How to Stop Point-Chasing & Start Learning

🎯 Are you tired of students chasing points instead of actually learning? This groundbreaking conversation with Sarah M. Zerwin reveals why traditional grading systems are failing our students and how to create classrooms where real learning thrives.

In this eye-opening episode of Schoolutions, discover how one master educator transformed her classroom by eliminating the "points for compliance" system that's been damaging student motivation and engagement for decades. 

🔥 What You'll Learn:
• Why traditional grading systems reward compliance over learning
• The historical origins of our broken educational measurement system
• How to shift from evaluation to meaningful feedback that inspires students
• Practical strategies for managing the gradebook without destroying student motivation
• The coaching metaphor that will revolutionize your teaching approach
• How to navigate district requirements while prioritizing student engagement

Sarah's approach addresses classroom management, student discipline, and low engagement by focusing on intrinsic student motivation rather than external rewards. Her methods support culturally responsive teaching, equity in education, and creating inclusive classrooms where every student can thrive.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction to Sarah M. Zerwin
2:19 The Problem with Point-Chasing Behaviors  
5:11 Historical Origins of Traditional Grading
8:14 Compliance vs. Proficiency in Education
10:47 Navigating District Obstacles to Change
13:12 The Myth of Standards-Based Grading
15:16 The Coach-Athlete Teaching Metaphor
18:14 What's Actually Required vs. Phantom Policy
20:48 Reimagining Assignments Without Reinventing Everything
24:59 How to Use Your Gradebook Differently
31:56 Redefining Feedback as Description, Not Evaluation
35:46 Sharing the Feedback Load with Students
39:29 Spreading Pointless Grading Across Content Areas
42:15 Final Thoughts on Process Over Product

Episode Mentions:

• Sarah’s Website Resource Page: Point-less Grading in General, Language Arts, Science, and Math; Teaching Writing; Teaching Reading; Workshop
• Alfie Kohn - The Case Against Grades
• Phantom Policy 
• Learning Goals (AP Lit / 9th-12th Grades)
• Grading Explanations (LA 12 / AP Lit)  
• For Students and Caregivers: 
  • Regarding Grades
  • Key to What You’ll See in the Gradebook
• Infinite Campus Gradebook
• Developing Grading and Reporting Systems for Student Learning
• Point-Less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More Meaningful Grading (2020)

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Schoolutions – S2 E6: Rethinking Grading: No More "Point-Less" Grading Systems or Points for Compliance Exchanges with Dr. Sarah M. Zerwin

[00:00:00] Olivia: Welcome to Schoolutions, where listening will leave you inspired by solutions to issues you or others you know may be struggling with in the public education system today. I am Olivia Wahl, and I am excited to welcome my guest today. A master educator with over 20 years of classroom experience, a writer and a teacher consultant for the Colorado Writing Project, Dr. Sarah M. Zerwin.

[00:00:27] Olivia: Currently, Sarah is an instructional coach at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado. Her work and research challenge caretakers, educators, and students alike to align their beliefs about learning with their assessment and grading practices. Sarah outlines a process for making the shift away from traditional grading systems in her book, Point-Less: An English Teacher's Guide to More Meaningful Grading.

[00:00:52] Olivia: I must also mention Sarah's fabulous website, and I'll make sure to include a link in the show notes. She offers invaluable resources to support us when moving away from grading systems that have for far too long rewarded compliance over learning. Making this kind of shift takes courage and vision.

[00:01:10] Olivia: Sarah is brimming with both in her own words: I want my students to be able to read our complex world so they can write their own future within it. And without further ado, welcome Dr. Sarah M. Zerwin. 

[00:01:27] Sarah: Hi, Olivia. Thank you so much. What a nice introduction. 

[00:01:30] Olivia: I'm so excited to have you as a guest and the way I begin every interview is by asking guests who an inspiring educator is from their life.

[00:01:41] Sarah: So that I went on a hike just a little while ago with my dog, and that was what I meditated over while I was hiking today. And, um, I feel like I'm surrounded by really inspiring educators at my school where I work and they inspire me. all the time. In my state, in Colorado, we were just talking about Sam Bennett and Cris Tovani.

[00:02:01] Sarah: Those are local educators that I get to work with in various ways and they inspire me an enormous amount too. I was thinking about student teachers I've had over the years. I'm thinking about college professors, thinking about other teachers that I just know like through Twitter these days that inspire me.

[00:02:19] Sarah: I pushed myself to go back, back, back, back, back, right? And what really my trajectory as a teacher has been all about cultivating student agency, both because of the places where I had it as a student and also the places where I didn't. And so that's what I was really thinking about. Um, I was a, a marching band dork when I was in high school.

[00:02:46] Olivia: I love it. 

[00:02:47] Sarah: Yeah. And I was thinking about this, my band teacher, Mike White is his name and he's still around. He's very retired, but he's still around and very well known, I think in Colorado music education, but he really did create an opportunity for me personally to build my agency and my leadership and my voice.

[00:03:10] Sarah: I was drum major of my marching band my, my senior year. And so, he really let me lead. He kind of stepped aside and let me lead. So that's kind of who came to mind for me when I was thinking about this today. 

[00:03:23] Olivia: That's awesome. Let students be leaders of their own learning to quote another fabulous book title.

[00:03:29] Olivia: It's so challenging, yet so empowering. And it's what the world is asking of our students to do. And I don't know if everyone is ready to take that journey but thank goodness you wrote your book because it gives a beautiful process to rethink not just how to help students develop their own sense of agency.

[00:03:52] Olivia: I have a fifth grader and a sophomore in high school. An issue I continue to see it's years of point-collecting behaviors. 

[00:04:02] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:04:02] Olivia: It's, I'm going to get these points and I'm going to get a grade alongside this hyper-focus on mastery. We have to master the standards. We have to master this content and you so eloquently speak to these facets in your book.

[00:04:18] Olivia: One main shift that I took away from your book is that your students' final grades reflect the growth that they've achieved toward goals they set for themselves, rather than mastery towards the standards. The way I'd love to frame our conversation is around the sections in your book called Navigating the Obstacles.

[00:04:39] Olivia: Because you throw questions out that I am asked often by educators and you have really spectacular answers and you know, the name of the podcast is Schoolutions. It's school solutions for a reason. Before we jump into those questions and obstacles. I would love for listeners to have you shed your brilliance on the context of grading systems and your research, just so they can have a better understanding of how grading has evolved and developed over the years.

[00:05:11] Sarah: In the book, I use the term traditional grading or traditional grading systems to identify the traditional way that we are expected, I think, to do grading and it comes all wrapped up in our systems our grade books like these electronic grade books that were mandated to use that get to grades really in one way, at least the one that I have.

[00:05:37] Sarah: And it's about points and percentages and grades and and ever calculating overall percentage. That's this high-stakes grade that goes up and down to the minute, really.

[00:05:50] Olivia: Yeah.

[00:05:50] Sarah: All of that, I think, reflects sort of a history of the need to measure and evaluate and rank and sort and determine what students know against a set of standards or a scale or a rubric or that sort of thing.

[00:06:06] Sarah: It's all very efficient. And that is from the research that I did. That is really where it came from. Where I could trace it back to years and years ago, there was a teacher at a university who many, many, many, many years ago realized that he could take on more students if he moved away from one-on-one personal evaluation that was happening. Where it's like one student, one teacher, lots and lots of conversation and grading with letter grades or whatever, any kind of evaluation became sort of a shortcut for giving feedback.

[00:06:42] Sarah: That's where I could find it as an origin for the very beginning. But then, if you go back to, like, the late 1800s and early 1900s here in our country, um, what we had going on then was an enormous amount of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe to our country. And one source that I came across said that high schools were opening up at an astonishingly fast rate at that time.

[00:07:07] Sarah: Something like one every two weeks or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it is that I have in the book there about that. But astonishingly fast and the deal was that there were so many new American immigrants that people in power were like, we've got to teach all these people how to be American.

[00:07:21] Sarah: So then was born the American high school and the high technology at the time was the factory model. 

[00:07:27] Olivia: Yes.

[00:07:27] Sarah: And so, we have the bells that organize things. We have moving kids like we're moving them on a conveyor belt through the school every day. And, you know, the American high school hasn't changed so much since the way it was born, right?

[00:07:41] Olivia: It's pretty scary. 

[00:07 :42] Sarah: Yeah. And at the same time, we had just a huge growth in the educational measurements movement as well, where these, you know, like IQ tests and the SAT and all of these ways to measure how much people knew or how smart they were or whatever came at the same time and it was really from the people in power trying to have something that was “scientific” to be able to rank and sort all these newcomers and they were feeling threatened things were changing. 

[00:08:13] Olivia: Yeah 

[00:08:14] Sarah: You know how can we have some kind of scientific data that shows that some people are less than and some are, are more than. Um, and that's really where all the educational measurement in America started. Very insidious origins.

[00:08:28] Sarah: So, anything that we do now, and the way of evaluating, ranking, sorting for rating, any of that, we can't help but trace its origins back to that insidious place. And that really troubles me. 

[00:08:43] Olivia: It is troublesome. And I continue to think about a conversation I just had with Cornelius Minor around the difference between being a compliant educator and a proficient educator.

[00:08:57] Olivia: I went back after we had talked and I looked up the definitions just to be really clear for listeners. I'm going to read a definition because it's fascinating. Compliance versus proficiency: Compliance being willing to comply, yielding, bending, pliant, submissive, willing to do what someone wants. While proficient is good at, skilled, fluent, practiced especially in relation to a task or skill.

[00:09:25] Olivia: And I think, you know, what are our grading systems truly asking of our children? Is it to be compliant and just bend to the system of points and gathering? Or is it to really be proficient with content and to get a message out there into the world through writing and reading?

[00:09:45] Olivia: It's fascinating to me that the two terms and how they sift and sort what we're asking kids to do.

[00:09:51] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:9:51] Olivia: And so, I've heard you use the term compliance for points. Can you say more about that? 

[00:09:57] Sarah: Yeah. At the root of traditional grading is this points for compliance exchange. And it's where like the teacher says: Do this and I'll pay you with points. And then you can cash in those points for a grade. That might get you something that you want, right?

[00:10:13] Sarah: So, for example, discounts and car insurance or admission to the college you want to get into, or maybe there's a possible future employer looking at your, your transcript or whatever the case may be.

[00:10:26] Sarah: So, points for compliance, if there's an exchange like that at the center of the classroom, and what students can get matters to them based on the points that they earn, then that's what they're going to focus on. 

[00:10:37] Olivia: So, these navigating obstacles sections in your book, the first comment: I'm worried my district would never let me move away from traditional grading.

[00:10:47] Olivia: What do you suggest to educators or even caregivers? Because my audience isn't just teachers. It's caregivers, it's students, district administrators. So, it's a pretty wide reach. 

[00:10:59] Sarah: Yeah. 

[00:11:00] Olivia: What do you suggest? 

[00:11:01] Sarah: Well, a few things. One is what I always say to navigate these obstacles is honest conversation with the stakeholders.

[00:11:10] Sarah: And I have found that if I can say very honestly to parents, or to a colleague, or to an administrator, or to a student who is pushing back at this whole thing, if I can say very honestly, like: These are the problems that I'm seeing with grading with a focus on grading in the traditional way. And this is where it's getting in the way of my students' learning.

[00:11:34] Sarah: Particularly, it's around taking risks. Readers and writers, especially writers, don't grow if they don't take risks. And sometimes risks don't turn out very well. 

[00:11:43] Olivia: Yeah. 

[00:11:44] Sarah: So, if, you know, if there's a high stakes grade attached to everything, then they can't take those risks. And they're just focused on whatever they need to do to comply with the teacher's request so that they can get the points that they need to get the grade that they want.

[00:11:58] Sarah: So, the first thing is just an honest conversation with people. This is why it's hurting my students. And this is what I'm trying to do instead. So, I have found that that is a starting point works incredibly well to help get people on board. And usually stakeholders will be like: I see that I do. I see it.

[00:12:15] Olivia: Yeah. 

[00:12:15] Sarah: And awesome. Not always, but the other thing too that I, I do sometimes when I consult with districts across the country is I will ask them to send me their evaluation standards for teachers because if it's like my district and many other districts are in the same boat, the only way to get a highly effective rating with assessment is to put students in charge of monitoring their own learning.

[00:12:47] Sarah: And so, for someone in my district, I can just say: Do you realize that our teacher effective standards are asking us to do this? 

[00:12:54] Olivia: Yes. 

[00:12:55] Sarah: So that's another place that I can go and so far I have not found a set of teacher standards that I can't point to for support for a more meaningful path to a grade. 

[00:13:07] Olivia: What I'm struggling with right now, the school district has shifted to a rubrics-based model.

[00:13:12] Olivia: It's some levels of the system, not at high school yet, but definitely at middle school. What's been fascinating is the notion of a 1-2-3-4, and where a 4 is that expert level, uh, 3 is meeting. And I, you know, the drill and it's interesting. I have a good friend and her daughter said: You know, 4 is perfection. That's ridiculous. I stand against perfection. So, I'm good with a 3.

[00:13:34] Olivia: It made me love this child a little extra. You know, what are we saying to kids? Like what, what is this whole notion of mastery? And I absolutely love the metaphor. Your colleague, Jay spoke to a bit around mastery versus practice and what the purpose of school and work are.

[00:14:01] Olivia: Would you mind sharing that metaphor? It's so beautiful. 

[00:14:04] Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And I also want to just throw in really quick too that rubric based 1-2-3-4 is still grading. And like Alfie Kohn makes that point so strong in The Case Against Grades. And if you were to talk with him, I've heard him speak. He's very spicy when he makes these points and it's awesome.

[00:14:22] Sarah: It's standards-based grading if you're still trying to assess students' levels of achievement towards something. It’s still grading. 

[00:14:29] Olivia: Yes.

[00:14:29] Sarah: Like it doesn't get just because you're not using A-B-C-D or 100-90-80, whatever. If you're ranking and sorting and evaluating towards a standard, it's all of the negative effects of grading that research has identified that are still in play.

[00:14:46] Sarah: Like it doesn't get you away from those. So…

[00:14:48] Olivia: Yes. And I'm going to have you circle back to that when we talk about standards-based grading and just have you define that. I don't want to leave without you describing Jay's metaphor because it's brilliant. 

[00:14:58] Sarah: Yeah, of course. For me, the whole no grading, pointless, et cetera approach, you know, I thank my colleagues at my school, Jay and Paul in particular, in my department, because they were doing this first before I was, and they were pestering me to make the shift.

[00:15:16] Sarah: And I was fighting them and saying that I couldn't, but it took listening to Alfie Kohn speak in person that I finally made the shift. But Jay's metaphor about practice is he likens our teacher's role to the same as a coach. And if you think about a coach, with an athletic team and what a coach does in practice.

[00:15:37] Sarah: And then what happens when the students go to participate in the game or compete in the game, the coach-athlete relationship really needs to be about like practicing and making mistakes and coaching the athletes through that to give them strategies for getting better and stronger. And the coach is not evaluating. Ever.

[00:15:58] Sarah: The game is where the evaluation happens. The coach is just getting the athlete ready for the competition, the match, the game, the whatever, the round of golf, the match on the tennis court, the race, whatever it is, the coach is just trying to get the athlete ready for that. And., I think that metaphor is brilliant to think about our job.

[00:16:18] Olivia: Me too.

[00:16:18] Sarah: Because there are other games or matches or races or whatever that we are training students for where they do get evaluated, like an advanced placement or international baccalaureate exam. 

[00:16:29] Olivia: Yes.

[00:16:29] Sarah: Or, you know, college applications or mandated state testing or whatever. Like there are other places that we can consider as the game that we're getting them ready for. But if we're evaluating constantly in our classroom too, it gets in the way of the teacher and learner relationship so that the student doesn't feel safe to take risks and sometimes fail as is necessary for the learning process, as is necessary for the training process.

[00:16:57] Sarah: And if you're an athlete, sometimes things just don't go very well. And, um, you know, if every move that you made during practice was being evaluated. 

[00:17:05] Olivia: It'd be awful. 

[00:17:06] Sarah: Would you want to even go right? 

[00:17:08] Olivia: No, no, it would feel awful. And I think too of writing and just how messy it is. It's so, it's so messy and how having a really good editor, having a second set of eyes to look and offer feedback that is naming what is in place and giving you guidance to say, look, this is what you need more for your readers.

[00:17:31] Olivia: That's another huge piece of what I love about your shift. It's not deficit based. It's not, I'm working for these points. It's instead the notion of points when you think of your grade book, it's really working toward a percentage of completion and it's all about the process.

[00:17:51] Sarah: Yep.

[00:17:51] Olivia: And that's what life is. It's about the process, not that final product. And I think of Cris's words alongside with Sam of, if we are only assessing that end product, it's too late. It's, it's such a lost moment in time. Sometimes school districts have common assessments or common mandates. I'd love to have you share.

[00:18:14] Olivia: How can we tell what is actually required? And I hate it when people say because it's always been done this way. So that is not what makes something actually required. Would you speak to what helps us know if something is for realz required that we can't let go of, please? 

[00:18:30] Sarah: Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I did a lot of thinking about this and I mean, really, truly, cause there's a lot.

[00:18:37] Sarah: One thing that I bring up in the book is this study that I found that I love that puts this idea on the table of phantom policy. 

[00:18:44] Olivia: Yes. 

[00:18:37] Sarah: And phantom policy is the policy that we carry around in our heads. That is the stuff that we feel like we're supposed to be doing. And the example given in the study is about Romeo and Juliet being taught in 9th grade.

[00:18:59] Sarah: Um, and there's even a little excerpt from an interview in the study, like where somebody's like: Well, you know, it must be required because, you know, my friends in California and their ninth graders, you know, I mean, the truth of the matter is there's a very like popular literature textbook that has Romeo and Juliet in it for ninth grade.

[00:19:16] Sarah: I mean, that's like, that drives a lot of it, I think, but it's also a super approachable Shakespeare play. It's also like, there's all kinds of things, right? 

[00:19:24] Olivia: Yes.

[00:19:34] Sarah: But that's a really, I think, salient example of this phantom policy thing that people just get in their head that, oh, that's the way it's, I'm supposed to do it because that's the way I'm supposed to do it. Right? But the thing is, unless you're being evaluated on it, or unless it's something that is hardcore required by your district or your school, then really it's not required.

[00:19:50] Olivia: Yeah!

[00:19:50] Sarah: It's just, it just isn't. And that, I mean, you know, there are a lot of values in schools and departments that teachers have to navigate with each other, of course, always. And I think it's very important to have those conversations and navigate those values. But I mean, when it comes down to it, there's not so much that is actually required.

[00:20:08] Olivia: I'm going to start using that term all the time, phantom policy, but it's true. I think of it with family is in relationships. It's the stories we create behind the scenes, writing someone else's story. The fact versus fiction, thinking of my work with Lucy West and Toni Cameron. This belief we have that these things must always exist, that Great Gatsby always has to be taught in 11th grade.

[00:20:32] Olivia: No, it doesn't. So, it's, it's interesting. One of the other pieces you address a question or a worry: I'm worried that I don't have time to reinvent all of my assignments. Or, what if we're required to use particular exams or quizzes? These are concerns that are real. 

[00:20:48] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:20:48] Olivia: Do we have to reinvent all of our assignments?

[00:20:53] Sarah: No, absolutely not. 

[00:20:53] Olivia: What do we do? 

[00:20:54] Sarah: I think you've got to go back and really think about what is it that I'm ultimately trying to teach? Like what is it that matters most? And if you get rid of that points for compliance exchange in the middle of your classroom and you take that out, you're not going to let that drive everything anymore.

[00:21:10] Sarah: You've got to put something else in the middle. For me, what that has been is a really nice tight list of learning goals. And I'm very purposeful with the word goals instead of standards or objectives or anything like that, because I want to say, this is not your curriculum objectives. And this is not your required standards.

[00:21:27] Sarah: This is something else because I think that we teachers, we need to sort through all of the curriculum expectations and all of the required standards. And we need to put something in front of our students that is much more meaningful for them than all of that. That is way too much. 

[00:21:42] Olivia: It is.

[00:21:42] Sarah: And so, I have done some work to boil down the curriculum expectations to a set of 10 learning goals. Three of them are actually like student habit goals. So, for each class I teach, I have only seven content goals and they are as general as revised extensively to improve a piece of writing. And that one goal actually covers many of the Common Core State Standards about learning process. 

[00:22:09] Olivia: Yes.

[00:22:09] Sarah: So, it's all in there, right? But I want to put something in front of my students that is a little stickier and a little easier for them to make sense of and hold in their heads and work with. Once you have that, then you can start looking through all of the things in front of you that seem to be required and start sorting and making decisions.

[00:22:31] Sarah: Like does this thing help me to achieve the goals that I have for this class, the learning goals? And we only have so much time, 180 days goes by pretty fast. I mean, it seems like it's endless when you're here at the start of the school year, like I am, but it's already week four. 

[00:22:49] Olivia: Yeah. It's crazy. 

[00:22:50] Sarah: Already week four, right? And so that's, that's crazy. It goes so fast and there's no way I could possibly ever teach all of the things that are, you know, “required” of me. 

[00:23:01] Sarah: And so, we're always making decisions anyway, about what we're going to teach and not teach. We might as well be super explicit about what we're using to make those decisions, and it's the things that we really value as teachers, and we can articulate those in a nice set of learning goals that is a fusion of our values and what we're required to teach and then use that to look at our curriculum and decide, okay, that thing actually doesn't help me meet any of these goals. So, let's stop doing it.

[00:23:33] Sarah: Right?

[00:22:34] Olivia: Ah, yes!

[00:23:34] Sarah: And here's a really important goal I'm actually not doing anything to meet it. I need to create something new. Right? But anything else that we have that lines up with those goals, we can certainly continue to use. And if it's a high stakes exam or a quiz or something like that, that we're expected to use, continue to use it, but just use it in a different way. Um, like, I repurpose reading quizzes as I call them reading comprehension checks and it's still a set of questions about the reading, but I put it in a Google form and turn it into a quiz so that it will automatically score itself.

[00:24:09] Sarah: And then the kids can go back through, and I set it so that it tells them what they got wrong, but doesn't tell them what the right answers are. And I set it so that they can go through it as many times as they want.

[00:24:19] Sarah: So, they go through and they answer the questions, they see how they did. They try to get the ones, right, that they got wrong. And it's all just for the purpose of them checking their own reading comprehension on their own. Without having that high-stakes grade being lorded over them because this is a high-stakes test or quiz or whatever.

[00:24:37] Sarah: And I think often teachers are really afraid that without those kinds of things like reading quizzes that have a significant grade that the kids aren't going to read. I just haven't found that to be true. I think the kids will read for other reasons, aside from having to be ready for a test,

[00:24:53] Olivia: Yeah, and so there are a couple of different ways I want to take the conversation.

[00:24:59] Olivia: I think we're at a good point to go back to that notion of standards-based grading. And then two other pieces I know I definitely want to have you speak to are the idea of feedback. And I want to also have you illuminate more about how you use grade book, because I think it's amazing. So, let's go back to standards-based grading.

[00:25:23] Olivia: What in the world does that mean to you? Because I know it means a lot of different things to different folks. 

[00:25:30] Sarah: Yeah, it really does. It means a lot of different things to different people and there's from I use a 4-3-2-1 scale. I'm doing standards-based grading like in some people's minds or in some school districts' minds.

[00:25:43] Sarah: That's we're doing standards-based grading. It's 5-4-3-2-1 instead of A-B-C-D-F, right? 

[00:25:49] Olivia: Yep.

[00:25:49] Sarah: To getting really, really clear about the standards that you're teaching and lining up in a grade book, like you have columns that are not assignments, but they are actually standards. That's also standards-based grading, right?

[00:26:02] Sarah: So, it means a whole bunch of different things. And so, when you told me that you wanted me to talk about this, I was like, oh, I don't really know what I want to say. But the thing is, it's just, it's so squishy. It's really squishy and problematic. 

[00:26:17] Olivia: It is. And what is problematic about it is that no matter what, as you were saying, if you're holding a grade connected to it, let's shift on to the grade book conversation because the way you use the standards or the notion of working towards this percentage.

[00:26:38] Olivia: It's really not about a standard per se, but it's much more about the process. And if you do give a quiz, it's just not factored into the grade is my understanding. So, would you speak to that? Cause I think that's really helpful.

[00:26:51] Sarah: Yeah, for sure. And I have become obsessed with process and trying to find ways to teach the process better and better and better.

[00:27:02] Sarah: Because that is where it all matters. Is the process and when we emphasize products that are with big grades and big rubrics and everything and finalize for the teacher to go through with a red pen. I like what you said about what Sam said, it's too late. It's really too late. That's where all our emphasis is.

[00:27:20] Sarah: Our emphasis needs to be on the process along the way. And for what that looks like for me, sometimes I don't even look very carefully at final drafts. 

[00:27:29] Olivia: Yeah.

[00:27:29] Sarah: Honestly, I look at their work and process and try to get involved there wherever I can through conferences and some feedback and getting the class doing a lot of feedback together.

[00:27:39] Sarah: And so, in the end, that final draft just doesn't matter as much, at least not for me, right? And I'm also trying to find more meaningful ways for those final products to be, um, used in my classroom community. Like, you got to finish this because a group is going to be doing something with it next week, so you better have it done.

[00:27:57] Sarah: But anyhow, the grade book. So, I cannot keep my grade book from calculating a percentage. Well, I could just not put any data in there. However, in the community where I am teaching, I would be fighting an uphill battle if I did that. I have no interest in doing that because there are so many people who look at my grade book for various reasons.

[00:28:18] Sarah: Parents look at it to monitor how their kids are doing. Kids look at it to monitor how they're doing. 

[00:28:23] Olivia: Yes. 

[00:28:23] Sarah: To find out if kids are eligible to compete in sports. My school pulls grade data from all of our grade books once a week, and so I gotta have something in there. And also, um, my admin team pulls great data at various times to monitor whatever they need to be monitoring or they have a question.

[00:28:42] Sarah: I just, I can't control who's going to be looking at it. I've also, um, support teachers like our special ed teachers and our English Language teachers, they're looking at the grade book data too. And, um, so if I have something in there that looks completely different and weird, I'm going to have to constantly be explaining it to people.

[00:29:01] Sarah: And that's going to get in the way of the shift that I have made. So I, I've been advising people to try to whatever you do in the grade book, make it look as close to what people expect as possible, but then train your kids to read it differently. And I do have a document on my website for parents to, to like, say how to read what you see in the grade book.

[00:29:24] Sarah: But training the kids, I think is the most important thing. And so, I record almost everything that I asked them to do, I put in there in the grade book, almost every single thing. And I put it in not with numbers, but I can make my own set of assignment marks. It's called in my grade book. We use Infinite Campus in my district.

[00:29:40] Sarah: My assignment marks are like if the assignment is done thoughtfully and completely, I put in complete and that calculates to 100%. And if they've done it, but they've got some work to do, I'll put in a partial and that calculates to about 70%... funny sometimes my students don't read instructions. I don't know if that happens to other people, but…

[00:29:59] Olivia: I think it may.

[00:30:00] Sarah:…if they do the work, but they really like miss something because they didn't pay close attention to the instructions, I'll put in review instructions.

[00:30:07] Sarah: And so that's the kind of immediate feedback I give them. And then I, I have about 240 characters in a comment to go with each assignment. I use that to record some qualitative data, or if there actually is a score, I put it there in the comment box. Because scores are good data for us.

[00:30:27] Sarah: If we're looking for trends and growth and blips where things were going fine and weren't going fine, those numbers can be really good data for us and for the kids. So, if I have a score, I put it in that comment box. So, it's there. The kid can see it. I can see it. Parents can see it. Anybody who needs to see it can see it.

[00:30:44] Sarah: But the number that's being calculated overall is a completed work percentage is what I tell the kids. And every Monday, what I tell them is just a reminder, the number you see in the grade book is not your grade. It's just a metric to let us know if you're keeping up with the work or not keep it at 100%.

[00:31:02] Sarah: If it's not at 100%, something is amiss. And um, it's just one metric that we'll consider when we're deciding what your semester grade is going to be. Every Monday, I say the exact same thing. 

[00:31:14] Olivia: I love it. And I have a quote that I took from chapter five, page 106. I want to read it because I think it is a beautiful synopsis of what you are going for with grade book.

[00:31:27] Olivia: They might start with partial but can definitely end up at complete. In this way, I honor the process of learning, recognizing that growth means working at something again and again. Students focus on the work rather than the grade. It frees them to take risks. It reduces their stress. They are not worried about losing points and can instead see their work for what it is so they can focus on making it as strong as possible.

[00:31:54] Olivia: Yes. I love it. 

[00:31:56] Sarah: Yep. 

[00:31:56] Olivia:  I love it. And I think that whole notion of making learning visible, I adore the idea too of teaching the students, the children, how to read the grade book differently, give them the key, right? So, all these codes and what this actually means, I think the way you speak to that in the book is just fabulous.

[00:32:17] Sarah: Thank you. This year, all the other assessment data that my classroom produces, I want to do a better job of getting the kids working with it, you know, getting in the weeds with it. And we have some new online tools the district has gotten us during pandemic and post-pandemic that have the potential to give us some good data, but I want the kids to be working with it, not me.

[00:32:37] Olivia: Yeah. 

[00:32:38] Sarah: You know, about the reading and writing skills. So, I'm trying to figure that piece out. 

[00:32:43] Olivia: Well, it's not easy and we can think about that too when it comes to feedback. Before we go there, I think it's just important for listeners and for caregivers, especially to think about. What do we actually want when we think we're asking for grades and tests?

[00:33:00] Olivia: What is it we're actually really asking for? And you cite some research in your book, Guskey and Bailey's research in 2001, it was saying that you quote: Parents want to have more detailed information about how their child is doing. And it's not going to come through a letter A-B-C-D. It's not going to come through a 1-2-3-4, unless there's the conversation that happens. So, when do you have that conversation with caregivers and so the students can feel empowered? 

[00:33:32] Sarah: Yeah. When I found that research from Guskey and Bailey, it was so helpful for me because I, I too have found that when I tell parents, you know, please look beyond the number when you check your student’s work in my class.

[00:33:44] Sarah: Sure. You might just stop at the percentage and if the number is something that you are okay, with you might, you know, not go any deeper, but please open it up the fuller detail because I'm building a story of your student's journey in my class. And with the comments that I put in, I just reflect back and say, you chose to write about blahhh and you on this revision, you worked on this.

[00:34:05] Sarah: I mean, it's just a very reflective, just mirroring back to the kids, the work they're doing, but yeah. You know, one little reflective comment at a time adds up to a portrait that is so much more meaningful than simply numbers in a great book. And so, I think that that is definitely what parents want. They want to know what their kid is, is learning, right?

[00:34:26] Sarah: They want to know where they're growing and where they're progressing. And I think that we can use the grade book in a way to help parents to be able to have that kind of information. And again, that is all secondary to me that I want the kids to have the information they need to really see their own journeys as learners.

[00:34:45] Sarah: That's the most important piece for me. So…

[00:34:47] Olivia: Yeah. And I love when you speak to the difference between description versus evaluation of how freeing it is to describe in those comments, what a student is doing versus evaluating what they're not. It's a total mind shift. It's awesome. So, talking feedback, as I told you earlier, I'm working with Cris Tovani and Sam Bennett in a school district, and we are grappling with high school and middle school teachers around: How do we offer feedback?

[00:35:19] Olivia: Do we give every prep feedback every day? Do we ever sleep again and spend time with family if we're offering feedback on everything? Probably not. So, you know, I love your words, sharing the feedback load with students. And you have seven really concrete ways to do that. Before I have you speak to those, would you define what feedback means to you?

[00:35:46] Olivia: Like what's the purpose of feedback in your mind? 

[00:35:48] Sarah: In chapter four, there's five things that I put up on the board and have the kids copy into their writer's notebook, and this will be just next week when we do our feedback boot camp in my class. But that was one part of writing the book, I did some research to try to figure out in the field and the research.

[00:36:05] Sarah: What really is feedback. How are people defining it? And I found lots and lots of different takes on it. So, I try to sort of sum it up in my book and for my students. And I mean, just on that list are things like the feedback should be a conversation. If it's a piece of writing between the writer and the reader, it should be a conversation between the two.

[00:36:23] Sarah: If you're in the position of giving feedback, you should be trying to cultivate thinking in the person you're giving feedback to. So, you should be thinking about what could I say that will get this person to think a little bit more feedback that's tied to people's goals that they have for themselves is according to the research, the best kind of feedback.

[00:36:41] Sarah: And so, once students have identified their own learning goals, then, um, they need to share those with people who are giving them feedback so that those people can tie the feedback that they're giving to those goals. Feedback is a mirror. It just reflects back. It doesn't evaluate. It just kind of reflects back to the learner, the work that they are doing.

[00:37:01] Sarah: It's powerful to do that too. It's, it's so crazy. Like just writing about here's what I saw you do and, and kids are like, wow, that's so helpful. Nobody's ever given me that kind of feedback before. I'm like, I literally just summed up and wrote back to you what you did. You know, it doesn't take as much energy as people think that it does, you know, and if you're not evaluating constantly, if you stop doing that, you have room in your head for feedback.

[00:37:44] Olivia: Yes!

[00:37:28] Sarah: And this kind of reflective feedback. So that's another thing I hear from teachers often. I don't have time to do that. I'm like, well, if you don't have to do the evaluation all the time and justify for the points you took off, you do have room in your head for feedback. So. And it doesn't have to be a lot too. It doesn't have to be extensive.

[00:37:44] Olivia: Sarah, this is so reminding me because my work also is with kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers. And the whole notion of a conference and how a conference can be structured through, I think of Vygotsky's zones of development and thinking of that zone of actual development. 

[00:38:04] Olivia: If we start there in that idea of mirroring and describing what we're seeing as strengths, with what's happening on the page or what that student is doing and then choose the next step based on just what's a little bit of a stretch for them and their proximal development. I think that that's a lot of the work we're asking primary teachers to do in the lower elementary grades. Still that structure of offering feedback in a thoughtful way based on the student's strengths, not sifting and sorting through what is not happening.

[00:38:37] Olivia: So, I think it's pretty cool if we're thinking of, uh, kindergarten through 12th-grade idea of how this work develops and evolves. The possibilities are endless if we start at the age of four and five naming for students what they're doing well and building upon that. And that's how I like to learn. 

[00:38:57] Sarah: Yeah, me too.

[00:38:58] Olivia: Right? I think it's, it's a good feeling. Um, I want to let listeners know that again, your website is incredible with lots of different templates, different resources, or links to Google docs as well. I know that there are different stakeholders and something I wanted to end our conversation around is how do you spread this notion of pointless grading across content areas?

[00:39:29] Olivia: Because often I'm having the conversation with ELA teachers, but I've started to have the conversation with social studies teachers and science educators. It's a hard conversation. So, do you have ideas that we can leave listeners with for that? 

[00:39:47] Sarah: Yeah, it's a challenge for sure. And there've been lots of people who aren't, you know, teachers of reading and writing who have picked up the book and have been able to translate it into their content areas.

[00:39:58] Sarah: Because I think at the heart of it is. And when I really got into this book, I realized I'm just writing an assessment book. It's like assessment 101. What are you teaching? How are you going to teach it? And how are you going to know what your students have learned? Literally that is what pointless is about, is taking it back. 

[00:40:17] Sarah: Because if you're going to take the points for compliance exchange out of the center of the classroom, you have to put something else there. And that is, what are you teaching? How are you going to teach it? And how are you going to know that your students are learning? And that goes across all content areas. I've had conversations with science teachers about, okay, let's strip it down.

[00:40:36] Sarah: What is it you want your students to get out of this year? Let's take what you value about teaching science up against what you're required. And let's try to make a really nice, tight list. Okay, now, um what are you doing to address those things in class? Are you teaching those things? Is there anything you need to create?

[00:40:53] Sarah: So, you're teaching those things. Is there anything you can get rid of because it doesn't match up with those goals, et cetera. And then, all right, now, how are you going to discover if your students are learning those things and how can you do it in a way that centers on students being the most important users of that assessment data? Then how can you get kids looking at the goals and making their own goals and how can, you know, all of those pieces are not contingent and only relevant to teaching, reading, and writing?

[00:41:22] Olivia: The other way I've looked at your book is the notion of feedback is not something that's just within schools as organizations. This is something we can think of ripple effects as adults, how we offer feedback, how we listen to each other across the board. And so, I, I think one of my favorite blog entries I'll end on of yours was August of 2021.

[00:41:46] Olivia: It's called 7 Reasons Why It's Okay That I'm Not Evaluating My Students Anymore. It's one of my favorites. I love for some reason, blogs that have like a number with reasons. I just, I like them. They're very clean. You lead off that blog with: Here are the reasons why I think it's okay to emphasize process and feedback instead of evaluation of final products, shifting the focus from measuring mastery to describing growth and making sure students actually do the work.

[00:42:15] Olivia: And Sarah, that's what it's all about. The process. Doing the work, actually reading, writing, becoming social scientists, historians. That's what we want, right? I'm grateful for you for putting this process into a book. I'm sure you have other projects and research cooking, and I'm excited to see what comes out next from you.

[00:42:36] Sarah: Oh, thank you. Yeah. I'm, I'm working on another book about instruction. This is the assessment book.

[00:42:41] Olivia: Oh! I can't wait. 

[00:42:42] Sarah: Got an instruction book on deck and maybe I'll write a curriculum book. I don't know. We'll see. 

[00:42:47] Olivia: Sounds dreamy. I will be ready and waiting. So, thank you so much for giving your time. 

[00:42:53] Sarah: Olivia, thank you for this opportunity.

[00:42:54] Sarah: It's been just a, a joy talking to you this evening.

[00:42:57] Olivia: All right, take care. Schoolutions is a podcast created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Special thanks to my guest, Dr. Sarah M. Zerwin. Thanks to my older son Benjamin, who created the music that's playing in the background. If you like Schoolutions, please share, rate, review, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @schoolutionspodcast. If you want to reach out, leave me a SpeakPipe voice memo at my website: www.oliviawahl.com/podcast or via email @schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Don't forget to talk about us nicely on social media, and please keep listening. Let's continue finding inspiration together.