Profile: Matt Townsley leads innovation in Solon schools

SOLON — Matt Townsley, the Solon Community School District's director of instruction and technology, is regarded as a leader among Corridor teachers and administrators on new grading practices.

Townsley, 33, has worked in Solon for 11 years, first as a math teacher at Solon High School. He is now in his fifth year in his current position.

As a teacher and administrator, Townsley has led the district's implementation of standards-based grading, in which teachers focus more on students' proficiency at specific skills than on homework or strict deadlines for completing a unit.

Teachers from other districts frequently contact Solon about standards-based grading, Townsley said. He and the Solon High principal, Nathan Wear, will speak at a national education conference in December, Learning Forward, in Washington, D.C.

Townsley sat down with The Gazette last month to talk about what motivates him as an administrator. Here are excerpts from that discussion:

Could you tell me a little bit about your background in education?

I went to Independence High School here in Iowa and then went to Wartburg College. It was right around kind of the big dot-com era, so I thought maybe I'd be a computer scientist. ...

Then kind of the dot-com crash happened, and I thought, well, I really don't want computer science, so I just finished up with a math education major and was applying for jobs and landed in Solon.

What's the overall idea about education behind standards-based grading?

I've asked teachers, agree or disagree with this statement: Students learn at different rates and different paces. Every single teacher agrees with that statement. I have not yet met one that disagrees with that statement.

So why is it, then, that we as teachers set arbitrary test deadlines, like you have to learn Pythagorean's theorem by next Friday?

Also, when we think about parents logging on to PowerSchool and Infinite Campus, these online grading systems, they're used to seeing (for example), how well did my kid do on the Civil War test. What does 85 percent on the Civil War test mean?

Now what they're seeing is, here is how well my kid understands the cause and effects of the Civil War, or how well they understand the area of a circle.

What motivates you to change the way students are graded?

As a teacher, I would be really frustrated when I was walking through the halls in the morning and I would see students that were copying each other's math homework that I assigned. ...

It also bothered me to see some students who just needed more time to do it.

Where do you see education changing overall in the next decade?

I think we'll see more blended learning — there might be an online component. We're experimenting a little bit with that in our summer (courses). We require a certain number of hours of contact time.

Of course online learning will be there, but especially for our high school and below students, there's just something about having a face-to-face contact.

What do you not want to change? What do you want to keep from the traditional education model?

I want to keep quality relationships between teachers and kids. …

I think there's something to be said when a kid's just had a bad day at home or at school, and there's someone they can talk to.