The desire to improve educational delivery and outcomes has prompted significant advancements in culture-based education as a foundation for community-driven, place-based, relevant educational approaches that more effectively engage children and their families in lifelong learning and leadership. This article shares the early process and tools of a large-scale, community-participatory project developed to understand the use of culture-based teaching strategies in Hawai'i and associated outcomes for students (7th-10th grade). Specifically, this work documents the initial planning and theoretical development that resulted in a Hawaiian Indigenous Education Rubric (HIER) from a teaching perspective. The HIER tool provides a building block in our efforts to understand what indigenous education looks like in the teaching environment and is shared here to encourage further research and development. Future publications will document the results of the broader project based on teacher and student data. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures, and 4 notes.)