Daniel Schneider, in a must-read piece:

I believe that standards-based grading, at its fundamental level, is only changing your gradebook so you grade individual standards. However, this change forces you to face realities about a traditional classroom that you can’t ignore and that you are forced to react to.

If this piece were only about the implementation of standards-based grading, it’d be indispensable. If you’re thinking about making a constructive change to how you grade and treat your students, you should read the Schneider’s how-to guide.

But it’s also about changes Schneider made from year one to year two in that implementation, which makes it rarer and more valuable among all the SBG literature you can find.

But he also diagnoses how this one change to assessment then rolls along and affects every other aspect of his classroom. Curriculum, homework, relationships, the definition of math itself – nothing is spared. Assessment is only the first domino.

It’s the best examination of the classroom as a thriving, codependent ecosystem I’ve read in a long while.