On Rigor

After the Common Core Standards came out there was a general outcry for "more rigor!"   If only American teachers were more rigorous, then we'd catch up to the Asian and Scandinavian countries.  My school got swept up in that frenzy, too, to some extent, and there was some real skepticism and ridicule.  One witty teacher copied this  definition of "rigor," blew it up to almost-unreadable pixelation, and hung it in the copy room: 

strictness, severity, or harshness, as in dealing with people,  stiffness or rigidity.

There's a number of current debates that are closely associated with "how much rigor should there be" debate -- the push for more AP classes in students' schedules, the question of whether kids should read YA literature, the debate about how much to give students "cold readings," the debate about how much narrative fits in the curriculum (because it's not as collegiate as argument and analysis), the homework debate.

Recently, there's been a number of educational things that can be seen as "anti-rigor," many of which address students' social emotional health.  There's a temptation to ease off rigor in the high school classroom. 

In the department that I belong to there's a microcosm of this.  There are calls to abandon all homework, to replace challenging texts with YA, to turn English classes into classes on SEL and empathy-building. There are also a couple teachers in the department known for their "high standards."  In observations, the atmosphere of the class was noticably different than other "regular level" classes.

Just as a point to note, as a Department Chair, I don't hear a lot of parents sharing this sentiment.  Instead, I hear of complaints of teachers not giving students real education.  This past year I heard it from parents of students in self-contained special education classes and from parents of an "honors kid" who was shocked at the "regular level class" she took in English. On the other hand, maybe I'm not the place parents and kids would go to complain about too much work.  Recently I heard an assistant principal talking about how the PTO parents said they appreciated the SEL efforts of the school.

The question of rigor is real.  (I wish that I could find a definition online that wasn't so negative, but I can't!)  Is no homework the right answer, so that kids can pursue other pursuits? Should we make all tests cumulative?  Should we push most -- or all -- kids into AP classes?  Should we reduce curriculum to make sure that all kids reach mastery?  The "question of rigor" touches almost all things.  But I think it's important to think about as a whole, too.  How much rigor overall should gets get?  How much should we push?

These questions remind me of the mouse longevity study:  you can make mice live longer and longer by feeding them fewer and fewer calories.  The magic number of calories -- the number associated with the longest lives -- is one calorie higher than the number that would cause starvation.  I know that if I were a mouse, I might want to trade a few days or months of life for a little more kibble.

I think we have a similar issue going on in schools.  Certainly it happens on the sports field.  The notoriously hard cross country and track coaches -- who push kids in training all year and in intensity of workouts -- bring home trophies fro the state meet year after year.  And I think that the same happens in the classroom.  One well-known AP Euro teacher assigns tons of reading and asks kids to write a lot.  But a great number of kids walk about with 4s and 5s on the test.

We can maximize learning if we wanted.  For instance, I think there's a pretty good correlation between the amount we ask students to write and their ability to become better writers.  But what are the side effects of the maximum dosage?

A few years ago, Carol Jago wrote a short piece in response to the question: "how can we best help teachers improve their craft."  Jago's answer, which I agree with, is all about rigor.

Advice from Someone Who Learned the Hard Way
1. Stop telling students that reading is fun, though not because it can't be. "Reading is fun!" puts books in competition with World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. If students groan, "I can't do it. This is too hard!" as you distribute copies of a novel, agree with them that reading this book may be hard in places, but assure them that with effort and your help they will be able to read the book. Experience has taught teenagers that if they complain loudly for long enough, the teacher will often abandon a difficult text for something shorter, simpler, and funnier. Don't fall for it.
2. Address, don't avoid challenging vocabulary. Instead of looking for books without difficult vocabulary or figurative language, teach students how to meet these challenges. Rather than pre-teaching all the hard words in a chapter, select a few to teach that are critical to understanding the passage. Also, while assigning and assessing lists of relatively random words is common teaching practice, that isn't how you developed a robust vocabulary. You did it by reading.
3. Teach student how to negotiate complex syntax. Reading long, complicated sentences is a challenge for all everyone but particularly for today's students in the habit of skimming and scanning Twitter updates. Teachers need to help students slow the pace of their reading for literature and develop the habit of rereading when a sentence doesn't seem to make sense. Though rereading doesn't have a cool acronym or fancy graphic organizer, it is the technique experienced readers employ most often. When was the last time you reached for a KWL chart when struggling through a challenging text? Don't seek out rewritten texts. Teach the real thing by helping students parse of each complex phrase.
4. Assign homework reading. In too many schools, teachers have stopped assigning homework reading altogether, principally because students have stopped doing it. This is the path to perdition for literature study. If a teacher reads aloud Lord of the Flies to a class of tenth graders, the only person in the room becoming a better reader is the teacher. I sometimes hear the excuse that there aren't enough copies of the books to send home with students. In many one-to-one laptop or e-reader programs the machines must remain at school. This is educational malpractice. Students need to develop the self-discipline and stamina necessary to read for extended periods of time on their own. How else will they be ready for college? The amount of reading required in college can be up to eight times greater than what students are reading in high school.

From "Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo" in Education Week

Response From Carol JagoCarol Jago has taught middle and high school in Santa Monica, California for 32 years. She is past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and author of With Rigor for All: Helping Students Meet Common Core Standards for Reading Literature (Heinemann 2011).