AMBITIOUS INSTRUCTION
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acknowledging each student’s comments before calling on another to participate. When she finished the questioning, she guided the whole class back toward the main idea of the unit she had shared a couple of times previously. She gave exit slips that asked students to summarize the main points of the different opinions they had heard. Two classrooms. Same grade. Same hallway. Same skills. Same text. And yet. We register the differences between these two examples as obvious, palpable. The second example feels familiar: we’ve seen it or done it ourselves; it’s fine. But the first feels like something else: comprehensive, challenging, complete. We recognize the sensible scaffolding, the rich interactions with texts and problem solving; we appreciate the rich student-to-student talk and argument-focused comprehension building. It’s what we aspire to, what we want every classroom, every day, to look like. Anyone would call this rigorous: we know it when we see it. That’s what I aim to do for secondary teachers: make rigor visible. Make it accessible. Make it actionable. And I want to do this for teachers not just within classrooms but across them, so that all students have opportunities to engage in meaningful intellectual work. That’s ambitious instruction. But accomplishing all this requires both authors like myself and school leaders and teachers like yourself to face a hard truth: this idea of rigor that has permeated so much talk in education has remained stubbornly elusive in many secondary classrooms. Studies show that a strong majority of classroom tasks do not meet the level of rigor established in the Common Core or state standards (Education Trust, 2015), are formulaic and not engaging (Applebee & Langer, 2012), provide limited opportunities to engage texts meaningfully (Greenleaf & Valencia, 2017; Litman et al., 2017), and rarely encourage the kinds of complex thinking necessary to demonstrate college and career readiness (Marzano & Toth, 2014). More than five hundred hours of instructional time are wasted per student, per year, on formulaic tasks that don’t encourage complex thinking (TNTP, 2018). Survey after survey of U.S. teachers (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014; Kaufman et al., 2016) confirm it: teachers struggle with rigor, and they want and need help to close the gap between their intentions and their actions.
A Clear Definition of Rigor Closing that gap starts with getting clear on what rigor is and what it means. It isn’t the buzzwords—creativity, 21st century learning, critical thinking—it’s all too easy to nod in agreement when watching a YouTube video on these subjects and then subsequently ignore it. I mean an operational definition, where rigor is a level or kind of
