#380 – Student Motivation, with Tyler Rablin

Tyler Rablin, author of Hacking Student Motivation: 5 Assessment Strategies That Boost Learning Progression and Build Student Confidence, joins us for this episode to examine the role that assessment plays in student motivation. He emphasizes the importance of rethinking traditional grading and assessment practices to better foster student success. He shares his experience with a brilliant but struggling student who inspired him to focus on growth rather than averaging scores. Tyler advocates for unpacking standards, using learning progressions, and providing meaningful feedback to help students see their progress. He also discusses the role of AI in enhancing feedback while maintaining personal connections with students. Tyler shares practical steps throughout to help educators implement these strategies.

If you’ve never felt successful at something, how do you know it’s possible?

Tyler Rablin, from his book, Hacking Student Motivation

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• AI in the K–12 Classroom (article collection)
• Assessment as Revelation, with Dr. Kelly Camak Niccolls (podcast episode)
• Accelerate Learning With Meaningful, Targeted Assessment (article)
• Assessment: Beyond Tests (podcast episode)
• Exploring the Crossroads of Assessment, Student Choice, and Grading: Stories From a High School Science Class, with Mark Peterson (podcast episode)
• Personalize: Meeting the Needs of All Learners, with Eric Sheninger and Nicki Slaugh (podcast episode)
• Design Assessments Students Will Want to Do (article)
• Improving Student Motivation Through Passion Projects (podcast episode)
• Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice (article)

It’s for the Students

Grades are supposed to communicate learning, but what if they’re sending the wrong message? In this episode, Tyler takes us through his journey of redesigning assessment to focus on growth, proficiency, and student success. He offers practical ways to help students see their progress and stay engaged, including moving away from averages and shifting from rubrics to learning progressions. Change isn’t easy, but as Tyler reminds us, “It’s not easy work, but when you see the impact it can have on kids, there’s no doubt that it’s important and meaningful work.” Tune in to discover how small shifts in grading can make a big difference for students. The following are a few highlights from the episode:

• About Our Guest: Tyler Rablin is an instructional coach in the Sunnyside School District in Washington State. He was previously a high school English teacher. Tyler is the author of Hacking Student Motivation and is currently working on an internship for his administration degree.
• Inspiration for Change: Tyler shares his experience with a former student in his classroom who was a gifted writer. He says, “It’s a story that for me, there’s a lot of joy and a lot of pain connected to it.” While this student excelled at writing fantasy stories, she struggled with traditional schooling and grading. Tyler’s joy was seeing her excel as a writer. His pain came at the end of the semester when he had to tell her that she was failing his class. Tyler realized, “My gradebook was super limited. It was saying you have to do X, Y, and Z, or else you’re not successful.”
• Grading Is Communication: Tyler’s experience with this former student led to him rethinking his grading system. He believes that “grading is communication,” but he says he discovered that his practices at the time were not communicating the right message to his students. The grades didn’t truly represent the learning that was happening, and he decided he needed to make changes to ensure that his grades were communicating a true snapshot of the learning actually occurring.
• An Old Practice: Tyler recalls looking at his beautiful but old-school building and thinking, “This [grading] practice has been around longer than the building has been around. This is such an outdated [system].” He adds that he approached this with a mindset of, “I gotta do better for kids. . . . They have so much brilliance that isn’t reflected sometimes in the traditional way we do things.”
• Refocusing on Assets: In reflecting on the assessment design process, Tyler says, “I realized, so often, the assessments that I was building [and] the assessments that I experienced in school, the only thing they were telling me is often what I can’t do. It was telling me, ‘This is as far as you’ve come, and these are the things you don’t know.’ . . . Maybe I’m only at like, a 70% mastery, and all I was hearing was the 30% I couldn’t do. And so, I really started to rethink both in the assessment system—our grading practices—but even just in the assessments we build: How do we help kids get an accurate picture of where they’re at? But that has to include an accurate picture of what they’re already successful at.”
• A Win for Every Student: Tyler believes that if we construct assessments well, through an asset-based lens, every student should be able to experience and identify a win. He says, “There’s no reason every kid in that room can’t find a way to feel that way. And for me as the educator, it’s my goal to structure things so that it’s as straightforward as possible for kids to see that.”
• Gradebook Restraints: Despite their utility and power, online gradebooks don’t always align with classroom grading needs. Tyler says, “I never found an online gradebook that did what I needed it to do with kids.” Because of these limitations, he designed his own system using a spreadsheet along with the gradebook. The spreadsheet was “organized very specifically to communicate learning to myself and my students.” He identified standards on the spreadsheet and then added “multiple columns underneath so that kids get multiple opportunities to demonstrate proficiency at that standard.” Using that spreadsheet tool, he would then “sit down and have conversations with students that were much clearer about, ‘Hey, this is a skill you’re doing great at. This is a skill we need to work on next.’”
• Moving Away From Averages: Rather than averaging student grades on multiple assignments, Tyler used a five-point scale and allowed multiple attempts to achieve proficiency. He says, “By the end of the term, I don’t care if they got a 1 for 10 tries. If they showed growth and could repeat a performance at the highest level of mastery of 5, that’s the score that was reflected.” Averaging scores, he says, leads students to getting in an early hole and giving up. He believes that the message we’re sending by averaging in failed attempts is, “Yeah, I know you showed a ton of growth. You had a bunch of resilience, but we’re going to hold that against you from early on.”
• Rubrics: “They’re a tool for a certain point in the learning,” says Tyler. Most importantly, he points out that rubrics have been proven to make teacher grading more fair for every student. The problem he sees with them is often in the wording. They can be hard to understand, and they tend to focus on deficit language—what students can’t do at each level, rather than what they can do.
• Learning Progressions: To focus more on student growth and an asset-based lens, Tyler has shifted from rubrics to learning progressions, which focus on presenting steps along the learning path that describe what students can do, rather than what they cannot. Each step, therefore, has the potential to give each student a small win and motivate them to continue on to the next level.
• Getting Started: Tyler’s advice for transforming student feedback is simple. He says, “The first thing I would say is give less. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but they’ve done studies after studies of how much feedback can we really process, and a lot of it comes down to a simple limitation of our working memory. But the most commonly agreed amount is on a full essay, three pieces of feedback, and that’s it.” Limiting feedback gives the students focus, presents an achievable goal, and is less overwhelming.
• Identifying Mistakes: While it’s tempting for teachers to tell students all the places where they can improve, the message that students receive can be negative. Tyler explains, “We’re telling students, ‘This is something you don’t know.’ And as those build up over, and over, and over, if I’m leaving 10 different pieces of feedback and nine of them are things they don’t know, as a student, I’m finishing that going, ‘I’ve got way too far to go to be successful.’” Even if well-intentioned, this approach can lead to students giving up.
• Less Feedback, but with an Action Step: Tyler has shifted how he gives feedback, especially on short assignments. He says, “My most common way of leaving feedback is to give one piece of feedback. . . . I’m leaving one piece of feedback that says, ‘This is a trend that I noticed. This is the next thing that we need to work on.’” He then provides links to reteaching resources, like YouTube videos, so students can act on that feedback.
• Learning Conferences: Another key to effective and motivating assessment is to meet with students individually. This means structuring class time to allow for these meetings, perhaps when students are completing independent or small-group work. These conferences allow for dialogue, clarification, and relationship building.
• Structuring Conferences: Tyler gives us an example of how a learning conference might work. “Bring me what you are most proud of in your writing,” he says. “And let’s sit down and talk about that. . . . Oftentimes, it was helpful to use the learning progression as a guide.” He and the student would review each level, and together, they would evaluate where the student was at. This might include verbal quizzing to confirm understanding or looking at the sample of student work as it applies to the learning progression. They would agree on a score together and examine trends in the learning. Tyler says that the key message is, “I’m not just doing this to you; I’m doing this with you.”
• A Caution When Using AI for Feedback: When getting started using AI as a feedback tool, Tyler suggests, “Use an AI tool to give students feedback, and then ask them how they felt about it before you go any further.” This can give teachers better insights into how this approach is working. Tyler says it’s important not to send the message that the teacher doesn’t care enough to personally engage in the feedback process.
• A Blend of AI and Human Feedback: AI is great at providing more timely feedback than a teacher is able to offer with a full class of students, and Tyler believes that teachers should be honest about this with their students. He says, “On a draft, I would be pretty clear with them: ‘Hey, I can’t give you fast enough feedback for you to be able to write a draft, get feedback, [and] turn around and write a final in a realistic amount of time.’ And so, I would kind of make sure that they know that this is why I’m using this tool. But then, I would also, in the process, make sure that there’s a step where we sit down together, and I can say, ‘This is what I love about your writing’ or ‘This is what we need to work on,’ so they know that I’m still personally invested.” The final draft was always evaluated by him personally, not by AI.
• A Place to Start: “Step number one is just learn to unpack your standards well.” Break them down into their essential components and put them in understandable language, both for the student and the teacher. He stresses, “Pick a couple that you think are most important and just say, ‘What is this standard really asking?’”
• Student Tracking: It’s very helpful to have students track the feedback that they are receiving. Tyler uses a glow and grow format, where students record their strengths and necessary areas of improvement. They do this with each assignment, which allows them to visually see trends on their tracking document. It also ensures that students actually read and process the feedback being received.
• Starting From Scratch: If Tyler were to redesign an assessment process from scratch, he would do away with averaging grades. Giving students a zero on an assignment and averaging that into the whole grade is demotivating for students. Tyler says, “We’re leaning into a lever that isn’t even the most effective lever we have to supporting productive behaviors in students. . . . Because they’ve recognized mathematically, ‘Why would I keep trying? I’ve got so many low scores early on, I’m gonna get an F, so I’m gonna sit here and be quiet,’ and that student is disengaged.”
• Sequencing Assessment Questions: One strategy that Tyler has been working on is sequencing assessment questions from easier to more difficult. He has found that this gives students an early win and builds their confidence as they work through an assessment. Tyler says, “I’ve just seen it do so many positive things for students in terms of helping them believe they can be successful on that task.”
• The Payoff: While there will be growing pains when redoing an assessment approach, Tyler encourages listeners to focus on the positive impact that effort can have. He says, “Look for those students that you know that they were down about what they could do before, and you see a glimmer of hope in them, or you see a smile on their face when they get feedback that maybe used to bring a frown. So that’s my encouragement. It’s not easy work, but when you see the impact it can have on kids, there’s no doubt that it’s important and meaningful work.”