Standards-Based Grading for New Teachers: 10 Essential Tips

A Beginner’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading: Tips for New Teachers

Some of you are aware that in addition to sharing ideas with you here, in the JumpRope blog, I’m on the Teacher Education Department faculty at the University of Southern Maine (USM). I work with undergraduate and graduate students pursuing initial teacher certification. They are the newbies joining our ranks. You know who they are – you’ve hired them, worked alongside them, you were once one of them.

Being new to teaching, or really, anything, is hard. Part of what I love about my work at USM is that I get to walk alongside our rising teachers and support them through their challenges. One of the great challenges we all face at this moment as educators is how we think about and respond to the use of generative AI in the classroom and beyond. I thought I’d take this early fall moment, as we come back to school, to play with the challenges of being new to something: For many educators no matter their level of experience, the basic tenets of standards-based practice and/or the emergence of AI can feel disorientingly new.

An Origin Story Meets AI in 2025

Unlike our JumpRope schools and districts that are transitioning to standards-based practice, most of my students, who are stepping into their first teaching jobs, are more like some of you: working in schools or districts that have not uniformly made that transition. Maybe you’re like my middle school teaching partner and me in 2008 when we chose to try this different method of teaching and assessing – with the blessing of our administration – but really totally on our own in terms of how to roll it out, enact it, and keep it moving in a positive direction.

I’ve learned some valuable things about standards-based practice in these 17 years, all of them rooted in my own persistence with the practice, which sometimes led me to uncomfortable challenges, but also kept me curious to keep trying. If I could reach back in time to give my 8th grade teacher self some advice, as well as an eerie glance into my own future, here’s what I’d say:

We live in a world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can answer a lot of questions for us. I recently asked my AI to generate several lists of the 5–10 most important things for a teacher new to standards-based practice to consider. Maybe not surprisingly, it left out and even got some things wrong. I had a sense of relief in seeing – indeed, knowing – that at least for now, it won’t replace me in my work.

The first list it gave me included very good suggestions with respect to how to make the transition. After some prompting from me, I got a list to help me understand why I might make the transition. That was actually the first place it went amuck. The Me of 2025 knows that a teacher new to standards-based practice must start with the why. If you’d like to know more about why we must begin with the why, check out this blog post about goals for standards-based assessment and reporting.

I asked my AI to let me know where it had gotten its ideas, and felt assured of the veracity of its suggestions when I read the names of authors and titles of works I myself have referenced consistently. What it did not include, though, is what I think is the single most important variable in making the shift. I’d even say this is the most important aspect of being a good teacher, but without it you simply won’t be able to shift to being an effective standards-based teacher: You have to know your students well.

The First Step: Know Your Students Well

1. In knowing our students well, we need to aim to know who they are as people, what their learning strengths and needs are, and how they like and don’t like to approach school-related tasks. In response to knowing these things, we must develop and maintain a deep and wide array of instructional and assessment strategies to meet the range of needs in the classroom and to provide multiple access points. Not only is this ethical and responsive teaching, but it also keeps things interesting for us and our students. For more on being instructionally responsive, see this post on matching instructional strategies with learning goals and this one on meeting the range of student needs.

Begin with the “Why” of Standards-Based Practice

Confident that you have strategies to get to know your students and that you’re working toward that ever important and demanding endeavor, the next steps to take are to work toward understanding key components of the “why” inherent in standards-based practice.

2. The ultimate goal for students is to learn, not attain a grade or comply with directives. This goal speaks to abandoning traditional grading scales and methodologies as they promote sorting students rather than teaching them. If you’re invested in knowing them well, as discussed in #1, your job of helping them learn as much as they can will be easier. For more on teaching rather than sorting, see this blog post and also Guskey (2014) and O’Connor (2018).
3. If the ultimate goal is for students to learn, we should acknowledge that we’re talking about all students learning as much as they can. Some students need more time, others need a different approach. In the end, this important point is also about knowing them. For more on this topic see this blog post on meeting the range of student needs, #6 below, and O’Connor (2018) and Wormeli (2018).
4. Further, our recognition that learning takes time and support means that we should favor looking at growth over time as opposed to allowing early struggles to color our picture of success. Standards-based practice does just this. For more on this topic see below at #s 9 and 10, and Marzano (2006) and Wormeli (2018).
5. Standards-based practice necessarily empowers students with things like clear targets and consistent formative feedback. An empowered student is an invested student, who in turn learns more (and thus earns better grades) than a passive student. For more on this topic see this blog post, as well as Marzano (2006) and Wiggins & McTighe (2005).

Instructional Shifts That Support Standards-Based Learning

Unlike knowing your students and embracing the components that support the philosophical mindset underlying standards-based practice, I genuinely believe that a choose-your-own adventure model of onboarding the “how” steps — suggested by my AI — is the best way to go. I have included my top five “hows” as the remainder of this post, but the order they appear in is not meant to be a suggested sequence. Choose from these five your own starting place and build from there. Strive to onboard all of them, but in a timeframe that works for you. And here’s a spoiler: While my AI did have some shortcomings in its approach to my queries and the information it ultimately produced for me, our partnership has been fruitful on this topic. Look for another post soon that offers further “how” steps for making the transition.

Some of the most important changes to implement in shifting to standards-based practice are in your approach to instruction rather than grading. I write about my own recognition of this truth in this blog post.

Writing Clear Targets and Using Rubrics Wisely

6. In planning instruction, it’s imperative to start with the standards, the learning goals for the course, unit, and lesson, not the activities you’d like to do with students in your classroom. As I explore in matching instructional strategies with learning goals, we are most effective in supporting all students to learn as much as they can if we are very clear about what they need to learn. How they will learn it, the activities they engage in, and instructional strategies we use are the means, not the end. For more on this topic take a look at McTighe & Willis (2019), Pollock & Tolone (2020), and Wiggins & McTighe (2005).
7. Related to starting with the standards is writing clear learning targets or objectives. Whether you are using national, state, or local standards, or even coining your own, the standards themselves are hard for students (and even adults sometimes!) to understand. When we write clear, student-friendly targets and help our students know what those targets are asking of them, they have a better chance of learning what we expect them to learn. I write about moving from standards to learning targets in this blog post. For more on this topic, I recommend Berger, Rugen, & Woodfin (2014), and Marzano (2006).
8. The final recommendation I’d make for instructional change is actually a bridge to assessment. It’s important to use proficiency scales or rubrics during instruction and as we coach assessments, so that students know what our assessment and grading expectations are. Since proficiency scales and rubrics can be just as elusive as standards in terms of what they mean, we should help students understand them. One of the most effective ways to do this is by providing them with concrete examples at the different rigor levels defined by the rubric. For more on this topic, check out What is a rubric? and when might you use each type of rubric? Additional resources are Guskey (2014) and Marzano (2006).

Assessment Practices That Empower Students

My last two tips for making this transformative shift are with respect to assessment and the connections between assessment and instruction.

9. Formative assessment is the critical key to your assessment system. It should be used as a means to offer consistent, targeted, and actionable feedback for the sake of improving learning. Formative assessments count minimally or not at all toward grades as they are the assessments we use throughout the learning process to check for understanding and help us see where learners should go next. Ideally, there is a strong relationship between formative and summative assessment, where the summative is only administered once ample formatives confirm readiness for it. To learn more on this topic, check out Brookhart (2008) and Chappuis & Stiggins (2016).
10. Offer multiple and varied opportunities to demonstrate proficiency through summative assessments. Remember that the goal is for all of your students to learn, not to sort them into categories along a curve. With this goal in mind, and with the knowledge from #s 3 and 4 above, it makes good sense to allow students the opportunity to revisit assessments – even summative assessments. I recommend that revisitation come with additional opportunities to learn because, while a farming analogy might be rough, it’s spot on: You can keep weighing the pig, but if you don’t give it more food, it won’t get fatter. It’s equally important to remember that not all students thrive in the same assessment situations. Some are more confident with traditional tests, while others do better with projects, presentations, or other creative assessment methods. For more, see Chappuis & Stiggins (2016), O’Connor (2018), and Wormeli (2018).

Starting Small and Growing Your Practice

The first steps I took in developing and implementing a standards-based practice in my 8th grade classroom were sort of marked by the “kitchen sink” model. I tried to do way too much way too fast. I wish I’d been reminded then that any steps we take toward making our classrooms places where we provide all students the environment, instructional strategies, and support they need to do their deepest and most invested learning are good steps. Those good steps are not always easy to take, but they will make us better teachers, our students more invested learners, and our schools places where everyone thrives.

References

• Berger, R., Rugen, L., & Woodfin, L. (2014). Leaders of their own learning: Student-engaged assessment. Jossey-Bass.
• Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139–148.
• Brookhart, S. M. (2008). How to give effective feedback to your students. ASCD.
• Chappuis, J., & Stiggins, R. (2016). An introduction to student-involved assessment for learning. Pearson.
• Guskey, T. R. (2014). On your mark: Challenging the conventions of grading and reporting. Solution Tree Press.
• Marzano, R. J. (2006). Classroom assessment & grading that work. ASCD.
• McTighe, J., & Willis, J. (2019). Upgrade your teaching: Understanding by design meets neuroscience. ASCD.
• O’Connor, K. (2018). A repair kit for grading: Fifteen fixes for broken grades (2nd ed.). Pearson ATI.
• Pollock, J. E., & Tolone, L. J. (2020). Improving student learning one teacher at a time (2nd ed.). ASCD.
• Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.
• Wormeli, R. (2018). Fair isn’t always equal: Assessing & grading in the differentiated classroom (2nd ed.). Stenhouse Publishers.