What Do You Mean by Rigor?

Understanding the True Nature of Rigorous Learning©

Elliot Washor

Charles Mojkowski

The Big Picture Company

We mistake narrowness for rigor, but actually we are not rigorous enough.

Mike Rose

Educational reformers are currently championing renewed rigor in high schools. Rigor, if you have not kept up with your school reform reading, is the lead member of the new three Rs in education, joining relevance and relationships as the new Holy Grail for secondary schools.

Eager to promote rigorous student learning, many districts have ramped up their efforts to produce a more rigorous (read college-ready) high school curriculum and to prepare teachers to deliver it. It appears that states and districts, prompted in part by No Child Left Behind mandates, are moving beyond specifying what it is students should know and be able to do to delineating exactly how those outcomes are to be accomplished, thereby seriously diminishing opportunities for students and teachers to shape their own learning.

Perhaps this tightening of the curriculum emanates from a frustration that, after several years of NCLB, student performance indicators have barely moved. Whatever the provenance, rigor in curriculum and in teaching and learning is receiving singular attention. It is appropriate, therefore, to ask (taking the lead from Seymour Sarason’s recent book, And What Do You Mean By Learning???) what do you mean by rigor?

We attempt to address that question by identifying several distinguishing qualities of rigor, qualities derived from our examination of rigor in both academic and real-world learning and work. We also examine the essential bond between rigor, relevance, and relationships, and suggest several strategies that curriculum designers and teachers can use to bring authentic rigor to student learning and work and thereby revitalize the prevailing paradigm of teaching and learning, a paradigm that is largely devoid of the vigor, vim, and verve of lively student engagement that exercises the practical, creative, and analytic intelligences (Rose, 2004; Sternberg, 2003).

What exactly is it that advocates of increased rigor are seeking? Our sense is that they expect to see a curriculum with more than the average requirements--four years of math and science rather than three, ten novels rather than five, a high level of challenge in performance tests and related assessments, and so forth.

We see such expectations as falling far short of the rigor students need. Curriculum developers and teachers—even students—often construe rigor narrowly, failing to encompass the scope and depth of real-world rigor. Their constructions of rigor often reflect neither the processes of authentic academic work nor the school and non-school environments which students need in order to do such work. These misunderstandings unduly constrict strategies for promoting rigorous teaching and learning in schools and underestimate how discipline and cross-discipline knowledge and skills can be applied rigorously in real-world contexts. These strategies also fail to exploit the potential of the relationships-relevance-rigor dynamic and of working with the heart, hand, and head in the context of a healthy individual, a whole person perspective established by 4-H Clubs at the turn of the last century.

Equally troubling are the varying interpretations of rigor across schools and students. It is interesting to note, for example, that what constitutes a rigorous curriculum in New York City’s top 200 schools—rich projects and time for music and art—is markedly different than the automated skills sheets provided to students in the remaining 800 schools. Prevailing interpretations of rigor raise serious questions of equity around race and class, particularly when curriculum and pedagogy leave no place for understanding the whole child and what conditions he or she experiences in and outside of school and the effects those conditions have on learning.

Getting Rigorous about Rigor

Rigorous learning and work comes in many forms and contexts, both blue-white-collar and white-blue-collar (a distinction that is rapidly blurring). For example:

· The New York City restaurateur and chef who, while balancing his checkbook and managing his staff in the kitchen of his restaurant, still finds time to catch some of the fish he serves and has become an expert in nearly every species of fish in order to bring to his customers the finest dining experience (Singer, 2005).

· The work of Intel high school science winners working in labs side by side with professors and graduate students at SUNY Stony Brook on cutting edge scientific investigations enabled by their close working relationships with the University, relationships that have contributed to extraordinary numbers of Intel prize winners (Winerip, 2005).

Here is an example, drawn from our own work in Big Picture Schools around the country, of how one student came to embrace academic rigor.

For his senior thesis project, Cory, a student at the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island, exhibited in the school’s bookstore café a portfolio of his photographs of the Old Royal Mill that he worked on with his mentor, a professional photographer. Over a period of 10 months, from August through April, Cory photographed the mill, perfecting his photography and, with his teacher, Charly Adler, he studied the physics of light and lighting and the lenses and chips that capture and process it. He studied the chemistry of producing the photographs from old fashioned cameras and film processing, and the nature of composition in art and in writing to better communicate his work process and how he felt about his photographs. He consulted with other photographers, read and researched, and spent long hours at various times of the day taking scores of photographs and analyzing their technical and aesthetic quality.

Here is what he wrote about his learning and work, displayed next to his photography exhibit:

When I first arrived at the mill on my first shoot, I didn’t know what to expect. Unfortunately, I could not do so, because in a certain respect I did know what to expect. I cannot remember exactly when I first set eyes on the Royal Mill, but it’s inconsequential, because the point is that I grew up around the place, though not thinking much of it. I became much further fascinated by it when I was 16. The show that was hanging in the gallery of my internship at the time featured a collection of works done by an artist named Jennifer Jutra. The exhibition consisted of a series of color photographs taken in the mill. The work captivated me, and left me with so many questions as to how I could have lived so close to such a beautiful place, and never have any interest whatsoever in exploring it. It would take me several years to do so. Between school always meddling with my artistic affairs and my spending time away during the summer, I missed every opportunity until the summer of 2002. After a hiatus in July, I resumed shooting in August and continued through until April of 2003. The body of work you see here represents 10 months of shooting, and consequently 10 months of discovery; discovery within the buildings, discovery within the community built around them, and discovery within myself and my own creative nuances.

Both academic and non-academic rigor involve deep immersion over time, with students using sophisticated texts, tools, objects, and language in real-world settings or great labs, often working with multiple mentors—experts as well as expert practitioners. In such settings, students—like academicians and clinicians who are rigorous about their work—encounter problems that are complex and messy and for which tools and processes for solving them are usually not readily apparent or available. Their work is open to peer and public scrutiny.

A rigorous project is one that causes students to take some type of action, to develop their own questions, to notice, observe, and retain, to learn how hard it is to do something well. Through such projects students develop their self-awareness and have ownership of their ideas, actions, and objects. They scrutinize and challenge original assumptions. They see their learning and work as never complete. The experience is reflective and intimate.

As Mike Rose argues in The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (2004),

We mistake narrowness for rigor, but actually we are not rigorous enough. To acknowledge our collective capacity is to take the concept of variability seriously. Not as a neat binary distinction or as slots along a simplified cognitive continuum, but as a bountiful and layered field, where many processes and domains of knowledge interact. Such a model demands more, not less, from those of us who teach, or who organize work, or who develop social policy. To affirm this conception of mind and work is to be vigilant for the intelligence not only in the boardroom but on the shop floor; in the laboratory and alongside the house frame; in the workshop and in the classroom. This is a model of mind that befits the democratic imagination. (p. 216)

In Big Picture Schools we employ five strategies for bringing increased rigor to student learning and work.

1. Work with students’ passions and interests. Students will spend considerable in-school and out-of-school time on learning and work that they care about. Once such a commitment is established, teachers and students can more easily introduce into projects the essential elements of rigor—complexity, breadth and depth, connections, and multiple disciplines—including reading and understanding relevant literature.

2. Connect the learning and work to real-world contexts. In such settings students encounter the messiness and complexity of projects. They learn how the real world operationally defines rigor, they observe adults doing rigorous work, and they connect through in-depth reading to the knowledge and skills nested within and across disciplines.

3. Provoke building relationships. In their projects, students build two broad kinds of relationships—to people and to disciplines of knowledge. Teachers help students find and communicate with adults who are working on similar interests and projects. Students learn how to engage these adults in serious conversations about their work and observe how they do their work. What kind of problems do these adults confront in doing that work? How do they go about solving them? How do they network with others working on similar problems? Teachers also help students understand and pursue relationships between the focus of their projects and other disciplines. Cory’s mastery of photography is deepened by his understanding of physics and chemistry and his mastery of the essay form.

4. Address the head, hand, heart, and health as one. Rigor in the real world often finds its expression in making, manipulating, performing, reading, and researching. The real world is equally taken up with learning that is centered on abstract ideas and objects. Indeed, in most cases, objects or artifacts are the real locus of most learning and work. Mike Rose advises that students “need to get a feel for all the feels. Then you'll form an idea . . . . You need to get a sense in your hand (2004, p. 153)."

5. Assess rigorously over time. Big Picture School teachers employ assessment criteria and processes that accommodate the complexity of rigorous student learning, including the processes and techniques the student employs. Exhibitions, project reports, and narrative assessments are primary vehicles for assessing the depth, breadth, and quality of student learning.

Teachers who employ these strategies holistically make the project/task/challenge more complex and require increasingly more sophisticated work (processes and techniques as well as products), thereby pushing each student to the edge of his or her competence and enabling an extraordinary depth and breadth of learning.

Ultimately, what schools and classrooms need to be about is enhancing students’ abilities to bring rigor—and relevance and relationships—to their own learning, and to understand how to employ standards of rigor to their advantage, first with respect to their passions and interests, and ultimately to all of their learning and work both in and outside of school. Such capacities lead to resiliency as a learner and as a whole person. Getting relationships and relevance right prepares students to embrace rigorous learning opportunities. Cory’s teacher was there when he was ready emotionally and intellectually for the truly rigorous challenges of his work.

The strategies we advocate are in sharp contrast to the notion of grade-level expectations applied uniformly to an entire class without any chance to deepen learning through exploration and contextual understanding. Likewise, the depth and intensity of such learning are not constrained by the pressure to cover scores of concepts, formulas, and facts. One need only examine the typical high school AP science course to see a distorted conceptualization of rigor, where most students learn a lot about science without actually doing science, particularly in any real-world sense, thereby demonstrating the downside of a narrowly academic conceptualization of rigor. Unlike the rigor in most “school work,” all authentically rigorous academic work has real-world contexts and consequences.

Like Rose, we operate on the assumption that real-world hands-on work is mind-full work as well. Indeed, the fabrication, repair, and use of objects are what engage us in the creation of the metaphors, language, and ideas that make us human. The processes of making things, repairing things, and using objects are among the most rigorous learning processes we have (Borg, 1999). Mastering these processes takes years, and our youth are in love with the constant exploration of the world through their grasp. What could be more academic than developing ideas from experiences? Yet, most schools separate students’ hands from their minds, exploration is minimized, and risk is narrowed to limit students’ creativity to a piece of paper or a computer unconnected to the real world.

Many high schools, particularly small ones, are attempting to build more meaningful relationships with students. Some are attempting to make learning more relevant by working with students’ interests. Far fewer schools, however, fully exploit the power of relationships and relevance as essential enablers for bringing rigor to student learning. It is that powerful and seamless relationship that is exemplified in Cory’s story and which teachers must help all students create for themselves.

Elliot Washor is co-founder of the Big Picture Company and of The Met School in Providence, Rhode Island. He is currently directing an effort to help districts throughout the country create schools based on the Big Picture School design. Charles Mojkowski is a consultant to Big Picture and The Met School and is assisting Washor with that work, which is supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

References

Borg, K. (1999). "From the village blacksmith to Mr. Goodwrench: The technology and culture of auto repair in the United States, 1896-1950." Ph. D, dissertation. University of Delaware.

Childress, H. (2000). Landscapes of betrayal, landscapes of joy: Curtisville in the lives of its teenagers. Albany: NY: State University of New York Press.

Rose, M. (2004). The mind at work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Viking.

Singer, M. (2005, September 5). Gone fishing: The chef who catches your dinner. The New Yorker, pp. 78-88

Sternberg, R. (2003). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Winerip, M. (2005, March 9). Want to be an Intel finalist? You need the right mentor. New York Times.