Is it Rigorous?

One of my district's goals is to increase the rigor and relevance of our curriculum. Last year our superintendent began educational rounds (like doctors do in hospitals) with a focus on rigor and relevance. At first it was just administrators making rounds, but not long after teachers were invited along. The group would visit various classes for approximately one period observing what students were doing, then meet for another period to complete a chart based what again we saw students doing. We were told, it didn’t matter what the teachers were doing, focus on the student’s activity and we were allowed to ask the students to explain what they were doing. For each class, we had to place a post-it in the quadrant that we believed the students were working.

   

 So, this rigor and relevance conversation has been ongoing for over a year. As we begin using the new teacher evaluation tool this year, many teachers are making it a goal to increase the rigor in their classes and the discussion about what is rigorous continues.

People always think rigor means hard. Calculus and physics by most people's standards are challenging subjects, but if you enter a classroom and the teacher is giving direct instruction what are the students doing, they are listening, watching, and maybe taking notes. Listening and watching is not very rigorous. A teacher can't say my subject is hard therefore my class is rigorous. So if rigor is not a challenging subject, what is rigor?

Rigor is about designing tasks that force learners to think about a strategy, to test that idea, to reassess the strategy, and to try again with a new strategy in a rinse and repeat fashion until they are successful.   I like a Hansel-and-Gretel-follow-the-bread-crumbs metaphor for rigor rather than the Wizard-of-Oz- yellow-brick-road metaphor. On the yellow brick road, one can enjoy a stroll through the country side while making their way to their destination, the answer. If the route to the answer is following breadcrumbs of information, this is much more challenging. Sometimes the crumbs of information are smaller than other crumbs, sometimes there are large gaps, maybe even a river, between bread crumbs, and sometimes what you think is a breadcrumb is a small pebble. A task like this requires strategizing, analysis, planning, applying prior knowledge, determining what's missing, experimenting, perseverance, and maybe even creating a river-traversing-system.

                                         photo source: http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/03/50_very_awesome.shtml

Often people also think rigor is assigning a lot of work, which is rigorous as a time management activity because the learner must plan and strategize how they will get all the work done in a limited amount of time, but a heavy workload is not content related rigor. In fact, the learner may think less deeply about the content activity because completion in a specified time frame is the goal, not learning. Creating a rigorous learning activity, requires the teacher to plan backwards and maybe share the the expected end-result, then start dropping the breadcrumbs that will get the learners to strategize a route to the answer. 

Recently, after a lesson about digital reputation, specifically who owns one's image once online, I challenged students to get themselves untagged from a class photo that I placed on a wiki (I had not introduced wiki’s yet). I gave them a bread crumb in the form of a blog post about how to get oneself untagged from an unflattering photo online. The blog post, however, was more a treasure map than a road map. Only one student was able to untagged themselves, and two others were close. It appeared all students waited until the minute, not giving themselves enough “trial and error” time, and many didn't bother to read, or they misread the “breadcrumb” blog.  What I learned was that I needed to add a few more breadcrumbs and closer together. Next time, I will prep the students with the Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs analogy to start. I think informing students that this is a challenging activity will encourage a more serious attitude.  I would also set a “questions for the teacher” deadline about half way through the time frame to force strategizing earlier in the process.