A Clear Definition of Rigor

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.

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

work we can feel, see, and do. As anyone who has tried to teach the skill of analysis or evaluation knows, it’s a serious challenge to take things we know and do tacitly and adjust them for school-age learners.

Let’s start simple, then. At its most elemental, rigor is teaching and learning that are up to standard—that is, they meet the level of cognitive complexity or challenge of the standards or benchmarks guiding the learning. Note the part about teaching and learning: rigor refers to both the instruction—the content or texts provided, the work or assessments administered, and so forth—and the efforts of the students, their understanding, and work. This is the science of rigor. What we ask of students and the instruction we provide for them to achieve it must be in line with our benchmarked expectations for teaching and learning. That’s not to say that rigor is inherently, say, the Common Core, or that the Common Core is inherently rigorous—we’ve all been in enough classrooms that use a textbook purportedly aligned to the standards, or seen a lesson plan with some Common Core State Standards (CCSS) slapped on, to know better. But the foundation for everything is our shared understanding of what students know and are able to do by the end of a given grade, as well as by how we ask students to demonstrate this understanding (for example, college readiness exams like the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers [PARCC] or the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium [SBAC], ACT or SAT, and so on). This is academic rigor. Still, this doesn’t quite cover the opportunity and challenge that attention to rigor presents. Standards like your state benchmarks or the Common Core, after all, only tell you what to teach, and even then, often only focus on general academic or cognitive skills, not content. Leveraging the standards, making them meaningful, requires careful attention to the content and facilitation of these skills—that is, a rigor of method. This is the art of it: we provide the additional teaching and learning supports that go beyond the standard. Project-based learning. Socratic seminars. Documentbased questions. Investigations. It’s the way we facilitate that engenders that 21st century learning, that critical thinking, that creativity. This is instructional rigor. Now, I know what you’re thinking: great, more education jargon. But the shift in thinking about rigor is quite simple, as shown in figure I.1 (page 4). Prior to the rollout of new college and career readiness benchmarks like the Common Core, the generally accepted notion of rigor was that it was something produced as a result of students being engaged in their learning. In other words, did students have a choice in how they responded to a task—say, of how to perform or create a product in response to it? Their creativity and interest and talent would be engaged in such a way that they would produce higher-quality work, hence rigor. The new vision, while not necessarily dismissing this notion, foregrounds rigor as the work students must do at all times—that is, there is a clear and expected standard for what students should

Rigor Creativity

Creativity Rigor

BEFORE college and career readiness benchmarks

Figure I.1: Rethinking rigor.

SINCE college and career readiness benchmarks

know and do, and the emphasis needs to be on ensuring tasks, texts, facilitation, and so forth meet that standard. We can enable creativity through that matching of expectations.

I know this seems simple, almost reductively so. But humor me for a minute. If you accept the basic premise of the preceding definition of rigor, consider for a minute how so many schools—including, perhaps, your own—are going about addressing it: by examining and applying taxonomies like Benjamin S. Bloom’s (1956) or Norman L. Webb’s (1997) Depth of Knowledge (DOK). You know what I mean: checking tasks or activities to see under what level of complexity they fall, then trying to up the rigor by changing a verb or making it more open ended. We all do it. It feels straightforward and easy (enough). And, on the surface, it feels right; if there is a common expectation that students should engage in higher-order thinking, shouldn’t all instruction be at DOK level 3 (strategic thinking) or 4 (extended thinking)—or the Evaluation level of Bloom’s—all the time? Truly shifting rigor, though, demands more. If the standards determine what rigor is, we cannot engage in any exercise of assessing or adjusting task rigor without the benchmarks of the standards. Furthermore, because nearly every single content literacy standard in your school’s or state’s learning objectives involves engagement of texts—class readings and students’ own texts— we also cannot reconsider rigor without our texts. And because rigor isn’t just the complexity of the task but also the quality of the student work on said task, we