Rigor. In the education world there’s often a great divide between defining this concept and actually implementing it. Last week, the blog offered some definitions. Hopefully you and your team were able to download the chart and discuss what rigor is and what it isn’t, and come to some agreement about how you define rigor and how you’ll know rigor when you see it.
 
This week, let’s learn from a real Texas teacher who’s crossing that divide one question at a time.
 
WATCH

Watch this Teaching Channel video, Designing Leveled Questions. (The Teaching Channel provides free resources on a variety of topics. If you haven’t already, you will need to create a free account. You absolutely should. They're a fantastic resource, and no one's paying us to say that.)
 
REFLECT

“What do I want [students] to get from the questions that are being asked?” 
 
Jamila Thomas, the high school teacher featured in this video, shares her thought process for how she develops questions for a lesson. She goes on to explain that she includes three different levels of questions in her lessons. Let’s take a look at this scaffolded approach to questioning and how it can improve the rigor in a classroom.
 
Step 1: Basic Questions—Questions that anyone can answer.
How do such basic level questions lead to rigor?  Remember growth mindset, or as I like to call it, the “I Can” mindset.  Kids who have traditionally not been successful in class may be feeling defeated.  Why try when they have a long history of experiences that tells them they can’t do it and won’t get it right?
 
Starting with a simple, obvious question helps build the confidence of all students so that they can start believing that they can be successful in the class because they ARE being successful. Starting with easy, no-fail questions is the first step toward supporting a shift in student mindset and toward creating a rigorous, thinking classroom. 
 
Step 2: Building Questions—Questions that build on the first questions.
Start with the easy question, but you can’t stay there.  As students are still beaming from the taste of successfully answering a question, immediately follow up with slightly more challenging questions.
 
In the video example, the last part of the question, “and what was left out?” requires students to think beyond what was presented and to analyze the information to determine what is missing. Why is this important? Because it requires students to pay attention to one another and allows them to build knowledge together.
 
Step 3: Breakthrough Questions—Questions that support students in “breaking through” the information that is presented, manipulating the information, and making it their own, part of what they know.
Jamila Thomas knows the true secret to learning—have students make a personal connection with the content.  When students are making personal connections, they begin to see the relevance of the content.  Then they don’t even realize that they are now responding to a rigorous type of question—one that requires application of knowledge to a new or novel setting—and they develop ability to use evidence to explain and justify the connections they make.
 
PLAN

This all goes beyond good questions, as the video so poignantly shows.  It’s worth highlighting procedural structures that you as a teacher must plan for in order to ensure success and fostering students’ “I Can” attitude when you use these questioning strategies in your class.

• Plan for ways to help students answer rigorous questions well.
  • If answering open-ended questions is new to your students, let them work with a partner.
  • Having opportunities to talk over ideas before committing them to paper will improve the responses of all of your students.
• Use structured responses and structured time to help students stay organized and on topic.
  • Providing some type of graphic organizer gives students a place to record their thoughts and answers after they brainstorm. I’m betting the students in this video were also provided with a graphic organizer to guide them in what evidence to record as they were watching the video.
  • Structuring and limiting students’ time so they are coming back together as a large class every few minutes helps minimize off-task behavior. They have a specific mission to complete in a limited amount of time! And remember that when you are circulating  around the room and interacting with struggling students, you’re helping all students focus.
• Plan questions aligned with objectives of the lesson ahead of time. .
  • You know your students, and where they’re likely to get tripped up. What questions can you create that
    • anyone can answer,
    • build on something another student says, and
    • help students make connections?
  • What if students are having difficulty answering the questions you planned? Use that information to plan better, more effective questions for tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

 
DO
 
1. Download and review the chart below, which summarizes how to scaffold questions to support all students participating in rigorous discussions of content.
 
2. Choose one lesson this week and plan three scaffolded questions you can use in that lesson.
 
3. Reflect on the process.  How did it go?  Did your students surprise you? Which questions will you use again? What questions might you need to add?

Rigor. Rigor? Rigor. Have you heard the word yet? I bet so, and I bet you've heard about how important it is. The fact is this: while rigor is critical to the successful classroom, we can say the word a hundred times, and it doesn't help anyone until we can define what exactly rigor IS and what it IS NOT.

Rigor is real. It's a real thing. I'm sure you've seen it in your classroom and in others. You've probably seen the potential for it in other activities or lessons you've looked at. But we keep coming down to the question of what rigor IS, and there's a reason for that: rigor is the kind of thing that tries to slide out of easy definitions. What activities and styles are rigorous for 4th-grade English are not necessarily the same as for 4th-grade Math. Or 7th-grade English. Or any-grade Science. Whatever rigor is, whatever it prepares the student for, is wider and weirder than any grade level or content area can do on its own. All the same, we as educators need to provide an environment for rigorous learning in each of our classrooms. While there's a whole lot of difference between what's rigorous and what's not and in which occasion, there are some things that remain the same. Those same things? They have to be our focus.

But before we get to what's the same, we need to keep fleshing out what's different. Google the word "rigor" if you want to know what I mean. You get a whole bunch of definitions, and they like to disagree with each other. The common root for the English word "rigor" is from Latin, meaning "stiff with harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, and judgement." That definition flies in the face of modern educational wisdom, and it should. We want a more challenging and supportive environment for our students. I'm reminded of a quote from Phil Schlechty, who said that "what we need are schools organized in ways that put the joy back into teaching and that do not confuse rigor with rigor mortis."

Barbara Blackburn (2012) provides us with a three-pronged definition of rigor. It's not terribly easy to apply, but it's easy to say, and sometimes just being able to say it is enough to help us form trackable goals based on shared understanding. Here it is: each student is expected to learn at high levels, is supported in learning at high levels, and has opportunities to demonstrate learning at high levels. Like with rigor, "high levels" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, but you can support your students best if you can build some kind of common framework for conversation in order to set goals and evaluate practices.

​Start a discussion with your teams and administrators about what rigor is and what is isn’t. You might want to download the chart we’ve started. You will certainly have ideas of your own to contribute, and you may want to tweak or even eliminate things that are on the chart we’ve created. It’s not a “there’s one right answer, gotcha” kind of thing. It’s a “let’s talk about this and come to a common understanding” kind of thing. What DOES rigor mean? What does it mean for all students to learn at high levels?
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Over the next several weeks, we'll be publishing additional parts of this Learning Series. I hope our thoughts and experience can benefit each other. Please feel free to comment or write back privately. I promise a response. Thanks for reading.

Sources
Blackburn, B. (2012). Rigor is NOT a Four-Letter Word (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Riordan, R. (2015). Rigor Reconsidered. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.hightechhigh.org/unboxed/issue13/rigor_reconsidered/
Tanner, J. (2013, September 9). An Educational Contrarian. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://edcontrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/pictures-of-rigor.html