Grading for
the Future:
A Practical Path to Competency-Based Grading
Josh Kunnath, Ed.D.,
Ryan Sikkes, Ed.D.
Foreword by
Matt Townsley
Find Your Stage. Take the Next Reasonable Step.
A practical, staged path from traditional grading through standards-based grading to competency-based grading.
Book Overview
What if grades could communicate real learning and better prepare students for what comes next?
Grading for the Future introduces the Grading Reform in Progressive Stages, or GRIPS, Framework: a practical path that helps teachers, teams, schools, and districts identify their current reality and move forward without rebuilding everything at once. Through four cumulative stages, Josh Kunnath and Ryan Sikkes show educators how to create more accurate, transparent, and learner-centered grading systems within existing standards, schedules, gradebooks, GPAs, and report cards.
Inside You'll Find
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A four-stage GRIPS Framework and twenty-six practices for sustainable grading reform
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Practical guidance for priority standards, gradebooks, reassessment, and reporting
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Tools for strengthening student agency, self-assessment, and transfer of learning Classroom examples, team protocols, implementation supports, and a current-reality self-assessment
“Maybe they just show how well students decode our expectations.”
– Josh Kunnath and Ryan Sikkes
Who Should Read This Book?
For K-12 teachers, teacher teams and PLCs, school and district leaders, curriculum directors, instructional coaches, professional learning leaders, and school counselors seeking a manageable path toward meaningful grading reform.
The Problem
Traditional grades often combine achievement with effort, behavior, participation, timeliness, and accumulated points, making it difficult to know what students have actually learned.
Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short
Percentage scales, averaging, penalties, and point accumulation can distort evidence of learning while encouraging compliance rather than reflection, transfer, and ownership.
What Makes This Book Different:
The GRIPS Framework gives educators a self-diagnosable, four-stage sequence for changing grading practices without requiring an immediate, all-or-nothing transformation.
Why Now Is the Right Time:
As artificial intelligence and an increasingly uncertain world reshape what readiness means, students need to apply learning in unfamiliar situations and assess, direct, and communicate their own progress.
“Effort and learning are not the same thing.”
- Josh Kunnath and Ryan Sikkes
Meet The Authors
Josh Kunnath, Ed.D.
Josh Kunnath is an eleventh-grade English teacher, instructional coach, and English co-department chair at Highland High School in Bakersfield, California, where he has taught since 2008. A practitioner-researcher, writer, and consultant, he focuses on grading, assessment, feedback, equity, and literacy and serves as editor of the Journal of School Administration Research and Development. His classroom and team experience grounds Grading for the Future in the daily realities educators face when changing long-standing practices. Josh brings particular expertise in standards-based grading, reassessment systems, meaningful grade communication, and practical approaches that preserve rigor while working within existing schedules, gradebooks, GPAs, and reporting structures.
Ryan Sikkes, Ed.D.
Ryan Sikkes is a Partner Consultant with The Core Collaborative and an educational leader with more than twenty years of teaching and administrative experience in Canada's Yukon Territory. He previously served as Yukon's Assistant Deputy Minister of Schools and Student Services, providing oversight for thirty public schools and educational programs serving more than 6,000 students. Ryan holds degrees in secondary education, curriculum and instruction, and educational leadership and policy, including an Ed.D. from the University of British Columbia. In Grading for the Future, he connects competency-based grading to system leadership, professional learning, stakeholder communication, collective efficacy, student agency, and the conditions needed to sustain meaningful reform across classrooms, schools, and districts.
Book Features
Practical Tools:
More than forty tools support grading-purpose statements, standards prioritization, gradebook design, reassessment, transfer, student self-assessment, family communication, and reporting.
Student Perspectives:
Students progress from receiving grades to assessing their learning, selecting evidence, participating in grading conferences, building competency portfolios, and contributing to report-card comments.
Case Study:
The Highland High School case documents how an eleventh-grade English team developed common summative-weighting and reassessment practices for approximately 400 students.
Leadership Applications:
The book addresses implementation sequencing, psychological safety, stakeholder resistance, family communication, initiative fatigue, policy concerns, and coherence across schools.
Examples:
Vignettes, policies, gradebook decisions, assessment structures, and report-card examples make each stage of the GRIPS Framework visible in practice.
Professional Learning Applications:
Chapter-ending discussion protocols and the GRIPS current-reality checklist support book studies, PLC cycles, coaching, leadership retreats, professional learning, and district audits.
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