EL Education (formerly known as Expeditionary Learning) embeds character education into its curriculum. EL claims to stress high standards, empower teachers, and challenge students.  Further, in the article "Emphasizing Learning: Using Standards-Based Grading in a Large Nonmajors’ General Chemistry Survey Course" authors Boesdorfer, Baldwin, and Lieberum used assessment scores and student opinion surveys to evaluate the use of standards-based grading. 

Videos:

Readings:

 (Links to an external site.)This first link focuses specifically on high quality instruction and discusses standards based grading; the second link involves EL Education links to the EL model: Curriculum, Instruction, Culture and Character, Assessment, and Leadership

There are 9 links that will link out to a new EL page, where you can download different resources. There are also links to related resources. So there are many pdfs to read throughout. 

Boesdorfer et al.'s article "Emphasizing Learning: Using Standards-Based Grading in a Large Nonmajors’ General Chemistry Survey Course"

These are the same readings for the discussion post so use this writing as a guide for what you may want to say for your post.