Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Arthur Chiaravalli grows beyond grading.
13 Plays1 hour ago
https://growbeyondgrades.org/
On today’s episode, we’re joined by Arthur Chiaravalli, House Director at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, Vermont. Over his career, Arthur has taught ELA, math, technology, and media arts, and also served as a dean of students—experience that gives him a whole-school lens on teaching and learning.
Arthur’s purpose is clear: to change how we think about assessment so it truly serves teaching and learning, rather than systems that reduce students and teachers to what’s easy to measure. At CVU, he focuses on practices that honor curiosity, growth, and authentic evidence of learning.
Outside of school, Arthur is the proud parent of eight children, whose educations have included homeschooling and outdoor programs—fueling his passion for learner-centered education.
Hosted by Starr Sackstein & Crystal Frommert
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
Contact us: Starr@masteryportfolio.com crystal@masteryportfolio.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Frommer.
00:00:14
Speaker
In each episode, we bring you an authentic conversation with educators, both in and out of the classroom that will hopefully encourage you to try something new. This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner centered spaces for their students, schools and districts or education at large.
00:00:34
Speaker
The learner centered spaces podcast is a member of the teach better podcast network. Get ready to be inspired as we dive right into the conversation with today's guest.
Meet Arthur Chiaravalli
00:00:48
Speaker
On today's episode, we are joined by Arthur Chiaravalli, House Director at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, Vermont. Over his career, Arthur has taught ELA, math, technology, and media arts.
00:01:03
Speaker
He also served as a Dean of Students, an experience that gives him a whole school lens on teaching and learning. Arthur's purpose is clear, to change how we think about assessment so it truly serves teaching and learning, rather than systems that reduce students and teachers to what's easy to measure.
00:01:21
Speaker
At CVU, he focuses on practices that honor curiosity, growth, and authentic evidence of learning. Outside of school, Arthur is the proud parent of eight children whose educations have included homeschooling and outdoor programs, fueling his passion for learner-centered education.
00:01:39
Speaker
Please welcome Arthur Kiaravalli. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, Arthur. I learned something. I just, just saying this before, I learned something new about the folks we have on all the time.
Transition in Educational Practices
00:01:54
Speaker
um So can you tell us a little bit about ah defining moment in your career or life journey around education that got you to where you are now?
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so many, so many different moments, you know, certainly um the moment of, you know, moving away from grades in my ELA class. I think that was definitely a big one. I think that was something that actually happened over a number of years.
00:02:27
Speaker
As I invited students into that process of assessment, grading and reporting, I'm going to actually go with the one that brought me here to Vermont. I mean, I spent my entire life in Michigan up to this point, with the exception of being born in Virginia for like less than a year.
00:02:45
Speaker
But it was during the pandemic. I was dean of students at a Catholic high school and I was you know trying to be something of an instructional leader, sort of finding my authentic expression in leadership, not doing a great job of it, I don't think.
00:03:02
Speaker
But it was just like the hands were off the clock. I mean, literally, the president of the school in this particular school, they had a president in addition to a principal, said the hands are off the clock.
00:03:13
Speaker
and And it was actually true that I went from early in the morning till late at night. And then the pandemic hit and all the activities were off and we weren't even coming into the building.
00:03:25
Speaker
I'd taken a pay cut going from a public school teacher to being a private school administrator, if you can believe that. And I kind of needed to increase my income. So i started looking around.
00:03:38
Speaker
I had some administrative assist experience. And I saw CDU High School. And Star, you might actually remember them from back in the day, SBL Chat, CDU Learns. they They had that handle.
00:03:54
Speaker
And it turned out that was Emily Rinkema, who is author of the Standards-Based Classroom. was behind that account but i remember seeing them. I remember their logo and i interviewed for the job and ended up getting the job. And like our whole family came here sight unseen to Vermont.
00:04:14
Speaker
And so that was an enormous shift. And i've been pretty, pretty excited about that. It's been kind of interesting.
Standards-Based Grading Challenges
00:04:23
Speaker
star you probably had some of these struggles as well about just like standardsbased grading is is like sometimes even harder to dislodge than normal grade a And so standards-based grading in Vermont is sort of the law of the land.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I've had to kind of retool a little bit as an administrator in terms of, um you know, bringing some of those ideas that I was able to embrace in my own teaching to this new setting. But overall, it's been really a pretty amazing shift.
00:04:59
Speaker
So I'd like to dig into that a little bit more, Arthur. So you moved to this new space and how does working in a state that embraces standards-based learning, like how does that like meet your expectations, but also differ from what you were doing in your learning space?
00:05:22
Speaker
right yeah I, mean i think that for one that is my background. I mean, i came to grade lists or ungrading, whatever you want to call I came to that through standards-based grading.
00:05:37
Speaker
And so I was very familiar with it. I practiced it in my own teaching. I ended up going, going away from it, but retaining, I think a lot of the, ah the, you know, bedrock concepts, um, that are involved in that. I think that's been kind of a distinction that I've made over the last couple years as ungrading has become a more popular term.
00:05:58
Speaker
Ungrading really has a totally different origin. It's higher ed and i think it really comes out of your sort of elbow and daniel litz you know contract brading type thing i feel like you know my tradition is much more standardsbased graing and so i was familiar with it you know and i'm able to talk with teachers and help them with that but i saw some of the same things that i saw as a teacher that made me want to go away from, you know, that strict measuring of every single artifact and assignment that a student presents.
00:06:36
Speaker
And so that's been a bit of a struggle. I've wrote a piece here that I think annoyed some of my colleagues. I have
00:06:48
Speaker
ended up writing it just because i just ah just needed to get it out and it was called we need to talk about standards-based grading uh and it just was basically a litany of all the frustrations that i have with standards-based learning and grading so um it's it's been a struggle but i mean i think that in a lot of ways that's the dialogue that is schools i mean we we don't just get to like make unilateral decisions Yeah, I certainly struggle with that a lot, not just in schools, but in life. I kind of, you know, like sometimes things feel so, so clear
00:07:30
Speaker
to one or a few of us and there's a system that we're pushing against to really do things differently.
Personalized Learning Plans in Vermont
00:07:39
Speaker
And so for our listeners, Arthur, I'm wondering if you can share a little bit more about what things actually look like in the day to day and how you reconcile the difference between those two paradigms that you're talking about.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yes. first of all i'm no longer a teacher so i don't need to wrestle with this like in my own practice on a day-to-day basis one of the things that i've done is another piece of legislation here in vermont is is that student every student should have a personalized learning plan.
00:08:15
Speaker
I believe it's Act 73. seventy three um And part of that is is that there should be a portfolio, a portfolio where students are able to curate artifacts and evidence of their learning. doesn't necessarily have to be in classrooms. It can be outside of classrooms.
00:08:31
Speaker
um And use those artifacts and evidence to reflect on, and then to make choices about the future and future pathways.
00:08:45
Speaker
And so I kind of spearheaded that for ah while. I'm kind of passing it off to one of my colleagues this coming year. But I think it's an opportunity and it's it's part of the reason why i I went away from some of the terminology of really emphasizing grade lists.
00:09:02
Speaker
That is like taking something away, you know, kind of, mean, it's a negative word. it so it doesn't really say like what it's for it's it's against great but it's not necessarily for anything.
00:09:17
Speaker
And i think that is where I kind of made this journey toward gro beyond grades because it's like okay let's figure out what it is that we want you know what is it that we say learning is and if it is this if it is this really studentcentered thing where they say what's most meaningful and what they're how they're learning and growing.
The Future of Grading Systems
00:09:44
Speaker
And we have a place where that's happening. I feel like one, it's not a non-starter, you know so it's not this controversial thing right out of the gate.
00:09:54
Speaker
It's like, oh, this is really cool. And you know wow, you know we have conferences about it. And it's like the students are proud of what they're doing. And I think that there's this is this optimism that I have that by putting that like really authentic kind of experience of curation assessment, not grading, but reporting and sharing, you know, one's learning story, I feel like that's going to become the thing, you know, as time goes on and you see that popping up in different places where they're having like portrait of a graduate and, you know, poor like
00:10:41
Speaker
initiatives like that have the potential to be kind of like new line and old wine skins if you know that biblical reference where you know you put you can't put new wine into old wine skins because it'll ruin both the wine and the wine skin. They will burst. and I think our job as people who are interested in making forward progress is to just keep on bringing that new wine.
00:11:10
Speaker
What is it that we want to accommodate? And it's just going to become more and more clear how grades and traditional transcripts just can't do it and so that's that's been what i've been working on i think over the last five years
00:11:29
Speaker
Arthur, Vermont sounds like a very interesting place. I've i've actually never been, um but now now I'm intrigued by the education system. i love that each student has their own individual learning plan. That's amazing.
00:11:41
Speaker
ah Next question about Grow Beyond Grades that that you're heading. Let's say that we have a listener who's a teacher in a school that is not in Vermont, it's somewhere else, and it's quite traditional, traditional grades, traditional transcript, as you said.
00:11:58
Speaker
How could that educator use Grow Beyond Grades or some other initiative to start a ah movement at their school?
00:12:11
Speaker
Well, the first thing that I would say in answer to your question is that I think it's actually in some ways easier to go gradeless in a more traditional based system.
00:12:23
Speaker
I don't think that it's hard to pack the grade book as Star talks about in her book ah to get it at least you know at least look somewhat normal while you're doing these cool things you know with students and feedback and self-assessment and peer assessment, all that good stuff.
00:12:48
Speaker
So I would say, actually, i feel more comfortable coaching you know a teacher who is one of those more traditional settings because in some ways it's so idiosyncratic anyway.
00:13:02
Speaker
I don't know, Star, if you experienced this in in the various schools where you work, but I mean, it's like something different is happening in every single class. I think the problem that comes up in standards-based schools is is that people are doing sort of the same thing in every single class and standards-based grading and learning and grading really demands that something is similar or, you know, almost the same is happening in each class.
00:13:31
Speaker
so i think that's the first thing that i would say is that there are ways of communicating, you know, what you plan to do. i think certainly you need to communicate that to, you know, anyone who's supervising you and the mean and the reasons for that.
00:13:48
Speaker
think you need to communicate that to your students. You need to communicate that to to your community, caregivers. But um I think there are very good ways of sharing that load, you know, that workload of assessment, curation, even grading and reporting that has traditionally fallen on the teacher. So, I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can do that. We can get into some of the different ways, but I think it's doable. And in some ways I think it's more doable in a more traditional school.
00:14:26
Speaker
I go back to when I decided to go gradeless and and to not grade an assignment, actually three assignments that had had come in to me very early in the year.
00:14:39
Speaker
um i was at NCTE. e I was presenting a totally different topic. And I was literally going through this thing in my mind where it was, I'm not going to be able to go to this conference. Like I'm going to to go to my own session, but I'm not, I'm just to have to find some time to get these papers back to everyone.
00:15:01
Speaker
And it was really, i think it was really messed up. I think there was this moment of clarity, that not unlike someone who's, you know, like who is addicted, frankly,
00:15:15
Speaker
um where you're you're worried that your colleagues are maybe gonna notice that you haven't shown up for lunch or that you're not at this or that session, or they haven't seen you in the hallways at all.
Innovative Feedback Methods
00:15:27
Speaker
um I was actually planning to spend the majority of my weekend in my hotel room. And that is so sad because there was so much for me to learn and I was going to return so such a better teacher.
00:15:41
Speaker
And so I was looking at these piles of papers that I had allowed to build up, you know, and that I think i I'd done that sort of rookie move where I collected too much all at once, which happens all the time. I think even for veteran veteran teachers, especially when you have a new prep or whatnot.
00:16:00
Speaker
And i just said to myself, shoot, I'm going to have to like miss the majority of this conference. And then, you know, I caught myself and I was like, I am not going to miss the majority of this conference. I'm not going to do this.
00:16:14
Speaker
I'm not going to do this this weekend. And I'm not going to do it in the future because this is stupid. ah No one is going to care. and ah basically what I ended up doing was I did a method that Todd Finley talks about. I think he's currently at East Carolina University, but it's called letter to class.
00:16:36
Speaker
And it's a method of collective feedback where you basically read like a quarter to a fifth of the papers. And by that point, you get a quarter of the way into the pile. You know what all the mistakes are. You know what all the strengths are. You know what all the weaknesses are.
00:16:52
Speaker
And so in Todd Finley's method, You just basically make a T-chart you put in the strengths as you notice them. You put in the weaknesses as you notice them.
00:17:04
Speaker
It actually helps if you can kind of snap a picture of what it is you're looking at in some cases or copy and paste it from some of the documents that you're looking at. But basically once you get a quarter or even ah even a fifth of the way through, you know what the mistakes are.
00:17:21
Speaker
and you set the papers down and you write a letter to class where you share those strengths and weaknesses. and you present that letter to class, to your class.
00:17:34
Speaker
And I did this when I returned from NCTE. And I invited them to see if they had any instances of these strengths and weaknesses and they did like they were so dialed in as I was sharing this letter with them.
00:17:51
Speaker
And then they were pouring over their papers to see if they had instances of either the strengths or the weaknesses or even just the missings, you know, like um things that hadn't been included that needed to be included. and so instead of this like push and pull process of,
00:18:12
Speaker
collecting the papers and then passing them back. And I was standards-based grading so they would have an opportunity to to resubmit and just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It's like, I'm going to invite you into this process and see what you see because we have so lulled you into this state of passivity, this attitude of passivity about your own work and being able to size that up.
00:18:40
Speaker
Now, the the tricky thing about that is is that you can't grade that. You can't take what you got out of that very real assessment process and put a grade in for every so student. And that's really what grading is. Grading is putting in a grade for every student.
00:18:59
Speaker
Assessment doesn't necessarily need to be that way. So I'd cross the Rubicon. I'd gone this route where I did a method of collective assessment.
00:19:12
Speaker
And I think what I did from there on out was figure out how to make this work, how to get away with this, because this is so much better in terms of students actually attending to their own learning and their growth.
00:19:30
Speaker
And um I think the question at that point was just, How can I do this without raising too many red flags? And I think it was like November when my principal finally approached me in the hallways and said, are you planning on putting anything in the grade book?
00:19:49
Speaker
And it was like trying to explain this to him in the hallway. and And I got better at that. I got better at being kind of diplomatic about this whole process because, you know, you have to buy yourself time.
00:20:02
Speaker
But there are ways of doing that. And there are ways of being responsible for this process. And it's just so much better head and shoulders better for kids than is the traditional method.
00:20:19
Speaker
And Arthur, as you were explaining that letter to class and the teacher, the whole time I was thinking about, I could do this in math. I can look at quizzes and make a list of weaknesses and strengths that they have in their computation, their problem solving, ah their notation, all of that. So I think what you're describing is very transferable to so many disciplines. So thank you for sharing that.
00:20:44
Speaker
That's fantastic. I'm go to try it this year. um So my last question for you as we wrap up is, who would you like to shout out as somebody who has contributed to you and your growth as an educator along your journey?
00:20:58
Speaker
Star in her book, Hacking Assessment, was very influential.
Influences and Restorative Practices
00:21:04
Speaker
um I mean, a lot of the people that i've I've had a chance to learn from over the course of the last seven or eight years since, um you know, we've created, first of all, Teachers Growing Gradeless. Now we're Grow Beyond Grades.
00:21:17
Speaker
And, you know, I've had a chance to meet a lot of the people in higher ed and and learn from them as well. And many of them are using labor-based grading, which just like totally went against everything that I had learned in, you know, in my standards-based grading background, but that I have a lot of appreciation for now. So think Asao B. Inoue is the big who taught me about that.
00:21:44
Speaker
I think ah the thing that I'm really interested in right now is restorative practices. And I'm drawing a blank on the names of the people that I've been learning from, But ah certainly the International Institute for Restorative Practices in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, want to shout them out.
00:22:02
Speaker
um I feel like it's there's an analogy there because, um you know, in terms of discipline, we we tend to... You know, we mediate through these really sort of stifling methods when really what we need to get better at is dialogue because we can't just keep people at a distance, um whether it's through assessment, which means actually the Latin comes from the word to sit beside.
00:22:39
Speaker
We can't sit beside one another. and simultaneously be doling out grades that are breaking and judging them. I just, I found that to be impossible as a teacher.
00:22:53
Speaker
I think a similar thing happens as an administrator where just doling out punishments, you know, punitive and exclusionary stuff, it doesn't solve, it doesn't move us, it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't move us forward as a community.
00:23:09
Speaker
And it doesn't allow anyone to learn. you know, in the same way that grades and there's so much research on this, grades really actively work against learning and growth mindset and all the things that we value in education.
00:23:24
Speaker
Similarly, traditional discipline works against people learning and growing as people and being able to reenter community. So I've been really impressed and I'm i'm kind of working through the IRP curriculum right now on my way to becoming a trainer.
00:23:44
Speaker
So that's been really interesting ah to me. And then I think the last one that I would say the folks at Human Restoration Project. And, you know, I brought up that question of like why I went away from great list. I mean, it's still used and I think there's still a need to dismantle.
00:24:03
Speaker
I think this the language of dismantling is still very much, ah very much relevant. But I think at the same time, in the same breath, we need to say what it is we want in education. Not what we don't want in education, not solely that, but also what is it we want?
00:24:24
Speaker
And I think probably better than anyone right now, Human Restoration Project, Chris McNutt, Nick Covington our are you know the founders of that organization.
00:24:37
Speaker
are really doing a great job, I think, articulating the what. You know, we talk about the why being really important, always start with the why, but the what is also really important. um What is that new wine that is gonna burst the old wine skins?
00:24:54
Speaker
ah Because it's just not adequate to what it is we're up to in education.
00:25:00
Speaker
Thank you for that. This has been a great conversation. I think we could go on for hours, but unfortunately we can't. But I think this has been really helpful to so many listeners. So thank you for your time, Arthur. You're so welcome. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Star.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:25:17
Speaker
Thank you for learning with us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes. Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at MasteryPortfolio.com.
00:25:32
Speaker
Please sign up for our monthly newsletter for resources to support your learner-centered pedagogy. You can follow us on LinkedIn on our Mastery Portfolio page. We'd love for you to engage with us.
00:25:45
Speaker
If you'd like to be a guest on the show or know someone who would be an inspiring guest, please email us. Look for our contact information in the show notes. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.