Meet Ashley

I'm Ashley Walther and I'll be one of the two contributors for this blog. The other is my colleague, David. He will introduce himself shortly.

I am a fourth year math teacher at an inner-city school in Knoxville, TN. I have my BA in Mathematics and my MA in Curriculum & Instruction. I've experienced both middle and high school, but the majority of my time has been spent at the high school level. I've taught every grade from 6 to 12. This upcoming year I'll teach solely freshmen.

My school does what is called "looping". The teachers follow the students for two years. The ninth graders I have this year I will have again as sophomores next year. In addition to this set up, we also have core-academic teams. David is the science teacher on my team and I am the math teacher. Ever since we became teammates, David and I have struggled to find ways to make grades more meaningful to students, teachers, and parents. We independently started talking about things that were hovering around the standards-based grading category.  Once we realized we were both talking about doing the same types of things, we knew what we had to do. We got permission from our administrators and this year we are jumping head-first into standards-based grading.

This blog will follow our journey through the ups and downs of SBG. Hopefully we will detail our trials and tribulations so that others may benefit from our experience. I also hope that this will be a good record for us next year when it is time to make changes.

This blog will be strictly about SBG, but you can also follow my math blog here. Most of the posts on this site will be duplicated on my math site, but the math site will have more than just SBG.