Reimagining Grading with Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

This past December, I had the honor of being a guest on the Grading Podcast ("reimagining grading as a tool for student success") hosted by Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley. We had such a great conversation that I thought I would return the favor and invite Sharona and Boz on my podcast.

Sharona Krinsky is the executive director of the Center for Grading Reform, a non-profit that hosts an annual conference on grading, among other things. She’s also a math instructor at California State Los Angeles. Robert Bosley, better known as Boz, is director of programming for K12 at the Center for Grading Reform and an instructional coach in the Los Angeles Unified School District. 

In our conversation, Sharona and Boz share why they named their podcast the Grading Podcast and not the Alternative Grading Podcast. They also share the state of the grading reform movement here in 2026 and talk about the barriers that teachers face when trying to adopt alternative grading practices. And they have advice for centers for teaching and learning on supporting grading reform on their campuses.

Episode Resources

The Grading Podcast

The Center for Grading Reform

The Grading Conference

Derek’s appearance on the Grading Podcast

Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:05

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

Derek Bruff: 0:21

This past December, I had the honor of being a guest on the Grading Podcast, hosted by Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley. The tagline for their podcast is Reimagining Grading as a Tool for Student Success. And they had me on to talk about the recent Alternative Grading Institute I helped facilitate, as well as my experience with mastery assessment and my own teaching, and the ways that alternative grading practices can serve as a response to the impact of generative AI on education. We had such a great conversation that I thought I would return the favor and invite Sharona and Boz on my podcast.

Derek Bruff: 0:56

Sharona Krinsky is the executive director of the Center for Grading Reform, a nonprofit that hosts an annual conference on grading, among other work. She's also a math instructor at California State, Los Angeles. Robert Bosley, better known as Boz, is Director of Programming for K-12 at the Center for Grading Reform, and an instructional coach in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Their work through the Center for Grading Reform and the Grading Podcast helps foster national conversations on grades and grading.

Derek Bruff: 1:28

In our conversation, Sharona and Boz share why they named their podcast the Grading Podcast and not the Alternative Grading Podcast. They also share the state of the grading reform movement here in 2026 and talk about the barriers that teachers often face when trying to adopt alternative grading practices. And they have advice for Centers for Teaching and Learning on supporting grading reform on their campuses. Sharona and Boz have such great perspective on these topics, and I'm glad to have them on my show.

Derek Bruff: 1:57

Sharona, Boz, I'm very excited to have you on Intentional Teaching Today. Thanks for being on the podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Robert Bosley: 2:04

Well, thank you for having us. This is, even though we've both been podcasting for a while, this is, I think, both of our first time on someone else's podcast.

Derek Bruff: 2:14

Oh, really?

Sharona Krinsky: 2:14

Really excited. Yes. Excited to be here.

Derek Bruff: 2:17

You get to be on the other side of the microphone, so to speak. That's great. Well, I'm going to start with the my standard opening question. I find it helps me get to know my guests a little bit more. Can each of you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? And uh Sharona, maybe I'll start with you.

Sharona Krinsky: 2:38

Okay. So this goes back a little bit, but um my mom was actually a math educator, uh, working with K-8 pre-service and in-service teachers. But I did not think I wanted to do that, and I went to college to be a geneticist. And then when I decided that organic chemistry was definitely not for me and switched into my math degree, I needed a purpose for that math degree. And I decided I did want to follow in her footsteps and work on changing mathematics education, but I wanted to do it at the university level, not at the K-8 pre-service teacher level. So I went and attempted to get a PhD in math because that's what you needed at the time.

Derek Bruff: 3:19

Yeah.

Sharona Krinsky: 3:20

So that goes all the way back to college for me.

Derek Bruff: 3:23

Did you, I'm curious, did um, you wanted to make higher ed math instruction better? Did you have a bad experience that led you to think that there was room for improvement? You don't have to name names, but I'm curious.

Sharona Krinsky: 3:35

Yeah. Um well, the benefit that I had that most people didn't is my mom was a phenomenal educator. So even when I did have bad experiences in math class, I went home and had fantastic experiences, but she was very involved in changing math education. So I would hear from around the dinner table what was wrong. And sometimes I would see it, but it didn't bug me because I was an excellent student. So I kind of brushed off my bad experiences, but I took them in because of everything my mom was saying. And so I thought one of the things she used to say is in order to change math education, you had to break the cycle at all the points. You need to break it at preschool, you had to break it in teachers, you had to break it everywhere. And I thought, well, I'd really like to work with university educators because quite frankly, they're some of the worst when it comes to math teachers. No offense to any of our higher ed people, but as far as effective pedagogy, especially at the time she was doing this, which was in the 80s and 90s, it was pretty rough. It was pretty rough.

Derek Bruff: 4:36

Well, they were perhaps the least prepared in that entire cycle to actually teach math in in terms of formal training. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Wow. Okay. All right. So a sense of mission from pretty early on. That's that's and and and we'll talk more about where that mission is right now in just a minute. Boz, what about you? Um, when did you realize you wanted to be an educator?

Robert Bosley: 4:56

Well, you know, for me, it it wasn't um as direct of a path as it was with Sharona. Um, I am definitely the first like educator in my family, so I didn't kind of have those role models. And when I first left high school, you know, I was a really good math student from very, very early on in my education career. Um, going, you know, even as far back as kindergarten, I was identified as gifted in math. So when I was in high school, pretty much the my you know college counselors and stuff were like, you're really good at math. You should be an engineer, they make money. So I I started off um you know when I left high school as an engineer major, didn't know really anything about it, didn't know much about the different types of engineering, kind of picked one at random and realized I really did not like that. Um so I I left school. I I actually went into the work for work forced without getting my college degree, um, and finally got it got tired of it, you know, got tired of I was working as a supervisor in a grocery warehouse and decided I was gonna go back and get my degree, and then everyone thought I was insane because this was in Oklahoma, um, you know, in the in the mid-late 90s. And I was making more than what the average teacher, high school teacher was would be making. So I actually went back to school to make less money. Now I I never taught in Oklahoma, and that's part of the reason. But yeah, I it was not a a short or distinctive path like it was for Shrona. I was I was almost in my 30s before I actually got into a classroom. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

Derek Bruff: 6:47

Um but now um I gather you've got a sense of mission about this too.

Robert Bosley: 6:53

Oh, absolutely. Um, you know, when I first started um my teaching career, I started out here in California. I moved um from Oklahoma to California to start teaching. Um I had a background in in supervising, so I very quickly at my school was a brand new school with lots and lots of new teachers. So I kind of fell into the department chair role pretty early. And once I started doing some of my like research into um plcs with you know a lot of the DeFor work, I very quickly realized that you know there's there's a lot of things that we do in education that doesn't make a lot of sense. And um my reform work kind of started with the PLCs, but that eventually led me into grading reform as well.

Derek Bruff: 7:48

When you say PLC, is that professional learning community?

Robert Bosley: 7:51

Yes, yes. I'm sorry, we're I forget in education we use so many acronyms. I mean that not everyone necessarily knows them. Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 8:00

Yes, yes. Well, speaking of naming things, um, Sharona, when you were, I didn't expect that segue, but that worked well. Um when you were uh when I was on your podcast recently, um I believe we talked about uh the name of your podcast, the grading podcast, and that was pretty intentionally chosen um not to be the alternate grading podcast or the ungrading podcast or something like that. Um can you share here kind of kind of why you named your podcast the way that you did and and maybe kind of what what what led to its its its uh its creation?

Sharona Krinsky: 8:35

Absolutely. Well, let me do a little bit of a joiner from my origin story to where we're at now, which is although Bosley took a little time to get to education, I took a detour in the middle because I did not finish my PhD and I went off into the workforce and I did advertising and I did real estate and I did a whole bunch of things, although I kept teaching throughout. But when I came back to teaching in math, which was in 2015, I was trying all of the really good pedagogy that I had learned from my mom. And it was fine. It was fine, it was good, whatever, active learning, all the things, but it wasn't that hit it out of the park home run. And for me, learning about alternative grading practices was the tipping point. That's where I finally got to a point where all of my practices started hitting. And I had this big aha moment that grading practices were sort of this all-encompassing thing. And I started becoming very involved in that community.

Sharona Krinsky: 9:40

So when we launched the grading conference, we started talking about naming. And at this point, we had mastery grading, we had standards-based grading, we had specifications grading, there's all these names. And we had a big conversation about what we should call these things. And at some point, I got very frustrated with the people that I was talking to, and I kind of threw my hands up in the air and said, you know, we just want this to be what we mean by grading. When we say grading, we want all of these things. We don't want, so what we did is we chose a name that was intentionally planned obsolescence. So alternative grading is a planned obsolescence term. We want to eventually drop the alternative. So why not drop it where we can? And hence we went to the grading podcast, which focuses on alternative grading and on deconstructing current grading conferences. But that's the same reason we called it the grading conference, and it's the Center for Grading Reform, because we realized there has been almost no national conversation about traditional grading other than things like, oh, grade inflation, grade deflation, grade this, grade that. But there's been no national quality deconstruction of what grading is and what it does. So hence the name planned obsolescence.

Derek Bruff: 11:05

Or rather, avoiding planned obsolescence. I love that, right? You're you're casting a vision for what grading should mean both in the future, but now as well.

Sharona Krinsky: 11:14

Yes, absolutely.

Derek Bruff: 11:16

Yeah.

Sharona Krinsky: 11:17

What we want it to mean.

Derek Bruff: 11:18

Yeah, yeah, I love that. So you said there wasn't a national conversation. Do you think we're getting there? Like, where where is the alternative grading movement as you see it here at the start of 2026?

Sharona Krinsky: 11:32

I would say that I was looking at those graphs around tipping points, you know, the sort of national conversation around tipping points, that when you hit a tipping point, you have sort of a permanent change of state from one state to another. I would say we're on the upward swing towards that, I hope. So we have gotten off of the steady state situation. Pretty much everywhere I go, I start to hear about alternative grading practices more integrated into larger conversations. So, an example I'll give is a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago, we went to Math Fest, which is a national conference by the Math Association of America. And at that time, we had some very specific sessions about alternative grading. And then last year or two years ago, there was not a specific session. But when I went around to a bunch of other sessions, I kept hearing people say, so I'm going to talk about this effective pedagogy thing I did. And by the way, this class is alternatively graded. And then they would move on. And so it's beginning to infiltrate into much more common usage, and we're hearing it more, not only in math, but across a lot of different disciplines. It's got a much broader awareness than it did 10 years ago when we were like crackpots off in left field about this stuff. So I would say that we are gaining momentum, uh, especially in math. And I would say also perhaps in writing, um, because with the AI threats, uh, writing is very much in a state of chaos right now. I don't know, Boz, would you add anything to that?

Robert Bosley: 13:17

Well, I I do think um we are definitely seeing a lot more national conversations around grading practices. Um, I I think you know, grading for equity and um Joe Feldman's book and a lot of the things that um Guskey, uh Dr. Thomas Guskey has done has really catapulted that. So you know, five, ten years ago, you you wouldn't hear anything hardly at all. And now there's all kinds of things in you know, national news about districts, large districts, even my district, um the Los Angeles Unified School District, trying to make some grading policy changes. So good and bad, you are definitely hearing more of these kind of conversations um, you know, and larger and larger platforms, whether it's regional or state or are getting into national level news now.

Derek Bruff: 14:15

Yeah, and you know, when I was on your show, I was looking back at the episodes I've done on this podcast that focused on alternative grading practices. And there aren't a lot of them that kind of have that in the title of the episode. Um, and I think it's an example of what you were mentioning is that like it comes up a lot, actually. Like, especially when I have an episode focused on AI, there's often some element of uh revise and resubmit or lowering the stakes or some piece of kind of non-traditional grading that instructors are implementing as a response to that. But it's not, it's it is, I think, becoming a little bit more the norm to have at least some element of that.

Sharona Krinsky: 14:52

Here's here's what I would say though. I think one of the biggest problems we have is the complete and total lack of awareness on the part of many, many, many educators that they even need to think about grading practices. So within the effective pedagogy community, it's a big conversation. So people who are listening to like intentional teaching, who are listening to teaching in higher ed, who are listening to our podcast, these are people in higher ed that are already thinking about these things. And in that group, it's pretty well known. But we are a actually pretty small group of the higher education instructional community. And so I would like to see a focus on getting first the problems with traditional grading to be a much higher sense of awareness. I mean, because everyone seems to have a little bit of if you ask a professor, do you trust a B on a transcript to mean what you think it should mean? All of them are gonna say no. So everybody agrees that grades don't communicate what they we think they should. So if we could have a national conversation that gets to all of these people, to start to say, hey, maybe we can agree on what grades should mean. Because if you look at the history of grading, it's all coming from very small elite institutions from the 1770s on. And it's not a conversation any of us have had. There's there's, I mean, we talk about this in our trainings. How many people have had a class on how to grade? K-12 or higher ed?

Robert Bosley: 16:31

Right, yeah. And to kind of build on what Sharon was saying, um, her and I have done several trainings together. We and we survey our audience, and at this point, we have asked literally thousands of educators. And two of the questions we'll ask them is Does your grade mean and say and um communicate what you plan to? And almost uniformly across the board, everyone says yes. And then we ask them the the question Sharona was talking about is if you see a student coming in with you know a B or an A, do you trust that that grade to necessarily tell you about the student's ability? And it's almost across the board no. So it's this weird thing of, oh yeah, my grade means something, but I don't trust the grades from anyone else. And I mean, like I said, we've literally asked these questions to thousands of educators uh across A12 and higher ed, and it never fails when we get those two answers.

Derek Bruff: 17:34

Yeah, yeah. So let me, we've been kind of looking at the, I don't know, 20,000-foot view. Let's scope it down a little bit here. Um when you're working individually with an instructor, maybe who has had that light bulb moment to say, okay, my grades, grades aren't working the way that I think they are. I'd like to make some changes. What have you seen helps an instructor make that pivot so that they would show up to a workshop or a training? Um do you have a sense of that?

Robert Bosley: 18:06

Well, I can I can tell you, because you know, we um on our podcast, one of our first questions is always, you know, your origin story, how did you get involved? And it's not everyone, but a m a large percentage of our guests and a lot of people that we've talked to outside of the podcast, uh it's a a specific um encounter with a student where either the system failed in some way, shape, or form, um, or uh you know, the the system uh did something just to beat the student down, and the the educators saw it and were like, I can't keep doing this. Um that is probably one of the most like instant changes. Like, okay, I I just saw me and my class and my structures tear this student down, and I can't do that to students.

Sharona Krinsky: 19:06

I'd say the other thing, the other that's slightly not quite as instant is when they experience or hear another alternative grader talk about how fantastic their experience is now that they've done it. So that's like the other one that tends to get people.

Derek Bruff: 19:23

Right. I hear someone else talk about their practices and maybe how it's changed their relationships with students, how it's kind of taken anxiety off the table in certain ways. And then I think, oh gosh, I'd like to have that in my classroom too. Like, like these are like I may not have even realized until I heard an alternative that like the problems that I that that are that are just inherent in the way that I'm doing things. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so what um that's really interesting. Um, and that you ask that question all the time, and you can see these patterns. Um what um so if someone is now ready to kind of make that pivot. What are some of the common challenges they face in trying to change their grading practices?

Robert Bosley: 20:06

Well, I I think there's one, I think there's one that's universal between K-12 and higher ed. And that is the LMS systems that we all have to use. Okay, yeah. They they are the the one thing about you know traditional grade, uh, grading using points, percentages, and averages machines are great at doing that. Like it's easy to set up an algorithm to find an average. So any kind of computer-based grade book or LMS system, it's easy to do that. They're set up to do that, and when you try to use them to do something different, it's hard. Like it the system doesn't work. In fact, Sharona does a whole thing on hacking the LMS, on how to make you know, how to make alternative grading work with most LMS systems. So I think that's the one um like physical barrier that all of the educators from K to 16 experience. And then I cut you off, Sharona. What were you gonna say?

Sharona Krinsky: 21:08

Oh well, I was just gonna say that once you open this Pandora's box, it unlocks huge amounts of your class that you've never really thought about. Because if you're gonna grade based on learning, you have to think about what exactly you want the students to learn. So I just gave a workshop this week, and the first thing I asked the instructors to come up with is the 30-second elevator speech that's the story of the course. Because if you don't know why you're teaching a course, you don't know what you want them to learn. And not to call out or shame the person, but one person said, you know, I teach algebra for liberal arts. I'm like, okay, what's your 30 second elevator speech? And they're like, algebra practices for people who don't need to go on. I'm like, okay, pretend I don't. Know what algebra is, explain your course. And they couldn't do it. And I think that's a problem. Because if I can't articulate to the students why they're taking this course in language that doesn't depend on the content, there's already confusion. So if you don't know what your course is about, how are you going to grade it? You know? So I think that it starts to unpack 80 million questions. And if you don't have a structure to think through those questions, you quickly end up just spinning in circles. Like super quickly.

Derek Bruff: 22:35

So I'd say the first thread and the whole thing unravels. And if you don't have some help putting that back together, you're in trouble.

Sharona Krinsky: 22:42

Yes. Yes, absolutely. So that was a challenge this week getting people to explain where their courses are.

Robert Bosley: 22:52

Yeah. When we start like when we do trainings and districts, and there are several districts around the country that have that have been doing this work for a couple of years. But if I come in and do a training on Wednesday with a follow-up the next week, the kind of model in K-12 is all right, I want to see it the following Monday. Like this very rapid and it doesn't work. Like the this, because of what like what Sharona was talking about, you know, you you pull this thread and the whole thing starts coming apart. You need time to actually redesign your entire course to do this. And a lot of times in K-12, we're not allowed that. We're not, you know, given that it's PD, maybe a follow-up if we're lucky, and expect to see it. So that kind of time crunch, and what happens is people will then try to put in a few practices without completely understanding it, like you know, no zeros or you know, 50% minimums, and then they hate it because they didn't understand really why they were doing it. They they did it in a uh you know quick rushed way that didn't really make sense and doesn't work, and then they're like, oh yeah, I tried it, it was a disaster.

Derek Bruff: 24:15

And I see that a lot with all types of teaching change, is that if instructors make, you know, a small set of perhaps not fully thought-through decisions, and then they try it out, and yeah, it's it doesn't work. And even when you're making really good decisions and you're fairly informed, sometimes it's your own skill at using these new practices or the time commitment that you didn't encounter, right? Like there's lots of reasons the first time out can not work as well as you would hope. Um, and I think it's important to persist, right? To realize this is not going to be, you're not gonna knock it out of the park the first time you implement these new practices. It may take two or three iterations before you've found the value that you were hoping to see there.

Robert Bosley: 25:01

Actually, we have seen so we we it is more common for a new practitioner to have a disaster the first time than it is to succeed. In fact, uh more than

Derek Bruff: 25:13

Do you say that at the beginning of your trainings just to get like everyone excited?

Robert Bosley: 25:17

Yeah. [Laughs] Um yeah, but one of one of my still favorite keynotes that we had at the grading conference, um, and this was one of our first, maybe even our first year, um, was Dr. Robert Talbert was one of the keynotes, and he came in and very honestly, very openly, and and very uh forthright about how bad his first attempt was, and not just his first attempt, but his second, and and how many different, I mean, iterations made it worse twice. Yeah, yeah, he he brought like his original syllabus, and he's like, I don't even understand this anymore. And I tell a story uh quite often about how bad the first time Sharona and I tried this, it it was a disaster, and yet I've never gone back. And that's the that's the thing when we talk about and we always make sure we emphasize is yeah, most people have a really bad experience the first time, and yet they never go back to traditional grading.

Derek Bruff: 26:23

Yeah, yeah. Once you've seen the flaws in that system, it's you got you just got to keep working on it, yeah.

Sharona Krinsky: 26:30

Well, and that's one of the most important talks that I think we're the only ones that I know of that are doing, which is we have a talk called Grading is the misuse of mathematics in the measurement of student learning. And it's literally an hour-long talk that deconstructs both the history and the mathematics of the current grading systems, and by the end, mostly convinces people that traditional grades are meaningless, mathematically meaningless. So, and coming from a couple of mathematicians, it seems great.

Derek Bruff: 27:05

Right, right. So I'm gonna change the scope a little bit here. Sharona, I know you've done some course coordination recently, um, which is always exciting. Um, and Robert, I know you work as a coach in schools, right? And so um, those are different roles, right? You're not working with just yourself or one instructor, but you may be working with a group of instructors or kind of a system. Um, and you gestured to the LMS as a kind of structural barrier to change. Are there other structural barriers that you see in that slightly more macro level work? And how do you try to pull some levers to fix those?

Sharona Krinsky: 27:46

Yes, structural barriers. So I'm really proud that we actually had an amazing run and an amazing success in course coordination with this. It took a lot of work on the part of the coordinators. We had to do the stick was you had to do this because it was a coordinated course. And the carrot was we're gonna do 90% of the heavy lifting for you. So we did so much work to build systems that um built out assessment systems because if you're doing revisions and retakes, you need a lot more versions of assessments. You need the LMS system built out to support it. So we did that work for instructors, which enabled the instructors to experience the good parts of the system without hitting some of the pain themselves. And we still hit a bunch of pain, but over the course of many years, we ended up with a wonderful team that did it.

Sharona Krinsky: 28:46

And then there was a directional change for the course on the part of the department, and they brought in a completely new team that had no background and no interest in alternative grading practices. So they are completely changing the course, which they're allowed to do, but they're also throwing out all of the alternative grading, which they didn't have to do. So if you don't have a sustained administrative structure who believes in this stuff, it's very hard to sustain it. And one of the problems is alternative grading practices have uncovered some unexamined beliefs that we have as faculty in our disciplines about ourselves. You know, we are the pinnacle. How many times do you go out and you say you're a university professor? And people are like, ooh, wow. And you're like, yeah, my paycheck doesn't reflect that. But even me, I feel good about myself getting to say I'm a university math professor, but I had to achieve that with certain behaviors and practices that I'm now challenging with my alternative grading practices. And the biggest one seems to be um revisions and retakes. That is the shocking one that I find people who are against this are like students should just, you know, it's not fair that two different students could both get an A when one got it the first time out and the other one needed two or three tries. Um, but that's huge. And I think it goes to who we are as people.

Derek Bruff: 30:24

Yeah. Well, say more about that because I feel like there's a there's an underlying assumption there that our job is to somehow rank students by their performance in some fashion.

Sharona Krinsky: 30:36

Um so that's it's not just an assumption, it's actually true. It's it's actually one of the biggest purposes of grades. It may not be what we want it to be, but they were historically designed to rank and sort students. And then in the Industrial Revolution, when the bell curves came in, they were designed further to be eugenicists. So grades are designed to rank and sort. And unfortunately, there are places where we need that because there is real scarcity in this world, such as graduate school admissions or things or scholarships, that grades and GPA are used to rank and sort. I just dispute that every grade should be used to rank and sort. I don't know, Boz. I know you have thoughts on this too.

Robert Bosley: 31:24

Yeah, so uh two things I I kind of wanted to say, and one of them is even though I don't do course coordination, I have done a lot of PLC work, which you know is a group of people teaching the same course and trying to do some things similarly. And I can say without a doubt, there is absolutely no way to sustain this kind of change at a level other than your classroom without administrative support and buy-in. Uh, we've we've had a couple of um you know guests on from schools where this is a school-wide thing, and every single time the key linchpin is the support and even leadership of the administration in trying to do this work. Um so that is a key thing, and Sharona saw it, you know, the unfortunately the bad side of not having that support.

Robert Bosley: 32:23

Um but I also kind of wanted to touch on what you what you were saying, Sharona, about the belief that if both people are able to accomplish something, but one did it in the first try and the other one did it in the third, that the first should be better. I actually this isn't an adult thing, this isn't an educator belief. I've done part of my um class when I I, you know, at the beginning of a semester or beginning of a year, some of the activities that I do to kind of buy in or get student buy-in and start to explain my grading is I I do this really silly um activity that takes the groups, we do it a few times. You know, a couple of groups will get it really early. By the third or fourth, every group's got it. When I ask my students which ones should get the better grade, they'll say the ones that got it early. Like this this is not an adult thing or an educator. This is yeah, this belief that if we both accomplish the same thing, but I did it first and Sharona did it after me, that somehow I'm better than Sharona, or that my in grade my end um grade should be higher, is fairly ingrained in both student and educator.

Sharona Krinsky: 33:45

And it's one of those things you have to unpack because there's also a difference between I have to have it because this piece of content is needed something else, versus I need it to have it by a certain time for the grade, like separating in instructors' minds. Because if you ask them, you know, why can't they retake it in week eight? And they're like, well, but they need it by week eight because of the later content. I said, Yeah, yeah, I get that. They need it by week eight, but why does it have to be baked into the grade? And they're like, Oh, you know, so separating those things, but yeah, that's that's one of the so there is a need for ranking and sorting, and that's again an unexamined conversation. There's so many unexamined conversations about these grades and where they come from.

Derek Bruff: 34:34

So Sharona, so one more follow-up. So do you see a connection between that belief or that need for ranking and sorting and our identities as professional educators? Like, is there is it is there a connection there that makes that kind of hard to disentangle?

Sharona Krinsky: 34:53

Yes, I think it is. Because even for me at times, with all the work I've done, sometimes I feel that sense of, but this is what I'm proud of. This is not everybody can do this, right? And so there's a little bit of a pang because I was one of those that got it at the beginning and things. But that's okay. I can have that feeling and acknowledge that feeling and still be okay with it's okay that some students are getting it later than others, because I have to keep in mind what is my goal for this class, whatever this class is. And my goal, my heartfelt goal is that every student learns the material in that class because I wouldn't teach the class if I didn't think that that material was important to the students that chose to take it. And so it just requires getting those feelings to the surface, taking a look at them and going, I see you, and then moving on and saying, it's okay. We have a 15-week semester for a reason. Why does what you know in week three determine your grade? When there are real implications. Like the reality is if you're further behind, you might not get as far. You might not learn as much because you're filling in holes. And that's okay. It's okay that not everybody gets everything, but it doesn't have to be so determinative throughout the semester. But you also can't wait till the end. So it's like this push-pull. Because if you wait everything to the end, your students are gonna die. So I'm not saying don't test them in week four. Yes. I'm like, don't I'm not saying don't test them in week four. I'm just saying if they don't succeed in week four, give them more chances later.

Derek Bruff: 36:35

Yeah. Yeah. I know I have a lot of staff from CTLs that listen to this podcast. Um what are what's some advice you would give to CTL staff or leaders who are wanting to try to make some grading reform change happen on their campus?

Sharona Krinsky: 36:51

So I do think that that CTLs are going to be critical to this. I would love for them, though, to really dive in and know for themselves some of the problems with traditional grading. Um, because when you don't know what's really wrong, it's very easy to recreate those problems. And so I really would love for them to know that. And I would love for CTL faculty to understand just how challenging this is on a personal level for faculty, like that teacher assessment identity. There's some research on teacher assessment identity because the types of ways and the types of evidence, and Bosley's on me about this all the time. Like, I get uncomfortable with certain levels of precision, and I want this like very high bar of what is possible. And you got to really expose that for yourself. So I think that CTL faculty can be these coaches to other faculty as we go through this super uncomfortable self-examination, like a lot of the transformational coaching that Bosley does. I think that's where CTL should go. You want to tell them about that, Boz?

Robert Bosley: 37:58

Well, I mean, and again, with a lot of the institutions that we've seen where a lot of good things are going on, it almost always is, if not centered and led by CTLs and things like that, it's at least supported. So uh Sharona said that you know they're extremely important, and I would agree that if we're one of the things that we need to do is really get um, you know, things like CTL on campuses bought in and get them to lead the work locally. Um but uh as for what kind of work should they be doing, yeah, finding out and really diving into some of the issues with traditional grading. Um, but also there are so many different levels to grading, and that's part of the issue with any kind of grading reform, is it is such a nuanced and multifaceted topic that uh no one can be an expert on all of it. It's really, really um a deep and often unexplored kind of topic. So if CTLs can start doing some of the research uh and being able just they don't have to be experts, but when some when an educator comes to them uh with uh you know kind of one area or another that of concern that those CTLs can point them towards that direction and just housing this very much growing uh multi-levels of research. So the in the instructors themselves don't have to go. I mean, Sharon and I joke that our our our reading list at this point is ridiculously long, we're never gonna get caught up, but but like that's all we ever do now.

Derek Bruff: 40:03

Right. But I think r like I remember a faculty member at Vanderbilt who basically came to us and said, Look, I don't have time to read the research on teaching in higher ed. Will you read that for me and tell me what I need to know? And on the one hand, like I wish she made time for that, but on the other hand, CTL do have more time to explore that literature and to gain expertise. Faculty, it's really hard for them to fit that in, right? And so to have someone you can go to on your campus who has more bandwidth to do that kind of work and can connect you with the resources more efficiently, um, that's a big win. The other thing I would say is um you mentioned the key role of leadership in sustaining this kind of grading reform work. Um and something I'm always advising CTLs to do is to not just operate at the individual faculty level, helping them do course redesign and teaching practice change, right? But to think about how we can do organizational development at the department level. Because so much of the change has to happen at that level. Absolutely. Um I think that's another strength that CTLs can bring if they've developed the skills at helping departments affect change, that can do a lot of good to providing this the infrastructure that that individual instructors need.

Sharona Krinsky: 41:22

I think they can also work on being connective tissue. You know, like we were just saying, there's little pockets, there's five or six people around the campus that are doing this. If CTLs can like find those people and bring them together.

Robert Bosley: 41:36

Yeah. And something else that I've seen um be real successful at a few CTLs is they're kind of the facilitator of um PLC or FLC groups on different universities. So they're not necessarily doing all the work, but they're the ones that are finding the people, bringing them together, and kind of being the facilitator and giving some structure so PLCs or FLCs can really come together and grow at that institution.

Derek Bruff: 42:07

Yeah. Yeah. And I love that kind of work myself. I love putting together a good FLC. And and right, finding those connections. Like, how come you two didn't know each other before? Like, like you guys are right in the same zone, you're two academic buildings away, and you're you're you're dealing with the exact same teaching challenges. Um, so our time is coming up, but I wanted to let you make kind of a pitch to the audience. What are some ways that listeners can get involved with the work of the Center for Grading Reform?

Sharona Krinsky: 42:33

Absolutely. Well, the first one is come to the conference. So the conference is virtual, it's in June of this year, registration's open, it's the 16th to the 18th. It's $75 or pay what you can. So we it is an extremely accessible conference. Um, and if you if you register, you get recordings of everything, often including uh the keynotes. I haven't, I don't know that all the keynotes this year will be recording. We have some absolutely fabulous keynotes this year, which I should have pulled up and I don't. Um, but uh that's the first way. We also will probably be running more programs throughout the year. Um, and we're trying to get a research conference together. We don't have that yet. But um, you can also go back and look at presentations from previous years. So we have every single conference that we've ever done is linked on our website, and most of the videos are up with the slides. So you can dive into six years worth of conferences.

Robert Bosley: 43:35

And beyond just going to the conference, um, something that we started doing last year is really opening it up to more um volunteers, like having so we can run more sessions, having people because I think one of the things that makes our conference so successful as a virtual conference is all the support that and technical supports that we give to our presenters so they. They're not having like all they have to do is worry about their presentation. Um you know, we we we call them like Zoom helpers and chat monitors, but yeah. Um last year I think we had like 80 something um volunteers at whether it was reading abstracts or putting together the programming or actually helping during the running of the the three days at the conference. So that's a great way if you if you want to get a little bit more involved than just coming to it. Um we we love and need as much help as we can get with that.

Sharona Krinsky: 44:35

And then we also at the conference we have these institutional registrations. So you can for $600 as an institution, you pay that one price and you can have up to 16 faculty, or it doesn't even have like institution we define broadly. So we've had like, hey, we're the network of science educators. Sure, you're an institution. Like we don't care. But so they can get for $ $600, you can get up to 16 educators. And then if you go beyond that, it's half price, you know, it's $37.50 as opposed to the normal registration of $75. But what that does is it gives the institution a tool to say, hey, we're supporting this. And again, it's $600. So for most institutions, they can afford $600. Not all, but most can. And then they now have a collection of names and email addresses from their institution that are interested. They can follow up and they can build things. And so we're hoping to support centers for teaching and learning and institutions doing this on their own campuses with that institutional registration. And literally the money is just to help administer the conference. You can also sign up to get on our mailing list. You can also donate. We are a 501c3, just putting that out there. Um and yeah, we have big plans. We're writing some grants. And if anyone has an idea for an institute or a workshop that they might want to run, feel free to reach out to us and propose it and we'll see if it makes sense to run it through the center. Because we're finding that a lot of people are running, are wanting to do some of this work and they're running into institutional barriers on the cost side. So we want to be the hub that different groups can do this work and not face some of those institutional barriers.

Derek Bruff: 46:25

Absolutely. Well, um, that was great. Um, thank you so much. Um, we covered a lot of ground here today. Um, and I appreciate you sharing your experiences and your perspectives and the patterns and challenges and structural issues that you're seeing in this work. Um, thanks for doing the work and thanks for coming on today and sharing sharing what you have.

Sharona Krinsky: 46:45

Thanks for having us.

Robert Bosley: 46:46

Thanks for having us.

Derek Bruff: 46:49

That was Sharona Krinsky, Executive Director of the Center for Grading Reform and math instructor at Cal State LA. And Robert Bosley, Director of Programming for K-12 at the Center for Grading Reform, and an instructional coach in LAUSD. Thanks to Sharona and Boz for coming on the show and sharing their experiences with grading reform at both micro and macro levels. See the show notes for links to the Center for Grading Reform and the upcoming 2026 Grading Conference. You'll also find a link to my appearance on Sharona and Boz's podcast from last December.

Derek Bruff: 47:24

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website and socials, and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.