Increasing Student Rigor:
Here you will find resources, collaboration, and ideas on how to increase rigor in the classroom.
Using Data:
Classroom Resources:
Video Resources
Sharing Community
Using Data:
Classroom Resources:
Video Resources
Sharing Community
What Exactly is Rigor?
Who doesn't love Ferris Bueller's Day off? Below if you remember the scene of the ever so exciting economic classroom. Clearly, the students are not engaged with material nor is it rigorous for the students. How much learning do you think is occurring in this classroom? We have all had our days of some lets be honest boring lectures at students and at the end of the lesson they did not walk away with an enriched sense of learning. Increasing Rigor is not only beneficial for our higher achieving students but is's beneficial for all. With our shift from common core our country has taken a step to up the rigor in our curriculum but with that there need's to be professional development for teachers to prepare them.
Trends: Where Teachers are Now
With our shift from common core teachers are feeling less prepared now more than ever. Robert Marzano and Michael Toth have compiled research over the last few years among side the common core shift and have made notable trends. They discovered that few teachers feel prepared in terms of teaching the new rigorous standards. Since the common core standards have been coming out there has been a large emphasis on what those shifts are and why they are happening but little professional development on how to actually teach these new standards and what the looks like in the classroom.
Below you will see an image of over 2 million lessons across the states and the type of lessons being taught. (Taken from the Learning Sciences Marzano Center)
Below you will see an image of over 2 million lessons across the states and the type of lessons being taught. (Taken from the Learning Sciences Marzano Center)
As you can see only 6% of the observed 2 million lessons are involving complex tasks where students are creating and testing their observations. With our shift in defining what rigor looks like it is essential that we begin to change our own mindsets as educators as to what rigor really looks like in the classroom. We need to prepare our students for jobs that do not even exist and to solve problems that dont yet exist either. The skills that we teach our students today need to prepare them for their future, not skills that are no longer useful. Students need to engage deeper with the content, it can no longer be solely skills based. We need to teach them more than memorizing important dates and algorithms. We need to teach students how to look at problems, decompose them, make changes, adapt, think outside the box, and collaborate with one another.
Below you will see another figure taken again from Learning Sciences Marzano Center that depicts the frequency of strategies that teachers use in their lessons.
Below you will see another figure taken again from Learning Sciences Marzano Center that depicts the frequency of strategies that teachers use in their lessons.
As you can see we actually need this graph to be inverse. The strategies that we use in our lessons should be more focused on optimizing students for cognitively complex tasks, revising knowledge, examining errors in reasoning, etc. At the core of our lessons we need to be implement strategies that are further developing the metacognitive part of our students' brain. Our lessons need to go in more depth.
Resources:
Marzano, R., & Toth, M. (n.d.). Teaching for Rigor: A Call for a Critical Instructional Shift [Scholarly project]. In Learning Sciences Marzano Center. Retrieved from http://www.marzanocenter.com/files/Teaching-for-Rigor-20140318.pdf