Rigor, It's All the Rage...

Rigor is all the rage these days, both literally and figuratively speaking.  Everybody from the President on down believes that students must have more rigorous curriculum, more innovative instruction and challenging assessments to prepare them for the 21st century, for a college ready future, for a solid career pathway, and for whatever else we want kids to accomplish in America in the next decade.  But here's the question.  Can anybody that politicizes rigor tell us exactly what rigor looks like?

Diane Ravitch likens the perception of rigor to rigor mortis (a strict and rigid curriculum), and Barbara Blackburn (author of Rigor is NOT a Four-Letter Word) said, "People don't know what it means".  These two experts are right.  Rigor is one of the most confusing buzzwords today, and it has a different meaning depending on who you ask.  So the question becomes this.  How can administrators and teachers work together to define what rigor must look like to inspire kids to achieve success at the highest levels?

For more thoughts on rigor, click HERE, HERE and HERE

Rigor Me This.

The problem that I see with rigor is not that we don't have rigor in our classrooms.  It's that we don't have an aligned understanding of what rigor must be so that students will be inspired to reach our rigorous expectations.  What teachers and leaders need is a common language about rigor, so that when someone says, "We Need More Rigor!", everybody knows what that means for kids.

To help educators work together to have some focused conversations about what rigor must mean, I whipped up this table comparing what it is and what it isn't.  My hope is that all educators within an organization will have meaningful discussions about rigor and create a common understanding, so that together they could make a rigorous school instead of rigorous classrooms.
.

Rigor is NOT	Rigor Is
More work	More appropriately challenging work
Engagement	Cognitive engagement
Teacher Q & A	Classroom discussion & student collaboration
Hard classes	Rich learning environments
Hard work	Cognitive work
Selecting Correct Responses	Making the best decisions from multiple correct responses
Depth of Work	Depth of Knowledge
Knowledge & Skills	Creativity & Analysis
Based on the verbs in a standard	Based on the complete standard
Frustrating and overwhelming	Challenging and motivating

Thoughts

What would you add?  

The Essence of DOK

The other day I ran across this tweet and thought to myself, "This visual reminder is exactly what we need when we are trying to help kids learn at DOK levels 2, 3 and 4 in our instruction."  Now the first assumption I made was that the goal of this visual was to get kids to teach others, and that is a great goal for any instruction. After all, the expert must know the concept deeply with familiarity, and teacher must transcend that level of expertise.   But as I synthesized the tweet a little bit longer, I said, "95% retention isn't good enough for someone to become an expert.  

So let's put all of those components together:  reading about a topic, hearing about a topic, seeing the topic, discussing the topic, experiencing the topic and teaching about the topic, that would add up to roughly 275% retention rate.  What I mean is this.  If a student has learning opportunities to learn a given concept at all of those levels, there's a pretty good chance that the student would have a tremendous depth of knowledge and high rate of retention about that concept.

Passive isn't always Bad

Passive learning is perceived as bad and active learning is perceived as good, but that's not necessarily the case.  Passive learning is a great way to activate introspective learning.  It grounds students to a central concept when introducing new skills.  Through listening, reading or hearing,  a student can internalize new learning to make meaning.  If students don't have an opportunity to internalize content on the front end, they'll have a difficult time generating products of mastery on the back-end.

Active is the Real-World

There are very few professions that require a person to merely think without producing a product.  Active learning is the real-world because every profession requires employees to use  their knowledge to produce results.  Instruction must produce results, and that means learning requires meaningful work.  Meaningful work starts with application, and sadly that is where traditional learning stops.  Authentic learning takes application and leads to creation, evaluation and presentation.  Why do you think teachers are so good at their content?  It's because they are constantly creating, evaluating and reflecting on their content.  Students need those same learning opportunities to master content.

Link to Visual

The Essence of DOK

The pathway to Depth of Knowledge is neither passive nor active.  It is both.  Learning requires activity and interaction as well as internal reflection and synthesis.  Educators mustn't subscribe to the theory that activity is the only way to help kids learn, but it mustn't cling to the safety of sterile and quiet learning spaces either.  The essence of depth of knowledge is knowing the depth of mastery for your content, the learning styles of your students and the best strategies to help all students get as close to 270% mastery of that content.

To Give or Not to Give Homework. That is the Question...

Homework (n) - a learning task that evokes tremendous excitement, felt no student ever.

Throughout the history of education, homework tasks have been given, and depending on who you ask, homework has multiple meanings. If learners struggle academically, homework has a negative meaning.  If they excel, it can be a bore or just another chore. 

If teachers want to give homework, they should keep in mind the goal of homework, to reinforce skills that students have already be exposed to.  Failure to meet that goal will certainly send students and parents toward a different goal, wondering why the teacher would assign something so difficult.  When teachers assign homework, they should always consider the following criteria if they want parents and students to find it beneficial.

1. Familiar Content - Homework should be over content that is familiar to the student.  Work that is unfamiliar to students can cause frustration or create bad habits or incorrect understanding.
2. Time Considerate - Homework should be something that the student can do in a relatively short period of time.  Consideration should be given when deciding how much homework to give students.
3. Feedback - Homework works best when teachers review the task and give feedback.  Research shows that homework that is not reviewed by the teacher has little effect on learning. (Marzano. Classroom Instruction that Works. p 64.)
4. Parent Support - Parents deserve to know what level of help is expected of them to give to their children.
5. Relevance to Students - Students deserve to know how homework will help them in their future learning.

HOMEWORK TIPS FOR PARENTS

When encouraging parents to get involved with teaching their children good study habits, here are tips from the US Department of Education  on ways parents can help their children successfully do their homework.  The last thing parents want from homework is to be confused about the role that they serve when it comes to homework.


✪ Make sure your child has a quiet, well-lit place to do homework.
Avoid having your child do homework with the television on or in places with other distractions, such
as people coming and going.
✪ Make sure the materials your child needs, such as paper, pencils and a dictionary, are available.
Ask your child if special materials will be needed for some projects and get them in advance.
✪ Help your child with time management.
Establish a set time each day for doing homework. Don‘t let your child leave homework until just
before bedtime. Think about using a weekend morning or afternoon for working on big projects,
especially if the project involves getting together with classmates.
✪ Be positive about homework.
Tell your child how important school is. The attitude you express about homework will be the attitude
your child acquires.
✪ When your child does homework, you do homework.
Show your child that the skills they are learning are related to things you do as an adult. If your child
is reading, you read too. If your child is doing math, balance your checkbook.
✪ When your child asks for help, provide guidance, not answers.
Giving answers means your child will not learn the material. Too much help teaches your child that
when the going gets rough, someone will do the work for him or her.
✪ When the teacher asks that you play a role in homework, do it.
Cooperate with the teacher. It shows your child that the school and home are a team. Follow the
directions given by the teacher.
✪ If homework is meant to be done by your child alone, stay away.
Too much parent involvement can prevent homework from having some positive effects.
Homework is a great way for kids to develop independent, lifelong learning skills.
✪ Stay informed.
Talk with your child‘s teacher. Make sure you know the purpose of homework and what your child‘s
class rules are.
✪ Help your child figure out what is hard homework and what is easy homework.
Have your child do the hard work first. This will mean he will be most alert when facing the biggest
challenges. Easy material will seem to go fast when fatigue begins to set in.

To Give or Not to Give Homework

The answer to this question can best be answered by this 2-part question. What purpose does homework serve in helping all kids learn, and how will the teacher gauge if the students learned from it?  Every learning task must have a purpose for supporting learning. Homework that is given flippantly or is not monitored to support learning should not be given.

Finally, deciding whether or not to give homework is often based on whether educators think kids will do it or not.  The excuses of home support or work ethic provide quick roadblocks to this issue. If this is the case, it all comes down to relationships and accountability.  If we can build strong relationships with kids, show how homework will benefit their learning, and hold them accountable for doing it, homework will get done in a way that enhances learning.

Drop a comment to share your thoughts on homework.  Your comments are extremely valuable to those who read this post.