A teacher begins their journey into standards-referenced grading (SRG), by first developing or identifying objectives/standards to be taught.
A great place to start is with creating an essential question or central question for your course of instruction (big idea):
With the central/essential question starting to focus instruction, the Standards (Mo Learning Standards) are the focus... proving and showing student progress towards mastery. The next page will walk through the process we followed as we started towards SBG.