Where Rigor Begins: How to Use This Book

Thinking about the relation between time and ambitious instruction means thinking about instructional rigor in multiple ways.

Practice and learning need to be deep: Understanding is tied to the examples and applications students work with, hence students need rich ones.

Practice and learning need to be diverse: Students will need several chances for their understanding to move from superficial to deep, so tasks should be sequenced intentionally in a way that enables increasingly substantive comprehension.

Practice and learning need to be differentiated: Students need to be able to access tasks in different ways.

Practice and learning need to be distributed: It needs to occur over multiple days, in multiple ways, to stick.

To be clear, this is not a call to eliminate either lessons or units; rather, I’m advocating for planning—both across months and within days—that reflects how people learn and apply complex skills and concepts. This planning might include individual lessons or several week units, sure. It may also include a week or month of project-based learning, a three-day problem-based approach around an essential question, or two weeks of independent reading to prepare for these sorts of inquiry-centered approaches. In short, the demands of the conceptual understanding that students need to gain should dictate instructional time, not the other way around. Chapters 1 (page 13) and 2 (page 39) go into this in more detail.

Where Rigor Begins: How to Use This Book The remainder of Ambitious Instruction: Teaching With Rigor in the Secondary Classroom is organized for action in your classroom and at your school—your tasks and texts, of course, but also the collaboration and learning processes necessary to enhance and sustain them. Teachers, expect to find step-by-step blueprints of planning and pedagogical practices every step of the way; instructional leaders, know that every chapter breaks down key teaching and learning concepts and provides guidance on how teachers can collaborate on—in professional learning communities, with an instructional coach—and enact ambitious instructional practice. Examples from across the content areas are included throughout.

Chapters 1 and 2 act as a close-knit pair with the aim to get you rigor ready—that is, I discuss how to plan ambitious instruction. With a focus on rigorous performance assessments and texts, and a fresh view on planning, here’s where you’ll learn how to refine and sequence your curricula over the course of a school year.