This is thinking cluesive I'm Tim Vegas. Every week we bring you conversations about inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. And this episode is about something we at MCIE get asked about a lot when we are talking with districts about inclusive practices. How do we great after a quick break, Dr. Thomas Gaskey breaks it down for us.
This week, I'm coming to you from San Antonio at the CEC conference. And if you don't know what CC stands for, it's the Council for Exceptional Children. The CEC is the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving the success of children and youth with disabilities and or gifts and talents. And no, I'm not presenting this year. But I'm very interested to learn what educators are saying about inclusion, especially here. It is no secret that not everyone is aligned with what I would call
our definition of authentic, inclusive education. That all really does mean all. You don't have to look very far to see a school district, continuing the practice of segregating learners with disabilities into separate disability specific classrooms. But I'm an optimistic person. And from looking at the schedule. I'm glad to see so many sessions centered around inclusion, inclusive practices and equity. Now on to our guest, Dr. Thomas Gaskey, is professor emeritus in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky, University of Chicago graduate and former middle school teacher he served as an administrator in Chicago Public Schools and was the first director of the Center for the improvement of teaching and learning a National Educational Research Center. He is author and editor of over 28 books and over 300 published articles, and book chapters. His most recent books include engaging parents and families in grading reforms, implementing mastery learning, and instructional feedback. On this episode of thinking cluesive we delve into the complexities of traditional grading systems, and explore the potential of standards based grading to revolutionize how learners are evaluated. Dr. Gaskey discusses the gaps between grading knowledge and practices, and how the reliance on traditional models has impacted education, highlighting the need for changes in assessment and grading methods. Do you believe that all children with and without disabilities deserve to reach their potential through inclusive education? If so, you'll love Brooks publishing, the premier publisher of books and tools on early childhood, special education, communication and language and more. Brooks publishing has been partnering with top experts for over 30 years to bring you the best resources for your classroom, clinic and home. To learn more, visit Brooks publishing.com. To browse their catalogue, read their blog, and sign up for their newsletter, Brooks publishing, helping you make a difference in the lives of all children. And just for thinking cluesive listeners visit bi T dot L y slash Brooks dash 0324 to put your name in to win a copy of the facilitators guide to the paraprofessionals handbook for effective support in inclusive classrooms. It's a second edition and it's by Dr. Julie Causton. And Dr. Kate McLeod. We will be taking names until the end of the month. So go ahead and look for that link in the show notes. And now my interview with Dr. Thomas Gaskey.
Tom Gaskey Welcome to the thinking cluesive podcast.
Thanks, Jen. It's a pleasure to be with you
Have, I just I can't, I can't go on without saying that I'm just so thankful that we're able to talk, even though we had some technical issues. We're both being very flexible today.
Just through the sort of things require that level of flexibility.
Exactly, exactly. Well, the reason I reached out in the first place, Tom was because I heard that you were the person to talk to you about grading. And grading is an issue and a topic that gets brought up a lot in our work at the Maryland Coalition for inclusive education. In fact, we were I was just in, we were in Arkansas, doing a all day workshop for educators. And people wanted to ask me about grading and I said, I don't I don't, that's not my wheelhouse. So I'm hoping that this conversation is going to be enlightening, not only for me and organization, but for a lot of educators. Because I think, especially in the realm of how to make inclusion and inclusive education work. Grading is a is a big topic. So because it's a complex issue, I wondered, the if, if the best way to start would be, you know, historically, educators have graded learners in a particular way, traditionally, so what's the best way to understand how schools have traditionally graded learners?
Well, there is a long history of research in the area of grading. In fact, in 2016, the American Educational Research Association, which is the premier organization of educational researchers in the world, actually was celebrating its 100th year anniversary. As a part of that celebration, they put out a call to the field, to different researchers and scholars requesting that they take on the challenge of trying to review the research in these different aspects of education that have been conducted over that past century. So together with my friend, Susan Brookhart, we put together an amazing team of researchers and scholars who had really spent a lot of time looking at grading issues over that time, and wondering able to develop an article that is then published in the view of education research, the organization's premier research journal. Following that we were approached by ASCD, asking if we could extend that work and talk about the modern implications of it and practical implications. And it works, we did not the book, the way you titled, what we know about grading. And one of the things that we discovered in putting this together is that there is a very long tradition of research, in grading, but very little of that research is found this way into practice. In fact, it led us to conclude that there's probably not another area of education, where there's a larger gap between our knowledge base and our practice than in the area of grading, we do seem to be bound by tradition, more ingredient than in any other aspect of education today, it's really amazing.
So what would be the, like, you said that there's a gap between what we know and the practice. So like, what is what is a way for us understand how we have traditionally graded, right, and what the best practices are, is I'm assuming what you mean by a traditional grading is that we use letter grades or that we, you know, grade on the curve, or, you know, I mean, just for example, right? My oldest daughter is a senior in high school. And she is taking a I'm not going to name the course because because I don't want any identifiers. But she, you know, people listen to this. And they're like, I know who you're talking about. You know, so she's taking a course. And let's say the teacher is that, you know, grading on a curve. And it was amazing to me that, wow, there's teachers that are still grading on a curve. And and so what is like, what does that mean? Like? Why are we still grading on a curve? And what's the alternative? Yeah.
Well, one of the dilemmas we have in education today is that almost all school districts throughout the United States and pretty much throughout the world, are using some form of a computerized reading program. It is among the fastest selling and that's selling software. In education today, there are over 50 Different computerized reading programs available to educators today throughout the United States. But there are three pretty much nobody in the market. But all these computers reading programs are based on very traditional models are graded, they're based on, on what schools have been sort of always done. The problem is that when those are implemented, it makes change and innovation extremely difficult, because you have to find workarounds within this complex reporting system that your district has purchased, which in some ways can reduce the workload for teachers by making bookkeeping a bit more efficient. But it perpetuates these sort of traditional practices for which we've got lots of evidence that indicator of work. I mean, a very quick example. There were some researchers, their names restriction and Elliot, they were concerned about the the sort of consistency in teachers grading practices. And when different teachers looking at the same body of evidence of the same sample of students were graded just exactly the same way. So they test this out, they took two compositions have been written by high school students demanding copies, and they sent those to 200. high school English language arts teachers, the directions were simply that they asked the teachers to assume these papers can be printed students, integrate them according to whatever criteria whatever students they will use for their students. assertion. I've got the papers back from the teachers and found the grades were all over the place. They use the teachers to assign a letter grade and a percentage grade to both of the papers. And they found that in terms of letter grades, 50% of the teachers gave the papers a grade of A which was the highest grade possible. 13% gave failing grades to exactly the same paper, every grade in between. In terms of the percentage grade on the first paper, they range from 50 to 98, on the secondary range of 6497. So starting with a public adjuster study, but as soon as I study people, when people criticize them, said, well, first of all you choose writing, writing is a very subjective judgment in the first place. Not everybody agrees with grading is a second you chose high school English language arts teacher and everybody knows they're kind of a crazy lot. You can't trust them anyway. So what was first thing I did in response was they took two math papers repeated their same study. And when he got the papers back with math teachers, they found greater variation in equations, math teachers, and then the English language arts teachers. And people always wonder how there can be what what starts related Finland is that many of the math teachers just kind of correct answers, because they felt that's what students would have to do with each of these large scale assessments. But many of the best teachers gave partial credit, how they gave the approach of credit, vary drastically, they have some Tech offers, some didn't. The grades were just all over. And so those results typically don't surprise people very much. I mean, it's very similar to what we're experiencing today as we tried to teachers grade portfolios, or demonstrations or projects, exhibit substitute or what they find surprising. Is that started I published her studies in 1912. I mean, we've known about this for a long time. So but what yeah, what happened was that when starch, Analia and other researchers in the early 1900s, were making these discoveries about the the inconsistency in teachers grading, we did see changes in grading practices sort of overall. In particular, there was a reduction and a sort of diminishing of the use of a percentage grades. People found that it was it was very difficult for us to have any consistency among teachers where you had a grading scale, with 101 discrete categories of student performance, a two thirds of which typically noted failure. And so when you look historically, that's when we started using fewer categories than the letter grade system was developed. At that time to 1920s 1930s. We had fewer great categories, a greater consistency existed among teachers. We started thinking about in 1940s, developing more specific criteria for classes. The work of Ralph Tyler at the University of Chicago was instrumental in this. His book on basic principles for Curriculum Instruction had a profound influence on having educators become more focused in their instruction and if I'll be greater transparency in what is when students learn to be able to do. And that sort of continuing until we hit the late 1980s, and 1990s. Because we started using computers for grading. And the companies that were developing the computer programs to software engineers, were not familiar with this background, they were, you know, they've been trained as software developers, and they liked the percentage system. It's, you know, 101 categories, very similar to money easily divided in halves, and quarters and tents. And so we need this resurgence, this return to percentage trades. Without any justifiable defense for it, when had we taken the time to look back, we would have found it, we knew this wasn't going to work when we started. And so it's this, this reliance on on technology that hasn't been formulated with the knowledge of what our research is provided to us without the knowledge base, this led us Australian, caught up in different directions. Now, in terms of grading on the curve, it's interesting, you should bring that up, because of all the areas we looked at the one thing for which we have the most sort of extensive research is that you really need to grade students according to what they've learned what they do not according to their relative standing among classmates, that means you don't grade on the curve. When you do that, there are a number of really negative consequences that follow. In particular, it tells you nothing about what the students have learned to be able to do. I mean, everybody in the class could do miserably, just something, let's move with others. It makes learning very competitive, because the students have to compete against each other for the few scarce rewards the future is going to give out. It diminishes any sense of cooperation or collaboration among students. Because if you help someone else, it's detrimental to your chances for success. Because every student moves up and then Mr. Desmond down, and actually diminishes the relationship of teachers to students, because now as soon as a teacher starts helping one student, you're interfering in a competition, you're not providing that assistance to others, and the main is perceived as being unfair. So we do have extensive research that shows that teachers do really need to grade students according to what they've learned. And what do we have to do a great according to curriculum and your learning goals, they're not according to the students should leave the classroom.
And I would think that if, if you have an educator who is teaching a lesson and in over half of the learners take an assessment and fail, that's probably that's probably a, that's a problem.
That is a real problem. And I think that one of the things in the area of assessment we were trying to emphasize is we use assessments as learning tools. It's a it's a learning tool, not only for the students, but for the teachers. So, for example, and this happens to me, you know, I have times when I'll give a quick assessment in class and, and teaching. And if I come to a question that other students in the classroom is, that's not a student learning problem, you know, that's a teacher problem. And what that communicates to me is, no matter how I taught it, it just didn't come across. And I share with teachers, that I'm not very good at predicting it. At one time, if I was, but have discovered, I'm not at all. There are times I teach lessons. And I think it's magnificent. You know, I think, Wow, this was I was on today. This was really great. That I asked my students about and they didn't get it. And what we're trying to emphasize with with teachers is that if students didn't get it, it didn't work. Because whether or not it works is not defined by what the teacher does, whether it works to find out what's the structure what to do.
There, there's some talk about moving towards a standards based grading and I'm not exactly sure what that would even look like, but like how, like what is standards based grading? How is that different than what we are? What we experienced traditionally in schools right now.
Right? Well, it is true there are either this tremendous press across the nation to move toward a standards basically agree with some places you're calling the competency based grading. Some people want to argue about the differences between those, but they're, I believe trivial at best and making artificial distinctions that are really necessarily helpful and the The The problem is that if you if you talk to 20, experts on standards based education, you get 18 different definitions about what it is what and that's led to some of the confusion about this overall, the premise of the idea is that it's it's focusing on this notion of transparency in all aspects of the teaching learning process. When we think about the teaching learning process, in the most general terms, there are four basic elements. There's your curriculum, which is what you want students to be able to do, there is instruction, which is how we help students acquire the knowledge and skill. There's assessments. And that's how we determine if students have acquired knowledge and skills. And then is grading reporting, which is how we communicate their learning success are limited to these to the students and to us and to others. The basic premise of a standards based or competency based approach is there has to be transparency in those four elements, and alignment across the, in any subject area, in any academic discipline. There's no limit to what students can learn. I mean, learning in any academic discipline is different. But a curriculum is finite. When we define a curriculum, we specify within that entire domain, the things that we want students to learn to be able to do. Once we specify the curriculum, then our job as educators becomes a all students learn it, and not just learn some of it, they want it all excellent. I mean, we would never define a curriculum to include some things that we would think students couldn't or shouldn't be able to learn. Or that certain students should, when we define a curriculum, we're specifying these things with all students. Excellent. Then we need to make sure our instruction is aligned with that we're teaching students those things, we consider it important, we need to make sure our assessments are transparent and are aligned with that you don't test students on things, and the.it just doesn't align with it, it's not appropriate, we're gonna be a valuable teaching and learning approach. And finally, then we need to report those results, in terms of those specified learning goals, how our students learn to do those things. And if they haven't, what we can do to overcome any shortcomings or are any misgivings and having those understandings to make sure they do well. So I think the whole whole premise of a standards based or competency based approach is that notion of transparency. Let's be clear about when tickets, shoot and those things that the session accordingly and reported in the same way that it is transparent.
For those schools that are moving towards this style of grading, like how I'm just imagining someone listening and going like, Well, okay, but how does that translate to high school transcripts? Because you have all of these learners who are scrambling for, you know, over 4.0 grade point average, and, you know, they're trying to use that thing to get into an elite school and like, how does that affect grade grade point average? Or is it a completely separate system?
Right? No, no, they're very much related. But there are on and I'm describing in some of the things that I've written, there are some necessary prerequisites, that that schools must establish before they can move to a standards based or competency based approach. The first is you must be clear about your purpose for grading. Schools need to take time to establish a purpose statement for doing so that that can provide a foundation for all their policies and practices. And typically, in this purpose statement, what they will indicate is that a grant should reflect accurately how well students have learned that are able to do or how well they've achieved a particular learning goals we've set and in happy to say didn't how well they're able to do it at this time, or currently able to do it. And along with the purpose statement, they often include a statement that would say, other aspects related to learning have to do with, you know, their behavior in school or their responsibility or other things are important, but we're going to import that separately from the negative achievement grade. So you establish that purpose first. Then the second thing is to Make sure all of your policies align with their purpose. And so if you say they want the grade to reflect what students have zoned in may have to do at this time. What that does is it eliminates averaging. Because what what you're saying is we don't care where you read the beginning marking period, we want to greet and reflect where you are right now. But it, you cannot move to those changes in those policy practices until you have the purpose statements, that has to come first. And so you establish that purpose statement, you print it on the report card, you have as the opening policy in the open parent opening paragraph and your policy statement. So that's number one. Number two, is to establish a more reasonable number of green categories, we find that there, there's one of the major elements and getting consistency among teachers, in looking at a common sort of body of evidence and coming up with the same grade is to limit the number of categories, you can get it down to about four to six categories just can't do with 101, there's just no way you can be consistent. And then the third aspect is that we have to move away from a single grade for everything to multiple grades. Typically, when when teachers are grading including criteria, there are three different types of criteria that they consider. The first we've labeled product criterion, and products are just common in demonstrations and let students in. The second area is what we call process criteria. And process criteria are typically behaviors that don't represent learning but an evolutionary process. So completing homework assignments, for example, is a process of formative assessments, process criteria, engagement and classic Miss participation, process criteria. And finally, we have progress with progress. You worry about not necessarily where they are, but how far they've come. Sometimes referred to as improvement grading, or value added grading. So students can make fantastic progress, but still be achieving below grade level or course expectations. So we know that all three are important, but all three distinct, what gets us into trouble is when we combine all three of those into a single grade, because in the grace impossible to interpret, the highly responsible low achiever gets the same rate of see as irresponsible, high achiever. And so the idea is that instead of combining those into a single grade, you report them separately, on a report card and on the transcript. Now, I know that sounds so novel, and unique to schools throughout the United States. But what's interesting is that if you go north to Canada, Canadian schools have been doing this for decades. Really, yes, they don't give a single grade, they give a a, they give a band of these. There's that achievement grade, the need to use it for grade point average or anything like that that you want. But then there's a separate grade for class, which is patient, a separate grade for collaboration, classes, Evergreen for completing homework. Now, when I first saw their system, they said, Well, it looks great, but it looks like so much extra work. And they turned back to me and said, it's easier than what you're showing people do in the States. We, we collect the same information as you, we just don't worry about combining it at the end. And so all those fights you have about how you weight stuff and how you consider this combination, we don't deal with it, we keep it separate. And the teachers there love it, because they find kids take homework or seriously, when they hit seventh grade for homework. It's no longer considered as part of the human decree. They also like it because it apparently their questions in about them achievement grade, although he would say well look over here, maybe if your child started completing the homework a bit more regularly. Or maybe if they started participating in class more regularly, it's even better you want parents like it, because it gives them a profile balloon. So the students, the college universities love it, because all grades are carried over to the transcript. And so if your admissions officer, would you rather have a straight A student that got there through diligence and hard work, or when they got there without even trying? And I'm not saying one is better than the other? What I'm saying is that from our schools, we can't tell the difference. And from your schools you can that
is really interesting. So hypothetically, you could have a situation where a learner has a very high Did you say is it product is that was the product process in progress? Is that what it was? Exactly? Yes. So you have a very high you know, critical product grade and not so great for process And that is an interesting contrast between one that would maybe have high marks in all three categories. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I see that now.
Well, it's becoming an even more important issue when we deal with issues of equity. For example, coming out of COVID, many schools found that tremendously increase the number of failing grade. School districts like in Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City, in San Francisco and San Diego areas, tremendous increases, I mean, their income, number of failing grades for the students was increasing like three and four times what they had seen before, when when they began analyzing these grades, and especially when they became when they began pulling off these non achievement factors and putting them separately, it cut the number of filling grades by more than half. I mean, these kids were learning, it's just that they were getting low grades, because they were turning in homework in time, and we're doing homework. And oftentimes, these were due to factors of which they didn't have any control. And so what this does is it brings greater accuracy and greater meaning to the grade, it also brings greater equity to our grading process. Those are the three things that really need to be in place before you consider going to a standards based approach would be, which would mean taking those subject area product grades and breaking them down in different components. So that instead of one overall grade for language arts, I might give separate grades for reading, writing, listening, speaking, and language skills. And that's what the standards base, our competency based approach we do. But before we can get to that, you have to be able to pull out those non achiever factors, we do some emigrating skills, and a very clear purpose.
Do you have any idea of, of how prevalent this practice is currently with the standards based grading? In the United States? I mean,
yeah, I do not know. I mean, it's very hard to get those data as to how many are actually doing it. We did a survey recently, where we have looked at school districts that attempted to do it and failed. That were terrible resistance to abandon the process completely. Any field actually, is we looked at this for reasons it could have been anticipated. And oftentimes, they they did things in ways that were advised, they were advised to do by very prominent consultants who were really well intentioned in this process, but maybe didn't understand the implementation process interest in the community. Well, they understand the attitudes and dispositions of the family or families in that area. And so if you can, if you can be more thoughtful about how you go about the implementation process, especially by looking at parents and families, not as resistors but as allies for you, and, and meaningful partners and change concepts, you can be much greater levels of success.
Yeah, yeah. Well, when you talked about the, the process of change, I'm reminded that the information around implementation science, I'm certainly not an expert at all, but in our own work with system change in school transformation around inclusive practices, you know, there's definitely a process to, you know, making change in a in a system. So I'm wondering if, if you see that in, as far as the school districts moving toward a different system, like, isn't it really just a systems change issue?
No, you're actually right. In fact, I'm a new book that's coming out next month on engaging parents and families in grading reforms. And there's an entire chapter there devoted to what you describe the change process. And when we when we think about change in education, and especially in change through the professional learning experiences for educators, especially teachers, generally everybody agrees there are three sort of major areas of change we're trying to impact. One way one some change in teachers attitudes and beliefs. When to accept inclusion as a good idea. We want them to think about grading in new and different ways, but they're committed to new instructional approaches. Secondly, when some changes in your practice, we're gonna do things a bit differently. And of course, we went through changes in student learning with students. And everybody sort of agrees on those being the three major areas of change we're trying to impact. But the question our recent years ago was, in what order, those changes occurred, did they don't happen simultaneously. And if you're going to be successful as a change agent, you really need to think about that order, because you want to know where to put your time and energy. So I was able to find a very long and distinguished history in education, especially in professional learning for educators. That was based on the idea that the order of changes, attitudes and beliefs converged. That needs to change in their practice, it results in changes in student learning. And I was able to trace this back to the work of some early change theorists. Kurt Lewin, for example, who wrote in the 1930s, and 40s, faced many diseases and psychotherapeutic models. Unfortunately, all of our research on teacher change shows that's not the way it works. But the typical order of changes, practices first, student learning second, attitudes and beliefs last. And the reason that is so is that is experienced that sheep's attitudes and beliefs is not the other way around. And so you're never going to be successful, or trying to change people's attitudes and beliefs directly on what you have to do as you need to focus on on changing new experience, the same order of change was for students, so that instead of saying, I want students to develop a growth mindset, I want them to feel responsible, I want them to develop a greater sense of agency, for me to put them in classes to show them how they should do this. The impact of that is modest, at best. What you need to do is show students in learning situation, how they can be successful, provide them with strategies for success, show them that when they implement these strategies, that they on their own, are responsible for their conditions of success, and they can do it. And when they gain that experience, then the attitudes and beliefs start to change. The same actually holds true for for parents and families. All these schools that have tried to change the attitudes of parents and families directly I've met with modest success events. We have a major effort going on here in Kentucky, though we approached it quite differently. Several years ago, a group of school districts in the state came to us near the university wanting to for help and assistance over the grading reform efforts. So we brought everybody together in a summer institute that we have here at the university. And those teachers work to develop purpose statements and work to do, we're going to go to a letter grade system of five configurations that are percentage grades, they were going to pull off these non academic connectors, we put them separately, they broke down the students way, we did not spend a lot of time orienting parents to this. What we did instead is they the teachers that have taken part in the summer institute went back and they worked with their colleagues. And so everybody was in line. When you change grading, you pretty much have to do a school wide, because it's something that you're going to school when it was actually done that way. But what we did for the first few marking periods in the coming year, is we sent them to report cards. We sent it to him the traditional when the parents were customers game. And that was, you know, a single letter grade for for each class. And then we sent home our new one. In our new report card, we put the teachers photographs and the report card for every class. This wasn't our idea. We stole this one we found taking place in many Canadian schools. We pulled out the non human factors, we put it in separately. And then we had we had we extended the comment section. So we've clashed on and submitted visual comments. So for two marking periods, the parents got three booklets. After the second marking period, all the school districts here in the state of Kentucky we put in a quarterly basis. So halfway through the school year, we surveyed the parents news districts and said to them, we don't have the resources to send you to any longer. We're going to send you only one. But you get to pick whichever report card you want is one that was ending. Do you know almost all of our parents chosen one. We have remarkable parents support just because it's better. I mean, we changed their experience. And so all the resistance that could have come about when parents saw what we were doing and somehow it was helpful to him. It gave them an additional guidance on what they were looking for from the school. It was was remarkable with the kind of support that we had. Because we focused on changing the experience first, and the Beatitudes at least.
That's powerful. That's really powerful. Well, we are running up to the top of the hour. So I just want to make sure I get one more question. And is that okay? Okay. So, for our listeners, a lot of our listeners are teachers, and a lot of them are interested in inclusive practices, specifically, surrounding learners with more extensive support needs. And we get this question a lot about, especially in high school, if a learner has an intellectual disability, or maybe more extensive support needs, and the school team, or educators, they're not used to having a learner with that type of profile in a science class or biology class, or, you know, a language arts class in high school. And the question is like, well, how does grading look like? What does grading look like for that learner? Especially if maybe they are on their part of that 1%? In a state that takes alternate assessment? Or maybe they have modified activities? Is that something that you have any thoughts about?
Sure. Actually, together with a former colleague of mine, Dr. Leon young, we would a book about this. And what we advocate in this book is the teachers at all levels have to understand, and we when students come with those, those sort of special needs, we need to make adaptations for them within the instructional framework to provide an adequate and appropriate instructional program for them. But those adaptations take one of two forms. There are accommodations and their modifications. Accommodations are are a kind of adaptation that is made, where we're just trying to level the playing field for students. And so for example, those of us who were eyeglasses, I mean, they are in accommodation, they don't give us superpowers of learning, they don't make learning any easier for us, they just allow us to learn in the same way that students with more visual acuity would be able to learn when an accommodation is made to allow a student to learn them in a level playing field, no change needs to be made in terms of grading. So for example, if you have a child that is visually impaired in a science class, and the science exam is read to students, and then they respond orally, there's no reason to change the grade, I mean, you're still going to have the same learning goals and the same expectation. Now, it could be that the group of educators stood up, you can post on special educators, regular classroom, teachers, parents, and families are there to look at the instructional program and say, based upon this child's learning history, we believe that it's going to be very difficult for them to succeed, given these particular learning goals. And so we need to change the goals, we need to define goals that are reasonable for this particular chapter. That's a modification. And when you change the goals, then you do need to change the grading, you're going to grade according to those goals. But with the greatest reporting, you're going to put a little asterisk by the bottom of the grade and just say, it's based on modifications, you don't specify modifications are that you would do in an IEP or some other instructor program where you don't do it on the report card, you'd have a June transcript, just indicate that based on modifications, and so but the other thing we have to help all educators understand is, is sometimes you read these books or articles where they have a list of things and saying, these are accommodations, and these are modifications, and they're all wrong. Because whether whether it is modification or or a combination really depends on the learning goal. So if I, if I read the science exam to a student and they respond orally, to those questions, that's an accommodation in science on if I read it to them, and I'm measuring, reading comprehension, well, that's different. And so you can't label any particular action as a, an adaptation or Two, three, excuse me, accommodation modification. It depends on learning goal, it depends on what you're trying to achieve with the student. And so it's just for thoughtful educators to make reasonable decisions about that, based upon the needs of students, it really becomes important. Yeah.
I think that sometimes to it, it becomes like, well, you know, accommodations are quote unquote, better than, like, there's a value judgment on, but it really is more, you know, it's supposed to be individualized. So depends on the learner. And if that's what the learner needs, then that's what they should get. Right?
Exactly. Yes, we are, you know, we're compelled by law to provide an instruction premium, which the champion screams success. And so those requiring reasonable judgments on the part of that single individual, we're a group of people are coming together here, all with the with that students best interest in mind, trying to design an appropriate instructional program. So it's, it's based on the individual needs of the students and on the curriculum, the learning goals, and then you make the adaptations accordingly. But it's not an accommodation is better, or worse. It's just it's adapted to that student for that particular learning goal.
Right. Right. What so what book was that with the with Leann?
It's, it's called. Let's see. Grading greeting exceptional learners. Think let me pull this up here quickly.
Well, let's see. We are grading exceptional and struggling learners by COVID. Plus press, it's young guy, ski cheese as well.
Great. Oh, wow, I was not aware of this. You know, we love Leann young, the she was one of the authors on the our students, your students, my students, I think. And that's, that's a great, that's one of the resources that we use, when we're working with school districts so
fantastic. A lot of work in the area of inclusion and your new organization. On inclusive education is very successful in helping school districts to bring about these necessary changes after
a short break the mystery question.
When you have to study for a test, this relates to our our discussion, kind of, yes, what is a what's a successful method for you? Like how would you study for tests like if you're a student?
Well, that's very relevant, actually, from our conversation. Because the way I studied and the way most teachers, if they think back to their own learning history study, is that we don't study what we think is important. We don't study we think we think of stress in the book or the materials. We study what we guess teachers are likely to ask and quizzes. And most of us are successful on education or career, for the very reason we become very good at guessing what our teachers were going to ask me was intense learning becomes a guessing game on and so you're always trying to anticipate you're out with your teachers and some teachers probably take pride in their ability to to outguess their students. I think that one of the things we're pressing for, as we talked about transparency in these education issues, is for that desperate to be taken out of the learning process to be very explicit about what it is when students learn. We've all had the experience of studying very hard for a quiz or a large test or examination of the class. And going in to take the exam and as a teacher, professor hands it out, reading it, and saying, Oh, my goodness, this isn't what he studied. We've all had insurance. And, and typically, that teaches us two things. The first is it teaches us that hard work and effort don't pay off in school. Because we worked really hard for that session. It really meant nothing. And the second thing it taught us was you can't trust teachers. Those are not the lesson. What did we communicated to our student Is that we've suffered for so long and this mistaken idea that tests have to be secret that is somehow unfair to let students know what's going to be in the test. Well, where did that come from? I mean, I, I work in an environment, people pay me to figure this out, and I just can't find it anywhere. And then the problem is, so long as it is a secret, then learning for kids becomes a guessing game. And I think as we move toward these standards based or competency based approaches, and instill this notion of transparency across those major elements of the teaching, learning process that goes away. So what students are going to be studying is what was emphasized in class, when the teacher stressed, go back to those list of learning goals. Look at what you how you performed on different formative assessments in class. Those are your best preparation for those common in museums is filled with illustrations of learning, the projects, whatever it is, it's going to be used to determine your grade. We view that formative information that teachers have been telling you all along, these are the things that are important for you to learn.
Amazing. And imagine if imagine, if teachers regularly were transparent about what was going to be assess, I would imagine that test anxiety would go way down.
Oh, of course. I mean, I always I use the example I just, you know, when, when I was growing up, there was a swim instructor. And, and we have these different levels, you know, within the Red Cross lifesaving classes from the classes of students making progress, but we're very, very clear about what we expect. There's no no secret to it, you want to let the kids know what it is you can practice and doing those things. And it should never be a surprise for them. They know ahead of time going into it, what the expectation is and what they have to do to succeed. So it's, I think it's bringing natural all aspects of teaching and learning, it's going to make it really, really much more effective.
Dr. Thomas Gaskey, thank you so much for being on the thinking cluesive podcast, we really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Jim, thank you so much for inviting me.
That's it for this episode of thinking cluesive We appreciate you listening every week. And if you want to say hi. Just email me at te vas. That's T V i l l e g a s@mcie.org. Or find us on the socials at think underscore inclusive. We're pretty much that everywhere. And I'm you know, I'm really liking threads lately. So find is there to think inclusive is written, edited, sound design, mixed and mastered by me to Vegas. Thanks to Brooks publishing, for being a sponsor for this season. We appreciate you. Please check out those books on their website, Original Music by miles credit. Additional music from melody, that's m l o d.ie. If you're interested in checking them out. Thanks for your time and attention. And remember, inclusion always works.
Well, so I've been doing this podcast for over 10 years, 1213 years. And when I first started, I used Skype. Okay, and so I and this exactly, this is exactly what I would do, I would actually record I would call from my computer to a person's phone. And then we would record over the interview, you know, over over the internet and dump it right into my audio processor, my audio editor and record it that way. So we've got all these newfangled tools now to make it quote unquote easier, but sometimes the kids are just fine.
Yours I understand that they can I'm always I'm always discouraged by seems every organization I work with has been tucked into using some other platform and eventually have 20 Different platforms looking at my computer right now, to communicate with you. MCIE
