The Standards Performance Continuum (SPC) is a 5-point rubric that provides a quantitative measure of classroom enactments of the Standards for Effective Pedagogy. The first standard, Joint Productive Activity, involves teachers and students working together on a common product or goal, with opportunities to converse about their work. The second standard, Language and Literacy Development, involves developing competence in the language and literacy of instruction and in the academic disciplines throughout all instructional activities. The third standard, Contextualization, situates new academic content in contexts familiar to students to connect it to prior knowledge or experience from the home, school, or community. The fourth standard, Challenging Activities, uses complex tasks requiring the application or use of content knowledge to achieve an academic goal. The fifth standard, Instructional Conversation, is a planned, goal-directed conversation between a teacher and a small group of students. Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, and Yamauchi (2000) proposed these standards as the most effective strategies for teaching culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse students who are less successful in school, but they also stress their importance for all learners.

There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of classroom implementations of these standards. For example, Padrón and Waxman (1999) found that in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms with largely Latino English language learners (ELLs) where the standards were used to a moderate degree, students perceived themselves as more capable readers, perceived more cohesion in the classroom, and spent slightly to moderately more time on task.