Rigor, what's it all about?

Fortunately for teachers at Ford, we already engage in many of these practices, so making sure our lessons have this element is unnecessary. What we can do, is fine tune our definitions and make our practices match.

After a quick dip into the research on this topic, "rigor" became the newest buzzword in 2010. Does that mean we should reject the idea as yet another part of the pendulum swing? I don't think so, and I'll tell you why.

For a long time, we as educators lamented the "sit and get" nature of teaching that fill in the bubble testing pushed us into utilizing. Many of us, especially here at this school, worked hard to keep critical thinking, project based learning, and rich discussions a part of our daily practices.

Utilizing the concept of rigor (which is really about open ended and critical thinking, NOT more assignments, or even "harder" ones), especially when paired with relevance (how does what we are doing speak to our students' lives?) and relationship (are you working to have a deep connection to all our students?) makes our teaching more powerful and the students' learning worth their time and investment.

There are numerous ways to develop rigor in our plans, because the first step in making it happen is creating a plan. In your lesson plans, build in time for critical thinking, discussion and pondering. Our students don't need to be "busy" every second. Asking students to design something, connect multiple issues, critique their own or others' thinking all attempt to add rigor to a lesson. Doing these things takes time, and that is okay.

One powerful way to add rigor to our classrooms is to present different points of view around similar situations and ask the students to consider those viewpoints before designing a solution to the problem.

Here is a six minute podcast on the debate over the semantics of the word "rigor":

Here is a 15 minute presentation from ICLE on Rigor and Relevance:

This is an awesome example of a rigorous 3rd grade math session!: