63 - Alternative Grading in a Math for Elementary Teachers Course: An Interview with Dr. Mary Reeves

Sep 24, 2024

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In this episode, Sharona and Bosley interview one of their former students. Dr. Mary Reeves took the MAA OPEN Math intensive training on "Redesigning Your Course for Mastery Grading" in the summer of 2023. Subsequently, she redesigned two of the math content courses for future Elementary and Middle School Math teachers. Join us to hear about Mary's experiences working with, and impacting, future teachers.

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[00:00:00] Mary Reeves: I was like, in 35 years I've never seen a student knock it completely out of the park on the very first try the way Isabella just did. And I'm not saying the rest of you didn't do a good job, you did, but this is amazing. And I want you to appreciate how incredible I think this is after doing this for years and years. Afterwards I told her, I'm like, this is going to be an assignment. I'm going to go ahead and put Mastery in your guidebook. You do not have to do it. Because you did it so beautifully the first time. Focus on something else. You've already accomplished everything that I wanted you to accomplish. After class she stayed for a few minutes and told me that was the first time she'd ever been singled out in a math class for something positive. And I'm not going to say that we both cried, but that's entirely possible.

[00:00:57] Boz: Welcome to the Grading Podcast, where we'll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We'll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success. I'm Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

[00:01:23] Sharona: And I'm Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in Higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week you will get the practical detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

[00:01:51] Boz: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co hosts and with me as always Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

[00:02:00] Sharona: I am doing well. I have a theme for this semester for myself. This is the theme of Exam generation semester, because with the new job I have, I'm writing a lot of exams and it's really making me aware of how much I've enjoyed my alternative grading over the last number of years. Because I haven't had to write exams in probably six years. And now that I have to do it as part of my new job, it's proving to be a little challenging.

[00:02:32] Boz: Well, but give a little bit more detail about that. Cause you're not just writing exams to give. What's going on with your new role that you're having to do that?

[00:02:43] Sharona: So in my new role, I have nine different courses that I coordinate of those nine, seven of them are in a traditional grading format, which means that five of the seven are not standards aligned. So they have learning outcomes, but the work to align the teaching with those learning outcomes hasn't happened. And in those I also have numerous, numerous sections. So I'm having to create exams that have a lot of problems on them. They're all mathematics So they're all having formatting issues. I need many many versions. So it's challenging, because you're working with me on this and you're asking me, so why am I asking this problem? And I'm looking at you going, I have no idea other than it's a section in the book.

[00:03:35] Boz: Well, but you're and the kind of the point I was hoping you would go to is these are all coordinated courses. So you're not writing test for a class. You're writing test for like common assessments. So that is kind of the first step that you've taken with all of these new courses that you're coordinating is you're at least getting common assessments in there as you know, you, and rightfully so, probably couldn't have jumped straight to alternative grading with all of these different math courses that you're now coordinating with six days in advance before the semester started getting the job right.

[00:04:13] Sharona: Exactly. Although I will say that yes, I'd say that the entry points that I have had with this sudden adjustment back into more traditional grading, I'm still me. I can't let things go unchallenged. So I'm very, very pleased to report that a couple of the fundamental features of alternative grading are creeping in right away. So I'd say the first thing is the idea of retakes. Almost all of my classes are offering some form of retake, even if it's not to the degree I would like. And the instructors very much want that, especially because they don't have to generate the exams for the retakes. So that's helpful. And everyone is cooperating to allow these common assessments. So those have both been really helpful very positive steps. We're also using some form of proficiency scaling because we're trying to do common grading. And so we're starting down the baby step paths to all that.

[00:05:09] Boz: So, and that's a key component, and one that I'm actually kind of surprised you're pulling off as well as you are, is anytime you have common assessments, the point of common assessments, you know, is to have kind of a equal measurement through the different instructors. That doesn't happen if you're not also calibrating your grading, which, like I said with as little time as you had and as big as teams as you have and as many that you have, the fact that you're pulling that off is also an incredible feat.

[00:05:43] Sharona: Well, and I have to give a big shout out to my instructors because they're the ones that are open and allowing this. And we have some people more skeptical and some people less skeptical, but everyone's at least willing to listen. And think about what we're asking. So that's been really good. But I am spending a lot of time head down in LaTex code and the things that make mathematics formatting happen.

[00:06:08] Boz: And we're not alone today, are we? So you want to introduce our guest today?

[00:06:14] Sharona: We are very happy to have with us in the virtual studio today, dr. Mary Reeves. Mary is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. She specializes, her little niche, is elementary and middle school math for teachers, so working with a lot of future teachers on the fundamentals of teaching math at those levels. She has her PhD in education from Louisiana State University. Welcome Mary to the pod.

[00:06:47] Mary Reeves: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

[00:06:49] Boz: One of the things, Mary, that we always like to ask our new guests when they first come on is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

[00:07:01] Mary Reeves: Well, it was 100 percent a coincidence. I was flipping through my email and I saw a message from MAA about the courses that they were offering for the following summer. This would have been fairly early in the spring. of 2023 so about February, and I just, I don't have anything to do right now, I thought, and I'm just going to take a look and see what the titles are. So I was expecting, and found, a lot of things that were clearly aimed at mathematicians who do different work than I do. Some very content focused workshops that were going on, but the very last one was enticing and intriguing and I don't remember exactly what the description said, but it really spoke to me about some things that I'd been dissatisfied with about my course.

[00:08:00] I taught elementary methods for decades, then I switched into mathematics, still teaching the same population, but at a different point in their studies. But I had been experiencing dissatisfaction with the amount of time I spent talking with students about their grade versus the amount of time I spent talking with them about what they had or had not learned in the course. So they would take exams, they would do not as well as they would have liked and then they would come to me and they were concerned about how they could score more points and get a better grade because they're required to attain at least a C or better. So they have to pass the course or they have to retake it. So I had those conversations that I think anyone who teaches mathematics has had. What do I do? How do I improve my grade? How do I accumulate more points? In a system where once they'd taken the test and we'd moved on, that was sort of finalized and their period for learning was over.

[00:09:04] So in reading, the description of the summer workshop. I just felt like this was something that I'd been kind of searching for. How can I shift my focus away from grades to learning? While still maintaining standards. So it was just a series of I clicked here, I clicked there, and saw it and I immediately went and told my husband, I'm going to be doing this workshop in July. I'm signing up for it right now.

[00:09:36] Sharona: And so that name of that course, I believe, was Redesigning Your Course for Mastery Grading through the MAA Open Math program and that was in 2023. That was the one that Bosley and Kate Owens and I facilitated, I believe.

[00:09:54] Boz: I don't think I realized when you were there that you hadn't had some introduction to it already, because most of the people that come to that workshop, the two years that we ran it, they had at least done some reading or they'd had some experience. So I don't know if I realized that course was your first kind of experience with it. That's kind of cool.

[00:10:18] Mary Reeves: Yeah, it was very interesting. And engaging with pedagogical topics, how to construct a lesson, how to design assessments, that's all part of my background as an educational professor, but it was very refreshing to work with content area people who were so interested in teaching and learning. So that was really exciting.

[00:10:43] Boz: Yeah. I remember working with you during that workshop and in that workshop, we do a lot of small group stuff, even though it's virtual, and everyone is planning their learning targets and they're dealing with calc issues and they're dealing with linear algebra and we're working with you and you're working with, how to teach how to simplify fractions.

[00:11:06] Mary Reeves: The basics of place value and the difference between tens and tenths. Yeah, that's where I spend my days.

[00:11:13] Boz: But it was very fun and interesting because yeah, the math that we were doing at that course, most of it was at least calculus and then we'd work with you and we're doing third, fourth grade math and I had a daughter at the time that was, and still is, in elementary school. She would have been in, I think, second grade, going into third grade, over that summer, and looking at your stuff, and just knowing what I'd worked with her over the past year, I was like, I wish her teachers had some of this.

[00:11:51] Mary Reeves: Well, that's really what led me to it. I started off as a high school teacher. And found that my students did not know things like basic arithmetic and multiplication facts that were a clear impediment to them learning the algebra that I was prepared to teach them. So as a new teacher, when I realized that some of my kids didn't, for example, know what 6 plus 5 was, it's hard to figure out what 6x plus 5x is if you don't know what 6 plus 5 is.

[00:12:19] And they didn't know that and I didn't know how to teach that to them. I had no idea how they'd ever learned that. So that's what really drove me in graduate school to focus on what I was focusing on. Because the foundation for the work that all of us do is what happens in those lower elementary grades, in those upper elementary grades, and that transition from middle school to algebra. That sets the stage for calculus. When we lose kids there, we're never going to lose them in calculus because they're never going to show up. So my question was, well, my assumption was elementary school teachers don't want to teach math badly. They don't want to inflict math trauma, but they do, because they don't know any other way than how they learned. So it seemed to me that rather than looking for who to blame, which is a game we often play to our students detriment in education, high school blames, middle school blames, elementary school blames parents. So that doesn't help. So, I looked at what I was doing and thought, how can I be part of the solution? Where would I step in? What would I want to do to help elementary school teachers know more math, understand it better, and then help children to learn math in a more efficient and less traumatic way?

[00:13:42] Boz: Yeah, and that's such an important idea and concept, cause I know when I was in school, when I was getting my undergrad, I basically paid for my last two semesters tutoring two groups of people, the sociology majors that had to take this action research class that was nothing more than advanced statistics. And then all the Multisubject candidates that had to pass the math part of the Oklahoma qualifying test called the, OGET, Oklahoma general educators test, I think. And I know how many just absolutely despise the math part of it. And I've also read several different researches and studies that, basically say it takes three to five great teachers to make up for one bad math teacher. If you have that experience as a student with a math instructor at a primary grade, like it really does. It, takes so long to try to make up for that and get caught back up. It's ridiculous.

[00:14:56] Sharona: And Mary, I just wanted to say that you're going to make me cry right now because what you are saying is what I spent my formative years listening to my mother say. So my mother had a master's in pure math, a PhD in education with a cognate in math and worked primarily with K through eight teachers. And she was the content specialist. Yet, she was very pedagogically minded because she had herself been a junior high school math teacher. So she was saying the same things. And she talked about that blame game, and you said high school blames middle school, middle school blames elementary, elementary blames pre K, and then they all go back and say then they blame the teachers, and the teachers blame their graduate advisors, then who blames the undergraduate, who blames the calculus, so it becomes this cycle, this circle. And my mom used to say the only way to make change in math education is you have to break the circle at every single one of those points.

[00:15:57] So for me to have found alternative grading as one of the linchpins, it doesn't do the work for you, but it removes this huge impediment. So it's amazing to hear you say the same things and be addressing it. My mom spent her life's work really working with things like cooperative learning, which we now call active learning, which has started to really embed itself. And so the fact that we're doing this work in alt grading is just exciting. So I'm so happy that you found the course. So I guess my question is when you, when you showed up, what happened when you showed up to the course?

[00:16:36] Mary Reeves: Well, we began to dive into the literature and get some definitions for some basic ideas, like the four pillars.

[00:16:46] Sharona: I was thinking more about what was your reaction to like, what happened? You showed up the course. What happened for you?

[00:16:52] Mary Reeves: Well, I was, I thought the course itself was great. It was, like I said, it was so exciting to engage with content people who were so devoted to and interested in improving their practice in the classroom and their experience with students and what students were, were We're walking away from the course with, so that was really interesting. It was not surprising to me that so many people were looking at math at such a different level. I expected most people were going to be mathematicians teaching upper level math courses.

[00:17:29] Looking back on it, I found the conversations around student buy in to be very interesting. But I wasn't really expecting them to be particularly relevant. And as it turned out, they weren't. So that's one of the things that I've learned is how easy it is to get students to buy into an alternative grading structure depends very much on how much the current system has rewarded those students. So people who end up in math major courses are people who've been rewarded for being good at the way the math education game is played. So they have always gotten good grades. They've always responded well to traditional instruction and traditional assessments. They are unlikely to have high levels of math test anxiety which contrasts significantly with the bulk of my population.

[00:18:30] I won't say that all of my students are math phobic or highly anxious. Every semester I have a few who tell me math is my favorite subject, I can't wait to teach that. I don't tell them this, but I actually worry about them for my course more than the students who tell me that they're afraid and concerned and weak and they hate math and math has always been their worst thing. But, in the three semesters now that I've introduced alternative grading to my students, I first ask them what they've heard about the course. This semester, the overwhelming consensus was we've heard that the course is really, really hard, but that you're easy to work with.

[00:19:12] And it's like, okay, well, that's that's probably fair. Because I think we have to take the content very seriously. I certainly do. There's a lot they need to learn. Some of them know procedures very well, but they can't really tell me much more than a fraction is part of a whole which is a problematic definition that we don't have to go into, because seven fourths, for example, is not part of a whole. Or it's not, you can't have seven out of four.

[00:19:41] So, they may know some of the surface level skills, but the deeper understandings, what is the structure of our place value system? And how can you help a child to build a complex and nuanced understanding of place value as they're going into working with the operations in place value? That's those are not questions that anyone has ever asked them. So I've always focused on those kinds of things and I've tried to ramp up...