... and David

My name is David Hawkins and I am the other of two contributors for this blog. Ashley has already introduced herself and together we plan to tackle a problem that we have noticed in our classrooms over the past years.

I have taught science at the same school for four years and I am beginning my fifth with a significant change in my grading system. I have an undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and graduate degree in secondary education. This year I will teach Biology, Honors Biology and a co-taught Inclusion Biology to freshman with the exception of a couple of sophomores. 

As Ashley has described, our school has made some incredible adjustments to the structure over the past few years.  The looping, Small Learning Community creation, an extended day for students, dress code, multiple intervention strategies, and more have provided us supports and systems for implementing a standards based grading system. We both saw a need to improve how we were assessing our students learning and communicating it in a meaningful and useful way.  After listening to Ashley’s ideas about standards based grading and doing a little research, I decided to team up with Mrs. Walther and take on this endeavor. 

Our blog will serve as a sounding board for us and hopefully we can generate some useful feedback through comments.  Neither of us has written books on the subject and both of us are humble enough to take advice and learn from anyone.  As Ashley stated, this will be a good reflecting tool so that as we carry this on into the sophomore year of these students, making changes to our systems will be more effective.