Justin Reich is joined by Barry Fishman, professor of education and information at the University of Michigan where he studies the use of technology to support teacher learning, video games as models for learning environments, and the role of education leaders in fostering classroom-level reform involving technology. Together they discuss the 50th Anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education with Barry Fishman’s new introduction, as well as grading systems during the pandemic, “Gameful Learning”, and issues with grading in general. “Grades remove information from the system. Rather than me knowing what a learner has learned, I know that they have an A or a B or a C. What does that mean? It doesn't mean really anything at all, especially if it's a B or a C... And maybe you throw a curve in. That's even worse. Curves really remove information from the system, and they ration success. This is one of the worst problems with grading, I think, is that they were really designed for ranking and sorting. They were never designed to encourage learning.” - Barry Fishman
Justin Reich is joined by Barry Fishman, professor of education and information at the University of Michigan where he studies the use of technology to support teacher learning, video games as models for learning environments, and the role of education leaders in fostering classroom-level reform involving technology. Together they discuss the 50th Anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education with Barry Fishman’s new introduction, as well as grading systems during the pandemic, “Gameful Learning”, and issues with grading in general.
“Grades remove information from the system. Rather than me knowing what a learner has learned, I know that they have an A or a B or a C. What does that mean? It doesn't mean really anything at all, especially if it's a B or a C... And maybe you throw a curve in. That's even worse. Curves really remove information from the system, and they ration success. This is one of the worst problems with grading, I think, is that they were really designed for ranking and sorting. They were never designed to encourage learning.” - Barry Fishman
In this episode we’ll talk about:
Resources and Links
Learn more about Barry Fishman and his work!
Check out Justin Reich’s book, Failure To Disrupt!
Join our self-paced online edX course: Sorting Truth from Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning
Join our self-paced online edX course: Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/barry-fishman/transcript
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. Recorded and mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Justin Reich: From the home studios of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. I'm Justin Reich. Today's guest is Barry Fishman, a professor of education and information at the University of Michigan, where his research focuses on the use of technology to support teacher learning, video games as models for learning environments, and the role of education leaders in fostering classroom-level reform involving technology. Barry is also the author of a new introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, a classic book on grading systems. Welcome, Barry. We're happy to have you here on TeachLab.
Barry Fishman: So happy to be with you, Justin. And I bring greetings from the authors of Wad-Ja-Get?, the original authors of Wad-Ja-Get?, Howard Kirschenbaum, Rod Napier, and Sid Simon, who've authorized me to go around and talk about this book without them. But they're hopefully going to be very present in this conversation.
Justin Reich: Well, I'm certainly glad that they're present, given that the book is 50 years old, that these guys are still hanging in there. That's terrific.
Barry Fishman: That was a nice surprise to me too, actually. One of the real joys of this project was getting to talk with them and have them tell me their stories and learn a lot from their experiences.
Justin Reich: So tell us a little bit about the origins of the book. What did you learn in those conversations? How did these guys get together to write this story? And maybe just as a little bit of [inaudible], maybe even before that, we should say, what is the book, and how is it framed?
Barry Fishman: The book is called Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, and it was originally published in 1971 by two professors at Temple University, education professors at Temple University, Rod Napier, and Sid Simon, and one of their graduate students, Howard, or he goes by Howie Kirschenbaum. And the book was in part a reflection of their own experiences both with teaching, both of them... They all had worked at various points of time as secondary school teachers and as college teachers.
And Sid Simon in particular was an early adherent of what he would call blanket grading. Let's take grades off the table. He was teaching at one of the, I think CUNY campuses, and he said, "I'm going to give everyone a B." The students were fine with that. Grades were off the table. We can just focus on learning. Before that, he was teaching in, I think high school, and he used to say how it would break his heart to have to give these students a letter grade, and then get into sort of arguments with parents and with kids about grades.
He said he wanted to use all the letters of the alphabet, really involved in narrative grading. Lots of feedback was his goal. And when he got to Temple, and Howie Kirschenbaum was in his class or TAing for his class, they decided to push it a little bit, and he said, "Well, let's give all the students A's." And the administration did not like that. It became a kind of clash around his contract, and he was denied tenure. Talking about Sid Simon here.
And in response, because he was such a beloved teacher, there arose protests. And Sid actually sent me some newspaper clipping from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, a newspaper I read as a kid growing up in Philadelphia, mainly for the comics, but it was this whole public event that was going on around Sid Simon and his approach to grading. And as part of the faculty review of Sid's tenure case in reaction to all of this, they engaged Rod Napier, another professor at Temple, who did a systematic review of the restriction up to that time on grading.
And the conclusion was, grading is highly problematic. It's highly contestable. What Sid's doing is completely reasonable. And Sid was granted tenure. He actually ended up leaving Temple, going to UMass Amherst. But the experience was made under Howard Kirschenbaum's leadership into this book, which is written as a fictionalized account of a suburban high school called Mapleton High, and it doesn't read like an academic book. It reads like a novelized kind of debate within the community and the school, and there are characters, and there's kind of a plot, in which they weave through all of this research.
The work that Rod Napier did as part of the case at Temple actually became an appendix, an annotated appendix of research on grading. And the book presents the problematic nature of grading. It doesn't come to a conclusion, per se. It doesn't tell you what you should do. It just problematizes the whole thing. Now, I was doing some work at Michigan and in some other places around thinking about how we could advance the state-of-the-art in grading and really make it reflect more about learning and care and equity, things that I think are very important and very missing from current grading practices.
And a school colleague of mine, [Laurie Domico], who had done her dissertation on what she called assessment infrastructures, said, "Oh, there's a book I read when I was doing my dissertation." This was back in 1995. At that point, it was already an old book. "But it really made an impression on me. It's called Wad-Ja-Get?" I got it out of our university library. It was in kind of deep cold storage. Dusted it off, read it, and was just astounded to find that the ideas, the challenges, the solutions, the arguments, they were pretty much exactly the same arguments, challenges, solutions we were still having and conducting today.
And I was so impressed that I did a thing. I just don't do this. I wrote a fan letter to the authors. I found their emails online. One of them was... Howard was just recently retired from, I think it was the University of Rochester. And he's emeritus professor. I was kind of surprised that he responded to say, "Oh, we were so happy to get your message."
And because in the email I told him why I was so inspired by the book and some of the work I was doing, he said, "You know, Rod and Sid and I have been kicking around the idea of trying to republish Wad-Ja-Get? somehow. We would love to see if you could help us with that, and maybe you could write a new introduction to contextualize it and bring things up to date." And that was really the birth of this project, and it's really such a pleasure for me to be able to bring this book back into the forefront of the conversation.
Because after its republication, what's happened is a lot of people have come out of the woodwork and said, "This book made a huge impression on me when I was a pre-service teacher or when I was a teacher or a parent thinking about these things." And one of the nice things we were able to do in the republication was make it digital. That was actually one of the hardest parts of this process. There were nothing except hard copies of this book. There was no digital version of it, so we had to [crosstalk].
Justin Reich: Somebody had to retype it?
Barry Fishman: Yeah, someone had to retype it, and we had to correct that, and we had to fix things. We were also able to make it available in accessible formats, and the authors were willing to make it available under a creative commons license, which means that you could of course go buy a paperback version of it, but you can also deal with the electronic versions for free, which I'm really hopeful means we can put it in more people's hands, use it to catalyze more conversations, and help reenergize this movement, which has got a lot of energy right now in part because of COVID and for other reasons around grading.
Justin Reich: Well, we definitely want to get into the sort of recent COVID angle, but of course it's also really interesting to hear. Here's this thing that was written 50 years ago based on research from that time that you think still feels durable and relevant. So I don't know, can you summarize for us, what are a couple of the key points of the grading research that Rod Napier came up with when he was defending his colleague's tenure review? What are some of the key principles that somebody might want to have in mind as they're starting to read this book or think about these issues?
Barry Fishman: Let me take that question really as sort of, what's a rundown of the problems with grading? Because that's really what came out in that review. And I think from that literature review conducted 50 years ago, there's been more recent research that kind of reinforces that work and extends it in some way. But first problem, grades are not reliable, and they're not objective.
I mean, what's interesting is this is true for... You might expect it in literature, right? Teachers might be very subjective when they're grading an essay, but it's also true in math. I mean, it's true in all kinds of areas you wouldn't expect objectivity to be a problem. That when you look at students who are judged by some third party [inaudible] doing equivalent work, they might receive very different grades from their teachers.
And this is in part because grades are a very confused construct. There's a term that gets used called hodgepodge grading. Grades include both your academic performance and your attendance. Sometimes there's a classroom participation element rolled in there. Who knows what that is comprised of? That might have a lot to do with whether the teacher likes you or the way you look, or who knows, right? All kinds of really problematic elements in that.
Grades remove information from the system. Rather than me know what a learner has learned, I know that they have an A or a B or a C. What does that mean? It doesn't mean really anything at all, especially if it's a B or a C. So if I'm teaching, say, an advanced level class, and people don't do this, but if they cared to look at their students' prior performance on a transcript, they would not know what they know and don't know, they would just know what this letter thing was.
And maybe you throw a curve in. That's even worse. Curves really remove information from the system, and they ration success. This is one of the worst problems with grading, I think, is that they were really designed for ranking and sorting. They were never designed to encourage learning, and that really shows through in some of these deficiencies with what grades do. I'll go on. Grades reduce motivation for learning. There's decades of research in academic motivation about how when there's a grade attached, people become very focused on the grade and not focused on the learning.
And when there's feedback and a grade, people focus on the grade and they ignore the feedback. I mean, this is certainly my experience as a teacher as well. Grades contribute to student stress and mental health challenges. There was just some research published in the last couple days indicating that in very academically competitive schools, students are way more stressed than in other schools. That's a lot about this sort of sorting and ranking problem.
And then these are issues that weren't really highlighted in Wad-Ja-Get? In some ways, Wad-Ja-Get? is also a product of its time. In the '70s, there was a lot of unrest of a lot of different kinds in the US, but the book itself doesn't really deal with racial inequality directly. It wasn't one of the topics that these gentlemen were focused on. But more recently, we've really come to understand that when you have systems that are built around ranking and sorting, the places people start matter a lot.
And it's very hard to recover when you start from behind. And so grades are one element of systemic racism and inequality in education. They contribute to the problem. They don't do anything to take away from that challenge, and it's one of the things that we deal with all the time when we look at issues like access to higher education, for instance, or access to jobs, and the role that grades can play in that can be very corrosive without, again, us really having any real information about what the learners know and can do because of what the grade is.
Justin Reich: So there's 50 years of work that's fairly durable. It sounds like there's some slice of that work that really focuses on issues of racial inequalities and other kinds of inequalities that are more new. But a kind of neat thing about reading Wad-Ja-Get? is you're transported back to the 1970s where people are having debates that sound pretty salient now. We've lived through 15 months of pandemic now, where in lots of institutions, grading practices that had been very consistent, in many places changed very quickly, and then also many places changed back very quickly.
In my institution of MIT, one of the things that we discovered is that our forebearers had buried somewhere in the books that in an emergency, the chair of the faculty is allowed to change the grading system to pass/no record, or A, B, no record, something like that. And everyone looked around and went, "Aha. I'm very glad someone thought of this before. This is going to work much better than what we had planned."
It's also the case that in a lot of K-12 schools, we did a bunch of research on this in March, April, May of 2020, lots of systems went to pass/fail, went to pass/no record, some kind of non-grading system. And we interviewed teachers, and they described to us a kind of double falling off. Right when the pandemic hit, they lost a bunch of students. Then a new set of policies came in, getting rid of grading systems, and then they lost a second group of students.
So then we were really surprised in August and September. Some of our strong, progressive allies with great progressive pedagogy credentials were saying, "We've really got to bring back some of these extrinsic motivation systems this September because we don't have in place what we need to do without them." So yeah, lots of tumult about grading and grading systems over the last year. How do you see that affecting the conversations that you're having now with folks about the book?
Barry Fishman: Yeah, before I directly answer that... And by the way, thanks to you and your colleagues for all that great work when the lockdowns were starting and there was a lot of rapid transition in schools. Many people commented, "We've never seen so much fast transition in education, in the history of education, and it's a lot to deal with." And I think the work you did really helped give people some data to work with, and some ground rules to think with. I know I passed around your review of what different states were doing to a number of colleagues-
Justin Reich: Thanks, Barry.
Barry Fishman: ... in K-12 education in particular. And in fact, we at the University of Michigan held up what MIT was doing as part of our debate about what we should do right now. It was very, very useful. So for me, I've been teaching at Michigan now for coming up on 25 years, and I've observed changes in my students. And I often characterize the change as a reluctance to exert autonomy.
25 years ago, I could assign my students a very loose sort of paper topic as a midterm or a final. "I'd like you to write a paper on a topic of interest to you that's related to this course and to [inaudible]..." I have some more parameters, but very loose. Over the years, they've required more and more specificity in exactly what they should do. At some point, I introduced a rubric, which I'm dying to get rid of because it really leads to extremely boring work when people are just responding to the rubric.
The questions go from, "How many pages is that?" to, "Is that double-spaced or single-spaced? What's the font?" I mean, seriously, they want me to specify everything, because our most successful learners, I'm making air quotes here, are the students who are best at following and executing instructions. That's what it means to be a successful student today and to excel. You've basically done everything that you're told to do really, really well.
And that had led to the current generation of undergraduates that are just ill-prepared to deal with ambiguity, which is unfortunately exactly what the world presents us with, is nothing but ambiguity. And in the pandemic, we also faced a lot of ambiguity. What's going on? What should I pay attention to? How do I stay engaged? And as you said, a lot of schools, mine included, and I spoke to a lot of consortia of K-12 schools as well, moved to either pass/fail or pass/no record.
And for listeners, no record, that just means that if you fail the class, it kind of magically disappears from the books. You weren't ever there. And I think the goal there was really to focus on something I mentioned earlier in the conversation, care. Right? I think grading should be about learning first, it should be about equity, and it should be about care for learners. And the care part was really emphasized in the pandemic by trying to reduce student anxiety.
And I heard from lots of different places three different kinds of objections to that move. The first objection was, "We are lowering our standards." The second objection was, "Students are going to be unmotivated." That's the one you were just pointing at. And the third was, "It's not fair. It's not fair to the students who've been working hard for A's, and it's not fair to the students that are counting on the hard work they might have been doing this semester to raise their GPAs." Okay, so shall we unpack those one at a time?
Justin Reich: Lead us through, Barry.
Barry Fishman: All right. The people who complained that by doing away with grades and by going to a pass/fail system were lowering our standards, my response to that is, "Well, what are our standards in the first place?" Why would we be comfortable with a student passing a course who has not gotten a handle on the core learning goals of that course? The idea that we're ready to claim that we can take credit for this course... and credit's a whole nother thing, credit hours are a whole nother thing, but maybe we'll get to that, maybe we won't... if a student doesn't understand the key ideas of the class is a farce.
And we should be redesigning our assessment systems to say that, "Whatever the passing grade is, that should be acceptable level work." And people might excel beyond that, but that should be the bar. And if we're unhappy with that, then we have a problem with how we define our standards to begin with. The second thing, students are going to be unmotivated. That's clearly one of the biggest things that came out of here. But to me, that really reveals the devil's bargain in all this.
If students are motivated only by the grade and not by the material or their own goals, or any number of other things that are more directly related to them as growing, developing humans, then again, we've done something terribly wrong. Now, I admit, it is very hard to make a change midstream. That's why they have that saying, you don't change horses midstream. And students are really deeply enculturated into this system.
So when I complained about kids today a few minutes ago, well, kids today are the product of the system we designed, and they're responding to the system extremely well. In other words, we ended up exactly where we should have. It's unfortunately the wrong place, right, because we were pointing in the wrong direction. And-
Justin Reich: It's quite hard to ask teachers, "It's the middle of a pandemic. We're getting rid of grades, and therefore, you're going to need to generate all of these other structures for intrinsic motivation."
Barry Fishman: Yeah.
Justin Reich: Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that to me kind of characterized the pandemic, especially the early phase of the uncertainty and ambiguity there, is like, oh, we can do all these things differently. We have that capacity to do so, but it's hard to make a big change. It's hard to get rid of grading that might work, but only if we were able to change 12 other things at the same time.
Barry Fishman: Yeah. We didn't equip anyone to think about that, and we didn't really give them time to think about that, and we really were just saying, "Just pass the kids, or who you think are trying." So all of that was kind of poorly aligned for actually making a difference here. The good thing, though, about these rapid changes was that it's opened the door to the conversation. Because I've never had more of my colleagues willing to talk about the purpose behind grades as I've had in the last... Has it been a decade now? How long has this pandemic been going on?
Justin Reich: Yeah, right?
Barry Fishman: I was going to say a year, and I realized, oh, it's more than a year, but I have no idea how long anymore. The third group that I mentioned, that it's unfair to the hard workers, they're not really affected anyway. They're fine. They're going to be okay. And the students who are trying to improve their GPAs, again, they're okay. There are other ways to support them, right? There are other ways to make it clear that they were actually improving.
That's part of the problem, too, is a lot of what we have in our grading systems and cumulative GPAs and all that, those are measures of a moment, right? The GPA especially, we've looked at GPA variation at Michigan, for instance, and found that most of the variation in a graduating student's GPA can be explained by their experiences in their first year, maybe even in their first semester. And what's really going on there is, they were adjusting to college, to being away from home, to suddenly everyone around you is as good as you were in high school when you were maybe used to being a standout. All kinds of things are different. You're homesick. Who knows? You're rushing a sorority or a fraternity.
Justin Reich: The point being, a student who tanks their fall semester, their fall freshman semester, and then goes on to distinguished work, having [inaudible] themselves, might have a 3.7 GPA, and is functionally no different from the student who successfully completed eight semesters and got a 3.9 GPA or something like that. When you're trying to evaluate the capacity of a person to contribute to work or civil society or something like that, there's no difference between those two kids-
Barry Fishman: Exactly.
Justin Reich: ... except maybe the kid who had the hard time is probably actually better prepared for facing adversity than the student who didn't face that.
Barry Fishman: Yeah. You came from an under resourced high school and you found a way to figure it out and to make it all work? This is the kid I'm really interested in, in many ways. So those are the objections that people have, and I think they really [inaudible] the system, and they invite the question, what should we do? What could we do that's better? That's a long list of things we could do that are better.
Justin Reich: And some of those are in Wad-Ja-Get? I think the book doesn't conclude with that, but what are the general directions that the authors kind of encourage communities to think towards?
Barry Fishman: Yeah. Well, I mean, some of them are the ones that do get used frequently today to supplement or complement standard letter-based grading systems, but written evaluations, even self-evaluations sometimes. The book mentions one thing that I've never fully processed and understood, but we could have grades, but just not tell them to the students. I'm a little unclear what the point of that one is, so I don't... Well, neither does the book.
There's blanket grading, which I mentioned Sid Simon had used. "Oh, I'm just going to give you all this grade." Contract grading is a more popular version today, where you make a deal with the students. You say, "Well, here are the bundles of work I expect you to do at a certain quality level. If you do those bundles of work, then this bundle is worth a B, this bundle's worth an A." You make an agreement upfront what you're going to do.
A variant on that is you actually have the student work with you to define the work they want to do and what they think that should be worth at the end. We've talked about pass/fail or credit/no credit. And a lot of these lead up to, to me, what I think is the real goal here, which is... And the language here is contestable, but in the book they call it mastery-based grading. It's still called mastery-based grading, or mastery learning.
Other terms that get thrown around that are equivalent are competency-based grading, or competency-based assessment. A new term I heard recently, Randy Bass at Georgetown was using this language, and I like it a lot, talking about accomplishment-based or capability-based grading, a real record of what a learner knows and can do.
And that's important, because it lets us start to distinguish what people know, and therefore what it is they need to focus on next. That's what's missing from current grading systems, which tend to smooth all those differences out and make it very hard to distinguish between learners and to figure out what they need or where they're headed, or how to customize or tailor their program. I mean, all kinds of things start to open up when you actually have a record of what somebody knows how to do and what they have done.
Justin Reich: And there are some domains that have had some success moving in those kinds of competency and mastery directions, especially places where high quality work is well-defined. I was involved in some efforts to bring competency-based, accomplishment-based sorts of evaluations into teacher education, and we were often comparing ourselves to medical education. And there are certain things in medical education, like a paramedic comes up to someone who's not breathing on the street, and they try to intubate them, and you could tell pretty readily whether or not the intubation worked.
Their chest is moving up and down, and air is passing back and forth, or it's not. In teacher education, some of these things are much more ambiguous. How well did a student create a classroom environment that was inclusive to all? How much did they challenge students to the degree that put them in their zone of proximal development, have them feel challenged and stretched but not overwhelmed? Some of those things are more subjective, maybe as subjective as A, B, C or 87, 93, 97 are.
I mean, how much do you think the kind of practical challenges of alternative grading systems are what bog people down versus inertia or moral objection or other kinds of things like that?
Barry Fishman: The practical challenges are real, but to say that's why we're not going to try this is to accept something that we know is inadequate, right? Because you could say, "Oh, it's so much harder to judge whether someone's executing these key signature moves in education well." But what's better, the Praxis exam? Certainly not.
Justin Reich: The Praxis exam, which is the test that teachers take to become teachers. Is there some performance component to it, or it's mostly a multiple choice test?
Barry Fishman: It varies from state to state, as such things do in education. But let's talk about other domains, right? And I'll pick on the science. Especially in college, where a lot of introductory science classes tend to be quite large, we have adopted the multiple choice exam. Sometimes there's a short answer, sometimes there's a show me your work kinds of things, but by and large, we have these exams and decades of question banks that have been developed in your physics department or your chemistry department, and those are now accepted as what it means to be a successful learner in those intro science classes.
But I don't know a scientist who would believe that responding to those exam questions is what it means to be a scientist or to do science or understand science. It's a compromise that we've made. And then what happens is, and this is I think true of grading in general, it's been around for about 100 plus years now in one form or another, but because we built systems, and infrastructures, that's a term that I like using a lot, around these systems that start to reinforce the practices that we have, we suddenly start to view these things as not just normal, but natural, and don't stop to ask, "What else could we do?"
So whenever somebody gives me the argument that it's too much work to do this better thing, to me you're making a really false choice. If we're doing a not-great thing right now, why don't we find a way to try to reduce the scope of what we're attempting in order to do something smaller, better? That would be, to me, the wiser approach than to just keep trying to do everything, everything, everything poorly, which is I think what we currently accept as the curriculum in K-12 and college education.
Justin Reich: Now, Barry, you have not only argued about these ideas, but you've done a bunch of design and innovation and technology development in your own classes, with partners and things like that. If we signed up for your courses at the University of Michigan, what would grading and evaluation look like, and what are some things that you're trying out and playing with, either in your own classes or with colleagues?
Barry Fishman: And I should say, it's actually, I'm happy to say that after a decade of doing this work, it's not just my courses, but I think we last year did some calculation and realized that a quarter of the grading seniors had had an experience in a course using the tools and systems that we've designed at Michigan. And we're up to something like 200 instructors now, and tens of thousands of students, and it's also spread across about 100 institutions, but usually one person at each of those institutions, not like a movement like on our campus.
But we call this gameful learning, and it's really rooted in assessment systems, and it's inspired by all of the abundant research on games and learning, much of which comes out of your institution. Eric Klopfer, Mitch Resnick, you've been involved in this work over the years in lots of different ways. There's a definition. I was inspired by, originally, work by people like Jim Gee, who argues in his book, it came out around 2003, a book called What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
He argues that any successful commercial video game is also a successful learning environment, because a really well-designed game does some things that are necessary for it to become successful. First, it has to get you engaged, and it has to keep you engaged even through extreme challenges and struggles. A really well-designed game does this through lots of ways, but in part it appeals to your curiosity, it encourages you to take risks because you understand that the consequences of failure are not like, now you don't get to go to the college you want, which is the way the school game is designed, but you'll go back to the beginning of this level and try again, or back to the beginning of the game and try again.
The risks of failure are reduced in order to encourage what we might call productive failure, which by the way, failure-driven learning is very powerful, right? There's nothing like... In fact, I think it's John Dewey who said that, "Failure is instructive, and a true thinking person learns as much from his failure as from his successes." And that's embodied in well-designed games.
And I mentioned Eric Klopfer at the Education Arcade at MIT. He said a thing once that I just loved. He said, "You know, people play a well-designed game because it's hard, not despite the fact that it's hard. People seek out challenge in games." Now, as an educator and as a program director for undergraduate programs at one point at my school, I can't think of the last time a student came to me and said, "What's the hardest thing I can do next?"
That's just not how the education game is played. Education is a game. It meets all the definitions of a game, of any game definition you care to find. My favorite comes from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, who are famous game designers. Katie's gotten more into education recently. She did some things with Minecraft for Education and so forth, Connected Camps with Mimi Ito, whose work I think you know well. That definition says, "A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict defined by rules that results in a quantifiable outcome."
Justin Reich: That sounds an awful lot like school.
Barry Fishman: It's a perfect definition of school. My takeaway from that is, look, school is a game. It's just a terrible game. And what we need to do is figure out why it's such a terrible game, and follow some of the rules that scholars like Jim Gee and other people have given us to make it into a better game. And to me, a lot of that comes back to the assessment system.
For instance, in my classes, rather than have a... The percentage-based grading system, which is the norm, that's the system that the Wad-Ja-Get? folks are really pushing back against, everybody starts with 100, and then it's yours to lose. So let's say you do pretty well, Justin, on the midterm. You got a 95. Good work. Not 100 anymore. You're playing a losing game. And I can't tell you how every year around midterms, I look on Reddit for the University of Michigan subreddit, and there's always posts of people saying things like, "I got a 34% on the CS1 midterm. Am I doomed?"
And people come back and say, "No, that's actually a pretty good score." And I'm thinking, what is going on here? And at the end of the semester, people say things like, "I only need to get 150% on this final to pass this course." It's like, well, that's not going to happen. So that student, not being a fool, will stop paying attention to that course. They put their energy where it might matter.
So in my classes, you start at zero. "Welcome to class. You all have nothing, but you can end up wherever you choose." And then I map out lots of pathways that people can get there, and I have a lot of different kinds of assignments for people to do, all aligned with my learning goals, the objective of which is that by the end of the class, you will have done enough work in enough areas to demonstrate to me that you have met those learning goals, but everyone will have taken a slightly different path to get there.
It's not like everyone's totally individualized. There's variants, but in the end, what I'm trying to do is give the learner some autonomy, some choice, and some freedom to have productive failure. Because when they get their first big paper back from me and they have only earned half of the available points on that paper, say, or they've only met half of the learning goals, their first response is to freak out.
"This has never happened to me at Michigan." But then we sit down, and we build tools and infrastructure in a tool called GradeCraft that helps them map their way to the goals they do have for success. And that has proven to be a very popular system with students because it gives them control back, and it's proven a very popular system with instructors because it allows them to grade very... I mean, to be very firm with what they're demanding of students, and to have very high expectations and help students find their way to them.
So it's not all the way to mastery-based grading yet, but it's on the pathway to that, depending on how you use it. And I should say, it looks different in every classroom, so it's not just one approach. It's saying to people, "Well, what game are you playing here? What are the rules in this game?" And letting every instructor define that for themselves, so we see all kinds of variants on this in different classrooms across campus and in campuses around the country and around the world that are using GradeCraft.
Justin Reich: And most of these faculty presumably end up converting things back to an A, B, C, D system because somewhere in Michigan's registrar offices, that's required, but the thing that you've done is to say, "Well, instead of saying, 'You all start with 100 and we're just going to see how far you fall each time you step up to the assessment plate,' you're going to say, 'You're all going to start at zero, and there's going to be lots of different ways to build points, to demonstrate mastery, to accrete your proficiency. And so through a number of different pathways, as many of you as possible should meet as many of the learning goals as possible, as can be achieved.'" And we'll put in the show notes links to GradeCraft and some of the other things that you've shared there.
Barry Fishman: Wonderful.
Justin Reich: So schools are going to start looking more normal in September, hopefully. We'll have lots of folks get vaccinated, lots more people will go back on campus. People are going to be really tired. At least that's one of our key findings right now. It's probably not a moment in which educational systems are going to profoundly reinvent, because the people who've been leading those educational institutions are going to go take a nap this summer.
But as they wake up from their nap and come back in September, what kinds of conversations are you hoping that they have? Where might Wad-Ja-Get? fit into that? What should we be talking about next to keep thinking about assessment and grading?
Barry Fishman: Yeah, I'm certainly planning on starting a reading discussion group among my colleagues to start to open them up to what's possible. And the first step there is to really problematize grading, to get them to question what feels natural, and to think about what else we could do. I mentioned the term infrastructure earlier. I think creating tools that help shape practice is really important. I subscribed to a... This is actually ironic given the current political debate about, what do we mean by infrastructure? I [crosstalk]-
Justin Reich: It's not just child care. It's also like, grading tools should be in the infrastructure [inaudible].
Barry Fishman: Yeah. But it's because this sort of sociological definition of infrastructure is that it really is sort of the standards and conventions that shape practice. We build roads and bridges that match the way we think we want to drive. And the way we build those roads and bridges in fact reinforces the way we do drive. And so infrastructure has a lot to do with more than just the roads and bridges. It is things like child care, and it is things like learning management systems.
A learning management system is a kind of infrastructure that really shapes grading practices because the grade books in these things are built by... Actually, one brief, short side rant, is, most learning management systems aren't built by people who think about learning. They're built by computer scientists and business majors, literally, who are recreating their experience in some respects. This only further reinforces all these elements of the system we've been talking about, including the grade books.
You can use a tool... I'll just call out a Canvas. There are mastery pathways in Canvas. There are various ways that Canvas tips their hat to these alternative ways of thinking about grading. But when you talk to people that are trying to use them, they all sort of throw their hands up and say, "Yeah, that didn't really work out," because Canvas really, really wants 100% somewhere in there. And it's just a bear to work around that problem.
So that's why we built GradeCraft. You could plug it into Canvas and use it as sort of a grade book that is built around alternative notions of learning and grading that welcomes you to experiment. It doesn't enforce a particular model on you, and that's a kind of infrastructure. So we also need to build that out more broadly. One of the reasons why K-12 schools are so reluctant, and this comes up in Wad-Ja-Get? all through the book, as the students were saying, "Well, how will I get into college?"
And how exactly did college get to demand so much of what high school is all about? And really, I view college as the tail that wags the dog here, because so much of K-12, even for learners who maybe don't feel like they're college-bound, is designed around college and the college admissions process in particular. And this is another sort of observation of mine as a recent old man, is when I was in high school, arguably high school was preparation for college.
Today, high school is arguably preparation to apply to college. It's all about getting your resume in order. And because so much of that process is impossible to control, students tend to get overly focused, and their parents and everyone else gets overly focused on the things they think they can control, which are their grades and their test scores. Everything else is an intangible. So we need to change the college admissions process. We need to retrain the dog, right? Or retrain the tail-
Justin Reich: [crosstalk] other direction.
Barry Fishman: Yeah. So in the intro, I mention the movements like the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which are building tools that are in fact infrastructures. They're trying to replace the standard transcript with something that is aligned with mastery-based learning. And once you have those tools, I think it makes it easier for teachers and parents and learners to see what's possible.
And the Mastery Transcript Consortium has had some success. I don't know the exact numbers offhand, but they had something like 100 students using the mastery transcript to apply to colleges last year, and they were successful. They got into colleges, including the University of Michigan.
And so with these example success stories, we can start to kind of calm some of the fears of these hyperactive parents and start to say, "Look, this is another pathway that maybe is better for everybody." And if colleges start to demand it, then we'll start to see. One thing that I am hoping is that even when we go back to normal, that things like test optional, or even test not looked at here, that they stay in college admissions.
Justin Reich: I certainly think it's going to be looked at very, very closely. One of the things, and there's a whole bunch of pieces in education that we thought that we could never possibly do without, without SATs and test scores, the college board getting entirely rid of the SAT II tests, and we got rid of them for a couple of years, and it all seems to still be running, and so maybe we could keep doing without them.
And then I had this really optimistic conversation with a group of high school educators in Madison, Wisconsin, and they said, "You know, the one thing we can do after this year is change. We've changed every two, every three weeks. We have not stretched our change muscles quite as much before, but boy, we can change." And we're tired, so there's not going to be all the change maybe that people want by September, but I think there are a lot of institutions that for all the terrible terrors of the pandemic and COVID-19, have found themselves stretching in new ways.
Well, Barry Fishman, I've been learning with you since I was a student in one of your classes nearly 15 years ago, and I'm privileged to continue to be able to learn from you, so thanks for joining us here on TeachLab.
Barry Fishman: A real pleasure, Justin. I want to say, full circle, that course, I'm still teaching it. And this fall, Failure to Disrupt will be the key text for that course-
Justin Reich: Terrific.
Barry Fishman: The mix of the book and the podcast conversations from the book club I think are going to be a great way for my students to really dig into what's challenging about education technology and the limitations it has for really leading to true change.
Justin Reich: That's great. And you'll get your $20 by PayPal [inaudible]. All right, thanks everybody. I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. You can check out our show notes for links to the new edition of Wad-Ja-Get? and other resources like GradeCraft that we discussed today. Be sure to subscribe to TeachLab for future episodes, and consider leaving us a review. You can find my Barry Fishman-recommended and assigned book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education, at booksellers everywhere.
And you can check out related content at FailuretoDisrupt.com. That's FailuretoDisrupt.com. The Teaching Systems Lab has two courses that you can sign up for free on edX. You can join myself and Vanderbilt professor Rich Milner in a free, self-paced online course for educators called Becoming A More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices, or you can join myself and Sam Wineburg and his team at the Stanford History Education Group in Sorting Truth From Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning, where you'll learn the skills and practices of information literacy that folks like fact checkers use to sort fact from fiction online.
If you've previously taken either of these courses, we'd love to have you back. Bring your colleagues, form a learning circle in your school or community, and just come and participate in our online community. You can find the links to these courses on edX in our show notes, and you can enroll now. This episode of TeachLab was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley, recorded and sound mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe until next time.