher ed divide, because too often we're speaking apart from each other or across from each other, but never with each other.
00:11:30
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And this is definitely a conversation that has an impact on teaching and the classroom, regardless of what level you're teaching.
00:11:39
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But the consequences and impacts are slightly different, as you're saying.
00:11:44
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So in college, after students have had all of those years conditioned into a system that tells them that the only thing that matters is the grade that you get, by the time they get to us in college, they have...
00:12:01
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changed from the questioning, curious, creative five-year-olds that enter into kindergarten into students who, by and large, are primarily what folks call strategic learners.
00:12:15
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They figure out exactly what they need to do in order to get the grade that gets them to the next class, that gets them the right GPA, the right honors, and the right career.
00:12:27
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And so that is difficult to undo.
00:12:31
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And in fact, many people who are experimenting with grades, the first thing they run across is student resistance.
00:12:37
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What do you mean we're grading differently?
00:12:41
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That doesn't make any sense to me.
00:12:42
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I've had all these years of grading in a different way.
00:12:45
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How is this going to affect my GPA?
00:12:47
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What are you doing?
00:12:48
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And so honestly, a lot of the work then of those who are experimenting is trust building, relationship building, creating a classroom that is safe for those students to experiment in this way.
00:13:04
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And that is not something that is traditionally done in a college classroom, right?
00:13:10
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It's come in, talk about what we're going to talk about, go on to the next topic.
00:13:14
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And so it's been kind of this conversation about grades has had ripple effects to all kinds of our teaching and learning practices, I think, course design, everything.
00:13:27
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But you also brought up a very good point about mental health.
00:13:29
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So one of the areas I was most interested in when I was looking at this research was the increased amount of data that we are getting on the way grades have an effect on students' mental health.
00:13:46
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And there are lots of reasons for that.
00:13:48
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But what changes in college is
00:13:52
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is students by and large are on their own for the first time.
00:13:57
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And so they don't have the same kind of immediate support structure that they did potentially, not saying that all students have this when they were at home, right?
00:14:07
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The other thing, there are two other things that happened in college.
00:14:10
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One is that most students are legal adults
00:14:13
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which means that there are laws that kick in that actually prevent anyone but the student from knowing what their medical records are saying.
00:14:23
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And, you know, obviously privacy is good in that way, but not having their parents, not having that kind of flow of information to their parents can sometimes...
00:14:39
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can sometimes be detrimental for helping them in moments of crisis with their mental health.
00:14:46
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And then the third thing is that there are some mental health disorders that develop in your late teens and early 20s.
00:14:55
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So schizophrenia is one of the most famous of these.
00:14:58
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It doesn't even develop until students are of college age.
Colleges' Response to Student Mental Health
00:15:02
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And so
00:15:02
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All of this converges to ramp up the effects.
00:15:06
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So it ramps up kind of the environment in which mental health challenges can come up when they hadn't before.
00:15:16
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And then you also increase the pressure and the academic stress of grades at the same time.
00:15:21
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You have all these students in college who are thinking, what am I going to do with my life?
00:15:27
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Right.
00:15:27
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Not just what college am I getting into, but what am I going to do with my life?
00:15:31
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And it's just a recipe for many potential problems.
00:15:36
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And so my my thoughts about this are that we have to recognize this as institutions of higher education.
00:15:44
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And at the very least, we have to talk about how academics,
00:15:49
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has an effect on students' mental health.
00:15:52
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Most of the conversation, honestly, at both the K-12 and the higher ed level, is about supports that we can put in place for students, rather than how the actual work of school is contributing to it.
00:16:07
Speaker
And that's because people don't want to think about how they might be potentially complicit in what's happening, right?
00:16:15
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And so we have to have those kinds of conversations.
00:16:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's one thing to say like social emotional learning as an add on right it's a box we're going to check at the beginning of class will have.
00:16:26
Speaker
We've seen some systems in the K 12 level that kids do like a little check in survey or something, you know, click a smiley face scale, how are you feeling today and.
00:16:36
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You know, it's just this perfunctory kind of administrative thing that we hear from kids all the time.
00:16:41
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They say, well, I just lie on that or I don't take it very seriously or I can't tell the truth on it because if I say, you know, hey, I'm feeling a two out of five today, it'll flag something somewhere.
00:16:52
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They'll have to, you know, go through some bureaucratic process.
00:16:55
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And yeah.
00:16:57
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And then at the college level, I mean, you're pretty pointed in the book, too, to say like,
00:17:00
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Colleges are really complicit in a lot of the stresses that they put on kids, but they don't want to own that burden that comes from their own systems.
00:17:11
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Yeah.
00:17:11
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What why is that happening at the college level?
00:17:13
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Why are colleges so eager to get, you know, kids in the door, get them through the admissions process, but then they don't want to have to change what they're doing in response to, you know, the young adults that are entering their campus each fall?
00:17:25
Speaker
Right.
00:17:26
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I think it's really complex.
00:17:28
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So what I think we can say for sure is that most of what happens in colleges and universities with respect to mental health is reactive rather than proactive, that they have to notice that
00:17:44
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or they get data that a crisis is happening, and then they'll react.
00:17:47
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So in the book, I look at a lot of reports filed by committees at universities who were responding, very sadly, to tragic events that had happened on campus.
00:17:59
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But those committees were not put in place until those events happened.
00:18:05
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And the results always are...
00:18:08
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more counselors, you know, more workshops for students to be resilient, more communication with resources to get help.
00:18:17
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And I'm not saying that those are bad things, but they are also not enough.
00:18:23
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And whenever you see cursory mention of academics in the discussion of mental health on college campuses, it is always, again, about
00:18:36
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helping the individual student, finding the students who are having troubles and giving them what they need to work their way through the class.
00:18:44
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It is never about how could it be that what we are doing in the classroom or how might it be that what we're doing in the classroom is contributing in some way to this.
Parental Role in Mitigating Grading Impact
00:18:56
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And, you know, first of all, students are saying, and we have surveys from some of these institutions, that the top stressor is academics and grades, but the institution doesn't respond to that.
00:19:09
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And I think...
00:19:11
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Part of it is that there is a discomfort with really looking closely at what's happening in individuals' classrooms.
00:19:21
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Academic freedom is a major tenet of higher education.
00:19:26
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And so that when it comes to what is a faculty member doing in his, her, their classroom, it often gets really people, people feel very wary about about having any of those kinds of conversations.
00:19:42
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But the thing about academic freedom is it came out of
00:19:47
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the 20th century as principles designed to protect people who may be studying, doing research on, or teaching about controversial things.
00:19:56
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It was never intended to protect people who were doing things in the classroom that could be potentially harmful for students, right?
00:20:05
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But talking about the way we grade
00:20:07
Speaker
raises flags about individual professionalism and academic freedom.
00:20:12
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So it has to be handled very carefully as a community in a kind of a trusting environment.
00:20:19
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And that can be really hard.
00:20:20
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And I think it's why some of the institutions are having challenges in doing that.
00:20:29
Speaker
And I had mentioned in the intro to how your book is really geared in part towards people who are on the outside looking in or on the receiving end of these systems, be they, you know, parents or students themselves.
00:20:41
Speaker
And,
00:20:42
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You have a whole chapter that's dedicated, speaking directly to parents from the perspective of parents.
00:20:49
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I'm a parent.
00:20:50
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I know parents listen to this.
00:20:52
Speaker
And that's not something that I'd seen in books tackling, again, you know, grades and grading from a pedagogical perspective or an assessment lens.
00:21:01
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But what just outline for us, what are some of the ways that parents can, I don't know, help shift mindsets and attitudes?
00:21:08
Speaker
If we can't change the system ourselves, how can we help mitigate these negative impacts of the grading systems that, you know, our kids, be they K-12 or college, are on the receiving end of?
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:20
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So it was really important to me to speak to parents, both as a parent myself, but also as an educator who's interested in solving big problems and knowing that solving big problems takes lots of people from lots of different corners of this conversation in order to do it.
00:21:37
Speaker
And I think parents too often
00:21:40
Speaker
You know, they're not in the weeds of the inside baseball of grading practices.
00:21:46
Speaker
And so I wanted to give them a helpful tool so that they could know what the range of things they might be seeing in their children's classroom might look like and what strategies to use.
00:21:57
Speaker
So what are some things we can do?
00:22:00
Speaker
You know, first of all,
00:22:05
Speaker
Well, honestly, the first and most important thing, and it comes early in that chapter, don't talk about grades so much that, yes, we know they're important.
00:22:16
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Yes, we know they can't change them.
00:22:18
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But try to talk to our, let's try to talk to our kids about literally anything else related to school.
00:22:25
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What did you learn today?
00:22:27
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What was one interesting fact that came out of your geography class?
00:22:31
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Who's your favorite teacher?
00:22:33
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What, you know, those kinds of things to let kids know that school is supposed to be more than just letters or numbers.
00:22:42
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And it's supposed to be about the learning that happens.
00:22:45
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So trying to reframe that.
00:22:47
Speaker
Other really important things, cultivating a child's or teenager's curiosity, really encouraging them in their interests, encouraging them to ask questions about all kinds of things, answering what you can, but looking up together what you don't.
00:23:07
Speaker
My daughter just asked me a question about weather yesterday, and I had no idea, but I said, let's look it up.
00:23:14
Speaker
Great question.
00:23:14
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Let's look it up.
00:23:16
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So what that does is it, I describe it in the book, is provides a kind of suit of armor for the negative messages that grades will send once they're in the classroom.
00:23:27
Speaker
It helps them see that learning for its own sake and being passionate about subjects and being interested in things are what is most important throughout their lives rather than this moment that they are students.
00:23:42
Speaker
Another good suggestion, I think, comes from Michelle Borba's work in a book called Thrivers, and it asks us as parents to identify and focus on our kids, what she calls core assets, which are their strengths, their fundamental strengths as people.
00:23:59
Speaker
So recognizing what those are and then helping students, children to build on them.
00:24:05
Speaker
Right.
00:24:06
Speaker
So first of all,
00:24:08
Speaker
Many kids and teenagers feel that no one really recognizes who they are, what they're good at, and what they're passionate about.
00:24:17
Speaker
And so just having their parents be able to recognize, you know what, you are a fantastic musician.
00:24:23
Speaker
You have a great ear.
00:24:25
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And then helping them, recognizing that and then helping them, giving them opportunities to build on those strengths, rather than forcing some kind of cookie cutter model of expectation that we're placing on our kids, identifying who they are and helping them build on that.
00:24:46
Speaker
Those are some key areas that I think the research points to.
00:24:50
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Yeah, give kids a fighting chance to develop a sense of identity and of purpose before they get into a graded context that sends them conflicting messages about what they're good at, what they like, and, you know, helps mold them in those directions.
Identity and Extracurriculars Beyond Grades
00:25:04
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Yeah.
00:25:05
Speaker
Go ahead.
00:25:06
Speaker
I was just going to say, and sometimes we may not understand those interests, but we may have the fascination with a series of books that we've never read that our kids just want to talk to us about.
00:25:18
Speaker
And that's the kind of thing that I think we actually need to encourage.
00:25:22
Speaker
Tell me about that character that you love.
00:25:24
Speaker
Right.
00:25:24
Speaker
And I get it.
00:25:25
Speaker
We're sometimes tired and lots of other things are going on.
00:25:30
Speaker
So I'm not saying that we're not doing that, but just giving them the opportunity to build those things that we might not even recognize ourselves.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, I love that analogy to a suit of armor, you know, again, to walk into the graded classroom context and have that resilience to know like, hey, I'm me, I have these gifts, I know there are things to
00:25:50
Speaker
that I can work on.
00:25:52
Speaker
I'm open to learning new things.
00:25:53
Speaker
I'm not gonna let these grades define who I am in such a, possibly a negative reinforcing way.
00:26:01
Speaker
I think the other thing I was gonna say is, when we talk to kids, particularly like middle school kids up into high school as well, they find reprieve in those things that we call electives or specials, largely because they're outside the context of grades and they speak directly to those issues of identity.
00:26:20
Speaker
right?
00:26:20
Speaker
Like kids who are in band, like identify with, with that click with those kids heavily with music programs, same with athletics, same with robotics, extracurriculars, art class, right?
00:26:33
Speaker
There's art kids.
00:26:35
Speaker
And very rarely, right.
00:26:36
Speaker
Do you find that for those core academic contexts?
Feedback and Grading Alternatives
00:26:40
Speaker
I think partly because grades are so alienating, you know, I,
00:26:44
Speaker
I always dreaded when I was teaching history, I always dreaded that conversation when I'd be getting my hair cut and the person cutting my hair would ask, well, what do you do?
00:26:53
Speaker
Oh, I'm a history teacher because 100% of the time, right?
00:26:57
Speaker
They're like, oh, I hated history in school, right?
00:27:00
Speaker
And
00:27:01
Speaker
I'm like, oh, you know, I'm not trying to contribute to that.
00:27:03
Speaker
Right.
00:27:03
Speaker
I'm trying to do things a little different.
00:27:05
Speaker
Like, I'm sorry, I don't need to apologize on behalf of the profession, but right.
00:27:09
Speaker
We do things in those graded contexts that send those alienating signals about, you know, identity and all those and what kids possible futures even entail.
00:27:21
Speaker
So.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think anything that parents can do to help set that up and then educators, too, to read those accounts in your book in part, but be open to feedback from parents and students about the real impact of these systems.
00:27:36
Speaker
They're not benign, right?
00:27:37
Speaker
Like you said, the research points to that.
00:27:39
Speaker
These systems of grades and grading are not just benign things.
00:27:43
Speaker
They actually do have real and positive in some cases and harmful in other cases.
00:27:50
Speaker
to kind of get into some, I don't know, like solutionary spaces, right?
00:27:56
Speaker
Like you, you close out the book by really examining the, those alternative assessment models, the things that you found, you know, grading,
00:28:06
Speaker
like pedagogy generally, but assessment in particular is really context dependent.
00:28:11
Speaker
It's really personal.
00:28:12
Speaker
It's really tied to, you know, pedagogical values, personal values, institutional values.
00:28:18
Speaker
But what in your mind are the best or the most promising ungrading or grading alternatives that address those issues that we've been talking about with grades and grading and the impact on kids?
00:28:30
Speaker
Right.
00:28:31
Speaker
Well, so, you know, I think what's great about this new grading reform movement that we've been in, I think, for about a decade or so, is that a lot of these experiments, they're all designed to address and mitigate the kinds of harms that we've been talking about, but they just come at it from different angles.
00:28:52
Speaker
And so,
00:28:54
Speaker
standards-based grading and specifications grading, for example, and I'll just give a basic model is that you have a course with a set number of academic and skill-based standards that need to be achieved over the course of the term.
00:29:10
Speaker
And the grade there is based on how many standards are achieved and
00:29:16
Speaker
and proficiency in, the students achieve proficiency in, rather than what do you get on an individual test.
00:29:24
Speaker
And there's often multiple opportunities to demonstrate that proficiency over the course of the term.
00:29:31
Speaker
What I love about that model overall is that it honors the fact that learning is a deeply complex process that happens at different rates for different students.
00:29:44
Speaker
And so a student may not do well on a test, you know, three weeks into the term, but could eventually develop really powerful understanding of that concept given enough time.
00:29:58
Speaker
And a model like standards-based grading really does that.
00:30:03
Speaker
It also releases the pressure valve that's not just about a high intensity exam.
00:30:09
Speaker
There's more opportunities to be able to meet that standard.
00:30:15
Speaker
So I like that at the college level, I find a lot of STEM educators who are drawn to standards-based grading because it allows for content and skill development.
00:30:27
Speaker
So that's one, but on the other end of the spectrum, you have something like ungrading or collaborative grading.
00:30:32
Speaker
And Nick, I know you know a lot about this.
00:30:33
Speaker
So not giving many grades at all over the course of the semester, giving a ton of feedback to students, having them self-assess quite a bit over the course of the term, and then proposing with a lot of evidence from the work that they've done, what grade they should get that goes in.
00:30:53
Speaker
So that's doing something very different from standards-based grading, right?
00:30:57
Speaker
But it's also still releasing the pressure valve.
00:31:00
Speaker
It's still giving them time to develop as learners.
00:31:05
Speaker
But that model is acknowledging that
00:31:08
Speaker
the work of learning is something that is meaningful in and of itself.
00:31:16
Speaker
That the grading system that has been superimposed on learning is an arbitrary structure meant for purposes that have nothing to do with learning.
00:31:27
Speaker
And so the grade that goes into the book
00:31:30
Speaker
grade book is going to be something that we talk about together and that you yourself as a student feel best represents the work that you have done.
00:31:41
Speaker
I like this model a lot.
00:31:42
Speaker
I've used it for years now because one of the things that I want my students to develop when they go out into the workforce is I want them to be, have a really good barometer for the quality of their work.
00:31:57
Speaker
So that when they get feedback on a project they've worked on, they can say, you know what, I agree with that feedback.
00:32:03
Speaker
I could have done a little bit more work on that.
00:32:06
Speaker
Let me fix it.
00:32:07
Speaker
Or they can get feedback and say, I disagree with that.
00:32:09
Speaker
I think this is really strong.
00:32:11
Speaker
Here's why.
00:32:12
Speaker
I think the self-assessment, the emphasis on self-assessment and self-evaluation in collaborative grading really helps them to develop that sense of their own work in a way that's really hard.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's so tracks.
00:32:28
Speaker
Obviously, with my experience, we talked about it, it made its way into the book.
00:32:32
Speaker
But, you know, when I was trying to move away from a more traditional way of grading, I found that the language that students communicated their learning in was only through the language of grades and points.
00:32:44
Speaker
So even when I tried to, you know, move towards a portfolio, but was still giving more traditional assessments, kids would say things, you know, I'd ask them, hey, how did you do on this assessment, you know, or talk to me about the things that you learned?
00:32:56
Speaker
And they'd say,
00:32:57
Speaker
Well, I know I did well because I got a 90%.
00:32:59
Speaker
And it's this perfectly circular logic, right, where they say, oh, I must have done well because I got a 90% and I got a 90% because I must have done well.
00:33:08
Speaker
Meanwhile, they could not tell you anything that they had learned or anything of the assessment about if they weren't looking at that directly.
00:33:14
Speaker
The number just communicates everything that there is to know.
00:33:18
Speaker
They probably tested, forgot, and moved on.
00:33:21
Speaker
So really, for me, it was that collaborative grading part really was about helping students be able to communicate with a language of learning rather than a language of grades and points, to actually be able to speak to their own work and to their own learning
00:33:36
Speaker
which again, from a learning sciences perspective is getting them another bite at that apple, another opportunity to construct and to recall and to reinforce the learning that they have, along with frankly, a positive adult relationship that isn't evaluative,
00:33:54
Speaker
It's not judgmental.
00:33:55
Speaker
It's always the focus of a conversation.
00:33:58
Speaker
Like, hey, mine is just one opinion on the work.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yours is another totally valid opinion on this.
00:34:04
Speaker
Let's see if we can meet in the middle and figure out what's going on.
00:34:08
Speaker
It totally was to speak to something you had mentioned earlier in the conversation, right?
00:34:12
Speaker
That
00:34:13
Speaker
that sense of the strategic learners at first were a little bit scared in the sense that, is this gonna put the system at risk?
00:34:21
Speaker
Is this risky for me to step into this?
00:34:23
Speaker
And they were the hardest to convince, but eventually most of them would lean into it and really excel in such a collaborative environment.
00:34:33
Speaker
But it also opened up doors for kids who were at the margins of traditional grading systems, right?
00:34:38
Speaker
Because now they get to say like,
00:34:40
Speaker
Why it is that they perceive things in such a way or what it is that they took away and learned.
00:34:45
Speaker
They get a way to communicate, perhaps in a sense, in a way that the traditional assessment and grading format just did not allow them to do because it was on a bubble sheet or it was on an essay or it was on something else.
00:34:57
Speaker
But now when it's a conversation, again, the relationship and learning takes priority over the grades and the grading.
Equity Issues in Traditional Grading
00:35:04
Speaker
Well, and I'm glad you said that, Nick, because like most systems in American education, grades tend to privilege those students who already know the game of school and know how to find their way through that.
00:35:21
Speaker
So we have a whole other thread of research looking at how grades mirror and magnify the inequities in our society.
00:35:31
Speaker
And
00:35:32
Speaker
We have a lot of work to show that those from historically marginalized communities, those who are neurodivergent, who simply learn differently, that they are the most harmed by a traditional grading system.
00:35:52
Speaker
So, yeah, I think it is something you're pointing to in that comment is really how
00:35:59
Speaker
I've learned to succeed in a particular model.
00:36:03
Speaker
So this is threatening to me.
00:36:04
Speaker
But then you also have the students who say, I've never succeeded in a traditional model.
00:36:09
Speaker
And now I have a shot to show who I am as a learner and what I've actually accomplished in this course.
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to keep going on this because I really identified with this, but I underlined it in the book here because it really spoke to me because it's from a parent and a student.
00:36:28
Speaker
And the excerpt is, his mother feels as if his teachers are trying to, quote, punish the neurodiversity out of him by giving him low grades.
00:36:37
Speaker
And I mean, I really felt that from the as a parent of a neurodiverse kid, as someone who, you know, was late to the game in his own diagnosis, but really explained his struggles with school.
00:36:49
Speaker
I felt that in my conversations with with kids who didn't fit into these standardized boxes, that if you make it about a conversation that's about like, hey, what did you learn?
00:36:59
Speaker
right?
00:36:59
Speaker
The kids who might be all over the place in a traditional assessment or can't put into words in that timed essay suddenly, right, can bring to bear a whole fountain of things to a conversation and, right, then go off on all these different tangents and you realize, man, they've got a depth of knowledge there that just isn't being captured by the assessment tools that I was using previously.
00:37:22
Speaker
So it really upends
00:37:24
Speaker
The apple cart, right, really is perhaps this, maybe this is why higher ed and K-12 systems are so averse to these things, because it really turns the system on its head and says kids who weren't successful in a traditional system that suddenly have the opportunity to be, shoot, they can get A's and B's too, right?
00:37:43
Speaker
A whole different type of kid can be successful in these models.
00:37:47
Speaker
And it's incredible to watch.
00:37:49
Speaker
Right.
00:37:49
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:37:50
Speaker
From their very origins, grades were never about learning.
00:37:54
Speaker
They were meant to rank and sort and separate students.
00:37:58
Speaker
That was their whole function very early on in our history.
00:38:02
Speaker
And so the people who get left out of that are exactly the students that you're talking about.
00:38:08
Speaker
So, yes.
Social Media and Educational Reform
00:38:11
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:38:11
Speaker
So, you know, we're having this conversation here, which is awesome.
00:38:18
Speaker
But as you might be aware, right, the social media landscape in the last couple of years has really changed.
00:38:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's true, yeah.
00:38:26
Speaker
The places where, you know, we've had conversations where we met on Twitter, Josh, where those alternative grading, those ungrading communities, those Twitter ed chats that used to be so productive in the past.
00:38:42
Speaker
I don't know where those things are happening.
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:45
Speaker
Now that Twitter is different.
00:38:48
Speaker
So where, I don't know, where are these conversations happening?
00:38:51
Speaker
Where can we kind of mirror what used to be that golden age of EduTwitter?
00:38:56
Speaker
Where are you finding solace and, you know, communities of practice around these things?
00:39:02
Speaker
Right.
00:39:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's been much harder and it's much more fragmented now.
00:39:07
Speaker
And so some of the Twitter alternatives like Blue Sky, you will find some of these conversations, just not in the same kind of, not in the same sort of capacity and number of conversations that you see, saw on Twitter.
00:39:22
Speaker
So with the grading conversation in particular, there's a Discord channel and there's a Slack channel that people are on and are using.
00:39:36
Speaker
And I could send the links to those.
00:39:38
Speaker
They're completely open.
00:39:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:40
Speaker
Can you shout out the names of those, the people who are in Slack?
00:39:44
Speaker
Is that something that can be searchable through Slack and Discord?
00:39:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:46
Speaker
Or do they need to get a direct invite?
00:39:48
Speaker
Yes.
00:39:48
Speaker
No, you don't need an invite.
00:39:50
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:50
Speaker
So the Slack channel is alternative grading.
00:39:53
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:39:54
Speaker
And the Discord, let's see, is hashtag ungrading hub.
00:39:59
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:01
Speaker
And they're completely open to anyone.
00:40:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yes.
00:40:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:26
Speaker
registered for it over the summer.
00:40:27
Speaker
It's all virtual, very low registration fees that really encourages participants.
00:40:33
Speaker
So some there, you know, I would say the deep irony of someone who has observed like the circle, the cycle of social media is that
00:40:43
Speaker
A lot when I was just out of graduate school, everyone was writing on blogs and the discussion was on blogs.
00:40:51
Speaker
And then we transitioned to social media.
00:40:53
Speaker
But now people are back to newsletters and sub stacks.
00:40:56
Speaker
And so that's the other thing.
00:40:58
Speaker
There are some really great newsletters about education.
00:41:03
Speaker
And there are conversations that do emerge on some of the comments to those.
00:41:09
Speaker
Oh, that's all very heartening because, you know, as a new teacher, I was encouraged to, I created my Twitter account at my school's behest because they thought it was a great PD tool, right?
00:41:20
Speaker
Share out your learning, connect with other educators.
00:41:22
Speaker
And my God, I would never now in a million years encourage new educators, yeah, jump into Twitter.
00:41:28
Speaker
It's a
00:41:28
Speaker
It's a perfectly safe space to have these fraud education conversations.
00:41:32
Speaker
No way.
00:41:33
Speaker
So it's good to know.
00:41:35
Speaker
I think, you know, yeah, the Discord and Slack channels are nice because they're a little bit slower paced.
00:41:40
Speaker
They're usually much more safer, safer communities of practice, right?
00:41:45
Speaker
Because you're not just speaking to everyone out in the world who all has, you know, sometimes crazy agendas to bear on the
00:41:51
Speaker
the things that you're saying, but they're all relatively like-minded people.
00:41:56
Speaker
It's just, I think the thing that is lost is a little bit of that community discovery piece, right?
00:42:01
Speaker
Part of what made the golden age of EduTwitter so dynamic was the fact that people from all over in different contexts, states, levels of education, disciplines could all like converge on these cool issues.
00:42:16
Speaker
And I mean, we're still bearing the fruit of that, you know, today, years later now through
00:42:22
Speaker
your book, Josh, and this conversation
Responding to Grading Reform Skepticism
00:42:24
Speaker
elsewhere.
00:42:24
Speaker
I'm glad there are at least some places for folks to land, whether they're new to those conversations or whether they want to be part of that continuing conversation.
00:42:35
Speaker
I'm sure your listeners know that not everyone is as rosy on these strategies as we are, and that it is true of any kind of reform that there will be pushback.
00:42:48
Speaker
And so part of what I am hoping that the book also gives people, both educators and parents, are the tools to be able to respond to the pushback.
00:43:00
Speaker
And so, you know, that's a whole spectrum of things from if you change grades, you'll diminish academic standards to how are they going to get into college and how are they going to get good jobs.
00:43:12
Speaker
So I address all of those things at some point over the course of the book.
00:43:17
Speaker
And I hope that that part of it is helpful as well.
00:43:21
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:22
Speaker
The book, I found it super accessible.
00:43:25
Speaker
It was frankly a breath of fresh air from a lot of the other, you know, how-to guides.
00:43:30
Speaker
I really enjoyed it.
00:43:31
Speaker
The book, of course, Failing Our Future, How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do About It.
00:43:37
Speaker
Thanks so much, Josh, for joining me today.
00:43:39
Speaker
Thanks, Nick.
00:43:39
Speaker
This has been great.
00:43:42
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:43:46
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:43:49
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:43:54
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:44:01
Speaker
Thank you.