Your Morning Boost - The Non-Negotiable: How to Partner with Parents on Grading Reform

Welcome to your Morning Boost, brought to you by AWB Education. Here we amplify knowledge, widen reach, and broaden impact in education, delivering your daily dose of professional development. This program is sponsored by Grundmeyer Leader Services, where together we are transforming education, one leader. At a time. Now get ready to amplify your day with your Morning Boost. Happy Thursday Boosters, Welcome back to your Morning Boost, and a big welcome back to our guests this week, doctor Matt Townsley and doctor Chad lang As. We've been engaging in this conversation around grading practices and trying out this new five question format here. So we got three down, we got two more to go. One here on Thursday that we're going to get to here in just a second. But gentlemen, this has been fun. I've really enjoyed our conversation so far this week. This has been great, So thank you guys for joining us. We will get to that question here in just a second after we pay a couple of bills, So hold on, guys, we'll do our commercial break and then be right back with question number four. Have you listened to Control Shift Lead, the new podcast from AWB Education and Inspired Edification. He stayed with the basics. He was never flashy, and I think that's one of the things that people liked. If not, you are missing out. And I think of the word vulnerable comes to mind all the time. Yep. Every month, Jim and Adam bring you three things. Something you can control, something that will shift your thinking, and something that can help you lead your school, district or building. I need our staff to be that. Search for control, shift lead Wherever you get your podcasts and start listening today. All right, So we've had some really great conversation about the fact that grating is communication. We're trying to make sure that we communicate true purpose of learning, and there's some ways to do that and ways maybe not to do that, certainly as we've gotten stronger and better at that practice. So this question is kind of talking on another little scale of this, which unfortunately is just part of the problem here sometimes for schools, and that is just this shift to standards based grading. It often conflicts with a traditional digital grade book software. So the question, gentlemen, is what is the most common functionality hurdle that these digital systems create for teachers and give us one practical, low tech workaround that. A school can use to minimize that limitation. Well, I think I can get it started with this, just like any retailer of cars or computers or phones. You know, the more options, the more customizable we can make it, the fancier we can make it. The illusion of precision and betterness for lack of better terms comes through in this case when it comes to grading, less is more. They all have so many different calculative functions, and it really bates us into this trap that, as our friendly Anne Young says, precision is not akin to validity. You know, the idea that we're kind of mistaking this calculation for some sort of clarity that we're getting from the grade. And this is simply not the case. And so my advice always with our teams is to while it looks fancy and nice, we don't need the Lamborghini to be able to communicate what a child can nowhere do related to a standard or unit. We need the Flintstones car. It's simple, it's straightforward. We all know how to use it and everybody knows how to interpret it. And while it's awesome, there's some other great features in these systems, all the math that it wants to really do just gives us this allua precision or this illusion, and it oftentimes just lefts with even more questions to ask. As Matt has pointed out before. THEE I think is add on to what doctor Lange said there the idea of less is more. I'm old enough to remember being in school as is to Sudent, where I couldn't access my grade on a daily basis or a weekly basis. Even I had to wait till the end of the reporting period, or I had to walk up to my teacher and ask what my grade was at that current time, and they get out their little green book and look down the columns and rose and maybe do a quick calculation and try to tell me an estimate of what my grade is. I remember also being a teacher where the norm was there was an electronic grade book, and we told our parents to log in and get access to them. And so our parents and our students are expecting to see things in the grade book with the number every single day, maybe even multiple times a day. And so the common hurdle for teachers to overcome is don't feel like you have to put a number in when you put things in, because we could go down the line of what those numbers mean. But I think if we dig into what those numbers ought to mean, the short story is there's oftentimes where just a symbol like check done, late, missing, partial, complete, we'll do the job of communicating that we thought the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, five point six or whatever was doing for us, but it really wasn't. And so I would argue that the common hurdle to overcome here is to not use a number, or the hurdle is to use a number, And the low tech solution is is to look for the functionality that we know now is in most electronic grade books a check an X, whatever that functionality is. And pro tip for the boosters out there, it's probably gonna save you time too. No kitty, No kitty, I said, as just as you're saying that there, it just brings me back. I've got I've got one kiddo left at home, my other two are off of college right now. And it was a week or so ago. She comes home. She'd just taken a I think it was a stats test or something, and she's like looking at her phone and like, is what you're doing? Like, oh, I was just checking to see if my grades in there, like, oh, when'd you take this test? Eighth period? I'm looking down in my watch like that was It's like thirteen minutes ago. You just got home right, And it's just crazy that that could happen. I mean, we actually have those moments and it does become that expectation, But it's crazy. What a what a different world round when it comes to grading Adam. Isn't there some advice out there, like when you have stocks in the stock market or you have fantasy football that it's like you shouldn't look at it all the time. It doesn't really change anything. In fact that it caused you to make some rash decisions when you don't have all the information. That's why you have a broker. You know. I don't know about fantasy football. I can't. I don't have a great grandiose advice there. But seeing the stats literally as they caught the ball doesn't change the fact that I can't change the outcome of this game. And I think we just live in that hyper notification society and it's really dangerous to do that and set that up as a system when you know it creates anxiety onto the kids and the parents don't have all the information, and maybe the students don't even have all the information yet. And it's just if there's ability, and there usually is to modify and adjust notifications and work with the companies. The companies and to be really great to work with about that. And we've found we've found that to be our case around the country. Only just reach out to and ask them and say, hey, we're really struggling with this piece. It's really encumbering our ability to move forward in our grading reform. They can really tend to work through some changes for you that maybe other districts are doing and used to know them out. And you know the phrase that we use in our book. I'll give Chad credit for for thinking this phrase is called scoreboard watching, where we're just constantly waiting for that next ping of that next notification. And I understand where it comes from, right, Like, the tool is there, and so why wouldn't we be using it to communicate something. I fully understand that, and our parents and students have access to it, so I fully understand that. But what we're communicating, I think is super important. How we go about communicating that, And so take the opportunity to not communicate a number when a number is not needed in there. I think is that low techt time saver hack that perhaps those listening to this podcast are going to take home this week and feel really good about. Yeah, that's good. One of my favorite authors, Brene Brown clear is kind man, clear as kind, and sometimes we forget we need to do that for our families and our students as well. Just that's okay. It's all right to not have to give all of that information immediately, and I agree it's going to save you a lot of time and effort and headaches too. All right, gentlemen, Four down, one to go. This has been a great start to our great kind of finish really honestly of the week. As we're going on here, I know we could probably do one hundred questions with you guys and still not run out of material. So we're gonna limit it to five. We're gonna get through this week and we're gonna get that done. Thanks again for joining us today, gentlemen and boosters. Thank you for hopping on to listen to some great tips and tricks on when we start talking about grating practice, is how we can make that better for everybody, yourself included. That's certainly very important. So again, thank you for listening. We'll be backing in tomorrow with a little bit more on your Morning Boost by AWB Education. Thank you Boosters. We'll talk with you again tomorrow. That concludes another episode of your Morning Boost. We hope today's daily dose of professional development helps you amplify knowledge, widen reach, and broaden impact. Your Morning Boost is an AWB Education production brought to you with the generous support of Grundmeier Leader Services. Join us again tomorrow for more. Until then, keep boosting your impact.