209. Standards Serve Institutions; Expectations Serve People: Antiracist Assessment with Dr. Asao B. Inoue

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In this episode, we talk to Dr. Asao B. Inoue, a researcher, writer, and professor committed to student-centered learning and innovative, antiracist grading practices. 

We explore dimension-based rubrics that focus on personalized feedback, encouraging students to engage critically with texts and their own writing processes. Additionally, the episode highlights labor-based grading systems in K-12 settings, which involve collaborative agreements with students and parents to foster a fairer and more engaging learning environment. 

The Big Dream 

Our guest's big dream for education—both K-12 and post-secondary education—is to let go of the standards that colonize us while maintaining high expectations that foster rigorous, meaningful, and joyful learning experiences. The aim is to create an educational landscape that prioritizes students' experiences and serves people rather than institutions. 

In Dr. Inoue’s words, “standards serve institutions, but expectations serve people.” So we can maintain expectations while releasing institutionalized standards, encouraging a world that is complex, diverse, and rich with different ways to understand and experience things.

Mindset Shifts Required

One key shift for educators is to move away from standardized American English as the gold standard, recognizing that while it may offer some advantages in our current racist and patriarchal world, it also carries limitations and perpetuates inequalities. Educators should interrogate these standards—how are they limiting us? What is it orienting us to in the world? 

Action Steps  

Educators can make the shift away from institutionalized standards by implementing these action steps: 

Step 1: Try dimension-based frameworks when it comes to providing feedback. Using writing about and understanding a text as an example, Dr. Inoue shares how dimension-based frameworks allow students to share their personal experiences. This is much richer to gauge their understanding than focusing on what’s “right” or “wrong.”

Step 2: Shift your perspective as an educator: it’s not your job to tell writers (students) what to do next, but allow students to receive information and make decisions. Foster a classroom community where students write from their experiences, listen to others, and offer feedback before moving forward. Use this to determine the next steps in your classroom setting from there, walking alongside your students in their journey. 

Step 3: Initiate labor-based grading in your classroom. This system is based on making a set of negotiated agreements with students (and perhaps their parents) regarding what labor will equal what grade. Collaborate with the students to create these standards and ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Step 4: Ensure you create space for self-reflection. They collect feedback from their teacher and peers, but it’s important for them to self-reflect independently on where they are and how they’re doing. This builds self-reliance in their own learning journey.

Challenges?

One challenge educators may face is student confusion when transitioning from traditional grading systems to new approaches like labor-based grading. Students are accustomed to receiving grades as indicators of their progress, so educators need to provide clear explanations and support as students adjust to these changes.

One Step to Get Started 

One step educators can take to get started is to prioritize a framing conversation at the beginning of class. Get clear, together, on this question: what are we really trying to learn in this class? Draw on your students’ lived experiences and knowledge, other fields of study, and interests in the class to map out where you are going with this class. 

Stay Connected

You can find more from Dr. Asao B. Inoue on his website. 

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Staff Meeting Agenda series with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 209 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

Quotes: 

• 3:21 “A lot of education, a lot of teaching, a lot of what we have to do because a school or a university or program requires it, confines learning and it confines students.”  
• 11:08 “When they [students] know and they feel that they are being institutionalized through things like standards and other practices in our classrooms, then they become less engaged.”
• 20:19 “All you’ve got to do is ask yourself, ‘How magical do I think my feedback is? Do I really think that what I tell my student is going to change their way of languaging that they’ve acquired over how many years from family members, loved ones, churches, the neighborhood? … I’m the one who’s going to save you from your language problems? Instead, I’d rather be another soul on the road of your language journey.’”
• 31:34 “The emotions and the feelings are wonderful to have, but they’re really not the main ingredient in a class for compassion. It is, ‘Let’s figure it out.’”

​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT

00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
So welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 

00:05 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Thank you, great to be here, honored to be here, thanks. 

00:08 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I'm so incredibly excited for this conversation. I've been like telling everyone. I know that I get to talk to you today, so I'm curious to know you know, beyond the kind of professional bio, is there something you want listeners to either know about you or just kind of keep in mind as we enter our conversation today? 

00:27 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
I don't know. I mean knowing that your listeners are probably mostly K-12 or secondary educators. I mean, obviously, I'm a college professor and I don't teach in the public schools or in secondary. Of course, I've worked with lots of secondary teachers over the years and I have a really close affinity with that work, knowing that it's probably three times as hard as my work as a teacher. But anyway, I don't think so. 

00:57
I try very hard in all that I do in my scholarship and research and my teaching, to always try to be, as student centered and thinking about students experiences rather than thinking about and I know that this can be touchy rather than thinking about a teacher's labor and needs. That is important, it is absolutely important, but that's usually my priority. Important, but that's usually my priority. And it may come out in what we talk about, which is, I think, first, what are the students' experiences and how can I afford them as much rich experience as possible? And then, what does that mean in terms of my workload and my labor? And I'm fortunate in my profession that I don't have a heavy, heavy load of students to teach every semester and I have generous enough breaks in the academic year and year to be able to think and reflect upon my teaching and so forth. And I know not everybody gets that. In fact probably a lot of most teachers don't get that, those luxuries, so I know I'm very lucky to do that, have that. 

02:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
That is really. That's very like self-aware as a college professor to name that, because that's not common. 

02:09
Thank you for proving that for us and I think so much of your work is going to. I'm really curious to hear your question here, but I think it comes through in your work. I mean your answer here is the idea of freedom dreaming. I love starting grounding conversations in this. So Dr Bettina Love describes freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so, considering that, considering your work, considering all that you do, and what's that big dream that you hold for the field of education, If we're thinking about I'm gonna use the field of education really large, so not just secondary but post-secondary also. 

02:45 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
I kind of feel like there's, you know, brother and sister or something, siblings in a house, in an academic house, um, so I'm gonna think large. 

02:53
Um, I think my uh dream for education is that we is, that we somehow try to let go of the standards that colonize us, while hanging on to the expectations that teachers have and students have, that create rigor and meaningful and joyful learning experiences and make a world a bigger and better place. 

03:21
I think a lot of education, a lot of teaching, a lot of what we have to do or required to do because a school or a university or program requires it through outcomes and other things, confines learning and it confines students and relegates some students to certain places and others and really tries to create little cogs that all kind of look and sound and do the same things. That's really great for a corporate machine, it's really great for a society that has all these things neatly put out, but that's not the way the world really works and it's certainly not an interesting and joyful one. That's complex and offers lots of different ways to understand things, experience the world, et cetera, and language. So I think that's what I'd like to see. Is this letting go of institutionalized standards, that is, standards really serve institutions whereas expectations serve people, and I can have my expectations as a teacher. A student can have their expectations for their learning, but those are not necessarily the same things as institutional standards. 

04:28 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love this so much. Okay, thank you for this grounding. This is really helpful because it isn't just like we're releasing the challenge or we're releasing the expectations right, we're keeping those because the standards serve institutions. Okay, this is really helpful. This is really helpful. I am curious, I think, with often very, very common challenge for me in coaching around grading, assessment rubrics, any of the kind of assessments habitus. I guess, as you described right, it's like there are some mindset shifts that we have to overcome before we can even get to the thing of like how do we do the thing, and so I'm curious to know are there mindset shifts that you have either coached on, helped illuminate, had yourself? That's really like kind of a foundation for what you eventually like help people to do? 

05:20 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Well, I mean, of course, I'm a. My center, my research center, is language and teaching, writing and communication in the college setting. So of course, language is at the center of some of the mindset shifts that I would that I would call those things. So, for instance, when I'm working with teachers, college teachers or whatever, one mindset shift that we have to to to to try to figure out how to make that we have to try to figure out how to make and we each do it differently because we all have different relations to this is to that standardized, edited American English that tends to be like the gold standard. This is how you succeed, this is how you're going to get taken seriously, this is how you get your A's, this is how you get your scholarships. 

05:59
And all those things are not untrue. There's an element of truth to them. But, like all misinformation, that element of truth hides other stuff that is so untrue and so bad for us. And that's the shift that we have to make, which is that, just because we can have an element of truth to say, oh, standardized American English, there's some good things that that can offer somebody in a world that's racist and white supremacist, but that in alone should tell us that it carries with it a lot of bad stuff. So I'm not one to say, oh, we should never teach that it should not be in our classrooms. I don't think that's true. 

06:37
I think I get read that way a lot, but that's only because I'm critical of that and I'm not going to just simply let my students blindly reproduce it. 

06:47
I'm going to certainly ask them what their goals are around it and then we're going to interrogate those goals and that standard so that we can understand better where it comes from, who it benefits, what happens when we put other kinds of languaging next to it and try to figure out a wider sense of criticality. 

07:06
That is, I don't think you can be critical of a dominant English without some other kind of English next to it to help build criticality. That's how you create distance right. It's like trying to work on a ship out in the ocean while you're using it and while you're on the deck and the engines are pumping and you have to get off that ship and you have to look at it from another angle to see what is it really able to do? How is it limiting us? What is it orienting us in the world? To see and understand. And then we realize, oh, there's so much other stuff out there, so other ways to be oriented. Again, not to say it's bad, just to say that's a mindset shift that I think we can make. And then, once we start making that, all kinds of other ideas start to come up for teachers, I think pedagogy-wise as well as assessment-wise. 

08:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
You're naming what's happening in my brain right now, because I'm like, oh right, because if we need to create the distance and put things next to each other, how do we lift up student writing and like individual student voices in our classrooms, as well as things out in the world and bringing those in? There's so many pedagogical moves you can make. Once you oh gosh, this is so good. Okay, thank you for that. I really appreciate that. And then I also just love I wanted to just make sure listeners heard that the idea of asking your students what their goals are, because I've certainly had students the last four years I taught. I worked at an all. It was a newcomer school, so it was all students who are new to the country and new relatively new to the English language as high schoolers, and there were many students who were like I need to get into college. 

08:59 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
And so I need to write this way and I need to. You know what I mean, like all of these things. And I was like, okay, how do we do this? And be critical. And so I really appreciate that you can invite students to name the goals and then you can help interrogate the goals and create that space for the criticality. 

09:07
You mentioned that particular teaching context because you know most, I think I should say many students, depending on the group that we're talking about, like that group, very specialized kind of group, so they have touch or contact with only certain kinds of ideas about the English language. 

09:19
So that is going to limit in many ways what goals they might want to have or think they want to have, and so I think part of my job also is to help them explore what wider range of goals might they have. For instance, could we not investigate the history of the English that you think you want and whether how it gets read and understood in other parts of the world? How it gets read and understood in other parts of the world I mean most of the English spoken in the world today are not the standardized English that we speak in the United States or in Great Britain or in Australia or in other major English-speaking centers. They are other kinds of Englishes and they're being used quite communicatively and they have all their power and all the things they do and they're usually hybridized and multilingual in terms of like drawing on other linguistic resources. So and that makes them different in some interesting ways, and why would we not want to not look at those we can if that's available to us in a classroom? 

10:22 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. I mean, I think that also speaks to the idea of engagement, right, when we say, oh, students are disengaged or whatever, like here's exactly how to bring in the engagement while doing critical thought and criticality and all of the things. I mean that it's like a twofer, like yes, let's do that. 

10:37 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
I'm glad you mentioned. I'm glad you mentioned engagement, because I feel like one element this is not the only thing I think, but about engagement, but I think one crucial or one, one dynamic I've noticed about student engagement, and this is granted, this is college students are not, so they've already gone through 12 years perhaps of of public schooling or some kind of schooling to before they get to me. So they're, they're indoctrinated in certain ways, um, but I ways. But I feel like from my observations that oftentimes students are, when they know and they feel that they are being institutionalized, that is, through things like standards and stuff like that and other practices in our classrooms, then they become less engaged because it feels panoptic, it feels like they're being manipulated, because they are, and it ceases to become about what is inside me that I want to learn about here, or what do I get energized about, or how do I grow and develop alongside my colleagues next to me? How do I help them in their learning? 

11:46
It's not about that. It's about follow this standard, achieve these things here that we've already listed for you, and that's the. And they what didn't require them to be there to figure those things out? And I think all learning requires students to be there to figure out what we're going to do and how we're going to, why we're going to accomplish it, and that's really hard, I know, to do in systems that have so many students and that you don't have a lot of time. But that in itself is an institutional problem that I think we could solve. But it's a problem created by institutions that have certain kinds of regulations on oh, here's when things start, here's when they end, and all of that stuff. 

12:21 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
So yeah, absolutely, and it makes me think about, like, the difference between standardized based grading and dimension based grading, which you I don't know if I can't know for sure if that's a term you coined, you can tell me. But I loved it because I was just like this. I've never been exposed to this language. This is exactly it, and it divorces kind of the things you've described. Right is like the standards for institutions and the idea that expectations served us and our students. I'm curious about kind of this idea of like what the difference is, but then also this idea of the reader-writer dynamic and the interplay that you describe. I think it speaks to kind of what you're saying. Right is like you have to be here and I as the reader am important and my understanding of the writing is important, and that makes kind of the dimension. I don't know if I understand that right. I'm gonna let you talk. 

13:16 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Yeah, no, you got it. So the biggest difference between, first of all, dimension-based rubrics and standards-based rubrics. So I got my. I didn't realize I was doing this for like about a decade until I turned around and realized, oh wait, my rubrics aren't rubrics. They're not the same as the rubrics that when I see in books or other places, a rubric or whatever, like a value rubric or you know, whatever they were dimension-based, whatever they were dimension-based, and that came out of naturally, out of my pedagogy, out of the work I'm doing. But so then I started to frame well, this is really, these are dimensions, they're not lists of expectations that a student has to meet like a little outcome, a tiny outcome. 

14:02
So I then, when I was doing that work, I found some work in secondary ed that looked at that coined single point rubrics I'm sure some of your rubrics. So it's kind of like a single point rubric, the dimension based rubric, but they're really dimensions that get readers to ask a question about some aspect or dimension of the writing in front of them, the languaging in front of them, as opposed to standards-based, which I'm sure everyone knows. They're often in grids, they often have points or letter grades attached to them. This is an A, here are the characters, here's a, b or whatever, and then they're going to be divided by the whatever dimensions that are being looked at decided upon. So I find that there's certainly some advantages to those two standards-based rubrics, but and I understand how some teachers may have to use them because of departmental or school requirements and such but there may be ways to critically analyze and critique them with students. That would be meaningful. 

15:09
You know academic and learning activities, but for me, dimension-based frameworks are much more powerful when it comes to providing feedback, because they stop judging students and their writing in the ways that students are used to, that is, you did this right or do this. Instead, instead, they ask for the reader's rich experience of the text. So what was my experience along this dimension? And now my feedback to the writer is much more about my languaging habits and how I'm interpreting this, what I'm bringing to this text and what I'm not, and what I expected and what I didn't get or what I did get, and so forth. So of course you're saying this is confusing, because I thought you were going to tell me this thing up front and you didn't tell that to me, but you told it to me on page 10 or seven or whatever. So those things come out in that. 

16:06
But really the main thrust of what I find useful for feedback from dimension-based rubrics is the reader's experience, that sort of rich, thick kind of commentary on it. And I do this through a kind of Lectio Divina kind of exercise with students where we read one or two pages depending on how long it is. Let's say it's a three-page piece that they're going to give feedback on. They read one page, they pause for five minutes and they write what did I just hear in that last page? What was the most salient or important things that I thought was in it? What am I confused by and why? And it's the whys in all those that really matter, because that's what pulls out the readers' habits of language, their training. And I tell them if you have a model in your head and mind, a particular author, a particular text, a particular lesson, say it. Don't hide it with abstract terms. Just tell us. 

17:04
I'm thinking about George Orwell here because I only read Animal Farm. That's all I know and this is what I'm looking at and this is what I'm comparing. That is really meaningful information to a writer. So it's that those things help bring out. And that's where I find the most important thing about judgment, which in classrooms, which is we got to find a way to divorce it from somehow this idea that assessing a piece of writing or giving it feedback whether it's peer or teacher is somehow this exercise in determining whether the student is right or wrong. 

17:36
And what does the student do next? That is not my job as a teacher, nor is it a peer's job to tell a writer what to do. Our job is to give them our responses, our reactions to their language. Their job is to figure out from that rich information what do I do next. Because only I know what my purposes are, only I know what I think I want to do, only I can feel oh, I learned something new from that reader. I want to do that now. I don't want to do my original thing. So I can't tell them what that is, even though I may have some ideas about it, but I don't. I don't know what it is and I don't want to know. I want them to tell me and show me what that stuff is. 

18:15
So for me, my first year writing classes, for instance, they always start with, like you know, a couple of truisms about the word, the writing and the feedback that we do, which is good. Writers don't take orders, they receive information and they make decisions. They don't take orders, they make decisions. So that means good readers who give feedback, good readers. They don't give orders, they provide a rich experience of the text. That's it. 

18:45
And once we can figure out how to do that better, then all of a sudden all kinds of magic happens and we get to take advantage of the Englishes and multilingual languages in the classroom and we get to have that critical distance that I was talking about. We get to see oh, look what the limitations of this is, look what the limitations that. Look at what this affords us, look what this one affords us. And then, what do you want to do? What's the next step for you? 

19:09
And this is where, if we have an institutional standard now, I got to say you got to do this, I don't want to do that. It's like putting a big juicy cake on the table and saying doesn't that look delicious? What do you think it tastes like? And then go. You can't have it. I'm going to eat this cake because I'm I'm the only one that can qualify to eat this cake. You can't eat the cake, but I can eat the cake. You can watch me eat the cake, you can appreciate how I eat the cake, but you don't get to have any cake yet. You guys couldn't take about five more years of schooling before you can have some cake. 

19:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh my gosh, this is mind blowing to me. This is so good. I'm like taking furious notes. This is the idea. I think the biggest aha for me in all of that is like that it is not our jobs to tell writers what to do next. It is that like made me pause and just rethink everything. I know that's the teacher, so thank you for that. I love that. I love that analogy to the cake too. 

20:08 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Yeah, and I think the best thing that a teacher can do is be really honest with themselves about their feedback, that they give and I'm not trying to criticize anyone because I put myself in the same category and I would say all you've got to do is ask yourself how magical do I think my feedback is? Do I really think that what I tell a student is going to change their way of languaging, that they've acquired over how many years from family members, loved ones, churches, other, the neighborhood? Why do I think I'm that? Now, I'm not saying I'm not powerful in many ways I certainly am as a professor or as a teacher, but I don't want that. I don't want to wield that kind of power Like I'm the one who's going to save you from your language problems, like, instead, I'd rather, I'd rather be another, another soul on the road of your language journey and you meet me and you can. You take what you can take today and you walk, continue to walk on that journey, on that road, and find out what else you can learn from the next person. 

21:09 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
So, yeah, I think it speaks to like such a like an inquiry based type of teaching. Like I mean just this idea that I mean I'm imagining, right, if I were to go back in the high school classroom, which now you're making me want to just like give me a class again. I want to try to be better as a teacher. This like journey is such a cool concept because I imagine you get the feedback from the rich reading experience. Right, and it's. It's. Here are the things that I have in my brain of things that I want to do based on what I already know, but then also maybe that I want to explore in other writers or people in my community. Like, oh, I really like how my mom has this like languaging around this like thing. I want to try to bring that in, or something right. Like I think there's avenues for further inquiry in the spaces that kids already inhabit, people already inhabit. I think that would be so fun to play with. 

21:57 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Yeah, I, for years I in first year writing courses, I would. I changed my practice from having a portfolio at the end of the semester where it was a combination, it was a compiling of their best stuff, and then a reflection on well, what did I, what did I learn here, what I still got to work on, what did, and all that, which is, I don't nothing wrong with that kind of a portfolio, it works very well. But I moved to let this portfolio be your illustration of your journey of learning in this class and then let the letter of reflection sort of help us understand what that journey is. Maybe you give us a metaphor for the journey, maybe you walk us through what that journey was. So I was really trying to get them to. 

22:41
I realized that the metaphors can be limiting for some students who don't think temporally, like day one, day two, et cetera, or spatially. For me, journey is a spatial metaphor more than a temporal one, although I know it's both of those things. But so for me, I like the idea of geography, topography, spaces, so that is what was interesting to me about it and that's what I share with my students. So I would get a lot of this and it was really actually kind of very meaningful and actually I enjoyed reading those portfolios more than I did reading the other ones that were more about okay, what did I learn? And here's my reflection on this class, which, again, not bad and there were certainly wonderful things there, but I just wanted to hear what they thought their journey was, and that was it was better for me. 

23:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
That's awesome. I love that I do. I do totally think selfishly as teachers. It's like do the thing that you have fun engaging in, reacting to. 

23:40 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Right, that's a card. That's my cardinal rule. Like I'm not going to sign anything I don't want to read. That's my cardinal rule. 

23:45 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Like I'm not going to sign anything I don't want to read Totally, so I think switching gears a little bit here, I think all related. Of course, this idea of labor-based grading is one that was brand new to me when I read your work, and so I'm curious to know, like especially thinking about the K-12, like maybe it's completely the same in terms of the? I know you've worked with a lot of secondary teachers, and so I'm curious to know what that might look like in K-12 spaces, or secondary spaces particularly, and any advice you have for teachers who are interested in implementing something like this. 

24:18 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Yeah, I think it really depends on where you're at in that K-12 space. So I think so I've worked with middle school and high school teachers. Obviously, the farther in that journey you get, the older the students are, the more they're able to negotiate a little better, and so it's easier, I think, in that way from there Again, depends on your context. I think some schools have really engaged parents. 

24:45
And those parents have very particular ideas about what you're supposed to be doing with their students, with their students in your classrooms, despite the fact that probably most of them don't have any degrees in education or in college. But it's their students, I get it, it's their kids, they, they, they have a right to be a part of that. So I would say, like, so that caveated, I would say that Labor-based grading is really about making a set of negotiated agreements with students and perhaps with their parents, about what labor will equal what grade. So this can be done in a number of ways. I use a contract system where we get to use the contract as a way to sort of say here is what we're trying to do and why we're doing it, and then here's how the grade gets figured out. That has worked very well for me and it's only about labor. Now you can do hybrid contracts where up to a certain grade which in the past when I did them, it was up to a B and then after that it was determined by a collaborative agreement between the student, a few peers and myself about whether they exceeded expectations along several dimensions. That I found ultimately to be unfair to students, because I'm saying all the way up to this, do your thing, you don't need to please me. And in the end you kind of have to please me. End, you kind of have to please me. So in the end I moved to a pure labor base where the default grade is an A plus. It's the highest grade possible in whatever system you have. And then if you don't do work, if you turn stuff in late or whatever, then that starts to go down, based on what we've agreed or negotiated in the contract. 

26:33
Usually there's two points of negotiation one at the very beginning and one in the middle or near the, depending on how long the semester is. At the near the end or middle end of the semester, so that you know they get a second chance. They realize oh wait, now I know what this is about. Let's. Is this still fair enough for us? Okay. What do we need to do to make it fair? Let's. Is this still fair enough for us? Okay. What do we need to do to make it fair? Let's vote. All votes of any changes on my contracts are for a super majority, which means not one. One student can't dictate or determine the, the, the. You know the destiny of all the students in the class, so it's gotta be two thirds agree to it. 

27:10
I, at this point, in my classes, at least at the college level, we don't get a lot, hardly any changes, because my contract has been changed so much by students that it's kind of, at least right now at issue. It's settled a bit in the classes I teach and students are like I don't have anything I can change here. I like like it, let's try it. And then, um, the only thing that might that has like shifted a little bit, is like number of late things or something like that. Uh, uh, but hardly ever, like just so rare, and the movement is like okay, one more late, like for to get to get this grade, okay, and then we vote and then I change it and then we we move on and finish the semester. 

27:53
So so how that would look in a in a high school setting or in a middle school setting, for instance, I think I'm going to guess, given what I know about past teachers and also you know just my sense of things, and I could be completely wrong. I think that parents ought to be a part of the process if they want to be and if that's appropriate, for I think that there should be a very a period in the beginning. So if the teachers are gonna be a part of the process, then they ought to also be a part of the learning process too. That is, my students have to learn what grading is, the history of grading, why we're doing what we're doing, what things have been institutionalized in grading and how harmful they are. That's a little bit like two ounces of research and then they read that, reflect on it, and I would expect the parents to do the same. 

28:54
I would say there's just no way you can be a part of these negotiations if you're coming in with no knowledge of what we're negotiating. It doesn't make any sense. So you just gum up the works too much. You're just uninformed. So here's how to be informed. Here's the stuff we're looking at. Please look at it and then we you can engage also with it, and I would encourage you to do so. That's how I would do it if I were in in a, say, a high school or middle school, and I've had a few uh, uh teachers in the past who did that, who did that kind of stuff with with. Now I have, uh, you know, I put together on my website a number of resources that I ask students to look at that are student facing, and I think they probably would be appropriate for high school. I don't know about middle school. Maybe the teacher you know teachers would be more, um, uh, more apt to figure that out if that's, if it's uh, you know, doable, maybe walking through some of it, but they're like podcasts and blog posts that are that are the same, that so, and they sort of just walk through these things and then we, along with that. 

29:56
I think it is for me these days vital that my negotiations with students are also coupled with parallel activities in which we negotiate our charter for compassion, how we're going to work with each other on all the work in the class, including the contract, but also our feedback, also the activities in the class and outside the class, and it boils down to a set of practices compassion practices that we agree to try to do, and then we revisit those with every assignment and identify two that we're going to try to focus on in that assignment and then say a few words in each assignment about how well we thought we did when we did it, so that keeps reminding us structurally in the class. Oh, we're trying to be compassionate. I'm trying to find compassion in my practices and I try to really reinforce, with some literature from different disciplines on compassion, that compassion is not a feeling. Don't mistake thinking that you have to feel good to somebody or you have to feel empathetic towards someone to be compassionate. 

31:00
Compassion is an action. It's something you do. You end up feeling empathetic after you've done compassion for a while. So it's all mixed up, we get it all mixed up. So it's we. Just it's all mixed up. We get it all mixed up. 

31:17
Um, in some ways I'd say it's the same as love. 

31:18
We don't you. 

31:18
You can, we can have feelings of love towards somebody immediately for all kinds of biological reasons, but real, long-standing, sustainable love is something you build every day with somebody and it's through the experiences and the things you do and commit to each other, and that is actions. 

31:31
So for me, the emotions and the feelings are do and commit to each other, and that is actions. So for me, the emotions and the feelings are wonderful to have, but they're really not the main ingredient in a class for compassion. It is let's figure out, what can we do and notice in others when we can say oh, they're being trying to be compassionate. I'm trying to be compassionate regardless of how we feel about each other or what we feel about it. So that has been a really big game changer for me, because it means we get such a wide table to work on, because we're so generous with each other, because we know we're all trying to be compassionate and we're working on it with every assignment. So compassion practices, along with the contract itself, really work together in my classes, or with the contract itself really work together in my classes. 

32:13 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
That's amazing and I can see the interplay between having the charter for compassion and the labor contract and the dimensions, like having a dimensions-based kind of system of feedback, because if the dimension system is clear, then people are able to put in the labor and see like my writing is growing, I'm doing the writing that I want, like I'm a richer writer and readers are having richer experiences and I'm not like fearful of the feedback and I'm leaning into the feedback because the charter for compassion is in place, right Like I can see all of those working together really nicely. 

32:49 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Yeah, and that you remind me one thing that that I do think is important for teachers, who who haven't done labor-based grading before but want to do it, and who haven't done, say, dimension-based rubrics but I've used standard ones but want to do it. When they do it, students will get confused. They're going to because they're the things that they are used to that tell them how well am I doing, am I on the right track? What's my grade? And they're gone, but they're replaced with other things. So one of the things I found has really helped, especially around that feedback thing, because they're still going to go like OK, so what grade would this get if I like? Wait, I don't know, I have no idea what I'm not thinking in those doors. We don't know. I have no idea what I that's I'm not thinking in those doors. We don't have a rubric, we don't. So I can't tell you that. And this sounds like I'm being evasive, right. So the best way I've found to to to uh allay a lot of those anxieties for students is to to include an activity at the end after feedback. They get all their feedback from peers and me and I want them now to send me a letter. All I want is this letter is going to be designed around, say, two, three or four, depending. You can decide what the capacity of your students are comments from all the feedback that tell them something about their writing. So I'm basically asking them tell me, describe these three, two or three, four things that you got from feedback, what they're telling you about your writing, what you think you want to do next, and then what does that tell you about how well you're doing and developing in this class as a writer? So what do you think you're? Where do you think you are now? So I'm really just trying to build some muscles for them to figure out on their own how well am I doing in this and be a little more self-reliant on themselves to figure that out. They get information from me and from their peers, so it's not like they're doing it by themselves. But they need to realize that they should have been doing this all along. They just didn't have any opportunities to do it right. 

34:52
Just because you get a grade from a teacher on a paper or whatever doesn't mean that you know how well you're doing on the learning. You know how well you're doing in the class, but that is not the learning right? That's not. You know, as I like to say. You know that don't build a good bridge. It's the learning in the class that may build that bridge, but it's not your A or your B. It's not going to build no bridge. So what is it? You tell me what you think you're learning, and then I get to have a conversation with them. I can respond because it's a letter, right? So I respond back oh, here's what you said, here's what I'm noticing. I don't try to tell them they're not. My point is not to correct them this is revolutionary. 

35:40 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love this. I love this concept. It's really good, and I think it almost is like a doubling down on self-assessment, like we, we ask students to self-assess, but we do it usually with like a standards-based rubric, and so it's like it's still in that vein, so this is so cool. Okay, I recognize our time is almost up, so we're going to shift to kind of some final questions and we'll just do kind of a lightning round, if that's okay with you, for sure. So this is all super big, transformative kind of practice that we've been talking about. I'm curious to know if someone's ending an episode like listening to this episode walking into a school building about to teach their high school class, right, what's something that they could maybe do, or start to do in a small way, like today, how do they get the ball rolling on some of this stuff? 

36:24 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Well, I think it depends on what they do. They want to try to transform their grading practices, if they can. Do they want to try to transform their feedback practices, if they can? Or do they want to try to transform the conversations they have about language and standards? So those things I've heard us talk about in this, you know, in the last 30 or so minutes. So I think it really depends on what those are. What is the lowest hanging fruit, do I think Again, I think it may depend, but I think that third one conversations about that is framing what it is that we're really trying to learn in this class. 

36:57
If it's a language class that standardized English, so the first thing that they should do is not go in there and start talking about what they think they know about it, especially if they haven't done any research on what it is and where it comes from and what. I think that's the first thing they should, folks should really do if they haven't already done that. I am still I've been doing it for like 25 years I'm still studying the English language, so so I think it's important that we can keep doing it, and because we can, we learn new, new stuff all the time and I think it's important to to get to draw on a number of fields. So not just education, not just linguistics, not just rhetoric and composition, not just those kinds of of things, but also history and sociology and psychology. Those are the places I draw on on a lot these days because they say so much about, about how we understand language and what language has been used for and what, what we know about it. So, so that's the first thing. 

37:55
I would say that if it's low-hanging fruit, if it's something that they're they're really unsure about, then maybe, um, they start by getting some information about what they, how they want to frame that standardized English, and then ask students about their experiences of it. That's where I always start. I just say, when I've set up on the first day, if I think that a class is going to be unsure, anxious about labor-based grading, my first activity, before we talk about the contract and look at the preamble of it, to talk about its philosophy, and then, before we look at those podcasts and stuff, I ask them to just do a little bit of writing about one experience that deals with grading that they've had in their schooling. What is it? Tell me about it. I say nothing more than that, and what I find is eight or nine times out of 10, it is a negative experience, it's not a good experience, and so I'm like interesting, hmm, why do you suppose? What do we think? So we just start making some pattern recognition in the class together. 

38:56
All we gotta do is look at four or five who are willing to share, and we find out that we're pretty, it's pretty common, and it doesn't matter if high performers, you know, people in the middle of the room or whatever you know, they're all they have. They all can share some similar similarities. And so then I share some of the research on grading and why you are not abnormal. This is absolutely the what, what happens in grading. This is what grading does to people. So I start with students, I ask them their experiences of language and grading, and that often gives us so much to work with, and all you've got to do is have some things in your back pocket to be able to pull out. Well, here's some research that shows this. Here's Paul Dietrich, and he talks about how unreliable grading is and all that stuff. So I think those, those kinds of things, can be really easy to do quickly. 

39:47
I mean, I'm always surprised by, not by what I learn about, what students know about language from their education, but what those experiences have been for them. That's what I'm surprised about that in this day and age we can still have the kinds of really negative and deeply problematic language-based experiences in schools. It shocks me. I'm just I'm shocked and I want to go. I'm so sorry that you've been treated this way and that your language has been treated this way. It should not be. Our language is one of the most precious things we have, and we get it from all the people who love us and even some of the people who don't, and so even the people who hate us or don't like us still give us these gifts of language. So I think it's a really wonderful, paradoxical thing that we ought to pay more attention to and be real tender with you know I mean it's, it's a, it's a, it's a careful thing. 

40:44 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love all of that so much, this idea of the language being so important, the grounding in students' experience and then having that research to be able to say you're not alone. Brilliant, I love that. Okay, two more really fast ones. One one thing you've been learning about lately or I know you're writing a new book, something that you've been like writing about lately feel free to answer. 

41:08 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
I've already mentioned one of the things I've been learning about recently, which is the, which is I go out in different fields to find stuff and and I I've only up until this last year and a half, two years I've only dipped my like two toes into racial linguistics, the literature and racial linguistics, and but I've done more so in the last two years and I'm not learning new things. I'm learning that the stuff I know from rhetoric and composition as a field, from educations that talk about how standards and such can be racist when used in assessment ecologies, match very tightly to racial linguistics, and so now they're not thinking in pedagogical terms, they're thinking just in linguistic terms and so forth and sociological terms. But it matches very tightly to that. So it's this cognate field that sort of is paralleling in many ways and we should know as writing teachers and so forth, we should, I think, know more about it, those things. But what I'm working on is actually just a guide for college and high school teachers who want to have anti-racist orientations to language in their teaching. So it is a monster book that I've been working on for over three years, four years now, really. 

42:21
That has currently 11 chapters. That's like, oh my God. It's like so big. None of those chapters are small chapters. I mean it's completed, but I'm working through it again, thinking did I do? Was I doing the right thing? It started. 

42:41
This started out as a book on anti-racist how to teach anti-racist grammar Cause I got that question so much like okay, so, but I have to teach grammar and I so how do I do it in a way that's anti-racist. And I started writing that book and a year and a half later I scrapped half of that draft and said I can't do this. This is not the thing I'm interested in. I can't, there's no. So I, and now that ended up being one chapter which I'm actually really, really proud of. 

43:07
It's it's anti-racist grammaring and it's a. It's a big, thick chapter. That ends the book, but it's not the heart of the book. The heart of the book is thinking about what is the? What does a teacher of language, whether they're high school or college, what do they need to know and consider in order to have an anti-racist orientation? To languaging and its teaching of it? And so it goes through theories about language and race and judgment and Marxist theory and the history of taxonomies of race and then the languaging of race from Black and Latin and Asian and Oriental and white, and then it looks at habits of white language and white language supremacy and then ends with anti-racist grammar. That's what I'm working on. 

43:54 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh my gosh, I cannot wait for that book to come out. Thank you for doing all of that work, and so, in addition to people looking that up when it comes out, where can people connect with you online or kind of follow your work? 

44:05 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Oh, my website has a lot of that stuff there and the podcast and things that a lot of information that supports teachers who use or trying to use and learn about labor based grading. So that's just my name, Asal B Inouye, at or dot com, and you'll find it right there. And then there's a whole page that that I you know build that gives resources for teachers and students around labor based grading template contract, as well as some the philosophy there is I'm only going to archive open source stuff that's free and available. So stuff that's in a journal that's got a paywall, I don't tend not to put up there, but things that are available, that are free, then I can put those up there and feel good about it. 

44:59 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Amazing. We'll link to that in the blog post and the show notes and everything so people can grab that link. Thank you so much. This has been such a wonderful time. Thank you for going over our time. 

45:08 - Asao Inoue (Guest)
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you, Lindsay, for asking me and for all of your good hard work, so thank you. 

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