220. Perceptions of Education

Posted in engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, writing
December 29, 2021

As faculty, we have our own views of the role of education in our society, but do students share these views? In this episode, Josh Eyler joins us to discuss his first-year writing class that invites students to deeply examine their understanding of the role of education in society.

Josh is the Director of Faculty Development, the Director of the ThinkForward Quality Enhancement Plan, and a faculty member of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Mississippi. He is also the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective Teaching.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: As faculty, we have our own views of the role of education in our society, but do students share these views? In this episode, we talk with one faculty member about a first-year writing class that invites students to deeply examine their understanding of the role of education in society.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners..

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Josh Eyler. Josh is the Director of Faculty Development, the Director of the ThinkForward Quality Enhancement Plan, and a faculty member of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Mississippi. He is also the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective Teaching. Welcome back, Josh.

Josh: Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.

John: We’re happy to have you back. Today’s teas are… Josh, are you drinking tea?

Josh: Ha ha ha… [LAUGHTER] You know the answer to this. I am not. Although I feel like I’m always letting you two down on this one. But much like Ted Lasso, I still have my water. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: At least it’s a nice healthy choice.

Josh: True.

Rebecca: And the base of tea. I have a new one today, I have Blue Sapphire. It’s a black blend, also from this new tea shop.

John: So it’s not a black and blue blend.

Rebecca: There’s something blue in it, some sort of flower, I think, I hope. [LAUGHTER]

John: Some type of beetle, probably, yeah.

John: And I have Twining’s Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: That’s a good choice, John… an unusual choice for you, though, might I add.

John: It is, we’ve got all this tea sitting around for the last year and a half, and I don’t want it to go bad. So I’m trying to hit into some of the less commonly consumed teas. And it’s good.

Rebecca: So earlier this fall, you posted a note on Twitter about an assignment that you were doing with students about defining education. And I was hoping you could tell us more. I was at first very intrigued, and now I just want to know more. So here you are.

Josh: Well, the context is that I was teaching a first year writing course, and with about 20 first-year students, most of whom had been on Zoom for a year and a half with their high schools. And so we were all together for the first time, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to build the course around the idea of education. It’s always good for a writing class to engage with students’ real-world experiences anyway. And this, to me, kind of intersected with their experiences during the pandemic, and something that they have experienced themselves for 12 or more years. So, we built it around education… really took a number of different approaches. We read Paulo Freire and bell hooks, and even Plato, The Apology of Socrates to sort of get at the political implications of education and citizenship. And it all culminated actually with an assignment where they had to draw on some of the readings we did and go find some resources as well to build their own kind of philosophy of education. What is the purpose of education? So we started with, and I think this is the assignment that caught your eye… as someone trained as a medievalist, I love etymology, and education has a fascinating and wonderful etymology as an English term. It comes from two different Latin words that got conflated over time and sprinkled with a little French as it came into the English language. But those two Latin terms are educare and educere. And educare, In Latin, means the training or rearing of a child, the raising of a child, and educare means to lead out of or away from, and the combination of those two are just fascinating to me, because one, educere is deeply philosophical. What does it mean to lead out or away from? What is the thing that we are leaving from and where are we going? And the other one is deeply pragmatic and logistical. What is the actual pragmatic purpose of education? And that is to help children grow into adults who can build meaningful lives for themselves and the community in which they live. And so that assignment was essentially to look at these two terms, think about them and argue for how we can or cannot see them at play in our current educational systems. And so many of them kind of split this I’m into two, really looking at each term on its own and came up with some really great insights, I thought. So, that’s kind of where we started and then worked our way up to what is the purpose of education from their perspective.

John: Could you tell us some stories about that first assignment and how students responded?

Josh: Well, the first response to it was wide eyed looks of horror, I think, [LAUGHTER] that their first major writing assignment in college was gonna dig into Latin etymology. [LAUGHTER] But once we got beyond that, I think the essays were in a number of wonderful directions. The analysis of that logistical pragmatic term was, as you would expect, I think, that looking at their last 12 years of education is really a step-by-step process to better inform them and better prepare them for the world. It was the philosophical term, that educere, the leading out of or away from where things got really fun and interesting. So, for some of them, it meant leading to or giving people the tools to a better life, whatever better or more meaningful meant to them. For some, it meant leading out of a forum way of seeing the world and to a new perspective on things they had never considered before. And some of them overlapped and intersected with those ideas. But that to me was the jumping off point that I wanted them to see at the outset of the semester, that education is not just about, here’s your book, here’s your test, here’s your assignment, that there’s a bigger reason that we do this. And some of that reason we can all agree on, and some of it is also deeply personal to the people who are going through it. So, that was a nice kind of setup to the semester, as we went on.

Rebecca: What was that conversation like in class, as they were digging through their different perspectives and understanding that they didn’t have the same perspectives.

Josh: It was a couple of different things. One is that they were intrigued that they were even being asked about their education. And so maybe I should have expected it. But we did spend a significant amount of time at the beginning of the semester, really addressing that head on, that they never been asked to think critically about their educational process. And so we talked about why that might be and why it benefits people to think critically about the systems that they are a part of, or are placed in, or enter into willingly. And we took some typical facets of education, standardized testing, the five-paragraph essay was one that we really started with, because its big shadow, like Mount Doom, looms over writing courses everywhere. And so that was a useful one to say, “Well, why have you been taught this? What purpose does it serve in high school?” And those are both potentially instructive, but also potentially harmful purposes in terms of their future work. And so we started with that. We, of course, talked about grades… that was a major avenue of discussion, both because of the subject matter, and this question about thinking about education critically, but because the course was ungraded, as well. And so I was asking them from day one to continually reflect on their experience with grades, how grades have functioned for them in their education, and how might we think about them differently. Once we got the ball rolling, and they thought, “Hey, it’s okay to say things that may not be entirely positive about being in school,” they just ran with it. And so it was really meaningful conversations, I think, from there.

Rebecca: What a great way to establish community at the beginning of a class. It’s like a shared experience, sorting through the words, but also education as a shared experience. So it seems like a great way to establish community, a sense of belonging, right up front, before diving into some of the big projects that I know you had ready and waiting for them.

Josh: It was fun. And I do think that because education is a shared experience, it did allow for some of that community building that was really organic.

John: Did they come to a shared definition of education by the end as a result of that discussion?

Josh: No, they didn’t. And that, to me, is a good thing. I think that really what we can do, and what departments of education from across the country can do is problematize the idea of the systems of education, really seeing it moving from a perspective where I am a lone student understanding my own experience in school to these are systems that have been around for a long time, and here’s how the systems function, and let’s look really critically at that. Whether we.arrive at the same conclusion about a different element of the system is less important than seeing it, not as an individual experience, but something that is much larger than that.

John: You mentioned ungrading. Do you think that doing this within the context of an ungraded class may have helped increase student motivation and engagement with the topic?

Josh: Well, I think maybe a little. I think that once you begin to critically interrogate the idea of grades, you sort of open the door to anything and everything in terms of assessing the different aspects of education. And so I used ungrading, I’m not a sole advocate for ungrading methods. I think there are lots of models that people can find. But I do think that, in this case, they knew that I myself was adamantly questioning the idea of traditional grading. I think they felt more comfortable in engaging in these other types of conversations.

Rebecca: And I believe that you ramped up to the end of this semester in doing a large project, a podcast project, right?

Josh: Well, that could have been a part of it. There was a multi-modal project in there that the department utilizes in the first-year writing classes. No one took me up on the podcasting. [LAUGHTER] But, there are lots of really interesting projects involving social media, video, and things like that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the structure of that project and what the choices were, what the parameters were?

Josh: Pretty open, actually, although we did think critically about the use of social media and some of those other modes. Right prior to that, they had finished their biggest essay of the semester on their perspective on the purpose of education. And then the multimodal assignment was asking them to cast that argument in a different genre, essentially taking the argument and expressing it in some other way. Many did a series of memes and reflected on that. Some did video, I had two people do a TikTok kind of encapsulation of their arguments. So it was really trying to just say, “How do we communicate this in other kinds of media?” But it all went back to that bigger assignment about the purpose of education.

John: In one of my classes this semester, we spent about two weeks talking about the economic role of education in terms of its impact on earnings and so forth. And my class was pretty evenly divided between those who bought into what we call the human capital model, that education makes you more productive, it increases your skills, and that’s why people get paid more as a result of having more education, and the signaling model, which suggests that education provides a certification that you’re of a high level of ability, which ties back to that grading concept… that basically you’re being assessed in terms of how able you are. And I was really surprised at how many students bought into that latter model, who saw education not really so much as increasing their skills and giving them new ways of looking at the world, but they saw it primarily as just a credential that’s going to give them higher earnings. I think in other disciplines, that’s probably less common. Most of the students in my class are business majors, and they’re often taking their courses with a very specific career goal in mind. Was that an issue for some of the students in your class?

Josh: Yes, to some extent, and that is also kind of a drum that’s been beat for them for at least some of their education. But I had quite a few business majors in my class. And so this came up fairly often, actually. And what I would say is, some students, probably by the end of the semester, really embraced that model,that here are the things that you need to do in order to achieve that certification that signals that you have been adequately prepared for whatever career you are pursuing. But the reason that I stuck Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Plato in there is because it’s really hard to read any of those essays and think this is all the education is for. You may disagree that the connections between education and politics and citizenship is less relevant, but I don’t think you can argue that it’s not relevant after you read them. So some, I think, still embrace the signaling models. It became, I don’t want to say more nuanced, but it did become more complex for them.

Rebecca: So in their final papers and projects, what were some of the conclusions that they arrived at? You mentioned at the start that they were fairly diverse in their response.

Josh: Yes, well, it really ranged from the perspectives that John was just talking about to one of my favorite, and I’ll paraphrase, because I can’t remember the sentence exactly. So it ranged from that up to that “it helps us to be the best version of ourselves,” and all the ways that the classes that we take in the schools and universities that we go to help with that. It kind of comes back to the beginning of the semester, too. And if you think about those twin ideas about education, the signalling/certification model is very much aligned with the pragmatic training of a child approach to education. And I don’t fault them for that, I think that’s part of what’s communicated to them. I think it’s part of the way our society is set up. And then you have this other more philosophical notion of education. And then some of the purposes of education essays really, ultimately aligned more with that particular approach to education, that perspective on it. And so the best version of ourselves helps us to discover what we want to be, which is sort of the same, but also career- and life-oriented, right? What it is that we want to be and what we want to do, and so there’s lots of different contours all along that spectrum.

John: What were some things they saw education as leading people away from as part of that more philosophical approach.

Josh: Some of them thought that it was old habits of mind, old ways of thinking, old methods, old perspectives, to getting more diverse perspectives, diverse viewpoints, and thereby broadening our sense of the world and our understanding of the world. For some it was that, for others…. they were specifically talking about university education with this perspective… it was leaning away from a place that seems safe and knowable and regimented to a less well known terrain for them in college and university life. So we’re moving away from one model into another model that allows them to have more agency but it’s also scarier at the same time. And so they saw that as a leading away from. At least several people talked about leading away from ignorance into enlightenment, and that’s most philosophical, and probably the best sense of that term as it was originally used, I think. So yeah, it kind of ran the gamut.

Rebecca: I can imagine that doing the same assignments during a time that wasn’t a pandemic would have been different. Did that play into the conversations and the way people responded, maybe having experiences online during the pandemic?

Josh: Yes, and did both in a small way for that assignment and then a larger way for the course. One student actually did write in that first essay about COVID, and how I had changed his experience with education. And so that did come up, that there was more about the purpose shifting for them, as they saw what has happened over the last year and a half. And, you know, being together and learning with a teacher, I mean, those were all things that they talked about. And then over the course of the semester, they actually read some news pieces about the impact of COVID on education. So we did talk then in larger ways about how this may have reshaped at least some aspects of our work together.

Rebecca: I’m always curious to ask faculty about their own reflections on an assignment or a path that they took in a class. So what are your thoughts, having done some of these assignments and having had this frame for this particular class? Is it something you want to do again? Are there things that you want to do differently?

Josh: I would definitely do it again. I think the shared common experience of education is one that just leads to fruitful discussions and meaningful reflections on the readings that we’re doing, and you can see that in the writing as well. It’s not as much work to conceptualize something with which they don’t have any experience. Although I think that’s a very valuable part of education. I think that, for my goals in a first-year writing class, it helps make the leap a little bit easier for them when they’re thinking about things that they have a lot of experience with. So I’d definitely do that, again, were I to teach another first-year writing class. As with any class, there are other things that might have them read. I had them watch the movie Pleasantville, which all of them liked early in the semester. And that’s a great movie about what it means to learn something new, and how that’s a very powerful experience. And so they’re supposed to reflect on the movie’s idea about that and then extend it to: “How can we see more of this in education today?” And so I might move that to a different part of the semester, kind of rearrange it a little bit, add a few more writing assignments in, but I think, largely, it worked overall, at least from my goals. And I think in the final reflections that we had for the ungrading model, we were able to talk together, I think, really fluidly and fluently about education, and what they’ve learned about it. Now in the different department, where I’ll be talking about this all the time with future teachers, which has long been a goal of mine. So there I’ll be doing the same thing, but just in a different context.

John: Did this stretch students into an area a bit outside of their comfort zone, because they’re used to talking about topics that are very narrowly confined to the boundaries of the discipline.

Josh: Yes, it did. And whether or not we were talking about education or not, we could be talking about anything, the open-ended nature of the assignments was initially, I think, something that had to wrestle with, and I did hear a lot of comments early on about that particular issue with the writing assignments. I can remember back to being a freshman or first-year student and can remember what that would have felt like. But I think scaffolding that process and giving support structures to help them… lots of feedback along the way. And I know that there are fellow colleagues in writing departments everywhere who have the exact opposite philosophy as this, and I respect that very much. But I do think that having an open-ended assignment that asks them for their own ideas, ultimately… at least the hope is that it… grants them some agency by the end of the semester; that they do have thoughts that are relevant to a really complex, nuanced discussion. That someone, their instructor and their peers, are acknowledging that they have something to contribute to that conversation, and whether or not it needs more development and the mechanics of writing, that’s something that every writer works on. But if we can help students get to the point where they recognize that they have something to contribute, that they have a voice that can make the kinds of claims that can add to that debate, that’s for me is kind of half the battle or more of a first-year writing course. So, helping them see how to navigate the open-ended questions can hopefully lead to that. And I did see growth, different for every student, but I did see growth in that latter area over the semester.

John: If you can get students to think more about learning and about how they learn and about the purpose of learning, that seems to be a great way of introducing them to more metacognitive reflection, which we know is helpful for learning.

Josh: And because the class is ungraded and metacognition and reflection is such a part of that model, the two did align. So they did a ton of reflecting on their own writing, reflecting on their own learning, reflecting on their participation. Then, of course, the midterm and the final reflections. where they propose a grade and then try to justify that grade. So yes, I do think that there’s a doorway there to thinking about education through the work of the class that helps them with that reflective part.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the scaffolding you did have in place for the open ended nature of the essay, especially towards the end? So big project, open ended, daunting, first-year students… How did you guide them through that scary process?

Josh: So a couple of different ways… all of the essays themselves had open-ended questions. So, you’re scaffolding up to the biggest one: what do you think is the purpose of education? But, even that first assignment that we talked about was “Here’s what the two words mean. What do you think?” So, it’s a small, but open-ended question, so gradually getting bigger and bigger as we work up to that, and pairing my feedback on those assignments with “Okay, here’s a great idea here, we need to see more evidence, need to expand it a little more.” So, we get more open ended. So that was a part of it. And also the length of the essays, they began very short, two pages at the most, really to get them comfortable, because there’s nothing more terrifying than saying, “Here’s a huge open-ended question, write six pages out of the gate,” [LAUGHTER] when many of them may not have written a paper that long before. So I started with very short essays and gradually worked up to that bigger one, which was five or six pages, which I think is about right for a first-semester writing class. It gives them something to work with. So, scaffolded in two ways.

John: Did you do any work with peer feedback, or did you provide all the feedback to students?

Josh: I did most of the feedback, there were some opportunities for peer feedback and I think that that, of course, is an important part of developing as a writer. I was doing so much that was different in this class, you know, changing my grading model a little bit and building in lots of different kinds of structures. I decided that true to the mantra of faculty development across the board, don’t change everything at once, or don’t add 50 new things, pick some things to add. So, that I would save for a different iteration, find a way to build that meaningfully in now that I have the structure that I can rely on. So, there wasn’t a ton of peer feedback, but that is something that I think I would do differently in future iterations of it.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you implemented ungrading into this course, as well. Obviously, ungrading has become a very popular topic recently, but also can be really daunting to figure out how to implement, especially the first time.

Josh: I’ve used a number of different grading models from contract grading to portfolio grading. So, I haven’t done the quote unquote, traditional grading for a long time, but just only recently moved in to ungrading, really inspired by the amazing colleagues that are doing it and have written about it and provided really solid guidelines for how you could do this, regardless of your discipline, but also a little bit of the research I did for How Humans Learn on failure that then led to this book on grading. I’m just mired in all of this research that is just so depressing about what grades do to students. And I just got to a point where I said, if I know this stuff, and I don’t do anything about it, I’m kind of complicit in perpetuating the system. So I just have to take the lead. And so using lots of the guides that are out there, Jesse Stommel, and Susan Blum and David Buck, and there’s a huge K-12 community called Going Gradeless, and there’s Aaron Blackwelder and Starr Sackstein, and some other folks there who were important guides as well. I will say this, that it was the most time I have spent on course design in a very long time. Most of the work for this kind of model happens at that stage of things. So I started very early, weeks ahead of when I would typically start to do this, because it just takes a lot of time to get the setup right, so that it’s navigable by students, it makes sense, it gives them enough time to implement feedback. And there are lots of threads that once you open the box of ungrading that immediately come up like what are you going to do about due dates? If you’re not going to give grades, and yet they have to turn things in to get feedback, how do due dates function in there. And so I learned from a lot of people on social media who use something that they called “best by dates” with a form that essentially says: here’s the target date, if you can’t meet that, just send me this form that tells me when you will turn it in, but know, that like milk, the later you submit, the less feedback I can give you, essentially. And so that was the accountability piece that a traditional grade used to, or at least I imagined that it used to, serve for due dates. So that’s an example of what pops out of the box once you open it and have to suddenly think about. So, there was a lot of work on the course design stage, but I found that it actually saved me time during the semester. Now, I’ll say a couple things about that. I think that my students in the ungrading class probably improved as much as students in a traditional grading class. But dispositions and behaviors like confidence and motivation and taking intellectual risks, they were dramatically different. And stress and anxiety just plummeted. And so to me, there’s an interesting question at the center of all of these debates. What’s the purpose of this? And hopefully, I think we’ll get more research on models like upgrading over the next few years that will address some of these questions. But if performance was the same, what is it that we’re trying to do, and if we can say, these dispositions increased dramatically, and that they may pay dividends down the line for students. If a student develops confidence in their abilities, what you hope is that that continues to grow and that that can be utilized to improve their achievement and performance along the way. So that’s kind of an aside, but that’s something that I found as I was going through this, but the reason it saved me time is that you no longer have to make comments. And this is true of other models as well. You’re not making comments on papers to justify a grade, which removes not only time, but I always found it psychologically distressing, right? It’s an A minus or B plus, and which one is it? And now I had to go back and add some comments to justify the fact that I gave it a B plus rather than an A minus. And so this was just coaching, this was strictly: “great idea, build on it,” “here’s some suggestions for you…” and just went through each paper like that. There was no sense at the end that okay, now I got to go back through and look at this again, did I do the right thing? Is it really an A minus and not a B plus. So that saved me time along the way that I could devote to working with them individually and as a group. So time on the front end saves time during the semester. And I think some of the folks to do ungrading in STEM and social sciences may not necessarily find that to be true. And I’ve heard some of them talk about that. But at least for the Humanities, I do think that there’s the potential to save time during the semester on the commenting and the feedback.

John: But at the end of the course, grades still have to be assigned. In most cases, I think people do it through some type of discussion with the students and let students suggest a grade and then there’s some type of reflection or some type of discussion. Is that how you handle the process of assigning those grades that the college requires at the end of the course?

Josh: Yes, that is definitely how I did it. So I borrowed a great strategy from that K-12 community that used Google forms to do the midterm and final assessment. It’s great because everything can be in the same place, they can answer questions and upload revisions, and do all these things all in the same place. And it really made that part of the ungraded model, that part of the course, a lot easier and really facilitated these conversations. So, we have to enter midterm grades for first-year students here. That served as a trial run, a practice run, for the final conversation where yes, they do propose a grade, and we have a conversation about that. Now, the way I handled it to make those meaningful for the students, and to hit the goals of the class, a couple of different things: one is that I borrowed one piece from the labor-based-contract grading movement – that’s pretty common in writing studies and maybe elsewhere, too – and that was, I said that in order to make it to this final conversation, where you could propose your grade, you had to complete all the work of the class. So that’s a pretty standard labor-based contract, you have to do all the things, and then from there, there are other things that you can do. And so if they did complete all the work we had that conversation, but if they did not complete all the assignments, the highest grade they could get was a C, and we still talked, but they knew that doing all the work was a prerequisite for having this upgrading model benefit them, essentially. And that, to me, was an acceptable compromise on accountability, because you cannot learn the goals of a writing class if you’re not doing the writing. And so that’s sort of the baseline. But the other thing was that we talked a lot throughout the semester, what does a grade mean? And at the beginning of the semester, it was much more about them, what does a grade mean to you? What does it feel like to be graded? What has your experience been with grades? At the end of the semester, closer to this conference, we shifted the conversation to what does a grade mean to people external to the class who are looking at it on a transcript? What does it mean to your major advisor? What does it mean to a graduate school? What does it mean to a medical school? What does it mean to a future employer if they see this grade versus this grade versus this grade on a transcript? So we talked about that as a way to set them up for: your grade proposal must solely be based on your writing, let me handle your reflection on your participation and your contributions and how hard you work. I’ll use that in my part of this conference to bump up your grade if I think you’ve graded yourself too low, but you need to propose your grade and justify it based solely on your writing. And so that was a major component of what they had to be thinking about. And it can be easy, of course, to say, “Well, I think I deserve an A, because I worked really hard.” So we wanted to take that out of the equation, but make it meaningful and justifiable by having them think about what do other people think of when they see a grade in Writing 101. So we did all that. And my experience with ungrading is almost entirely positive. I think that, for the most part, students gave themselves grades that I agreed with completely that they were spot on in terms of the progress in their writing and their contributions in class. Some observations I would make is that there were several folks who I will admit graded themselves very high, much higher than I thought was appropriate. And so we had a conversation about that. And by and large, they said, “Okay, yeah, you’re right.” And so it was kind of a negotiation. But that number was very small. I’d say the bigger thing that I want people… and people have been talking about this, so this isn’t a revelation, but I think there needs to be more awareness of this… is the group of students, largely women, in this case, who graded themselves too low. And so my conversations with them were twofold. They’re number one, this is way too low. Why are you giving yourself this great, I’m moving it up to this grade, because of X, Y and Z. And the other part of those conversations were all about talking to them about how good their writing was, and the confidence that they need to carry with them from that into other classes. So it was much more about dispositions and behaviors than it was about what did you get on this essay. But it was also some of the sociological components of education being borne out in a single class. You see those who grade themselves high, those who grade themselves low and the dynamics there in between.

John: Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot of discussion of alternatives to traditional grading systems. Where do you see that discussion going?

Josh: Well, you know, I think there has been a lot of conversation about grading models, certainly over the last couple of years. But, I’m thinking more over the last few months. And what I have noticed a little bit that the discussion, the conversation has changed a little bit, that it’s moved from kind of a united front of advocacy for thinking about grading differently to more that people are on different teams promoting one particular model over another, and I’m not going to single any model out because I think you can see it across the board. And that to me is a little concerning for a couple of reasons. One is we’re not far enough in the movement to address traditional grading models to suddenly have this internecine warfare, right? [LAUGHTER] It can be easy to look on Twitter and think education is completely reformed. But those, I think, who work in centers for teaching and learning know that the reality is that change is a very slow, step-by-step process, that we are making progress, but that progress is still yet to unfold in many corners. And so I think, because change is hard, and because change is methodical and takes place over a lot of time. I think that in our conversations about grades, I’m hopeful that as a community, we can get back to a place where we can say, “Okay, we all have different motivations for adopting which model we do, but we need to come together a little bit to continue advocating for change overall, rather than adoption of a model,” which is where I think the conversation has drifted to… adopt this model, not let’s think about grading, and let’s make some change. I’m not denying that it is useful in any kind of change to have different personalities, different types of people, you need the flag wavers, to say this is a great model, you need that. You also need people to take a more nuanced approach and say, let’s look at what works for you and your students, and together, I hope we can continue to push that message.

John: There’s certainly a lot of interest in alternative grading systems. And at our campus, we haven’t seen a lot of adoption of that yet. But there’s a lot of discussion, and there’s a lot of people considering that. And I think there’s a lot of benefit in keeping many options open as alternatives until people get a chance to explore them, see how they work, and then modify them based on their own circumstances. Have you seen much adoption of alternative grading systems on your campus?

Josh: I see more and more every semester. And so, this is kind of what I mean about the pace of change. There is a ton of interest. I don’t know what the right analogy is, but you think of interes, there’s a lot. Then you think of considering adoption, there are fewer. Then you think about the people actually adopting, many fewer than that. But I see that pool, which to me is the critical pool for change to happen, expanding each semester. And I think maybe next semester, the semester after, we’re gonna have a panel of faculty here who have been trying out different kinds of models. So I remain optimistic about all this, I just think that we need to be cautious and aware of the rhetoric that we use, and how that can affect the people who are on the fence between thinking about adoption and adoption. That can be a big gulf to cross. And I think we need to work to shrink that end to bridge it. And so I think we just need to be aware of that.

Rebecca: Those are really great points, Josh. And also, depending on the context of your class, you might teach different classes and different models are going to work in those different classes more effectively. [LAUGHTER] There’s not a one size fits all for even an individual instructor, if they’re teaching different kinds of classes.

Josh: That’s absolutely true. And if we can get to a place where people see enough value in making a change, and find a model that really works well for them, that makes me happy. That is the right step, I think, to take.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for sharing your example. I think sometimes one of the hardest things to envision is: How would that happen in my actual class? It’s easy to read guides and get a general sense of something but the practical application and what it actually looks like in an actual class becomes hard to put your finger on.

Josh: Right? Absolutely. And I agree, and I’d love to hear lots of people talk about the logistics, what do they do on a day-to-day basis and what do they do in the planning phase? …which to me is always the trickiest part. So, I agree.

John: We always end with the question. What’s next?

Josh: [LAUGHTER] What is next, John? [LAUGHTER] Speaking of Pleasantville, actually that’s the question that it ends on, which students love. There’s no conclusion here. But what is next? I think I’m still working on the book that I referenced about grading. I’ve done a ton of interviews that have just been mind blowing with K-12 and university educators from across the country, not just about practices, but about how do we get systems to change, which is the last chapter of the book. And so, still working on that, and I hope to keep plodding away over the next few months.

John: We’re looking forward to that. And that is coming out from West Virginia University Press.

Josh: Yes, it is.

John: …an excellent series.

Josh: Well, thank you. Yeah, I’ve had nothing but amazing experience working with the editorial team there. So it was just a natural fit.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your stories and experience. We always like talking to you, Josh.

Josh: Yeah, and I appreciate the invitation and I love chatting with you guys.

John: And someday maybe we’ll see you at a conference and we’ll bring some tea [LAUGHTER] to put in that water.

Josh: And I will gladly drink that tea that you bring. Yes.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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