Student directions: Choose 200 vocabulary words from chapters 1-8. Define each word, create a visual representation of each word, and construct a meaningful sentence for each word.
Teacher in a department meeting: My students are currently reading a 1,000 page novel. My classroom is full of rigor.
Teacher email to parents: Your students will be writing several essays this year. They will be graded on the following scale: 10 paragraphs = “A,” 8 paragraphs = “B,” 6 paragraphs = “C,” 4 paragraphs = “D,” and anything less will results in a “F.”
Back in the day (can you tell we’ve read way too many student essays over the years?), many educators thought more was more, that rigor meant excess, and that quantity, without much purpose, must be present in order to ensure students were successful.
But, when we consider the three questions that guide our work:
What are you doing?
Why are you doing it?
How does this help you to do what is important?
We really need to know… are these classroom examples rigorous or ridiculous?
With the shift to the Common Core State Standards, teachers acknowledge that students need to be doing more, but what does “more” really mean? More means writing with a purpose, and reading beyond comprehension and toward analysis. More means having students collaborate with the goal of sharpening listening and speaking skills. And more means conducting research that allows for real world application.
More also means asking teachers to grow and change. This usually means asking questions without easy answers, working without answer keys, and grappling with topics that are not “Googleable.”
Some other views on rigor:
