Redefining Student Accountability A Proactive Approach to Teaching Behavior Outside the Gradebook

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program, Tom Shimmer. Tom is an author and speaker with expertise in assessment, grading, leadership, and behavioral support. An educator for more than 20 years, Tom is a former district level leader, school administrator, and teacher. As a district level leader, he was a member of the senior management team responsible for overseeing the efforts to support and build the instructional capacities of teachers and administrators. And Tom is a sought after international speaker who works with schools and districts around the world. And he's the author of now nine books, including his latest, Redefining Student Accountability, a proactive approach to teaching behavior outside the grade book, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:56] SPEAKER_01:

Tom, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Justin, great to be here with you, for sure. Thanks, and I'm excited to talk about this book because this is an issue that we have been hearing a lot about, and I think there is a set of issues that need a fresh look. What in particular did you see happening with grading and accountability and behavior that prompted you to write this book?

[01:17] SPEAKER_00:

This is the tale as old as time, Justin. This is the top, the number one topic, especially at the secondary level that teachers wrestle with when it comes to grading reform. Because on the one side of the ledger, we have, many of us out there have been working toward this idea of grades being more accurate. the more you put into a grade, the less it communicates any of it. So if we want grades to be communicating learning, then we have to extract any other sort of non-learning factors, including behavioral attributes and characteristics. So that's the one side of the ledger is how do we make grades more accurate?

[01:49]

But on the other side of the ledger is a fair question. Kids still need to be held accountable and they need to learn responsibility. So how do we do that without distorting their achievement levels in the grade book? And that's the rub. And so one of the things that I've seen over the years as I do this work on a weekly basis with schools at every level, elementary, middle and high schools, In particular, at the middle and high school level, the question is if we're not using zeros and if we're not penalizing late work and all those things, which I think people misunderstand completely. We're not letting kids off the hook.

[02:18]

We're trying not to distort their achievement levels. But if we're not doing those things, then what do we do instead? And I think that's a fair question for people to ask, and I think they need an answer. So in my first book that I wrote with Solution Tree grading from the inside out, there's a chapter called Redefining Accountability where I talk about this issue. But this issue is intense. It needs more finesse.

[02:38]

It needs more nuance. So I took that chapter and blew it out into seven chapters in one book to say, here's the answer. This is how you teach kids to be more responsible without resorting to distorting their achievement levels. and lowering their grades and things like that and using grades as leverage and coercion. That's really an antiquated way to approach grading if, in fact, we want grades to accurately reflect learning. So that's where the impetus for the book came.

[03:02] SPEAKER_01:

Good deal. Let me ask this for starters. To what extent does society, do educators, does the public want grades to reflect learning as opposed to just kind of the amalgamation of things that they traditionally represent? You know, like the public kind of understands grades but doesn't necessarily see them as purely a reflection of learning. And you're saying there's this pollution of what grades are supposed to represent. Tell us more about that.

[03:28] SPEAKER_00:

I might push back on the premise that the public understands grades. I think they are familiar with grades. And I don't want to dismiss any individual parent or stakeholders' knowledge of the system. But generally speaking, if you were to say, what does a grade communicate? I would be willing to bet that the majority of parents would be the degree to which my students, what my students, what my child has learned. What I suppose the question becomes, society might have a lot of opinions about what we do in school.

[03:54]

And I think that we as educators, like any sort of profession, have to follow what the research tells us is the most favorable course of action. And I'm wondering what the argument would be on the opposite. What is the argument for grades that are inaccurate and distort our understanding of what the child has learned? I just don't see the counter argument to accuracy. Why we would not to, when a student is in a science class, why we would not want to communicate the degree to which the student has met the science outcomes. Partially because in many ways, the public through the elected bodies, the state bodies, et cetera, have mandated a curriculum.

[04:29]

They said, these are the standards that kids are supposed to achieve. and in those standards there typically aren't behavioral elements associated with them so it doesn't say add and subtract fractions by tuesday it says add and subtract fractions and so if that's the learning goal then we would want to make sure that if we're going to report grades which by the way i think we will always have to do now grades can take on a number of different formats i think there's a very narrow caricature that's out there on social media about what grades are. But generally speaking, a grade is just using assessment for the summative purpose and being able to communicate that learning to other people. If we're going to tell parents what their children have learned, I would hope that there's consensus that we would want that information to be accurate. We wouldn't want to say your child actually is a pretty good reader, but we lowered their grades because they're misbehaved in class. That to me would be a little bit of, again, manipulation, leverage, and really not fulfilling the promise of what reporting learning has to be about.

[05:25] SPEAKER_01:

And I think virtually everyone would agree that any kind of vindictive use of grades, you know, you looked at me wrong or I don't like your shirt today, so I'm going to take off points. You know, that kind of use of grading would be inappropriate. One thing that I do hear a lot from parents and other non-educators quite a bit, though, as well as kind of students looking back on their K-12 career and thinking, what did I get grades for? It's a very common statement to say something to the effect of grades reflect doing your work. Talk to us about that popular understanding, because I would say that is a slightly different purpose than assessing mastery of standards or, as you said, learning the material.

[06:06] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's a low bar. I could do all my work and have it all wrong. Should I have an A? The question of doing it is a very important characteristic and attribute, you know, being responsible and following through on your assignments and all of those things are very important character. And this is just in part of what I think people really misunderstand. is that the gradebook is not the only place that you can teach kids life lessons and help them learn to be behaviorally sound and appropriate and all of those different things.

[06:37]

For some reason, I think it's low-hanging fruit. I think it's easy to coerce kids through the gradebook by threatening the lowering of a score if they don't do something. But as soon as you start using your gradebook as a behavioral management tool, you've lost the plot. You've completely lost perspective on what assessment is supposed to be about. So doing your work is a very important quality. And I think that should also be reported on and should be honored.

[07:00]

And we should let kids know that they have work ethic and that they are responsible and that they are setting themselves up for success. But the idea that a grade would somehow be enhanced simply because you completed an assignment, that definitely happens in schools. And it may still happen today, but it is just completely disjointed. from standards that are quite cognitively rigorous. The demand that states are putting on students, and rightly so, in reaching high levels of intellectual performance is different than doing. So the two things are not oppositional, they're just different.

[07:34]

And I think that doing your work and showing work ethic should also be honored, but separate from the degree to which or the quality with which you have met the standards. And so those are two different things. They're apples and oranges. And the idea that we would add points because you did something or deduct points because you didn't do something, regardless of its quality, in the achievement grade would be problematic for me.

[07:57] SPEAKER_01:

So Tom, if I understand what you're saying correctly, you're advocating for separating the two a bit more than is conventional or traditional in grading.

[08:07] SPEAKER_00:

Okay. How much I know and when I handed it to you are two completely different issues. I don't know less because I hand you something two days after you wanted it. You know, and Justin, this goes to a question that we have to ask ourselves fundamentally, and I know this is going to sound a little harsh, and I mean to be so aggressive, but in some respects I do, because I think we kind of need to shock the system. I often ask people in workshops, under what conditions is it okay to be dishonest about a student's level of achievement? And every educator will tell me, never.

[08:38]

And then I give them this scenario. A student submits an assignment to you and you judge it to be of an acceptable quality. And let's just use numbers for effect. A student hands you an assignment and you deem it to be a 70. It is of an acceptable passing quality. You know that.

[08:54]

You've looked at it. You've examined it. You know it's of a passing quality. But here's the catch. They handed it to you three days after you wanted it. So you're going to reduce that score by 30%.

[09:05]

You know the assignment is acceptable. You're going to enter a score that says it's not. It was a 70, you're going to enter a 40. So I asked the question again, under what conditions is it okay to be dishonest about the degree to which a student has met the learning goals? That's something we have to confront. This idea that the way we've always graded came first, therefore it gets a free pass, I think is something that we all have to question and challenge.

[09:32]

This idea that we're just okay with distorting their achievement level. And it's really interesting because it seems to only be certain aspects of responsibility that we find most annoying. I'll often ask groups this question, how much do you reduce a student's score when they don't bring their materials to class and are unprepared to learn? Because that's also an example of being irresponsible. And the typical answer is, we don't. So not only do we cherry pick the behaviors that we reduce scores for, we actually cherry pick inside the behaviors.

[10:00]

And typically it's the ones that we find most intrusive or the ones where we say, I told you Tuesday, how dare you hand it to me Thursday? You defied me, therefore I'm docking you. Now we've managed to couch it. After 33 years, I've seen the evolution of this. But when I started my career, I was the zero guy, the penalty guy. Like I was that teacher and I was intense and harsh about it.

[10:22]

But you know what I didn't do? I didn't try to couch it. I just told kids, you handed in late, you deserve a penalty. Then toward the late 90s and the early 2000s, we started to shift the language of you deserve a penalty to I'm holding you accountable. And then we found a very clever way to couch this, which is I'm teaching you about the real world. And we've gone through this evolution of messaging just as ways to sort of soften the edge of what it is we're actually doing and the potential.

[10:50]

I don't want to be alarmist here, but the potential harm that we may be causing to students in terms of how we use grades as a weapon.

[10:56] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. And I think I'm following your argument and I'm sympathetic to it. At this point, I think I want to bring up though Rick Wormley's op-ed in the Washington Post where he was talking about the policies that give students a minimum grade of a 50. And I appreciate your point about accuracy and that if we give a student a zero or take off a different number of points because they're late turning in an assignment, that has a distorting effect. But I can't help think that giving students say a 50 on an assignment that they haven't done is no more accurate in terms of representing their learning. And I'm wondering, what do we substitute for that assignment?

[11:34]

If I think a student knows some of the stuff that I've taught them, but they haven't turned in their assignment, do I rely on speculation, test scores? Do I drop the grade and just average in the others? There are various approaches we could use. But it seems that a lot of districts are going with the route of 50 as the lowest allowable grade. And teachers say when you give teachers or when you give students 50 points, no matter what, they often just realize they don't have to do their work to pass. And we don't like that.

[12:01]

So help us understand some of those issues.

[12:03] SPEAKER_00:

This is I mean, this is a complex answer for sure. So forgive me if I get a little long winded here. But there's a couple of things that we have to understand. First of all, the percentage system is wildly inaccurate and quite unreliable. I'll give you two examples. OK, in the research, just because we're what we're talking about with minimum 50 grading is unbelievable.

[12:19]

a workaround when you have two systems in conflict. Grading on quality, levels, rubrics, and percentages are incongruent. When districts say to people like myself and Rick and others, like, how do we do standards-based grading or standards-based learning when our gradebook only accepts percentages? This is a workaround to make sure the mathematics of the gradebook stay current and proper. When you use a zero, you are...

[12:46]

It's mathematically invalid. Every math teacher knows this. There are three measures of central tendency, mean, median, and mode. And the most accurate measure of central tendency tends to be the mean if you have an adequate sample, but it has one vulnerability. And that vulnerability is extreme scores. I'll give you an example in the sports world.

[13:02]

If LeBron James walked into a room with three teachers, the mean average salary per person in that room would be $21 million a year. Do you see how that number does not in any way reflect the situation? That's what a zero does in a zero to 100 scale. The notion of zero to 100 is already absurd because no one on this planet can distinguish between 101 levels of performance. So this idea that there are 60 levels of pass. Now, if we start calculating grades to decimal places, let's say we go two decimal places.

[13:34]

The assertion there is that there are 10,000 distinct levels of performance, 4,000 of which are passing. This is absurd. Now, here's the two examples I want to get to. Let me give you the best case scenario with a percentage grade. Two students earn a 15 out of 20 on an assignment. They both scored 15 out of 20 on a math test.

[13:52]

Let's just say it's math. 15 out of 20, 75%. Now, based on that information, I wouldn't blame anybody for thinking, oh, both 75, they both must be the same. Okay, let me add more information. One student answered 15 questions and left five blank, had no idea how to answer those five questions, but the other student answered all 20 questions, knew what to do in all 20 questions, but made five simple mistakes where two times three became five, or four times seven became 11. Those two students are not in the same place as learners.

[14:24]

yet the score says they are. So right away, when you're counting right from wrong, you are not accounting for the type of error that the student made. That's the difference between counting and quality. Now, let me take you to the other side, this sacred percentage system. When teachers are not counting right and wrong, but on the other side of the ledger, when they're making an indirect scoring inference, like you do with writing. So you'd read writing, you would judge its quality, use a rubric or like AP extended essays are scored on five levels, things like that, right?

[14:54]

When teachers have been asked, and this is over 100 years, and that's not hyperbole. Studies go back to the early part of the 20th century. When teachers are given, large groups of teachers are given the same writing sample or math test, asked to read it, judge its quality, and then assign a 0 to 100 scale. The margin of error as of 2019 lands at about plus or minus 5 to 6 points. That's a 10 to 12 point window. So if we hand three English teachers the same essay, we could expect a range of one teacher saying, I think this is a 70.

[15:26]

I think this is a 76 from another teacher. And the third teacher say, I think it's an 82. That's as close as the research has come. So what emerged from that research, Justin, was. What's the answer? And the answer is have fewer, more clearly discernible levels and base grades on clearly articulated success criteria.

[15:45]

That's why we build rubrics. This stuff didn't just fall out of the sky. This research has been out there. Now, if listeners right now who are listening aren't familiar with that research, that's okay. Like we can't know the research about everything. That's totally fine.

[15:58]

When I work with groups, I say, look, if you're not familiar with that research, no problem. I said, we can't know the research about everything. This job is super busy, but just don't pretend like this stuff fell out of the sky in 2023 because it didn't. And so we already are starting with an imperfect system. So what minimum 50 grading does is it keeps the mathematics of the grade book in check. So we have to get our heads out of the percentage system.

[16:24]

Think of it this way. If we had five levels, four, three, two, one, zero, but our grade book only accepted percentage-based grades, we would have to find an equivalent for those five levels. So the workaround for the insufficient evidence is the 50. It's not giving a kid a 50 for doing nothing. It's having a reasonable replacement, because 50 is an F, is it not, in most jurisdictions? 50 is an F, right?

[16:53]

So sometimes I'll ask people like, how when is it F enough? How F does your F need to be? At what point are you wanting to just stick it to the kid or do you want to keep your grade book accurately in check? Because 50, it's a good solid F. It's 10 deep into an F. How F does it have to be?

[17:11]

So for me, the only worker right now, I know there's a lot of fear mongering about minimum 50 grading. There has been some research on that and it does not, it's not a ton, I don't want to pretend like there's been a lot of research on it. But the research that has been done has shown that a lot of those fears that people have about kids just throwing up their hands and doing this doesn't manifest, it doesn't play out that way. So I know that's that can be a fear. And it's a very real concern. I do understand that.

[17:38]

But The idea that you annihilate a grade with a couple of zeros, because a couple of zeros can drop a kid's score by a lot of points and in a disproportionate way. Five zeros can eliminate a 70. If we had 25 assignments that were judged to be a 70 and the student had five zeros, they'd have a 58.3. So five assignments would undercut 25 passing assignments. That to me seems disproportionate.

[18:04]

So the minimum 50 grading is an imperfect solution to what is an already imperfect system. The best case scenario would be to not have the percentage-based grades and use a zero through four, because you can use a zero. When people say to me, Tom, is there ever a time I can use a zero for work not handed in? Now it's not my favorite choice, but I have to be honest with people. The answer is yes, but you have to shrink your scale or you have to raise your floor in order to keep the mathematics of the gradebook. Because no math teacher in the history of grading should have ever used a zero, especially when the student didn't hand in their mean, median, and mode work.

[18:38]

That is some kind of irony because it is mathematically invalid. So the minimum 50 grading, I know it has a lot of, tension around it and a lot of worries about it. And I will say right up front, I don't love it either because it's imperfect. But what is the other answer then? What is the answer? Is it just to distort their achievement levels disproportionately because we're wanting to teach them a lesson?

[19:01]

That to me doesn't seem the right way to go.

[19:04] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that's where your book comes in, offering ways to think about behavior other than taking away points. And I will say, as we move on from this section of the conversation, I remain unconvinced about the minimum 50. I think there really are some unintended consequences around students not doing their work at all. But it's not as if we have no other tools at our disposal to address getting students to do their work. And I think we have to not downplay the extent to which getting students to do their work matters both to society, you know, in the quote unquote real world and for students actually learning what we want to in the first place. Because, you know, that to me is where the educational rationale circles back in that ultimately, if students don't turn in their assignment, the main consequence is not that their grade goes down.

[19:51]

The main consequence is that they probably didn't learn what we intended them to learn. So we do need ways to get them to do their work and to participate in their education because we can't just, you know, we are not just playing a video that hopefully students overhear and get something out of it. We need students to be engaged in their education and participate and do their work. How do we think about that beyond just taking away points? Take us into some of what you teach in the book.

[20:15] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we have to. I mean, I understand that you might be unconvinced, Justin, but I'm not here to convince you. The traditional grading paradigm is indefensible. It's mathematically invalid. It doesn't follow sound assessment practices. So I'm not here to talk anybody into anything.

[20:29]

Just because 0 to 100 came first doesn't mean it gets a free pass. And I think that's the part that we have to understand is that The traditional grading mindset can just fold up their arms and go, I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced of your position. I think that's indefensible. I think it distorts their achievement levels and all those things. So, you know, I mean, I'm not trying to convince it.

[20:51]

You either want your grades to accurately reflect learning or you don't. And that's the bottom line. And what I struggle to understand is why is it about responsibility? Why can we, for example, and I'm going to get into your question here about teaching because we teach kids a lot of things in schools. We teach kids how to be respectful. And every school in this world expects their students to be respectful.

[21:14]

And when students are disrespectful, those kids are held accountable for that disrespectful behavior. And often, very effectively, schools redirect those students to more effective ways of being respectful and being more respectful citizens in their school community and elsewhere. And yet we never touch our grade books when we do that. So why, when the behavioral misstep is disrespect, can we hold kids accountable for disrespectful behavior and never touch their grades? But as soon as it becomes irresponsibility, we pretend to not know how to do this without our grade book. Oh, how would I do that, Justin?

[21:49]

I have no idea how to do that. You disprove that theory every day because there are so many behavioral missteps that we don't handle inside the gradebook. So one would have to ask the question, why is that? What is it about this late work or irresponsibility that for some reason we feel compelled to to stick it to them in the grade book. What is that? Where's that coming from?

[22:10]

Why don't we dock them for being disrespectful? Because we know they're different and we don't do that. The key here, Justin, is to be proactive. I'm with everyone who says, hey, these kids need to learn responsibility. I'm with you. I agree.

[22:23]

So let's teach them. It's a funny thing in our business where we claim to be teaching kids about something without doing any teaching. Like the way we've approached responsibility, I'm going to put it into an academic framework and it's going to sound absurd. Could you imagine a teacher saying this? I'm going to teach you math by penalizing your inability to do math. Does that sound rational?

[22:47]

No. So let me put it into the behavioral realm. I'm going to teach you responsibility by penalizing your irresponsibility. And we all just sit around going, yeah, that's just how we've always done it, Tom. What are we talking about here? Don't use the word teach if you're not actually teaching.

[23:02]

So what the book gets into is establish what you mean when you say responsibility, create criteria around that. Chapter six gets into how would we include this on a report card? How would we report on these behavioral attributes? Because here's what I tell parents all the time, and I tell students this too. Your academic achievement grade will get you into college. But it's your behavioral characteristics and attributes.

[23:23]

That's why you will graduate from college. If you're not disciplined, if you're not responsible, if you don't self-advocate, if you're not self-directed, if you're not respectful, all those things, you might not make it through four years of college. So I'm with everybody that says kids need to learn these things. The part that I sort of pump the brakes on is when people say we got to teach them about the real world. Kids live in the real world. Let's not pretend these kids don't live in the real world because everything young people experience is real.

[23:49]

It's not the world of an adult, but they're not adults. So we have to be careful that we're not projecting adult-like behavior because adults choose their career. And for the most part in school, you're forced against your will to take the subjects you're enrolled in. Could you imagine if I forced you to become a heavy duty mechanic against your will and then put it on you to get motivated? And if you didn't, I would say, well, you're apathetic about heavy-duty mechanics. You don't want to learn how to fix bulldozers.

[24:13]

There must be something wrong with you. That's not how we should be thinking about it. So for me, it's about teach them. Establish what it means to be answerable for your actions. That's what being responsible or accountable is. Then...

[24:26]

Go about the business of helping kids understand what the characteristics are, what that would look like, what is the criteria. And then as a teacher or even the students for themselves can self-assess where they are. And of course, every self-assessment claim has to have substance behind it. Isn't just like, I'm awesome. And what makes you say that? And there's no evidence.

[24:43]

You got to have evidence for that. But a way to report on it, to give it some profile. I don't want to pretend that parents and students will treat the behavioral attributes as equal to the academic attributes. grade, I don't know that they will or they won't, but at least if it has enough profile, because what adults give their attention to is what kids will think is important. And if we don't give enough attention to it, then the kids will dismiss it. I agree with everybody that kids need to be taught responsibility, but we can't be, we can't be cavalier with that word teach.

[25:13]

If we're going to claim teach, then we need to actually teach them proactively, like we would teach them math. not reactively because teaching you math by punishing your inability to do math is absurd. But when it's responsibility, we just sort of let, we just never question it. So the book really gets into questioning that and saying, yes, this is how we redefine accountability. And I'll get into that in a moment, but that's ultimately the process is how we teach them those characteristics and all of that.

[25:42] SPEAKER_01:

I feel like you have made in everything you've said about grading and how grades should reflect learning. I feel like you've made an excellent case for standardized testing. And I wonder what you would say to the argument that we don't need grading at all as you're describing it. We only need standardized testing because I don't think anybody would argue that the grades that are given in the typical classroom are are better at measuring learning in an objective and fair and carefully designed way than some of our higher quality standardized tests. Not to say that all standardized tests have always been good, and certainly they have not, but certainly we can do better at actually measuring what students know if we're careful about it and if we don't have those individual biases and individual Convince me that you haven't just made a case for completely throwing out grades and replacing them only with standardized test scores.

[26:34]

Because I hear a lot of people say, what about the student who doesn't do any of their work, but they know everything. They're sitting back, absorbing it. They're learning. They just learn a different way. They don't feel like doing their work, but they learn it all. And I have to say, a standardized test would capture that really well.

[26:48]

And speculation about what the student has learned apart from that doesn't really get us anywhere. So what do you think about standardized testing as a substitute for, you know, did you just make a case for that or no?

[26:57] SPEAKER_00:

Again, like, no, but maybe sort of. Like everything, you fasten your seatbelts because see, the challenge, Justin, is that we live in this world of instant gratification and social media and TikTok and everything in assessment is context dependent and nuanced. And there are very few absolutes. So I often say to people, when you talk about always and never with assessment, you're probably wrong. Because you just have to know that there's nuance to it. Now, assessment is always about adequate sampling.

[27:24]

Do I have enough evidence to make it? Dylan William talks a lot about this. He uses this idea that assessment is about gathering information so you can make an inference about the learner. So what do I learn about the learner? Is a standardized test enough evidence? A standardized test doesn't show a lab.

[27:41]

A standardized test doesn't show anything that's constructed. A standardized test doesn't show... There's nothing wrong with...

[27:48]

The issue with standardized tests is not that they're standardized and not they're external. Those are not valid critiques of standardized testing. But the critiques of standardized testing is the misuse of the data, the way we beat teachers up, the way districts are beaten up, all of those different things. So a really good standardized test can be better than a poorly designed classroom assessment. There's no question about that. But a standardized test is one piece of evidence.

[28:10]

And I think if we left standardized testing for large scale decision making, large scale assessment for large scale decision making. It's not something that teachers are going to use on a daily basis for instruction. But it is another piece of the puzzle. But it is a particular format which would not account for things like lab work, experimentation, inquiry-based learning, things like that. So the idea that you would never update or report. And this is the interesting part.

[28:37]

We talk about grading, but I want to rephrase it. Using assessment evidence for the summative purpose is grading. That just means verifying at certain checkpoints along the way and reporting out. Now, what I can get behind is a lot of educators grade too much. And I'd be put me at the top of the list in the early 1990s of someone who graded everything. I graded everything.

[28:56]

We should only grade when we need to. We assess because we have to. You can't teach without assessment because you have to know at the end of every lesson, did my students learn what I taught them today? But that evidence should be very granular. That evidence, I often say the majority of assessment evidence should steer clear of your grade book and should not be quantified. It's about advancing learning.

[29:16]

You assess because you have to. You grade when you need to. And if we would grade more holistically, we could at certain checkpoints sort of look back and say, okay, based on the body of evidence I've seen so far this quarter, What is the degree to which the student understands? And I would phrase it this way, going from four to zero. Does the student have a overall, a deep exemplary understanding of the standards? Do they have a good competent understanding of the standards that would be proficient or three?

[29:41]

Are they partway there? Do they have some strengths and aspects that need strengthening? Are they a novice learner or are they still insufficient evidence? Only one of five decisions right there. And that most teachers can do. because it's how AP extended essays are scored.

[29:55]

Usually they read them in about a minute or two and they give it a score on a five level scale. That's it. So I would agree that we grade too much, but I do think that we can't, there's no way we could go through an entire year and not communicate with families or other stakeholders, athletic associations about eligibility, all those things, because there are other users of grades, especially at the secondary level, besides the student and the teacher. I think sometimes this is not the majority at all, but I do come across teachers sometimes who kind of think they grade in a vacuum. I don't need grades. Yeah, you don't need grades to teach and kids don't need grades to learn.

[30:30]

But there are points where we have to report back to families because this is in a public system, you are accountable to the public. And in a private system, you are accountable to the tuition paying parents. So in the alumni and all of those different things. So there's always a level of accountability and we should give checkpoints along the way. But that doesn't mean our grade books have to be filled with 150 entries. Am I okay with standardized testing?

[30:51]

Yeah, I wouldn't say. I think a lot of how standardized tests are implemented is the problem, the association with funding and the way that we beat up teachers and things like that. But a standardized test can be a part of a larger assessment system that really does paint a picture of where a learner is.

[31:08] SPEAKER_01:

Let's get into some of the specific recommendations you have in this book. I know we've given a long preamble and had a good discussion about the purpose of grading. But this book sits at currently the front end of a long line of work you've done around grading and specifically tackles the accountability piece. and asks the question of how can we address behavior outside of grades? So take us into that specifically. And let's start with a couple of things that community members, parents, adults in general, employers would care about.

[31:37]

Things like, I want our graduates to be students who are capable of doing good work, whether that work is a US history paper or a report on the job or diligence on the job. There are lots of behaviors that don't show up you know, in the grade book proper, but that we care about. Help us think about how to assess and report on those from the book.

[32:01] SPEAKER_00:

Often I will ask schools to think about this way. In fact, this is what we did in one of the faculties I worked on. If you had a magic wand and you could grant the students complete competence with two behavioral characteristics, what would they be? And so what we did as a faculty is we brainstormed what those were. And then we started to consolidate them because we want to land on about three to five. That doesn't mean we're only going to address three to five, but those are the ones we're going to go deep on.

[32:25]

Those are the ones that really matter. Now, every school in the world that I'm familiar with Talks about responsibility and respect or some sort of those are almost ubiquitous everywhere. Schools will talk about things like being self-directed, being collaborative or, you know, being creative and innovative or they'll think about habits. You know, there's profile of a learner. There's all sorts of things that, you know, resiliency, those types of things we want to do. And as soon as we identify those three to five, then what we do is we say, OK, what does that look like?

[32:53]

If we're going to teach kids to be more self-directed, what would they notice in themselves or what would we notice in them? And how would that play out? And so you identify that criteria and then everybody understands that's the criteria upon which the student is being judged. Now, when it comes to the reporting and there has to be some correction there. So what do we do when a student acts in an inappropriate way or breaks a rule or whatever? That's where we need to come in and help teach them to be that which they are not currently.

[33:21]

And the reporting end of it Is, you know, ideally I think it's just preferable. This is not a non-negotiable, but I think it's preferable that we have kind of the same number of levels. as you do for your academic achievement. So if we're gonna have four levels of achievement, let's have four levels of performance with your behavioral attributes. Now, when it comes to responsibility, there aren't four levels of quality. I can't meet a deadline on four levels of quality, but what I can do is I can rate the student on their frequency.

[33:49]

So I would ask the question, what is the consistency with which a student meets deadlines? So a four to one would be consistently, usually, sometimes, rarely. And so we would rate the student on a frequency scale, or ideally, they rate themselves. And then we as the teacher, of course, come in and verify their rating. But we put it in their hands and have them reflect on where they are with those attributes. So You can include that on a report card.

[34:13]

That's what I get into in chapter six. Chapter seven of the book is all about how we turn this over to the students from an SEL perspective. Like, how do we get them to be more self regulatory and manage themselves? In chapter six, I talk about, you know, what could be on a report card? What would it look like at an elementary school level, maybe a middle school level, high school level? so that it has a profile.

[34:30]

Because again, what we give our attention to is what kids are going to think is important. So if we don't give it any profile and it only comes up when we're annoyed because a kid missed a deadline, that's not intentional. That's not purposeful. That's not proactive. And I think that if all kids need to learn about responsibility, because here's the question we have to ask ourselves every day, and it's a tough one. Are your students actually responsible or are they just compliant?

[34:55]

Are they just doing what they're told? Are they actually responsible? Because if you weren't there harping on them, would they actually follow through? Do they behave that way when they're not being supervised? That's the real question, right? What does an athlete do when the coach isn't watching?

[35:10]

What do the students do when the teachers aren't watching? So we can have very compliant students and think they're responsible, but But ultimately, they may not be. So we have to make sure the criteria is there and the students know how to judge themselves and all of that stuff, right? Because a student can come in after lunch with all of their homework completed and you might think to yourself, wow, what a responsible kid, so much work ethic. And guess what? They just copied the answers at lunch in the cafeteria from their friend.

[35:35]

They're not responsible. They're resourceful. So we have to tease some of that out. And if we have criteria, then the kids will know how to judge themselves and we'll know how to judge their levels of responsibility.

[35:45] SPEAKER_01:

This also seems like a great protection against helicopter parenting, right? Because if we are judging students by how conscientiously they get all of their assignments in, but the real reason they're getting their assignments in is because Their parents are making them. We're not really measuring an attribute of the student. And there seems to be no end of that. Like I was reading an article on helicopter parenting in college and even graduate school where parents are setting up play dates for their college students and emailing grad school professors on behalf of their adult children. And certainly that's not good, right?

[36:20]

We want to get to the point where we can actually say, yes, this student is actually responsible. Not only is their work turned in, that student is responsible in ways that we can kind of keep track of separately from whether their work was turned in. So talk about some of those things that we could... kind of report on separately, because I really appreciate your point about, you know, students paying attention to and caring about what we report on.

[36:44]

What are some of those things that like currently we might just smash into a grade or attendance report that really could be broken out more explicitly because we care about them and because we want students to notice that we care about those attributes by reporting on them?

[36:56] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, that's how you're going to send that signal is by reporting on them and by making them, giving them the profile and giving them some attention. And again, it doesn't always have to be a formal lesson plan, but it has to be something where the students realize that this is a part of what I'm learning. We can't, on the one hand, say, You know, Tom, we teach more than just the standards. We teach these kids life skills. And I say, okay, let's teach them life skills. Let's develop some criteria and some lessons.

[37:20]

Oh, Tom, we don't have time. We have too many standards to cover. Pick one. You can't have it both ways, right? You can't tell me on the one hand that you're teaching them life lessons, but then you don't want to teach them life lessons. So that's an interesting...

[37:30]

that we have to overcome. And I'm not naive to the pressures that teachers feel about covering standards. But if we're going to claim to be teaching them life skills, then we need to carve out some time for that and make sure that's an important skill too. That is a part of our day. It doesn't have to take... For example, I'll give you an example.

[37:47]

You might have just finished... giving all the directions for a big project the students are going to do in their history class. What would it mean to just stop for a minute, look at maybe one of your strong performing students and say to that student, okay, Maria, now let me ask you this question. When you have a big project like this, how do you plan your three weeks?

[38:07]

What do you do? You've got a project due in three weeks. How do you do this? And Maria might say something like, I look at my calendar and I look at, you know, I play volleyball and I know that it looks like I have three weeks to do this, but I know I have a big tournament next weekend and my grandmother's coming to visit. So what I'm starting to realize is that in the three weeks, I really only have eight squares or days that I could actually sink into this project. And four of them are this week.

[38:32]

So I better get started. You know what Tom does? Sunday night. Oh, I got a project due tomorrow. Right. So Tom needs to know what Maria does.

[38:41]

And I could say to my class after Maria does that and say, OK, everybody, look at your calendars. OK, let's how many actual be realistic. You're not going to work on your project when you have a volleyball tournament. So don't pretend that you are. How many actual days do you have? So right there and then I am teaching kids how to.

[38:57]

plan to meet a deadline how to be organized in advance of a deadline that's the stuff that we can do it doesn't even have to be that formal it just needs and a lot of teachers do this naturally right it's out there but i'm not pretending this is something that people don't do but i think we need to make it more purposeful so that school-wide that it doesn't depend on who my teacher is but it's how we help our kids become that which they are not currently and If they're irresponsible, if they're disrespectful, if they're not self-directed, if they're missing some of those habits, the resiliency, all of that, we want to help them learn what that means or learn to recognize what that is and how to overcome that. So giving it the attention, giving it some profile in the classroom will lead to the ability to report on that ultimately. And giving it that attention is how kids are going to take it seriously.

[39:44] SPEAKER_01:

And we should say in the book, and people can look at the previews of some of these on Amazon or other places where books are sold, you have quite a few examples and kind of charts showing, illustrating how we could report on some of those other habits of learning. In the podcast format, how would you describe those for our listeners?

[40:02] SPEAKER_00:

It's about real estate. What you give real estate to on a report card, it's like, think about the old days of newspapers, and we do everything online now, but in the old days of newspapers, if it was above the fold, of the newspaper, it was an important headline. It was a front page headline, it was important, but if it was above the fold, it was. So the key would be, how do we make sure that we're reporting on these attributes above the fold or side by side? So the optics of the report card will matter. So when you're reconstructing your reporting system to report out on the habits as well as achievement, Think about the optics of it.

[40:41]

What message does the format send? Does it send the signal that these are also important? So if I'm an elementary school teacher and I teach all the subjects, I might put the attributes separately at the very top and say, hey, we want them to learn the habits of learning. And here's their academic achievement. What a strong signal that is. If you're talking about middle school or high school where it's going to probably be class by class, then are they side by side?

[41:04]

How do you organize it? So I know you're limited by what some of the companies can do with your report cards and things like that. But just think about the optics of how we make it above the fold and how do we give it the profiles so people start to go, oh, wow, this must be important because it's up front. Yes.

[41:19] SPEAKER_01:

And talk to us just briefly, if you could, about how schools can kind of determine what goes into those ratings. Because certainly it's important that the bottom line be the bottom line. We actually have a way of reporting on those things. But what are some of the pieces, just briefly, to get there as far as determining rubrics or kind of what we're looking for and how staff and students are involved in those?

[41:42] SPEAKER_00:

Again, I mentioned earlier the frequency scale. I would say that you'd want to identify, you know, maybe three to five, you know, strong performance indicators. What would I notice in a student if they were being responsible? What are some of the habits I would see? There is going to be some teacher judgment involved, but there always is. There's nothing purely objective in assessment.

[42:00]

That's a myth. Even in multiple choice questions, you wrote the question stem, you chose the distractors. There's always some level of subjectivity. It's just not, it's not a four letter word. It's just how we work. Teachers use their professional judgment because they're professionals.

[42:13]

This isn't a J-O-B. You know, J-O-B, you follow a manual. In a profession, you're required to use your judgment and make decisions. So there is going to be some teacher decision, but if they're only making a decision along four levels consistently, usually, sometimes rarely, again, this goes back to what we talked about with percentage-based grades. If you want to increase reliability, you decrease the number of choices. And so grades or ratings become more reliable or more likely reliable when you have fewer choices.

[42:42]

So you want to have a scale that is frequency probably around four levels. You don't have to have four, but generally it kind of aligns with the A through F system and that can work at the four levels. And so people tend to go with four and just determine what the criteria is and then talk about what we mean when we say consistently, almost always. you know, usually more often than not, sometimes is the opposite of that and rarely is on occasion. So we just have some guidelines for us and we just sort of calibrate with one another. But most of the time, teachers will be pretty accurate with their judgments on their students.

[43:14] SPEAKER_01:

So we'll definitely refer people to the book to see all of those tools and all those recommendations for themselves. Tom, if you could give just a couple of kind of wishlist items that if you could get people to completely and immediately remove these considerations from their grades, what would be at the top of your, what would be just a handful of things at the top of your list that you wish we would just stop including in grades right away?

[43:38] SPEAKER_00:

Don't allow any student to behave their way up or down the achievement scale, period. That's it.

[43:44] SPEAKER_01:

Even if they clean the whiteboards during recess?

[43:46] SPEAKER_00:

Even if they clean the whiteboards during recess. You can give them some Skittles or whatever. No, I guess we can't give candy. Give them an apple. Give them a healthy snack. No, but yeah, just there's no extra credit.

[43:57]

See, this is the part that people forget is I'm equally adamant about extra credit. That's also distorting. Like you giving me bonus points because I behaved appropriately. It's always interesting. Like people don't want to add 10% per day an assignment as early. I wonder why.

[44:15]

Why don't you add 10%? If on time is desirable, then why not add 10% per day an assignment as early? And I ask teachers that question. You know what they often say? Oh, we couldn't do that. That's not what they know.

[44:25]

Everything they say is the exact argument for not using late penalties, just on the opposite end. So it's an interesting dichotomy. So do not allow a student to behave their way up or down the achievement scale. Deal with those behavioral missteps elsewhere, and that will solve 95% of the problems.

[44:44] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Redefining Student Accountability, A Proactive Approach to Teaching Behavior Outside the Gradebook. And if people want to get in touch with you, Tom, and talk about doing some work on grading in their district, I feel like probably every district has some things on grading that are not quite right. What's the best place for them to contact you and talk about working together?

[45:03] SPEAKER_00:

They can certainly message me on social media on X. It's at Tom Schimmer. It's also at Tom Schimmer on Instagram. My email address is tschimmeratlive.ca because I live in Canada. And that's probably the best way or directly through Solution Tree.

[45:19]

They can just reach out to Solution Tree and say, hey, we'd like to talk to Tom about doing some work. And I'd be happy to meet with them and talk about their needs and see if we can put something together for them. So happy to do that as well.

[45:28] SPEAKER_01:

Tom, thank you so much for joining me once again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Justin.

[45:32] SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate the opportunity to be here and a good conversation. Thanks.

[45:36] Announcer:

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