Best Teaching Practices for Rigor in Learning

Classroom Techniques to Draw a Line Between Difficult & Challenging

Dec 7, 2008 Marcy Paulson

Best teaching practices & Student education are prone to buzzwords. A while ago, "rigor" entered the eduspeak lexicon. How should the concept fit in classroom techniques?

Best teaching practices concerning rigor can be confusing, because teachers are sure they know what “rigor” is, but very few educators agree on classroom techniques to achieve it in everyday student education. What is “rigor”? Merriam Websters online dictionary has several definitions for it:

  1. harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity
  2. the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness
  3. severity of life : austerity b: an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty
  4. a tremor caused by a chill
  5. a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially : extremity of cold
  6. strict precision : exactness
  7. rigidity, stiffness b: rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli c: rigor mortis

Try applying these definitions to an ideal classroom setting. The definition that seems to have the most universality with teachers seems to be the one about making “life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.” If rigor is simply making classrooms artificially difficult, why not require students to construct their own pencils each day before being allowed to complete their worksheets?

Best Teaching Practices Concerning What Rigor Is Not

It doesn’t make any sense to artificially create obstacles for students. On the other hand, rigorous learning is often difficult. The difference comes from the order of thought. Is a lesson rigorous because it is difficult, or might it be difficult because it is rigorous?

To use an illustration from the classroom, when trying to teach students the difference between energy and work, one teacher asks a student to move a pencil five feet and another student to move the classroom wall five feet. Afterwards he asks, “Who used more energy? Who got more work done?” Moving the pencil five feet is akin to the level of rigor (or lack of it) many classrooms have. Moving the wall five feet is akin to the types of situations some teachers put students in to claim their teaching is rigorous.

Some states have scotch-taped the upper tier of Bloom's Taxonomy to the word “rigor” as a working definition. Politicians have demanded that rigor be put back in the classroom. But still, there is very little understanding or agreement in what rigor is.

Best Teaching Practices in Defining Rigor

Jeff Paulson, an instructional coach, uses a definition that he pulled together from the Rigor/Relevance Framework, which was created by the International Center for Leadership in Education.

Rigor (n) An expectation that requires students to apply new learning to other disciplines and to predictable and unpredictable real-world situations.

The Rigor/Relevance Framework loosely aligns itself with Blooms. It is like this:

  1. Remember – acquire new information
  2. Understand – summarize new learning
  3. Apply – apply new learning within same discipline
  4. Analyze – apply new learning across disciplines
  5. Evaluate – apply new learning to real-world predictable situations
  6. Synthesize – apply new learning to real-world unpredictable situations

(Note that the skills on the right are only aligned with the Blooms on the left; they are not explanations of Blooms.)

Strong, Silver, and Perini offer another definition: "Rigor is the goal of helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging." (Teaching What Matters Most: Standards and Strategies for Raising Student Achievement. ASCD, 2001)

While the application part of the definitions are obvious, there is one other subtle part worth noting. First, rigor is made of high expectations for the student, but it also requires the teacher to provide the tools necessary for students to accomplish the task. As an analogy, if the task is to reach a high place, a rigorous teacher is the ladder. A ladder in itself holds an expectation to climb and also a way to achieve it.

For a teacher that is just awakening to rigor, it can seem simple until she applies it in the classroom. Rigor is certainly an educational concept that is worth further explanation.

The copyright of the article Best Teaching Practices for Rigor in Learning in Teacher Tips/Training is owned by Marcy Paulson. Permission to republish Best Teaching Practices for Rigor in Learning in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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