Khan Academy Ed Talks with Matt Townsley, EdD - Thursday, Feb. 10

Hello and welcome to ED Talks with Khan Academy. I'm Kristin Docero, the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, and I'm excited today to talk to Dr. Matt Townsley, who is a professor and author of Making Grades Matter. We'll be talking about all things grading, so if you have questions, please drop them into the chat.

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So, as I said, I'm excited today to welcome Matt Townsley. He is the author of Making Grades Matter: Standards-Based Grading in a Secondary PLC. I'm looking forward to talking about all things grading. Welcome!

Dr. Matt Townsley: Well, hello! Thank you very much for having me.

Kristin Docero: Absolutely! So, I always like to first ask people, how did you end up studying grading and grades? What was your path to get here?

Dr. Matt Townsley: Yeah, that's a really fun question and one I'm really excited and passionate about. I don't think I went into education; I don't think anyone really went into education to get better at grading. In fact, it might just be something that we all have to do. Although, in 2008, I was a high school math teacher here in Iowa. I went to the State Math Teacher Conference, and there was a breakout session called “How to Fix Your Broken Grade Book,” led by another high school math teacher. I thought, "Well, I'll just go and see if I can take something away back to my own classroom and get a little bit better."

Kristin, literally that 45 to 50-minute session changed my professional career forever. I came back really excited, talked to our high school principal at the time, and just, you know, thanked him for allowing me to go. Back in 2008, he just really encouraged me to say, "Hey, could you try out something that you learned from this session in your classroom?" I thought, "Well, there's only nine weeks left in the school year; that seems kind of crazy." But I picked my last period geometry class and just started changing some things up related to grading.

As a result of that, I started reading every book, article, or blog post I could find about grading. Fast forward a couple of years later, I had a number of conversations with other teachers in our high school and our middle school, and they started thinking differently about grading. Fast forward another year or so later, and I got promoted to the district office. We had this dilemma in our school in Solon, Iowa, this little rural community in Iowa, where some of our teachers were thinking differently about grading and others weren't yet.

So we had a decision to make: Were we going to kind of be okay with that middle ground, or were we going to go on a journey to see if we all wanted to think about grading differently? So obviously, we made the decision to all think about grading differently. My experience comes from being a classroom teacher doing this standards-based grading thing and also leading a change in our school district to make grading practices significantly different.

You mentioned our book, Making Grades Matter, and again as a high school math teacher, I don't really consider myself to be an author or really that great of a writer, but through others that have written books and heard about our work, we were actually encouraged to write our own book. Standards-based grading is not always viewed as something that is easily attainable at the secondary level in particular, so our book really helps middle school and high school teachers take their next steps with standards-based grading.

So that's a little bit about my journey. Currently, though, I work at the University of Northern Iowa, where I teach future principals and superintendents and also support as many educators as possible to take their next steps towards more effective grading practices. And it's just a thrill to be here today to talk about a topic I'm really, really, really passionate about.

Kristin Docero: That is great! So let's start at the beginning. What is standards-based grading?

Dr. Matt Townsley: Yeah, great. Maybe the best way to explain it is it's a philosophy, or a process, or a set of practices that really aim to communicate students' current levels of learning separately from their behaviors. When you think about maybe the grading practices that you and I experienced as students, maybe we got like a 95 percent in a class, but that 95 percent could have meant we got 95 percent of the points, or it could have meant we actually got 100 of the points and turned in a couple assignments late.

In the past, we've mixed kind of behaviors with learning. In standards-based grading, those two things are separate. I think about when I take my car to a mechanic; sometimes I do a 20-point inspection, and on that 20-point inspection, it tells me if my brakes are really good or not very good, if my battery is really good or not very good. A mechanic kind of breaks down the components of my vehicle and gives me very specific feedback on how well my car is doing on each one of those.

So that's the aim of standards-based grading: to give our students a much more detailed perspective on a standard by standard basis, if you will, on what they're doing really well at and what they could get even better at. It also embeds elements of probably something I know you're very passionate about: mastery learning, as well. I hope we can talk more about that today.

Kristin Docero: That's great! So from a student perspective, what are the benefits of grading this way as opposed to a more traditional way?

Dr. Matt Townsley: So maybe in the past, students have found themselves not really knowing what the currency of the classroom is. Sometimes it's just all about earning. When they're at that cusp of 89.4 percent and they want to get their grade up to an 89.5 percent, so they'll get rounded up to the favorable grade. They want to get the scholarship or the honor roll or the GPA that they want. They may just ask the teacher, "What can I do to improve my grade?"

Maybe the teacher is in a good mood that day and says, "Here’s an extra credit crossword puzzle," or "Here's something else you can do." But maybe the teacher's not in that great of a mood or just maybe has more of a "Hey, you need to just do better next time" mindset. Because the currency of the classroom is all about earning at that point, when the currency of the classroom, which is what standards-based grading is all about, is more about learning.

Now a student might ask, "Hey, Mr. Townsley, I'm not very good yet at Pythagorean's theorem. Could I show you how I'm better at Pythagorean's theorem now?" By showing me as the teacher that they're actually better at Pythagorean's theorem, then as a result of that, their grade might improve, which is a good thing, right? Because if the student has learned more of the math stuff or the science stuff or the social studies stuff, they should, of course, have a better grade because the purpose of grades is really to communicate students' current levels of learning.

So students really, I believe, have more ownership in their learning process because it's more about what's what they're in control of, which is the extent to which they've learned the standards in the class.

Kristin Docero: Got it! So I see that link. So, as we think about mastery learning here, one of the things that we're thinking about is that you're doing whatever work you need to increase your proficiency or work towards mastery and that it's not that you get one shot at a test and that's your score, but you can keep learning and keep trying and improving on that over time. Does that fit into this idea of grading based on standards?

Dr. Matt Townsley: Yes, indeed it does. In my own research, I've read quite a bit about mastery learning, so I can confirm this on that level, Kristin. As I think back to mastery learning, I think of Benjamin Bloom and others that have really set the foundation for what mastery learning is. You know, back in the day, there was this mentality of: well, only a certain percent of the students ought to deserve an A, or only a certain element of students ought to be successful in a class, kind of that bell-shaped curve IQ testing mentality.

But when Bloom and others really challenged that mindset, they said, "You know what? If we provide students more time and the right conditions, many, many, many, more students can learn at a high level." In other words, if achievement can be constant and time can become the variable, then even more students can learn at a high level. As I think about standards-based grading, that's really what it aims to do.

Again, if we did not do very well early on in the learning process—maybe we turned in some homework assignments that we didn't really understand what was going on in our class—we kind of dug ourselves into a whole point-wise or percentage-wise within a standards-based grading mindset. It's really all about how much a student has learned. If Kristen, if you or I are in the same class and you learn it before I do, one of the premises of standards-based grading is that it doesn't really matter when a student learns it. We honor the fact that students learn at different rates and paces, and if my learning comes later, I'm going to erase that old version of learning in the gradebook and replace it with more recent evidence of learning.

Again, that's a mindset shift in particular for many of our secondary educators out there, but it really comes—it's not necessarily a new idea—it comes from years and years of theory and research related to mastery learning. I think Leanne Young and Tom Guskey, in their 2011 article in the Clearinghouse, really made some strong connections between mastery learning and also the response to intervention model that many schools are working towards right now.

That just says, "Hey, you know what? If we can really provide quality instruction, if we can also then provide the right amount of interventions to students who still do not understand it, we can help a lot of students learn at a high level." All those things really fit in the standards-based grading and mastery learning bucket, if you will.

Kristin Docero: That totally makes sense. This also is reminding me of links to motivation research, where there's whether students are motivated to learn or whether they're motivated to get a score that shows what they learned, and that students who are motivated based on learning a new thing tend to be more engaged and more interested in learning. Is that connected to all this as well, in terms of increasing student motivation?

Dr. Matt Townsley: Of course! Yes, again, as I think about the default feedback that I included that I gave to students back in the day before I went to this state math teacher conference, I would frequently give students like a 14 out of 16 on a quiz. But that 14 out of 16 really didn't tell the student what they're doing really well at and what they need to get better at.

I mean, imagine if I went to the doctor's office, and the doctor said, "You're about an 85" health. I'd be like, "Well, what's the other 15, Doc? Tell me, tell me!"

At the heart of standards-based grading is using some other type of scale—many schools use like an almost, or a proficient, or some other descriptor of learning—to tell a student exactly the extent to which they have learned that particular standard. Really, what it is, it's much more specific feedback to the student on exactly what they're doing and what they need to do to get better.

One of the things that I look back on in my own teaching career and wonder is how often was I giving feedback to students that really helped them understand how to close the gap? So sometimes when educators start doing this standards-based grading thing, they realize that it's not just the gradebook that needs to improve, but it's also their feedback practices.

You know, if I can just give a shout-out to so many wonderful researchers and authors out there—Susan Brookhart, Dylan Wiliam, and others who really talked about feedback being at the heart of the learning process. Our students really deserve feedback not on a unit 3 test or in just an essay perspective, but on a much more granular level on a standard-by-standard level, and when we provide them that very detailed level of feedback, you're right, Kristin, the research suggests they're much more excited and motivated to improve upon that feedback.

Kristin Docero: That makes sense! So you said this could be a change in thinking and mindset for some educators. Where do things start? What are some things that, for instance, when you came back from this conference, or what are maybe some initial steps that teachers can take towards this different mindset?

Dr. Matt Townsley: A couple things. One is, in my mind, I tend to think about textbooks and chapters as being the driving force for what I taught. In fact, I'll never forget when I got my first teaching job; I was assigned to teach geometry and several other courses, and I asked some of their teachers, "Hey, like, what are kids supposed to learn in geometry?" and they said, "Well, here's the textbook. Most years we get to chapter 12, and some years we get to chapter 13. Here you go."

Of course, that's what I did! But now what I know is most states have some list of state standards, right? There have been some people who have gotten together and said these are the most important things that students are supposed to learn in biology or Algebra 1 or 7th grade science. So instead of thinking about the textbook being the driving force of what we teach, we should look at the standards.

I worked with some PE teachers even in our school district, and they said, "Well, I was just so used to always doing the volleyball unit or the PE or the football unit," and frankly, like, that's the way they've always done it. That's okay, but we started thinking about "What are the specific learning goals? What are the specific standards that students are supposed to be learning in PE or seventh-grade science or math?"

So instead of thinking about the activities and the units as being the driver, we have to first start thinking about the standards or the learning goals being the driver. Then secondly, we have to design assessments that are very well aligned to those learning goals or those standards. Again, so many of us we just inherited the assessments, right?

The tests that come with the textbook materials, or the tests or the quizzes or the projects that have been handed down from one teacher to the next. We have to ask ourselves to what extent are those actually aligned to the learning goals that we want. Finally, if I'm thinking about just a typical high school or middle school teacher, so many of us are used to grading based upon points and percentages, and points and percentages don't really do the best job of communicating to students what they're really good at and what they're not really good at.

I mean, think about this: What's the difference between a student who has 96 on a test and 94 on a test? Is there some—really is there a difference that's actually describable? Can we put our minds and our hands and our fingers on that difference in that two percent? So when educators really wrap their minds around the standards-based grading thing, they're going to think about some levels of learning like beginning, developing, area of concern, and proficient.

Again, that's just a huge mind shift for many of us—not because we may not want to do it, but because in our teacher preparation programs, we haven't necessarily been taught how to do it yet. I'm confident as we continue to improve and evolve in our teacher preparation and administrative preparation programs, that in time, we'll get to that point where more educators will be familiar with this process.

Kristin Docero: Yeah, so that leads me to think, how much can a teacher do this on their own versus how much do they need the school support? Changing what the report cards look like, changing what, you know, the parents are expecting to come home—what's the balance between those?

Dr. Matt Townsley: Oh, Kristin, you're giving me some good flashbacks to 2008-2009 as myself and just a few other teachers as we start doing it. Frankly, Kristin, it was an uphill battle for a number of years because in our classrooms, we were trying to reculture, as I referred to earlier, the currency of our classroom for students being all about learning.

This is not because the other teachers in our school were consciously doing it, but that's just what they knew. So students in my class might have—I might have been the only teacher that they had all day long where the currency of the classroom was learning early on.

It takes a really passionate, knowledgeable teacher to say, "You know what? There are going to be some hiccups; there are going to be some implementation dips along the way." One very specific one, as we think about again this idea of mastery learning is that time becomes the variable, not the constant. We want achievement to be the constant.

So myself as a teacher, I have to figure out times during my class period or during the school day where I can provide additional instruction to students who have not yet demonstrated an understanding of Pythagorean's theorem or the other standards in the classroom. That's much easier when the whole school is on board. We'll hear about schools doing an intervention time or a "what I need" time, or if their mascot is a tiger, a "tiger time" where school-wide students are provided time for additional instruction and reassessments.

If those specific times during the day are not in place, and if the culture of most classrooms is still more about earning than is about learning for individual teachers, this is going to be a pretty big uphill battle. That's why in our book Making Grades Matter, we talk about the individual classroom shifts in many of our chapters. We talk about doing it as a team, as a professional learning community, together. Then the final chapter of our book, we also talk about how to make this entire shift as a school.

In the research that I've done and that I've seen, Kristin, almost always there is a certain level of an implementation dip that happens, and it's most often because we're not approaching it as an entire school and understanding that there will be an implementation dip. I appreciate that question, and I want to encourage listeners and viewers out there who are really thinking about making the shifts to know and appreciate the implementation dip and to ride it out, to encourage our entire school to make these changes in time. It really does take time.

Kristin Docero: That totally makes sense! So we have a couple questions that are similar to each other and along the same line. One from Aviv and one from Lance McConnell: What are the things to start to work with teachers to help shift mindsets? And if you've asked if teachers have less flexibility, what are some things that they can do—again, a first couple of steps to start changing their practice?

Dr. Matt Townsley: I'd say a couple of things. One is just to first take a kind of a balcony view and say, "What's the purpose of grades in my classroom?" You know, sometimes we'll kind of jump right down to the actionable things that the teacher should do—like maybe instead of giving zeros for incomplete work, maybe just give 50s. Sometimes we'll hear about schools doing that, and while that's an admirable practice in absence of really focusing on what's the purpose of grades. Oh, the purpose of grades is to communicate learning.

So just having the conversation with a department, having a conversation with an individual teacher, having a conversation at a faculty meeting about what do we believe as a school or as a team about the purpose of grading is crucial. And then, while we're waiting for maybe everyone to move forward in an actionable way, individual teachers can start doing what I call having one foot in the standards-based grading world and one foot in the traditional grading world.

We can experiment with our students. For example, at an upcoming test, if you know as a teacher that you cannot yet put like a one, two, three, or four, or an area of concern, beginning, almost there, proficient in the gradebook yet, you could still provide that same level of feedback to students on an upcoming test for each standard or learning goal and just ask students, "Hey, with this level of feedback, what do you want to do next? How can I help you as a teacher improve on these learning goals? What can you do as a student to improve on these learning goals?"

You can have that conversation without having to change anything at all in the gradebook. Now, in that scenario, you would still put whatever the building or the district requires, like a percentage in the gradebook, but you would have the conversation with your students to see how they would react to a much more specific learning goal feedback. What most educators will find is that students actually crave that same level of feedback.

One of the things I did in my own classroom is I started asking students about the level of feedback they got from their drama director or their musical director or their band instructor or their football coach, and most often, all of those extracurricular and co-curricular sponsors and coaches gave them very detailed feedback. If we make that connection, even if we can't be all in the gradebook because of building or district policy constraints, we can still begin to provide that same level of feedback to our students and see how they react to it.

What that's going to require is just taking a more precise look at our assessments and aligning the standards, and I think any teacher can start doing that now without having to have the permission of their administration or have some switch turned on at the electronic gradebook level to make that possible.

Kristin Docero: Great. Here's another question from Facebook, Greg Mullin. It's a little bit different but interesting. How does standards-based grading help prepare students for higher education? I wonder if there's a sub-question in there of like if I had good grades like this, are colleges going to look at it kind of funny?

Dr. Matt Townsley: Fun to hear some of these names—thank you, Lance; thank you, Greg—for your questions. Regarding your question here, Greg, just a fantastic question, and one that is very important to discuss specifically for high schools making this shift. First, so often secondary parents or secondary teachers or secondary administrators will say, "If we do this, is it really going to prepare students for college?"

First, a couple things: If most of the high schools I know that do this, they still eventually determine a specific letter grade from the standard marks in the gradebook, and so these high schools still have a GPA that's still used for admissions and scholarship decisions. Now, down the weeds a little bit, then the next question maybe Greg's thinking about is, "But what if we provide students these multiple opportunities? What if we provide these redos and retakes in the spirit of mastery learning?" They may or may not do that at the college level.

What we have to know at the K-12 level is that our aim—because of federal legislation such as No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act—our aim is to help as many kids as possible get it. That's our job in the K-12 world. That may or may not be what the university and college folks are doing. Again, as a college professor, I can kind of speak to that. But there's just a different paradigm sometimes at the college/university level.

So, regardless of what college or universities do, our aim in K-12 is to help as many kids as possible get it, and so we believe that kids learn at different rates and paces. Of course, it makes sense to provide students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning through this whole reteaching and reassessment process.

Finally, some research that I've done with Dr. Thomas Guskey and Dr. Thomas Buckmiller suggests that college students at the end of their first semester, freshman year, we actually went through some surveys and interviews with students who self-disclosed that they went to a high school that was doing this standards-based grading stuff. They shared with us in our research that was published towards the end of 2020 in the NASSP Bulletin journal that they had just an okay time adjusting to the college and university level.

So if we have this idea in our mind that it's somehow going to wreck them as they transition to college/university, our research suggests that's just not the case as well. So thank you, Greg, and others for that wonderful question.

Kristin Docero: Excellent! Lots of good questions coming in. Here's another one thinking about how this applies to gifted students.

Dr. Matt Townsley: Fantastic! I wonder if there are thoughts about—does this create a ceiling that prevents gifted students from maybe moving into accelerated work or something?

Dr. Matt Townsley: I think there are two facets that are actually beneficial to gifted education. One of them is this: I mean, I think about some students I had in my own classroom that were just high achievers, and I worked in a high achieving school district—one of the most high achieving school districts in the state of Iowa.

There were some students who were still required—this was pre-standards-based grading—they were still required to do the homework or practice because there was a point value attached to it, but they knew; their parents knew, I knew that they really didn't need to do that practice. So it was just busy work for the sake of getting points to get the grade they wanted.

In a standards-based grading philosophy or school, there is no point value attached to home to assignments that are intended to be more practice-oriented. So if I'm a gifted student now, I no longer am subjected to doing busy work for the sake of busy work to get points. I think that's a huge win for our gifted students who may have other aspirations.

Secondly, in some schools, what they will do is they'll say, "Wow, this student, based upon this assessment evidence I have right now, is already proficient. They're already rocking and rolling with a specific standard," and so I'm going to provide some level of extension activity for the student. Before we would not have had that same detailed level of information for the learner because prior to standards-based grading, we would not have known by the student by the standard who was already getting it.

But with a standards-based grading mentality and gradebook, now we'll know specifically not just who the gifted students are, but the specific standards that they're absolutely rocking and rolling with. So, Kristen, I think to summarize this: this standards-based grading thing can be very beneficial to gifted students or high-achieving students because it provides better information to them and to their teachers about where it is exactly they're rocking and rolling, and it frankly just eliminates some busy work that they may have been subjected to in the past.

Kristin Docero: Great! All right, I'm going to sneak in one more question here before we close out. The other place that I've been hearing a lot about standards-based grading is in conversations around equity and in schools that are serving students from historically under-resourced communities. Tell me how you see standards-based grading potentially helping those students.

Dr. Matt Townsley: There's plenty of research that has been done about the factors that teachers consider in determining a grade, and this is again pre-standards-based grading. What we'll find in that research is that often teachers consider things like participation, sometimes even attendance. What we know when we look at students of different backgrounds is that by grading based upon participation in attendance, that is a very inequitable practice for some student groups.

I also think about—just to focus in on a very specific practice that I'm ashamed to say I did in my own classroom—that's awarding extra credit points for students bringing in materials such as Kleenex boxes or whiteboard markers. Think about the families that are able to do that and the families that are not able to do that. It's pretty obvious that there are families who are able to buy their kids' grades or improve their kids' grades by bringing in these materials.

Of course, this is just a far-out, over-exaggerated example, but this happens to the point where there was a legislator in Iowa several years ago that proposed a law to eliminate this practice because of the very question that you brought up, Kristin.

Perhaps the viewers and listeners here that are thinking about maybe just a real small step they could consider is if we are to eliminate the awarding of extra credit for materials, that's one step closer to more equitable grading practices. If we want to eliminate providing some points in our classrooms for participation or for attendance, that would be another great and wonderful step we could do that is more equitable for students of different backgrounds and demographics.

So yeah, and just give a shout-out to Joe Feldman who wrote a fantastic book called Grading for Equity that speaks even more detail to this very topic. We're hearing some pretty big school districts across the state saying we want to make some of these grading changes because equity is our driving force behind it. I'm saddened to see that COVID-19 happened, but in a way, I'm pretty excited to know that as a result of COVID-19 happening, more schools are recognizing how to create and utilize more equitable grading practices.

Kristin Docero: So thank you for bringing that topic to light, Kristin!

Dr. Matt Townsley: Absolutely! Well, this 30 minutes has flown by. It's been so nice talking to you. Thank you for all the research you're doing and the work you're doing to help schools and teachers make this shift. It's been a pleasure talking to you today.

Kristin Docero: Thank you very much, Kristen, for having me. It's been a pleasure!

Kristin Docero: Great! And thanks to everyone out there who's been listening. We will see you next time!