The Specter of Perceived Rigor that Looms Over Learning

I will be entering my third full week (twelfth class day) of the semester, where we established workshop right from the start. I feel I am far enough into our intensified block schedule (880 minutes logged with each of my three classes) to have a better grasp on my procedures.

But there’s this Specter of Perceived Rigor that is trying to haunt me...

What My Workshop Looks Like

This blog post contains my first full week of the semester.

1.      Students read an independent novel for the first fifteen minutes of class. See here for the bookmark (edited from @BeritGordon’s NoMore Fake Reading) that helps students read at least one novel every twenty calendar days.

2.      I (and my co-teacher) teach for 15-20 minutes. This is usually direct instruction, lecture, or us modelling how to analyze a text, annotate a text, plan writing, or actually writing an analysis in front of our students and thinking-aloud.

3.      Students have the next approximately 45 minutes to work on reading, our online GrammarFlip.com (@GrammarFlip) exercises, or writing analyses. My co-teacher and I circulate around the room, conference with students, answer questions, and record summaries of our conversations in their Google Doc Work Log (see this blog post for more).

Establishing Procedures versus Establish Rigor?

Setting up workshop has slowed down how quickly I used to “cover” content. More time was spent up front making sure all students had a novel to read, were logged into our Google Classroom, and had time to practice creating a daily Work Log. Since I wanted to limit how much we, as teachers, were talking, I would generally divide a lesson into three days:

1.      Introduce a concept with a lecture (methods of characterization, different points of view, etc.)

2.      Project and read aloud from a novel while identifying the concept from the previous class

3.      Complete a planning guide to analyze the targeted literary element and then model a written analysis for the class.

We are moving into Day 12, and my Honors English 9 class is on their third analysis (second is due Monday and third is due Wednesday), and my Academic English 10 class is moving onto their second written analysis this week (and they also had some practice analyzing text structures in multiple-choice questions, but those were not scored, just recorded).

This pacing has slowed me down in terms of how quickly I review these literary elements (which are the foundation of the rest of the course). However, the fact that students are analyzing their independent novels (that they are actually reading, as oppose to a class novel that they are more likely to “fake read”), I can have more meaningful conversations with students, and students are genuinely analyzing the setting, characters, and so on.

The Specter of Perceived Rigor

I am struck by the Specter of Perceived Rigor. I am moving slower, but just because I am talking less does not mean my students ever learned more. I feel that I am not being rigorous enough at times, but I am giving direct feedback to my students and holding conversations about their reading and writing, providing student-specific instruction in short bursts during mini-conferences. I am not assigning any busy work or filler work (GrammarFlip will become targeted once we write more, where I can assign a short lesson on “Dependent Clauses” to one student but a lesson “Appositives” to another as necessary). Students are not memorizing much (other than points of view or the difference between physical, temporal, or social setting, etc., so they can begin analyzing these aspects).

Instead, students are reading, writing, talking, and—it seems—learning.

In other courses—where my Honors students, especially, have more “work” to do an memorization to accomplish—I fear my class feels “easy.” Yet, students are accomplishing the learning targets we have established; or, if not, we can target remediation during workshop. Further, we will be adding a long-term writing project and vocabulary acquisition in the next two weeks, so the workshop time will become multi-faceted. I cannot ask my students to do this without having taken the time to establish and practice procedures (and address anything I may have improperly set up).

I sent this question out to Twitter earlier today:

I am not fully in a standards-based classroom, but I have clear learning targets (see my Weekly Student-Authored E-mails Home on Progress blog post) with a holistic rubric (instead of a 1-4 rurbic, I use a holistic A-F rubric) where students can re-submit work. Mr. Rik Rowe (@RikRowe)—my go-to standards-based learning Twitter-colleague—responded as follows:

In scoring the first written analysis on setting, students did well—an average of a B (which I’d equate to a 3 on a 1-4 scale since an F is basically incomplete/missing), but many scored an A. If students wish to resubmit, they can conference with me during workshop and we’ll discuss where their analysis was lacking (in specific examples, or the actual piecing of the analysis together, or if they lost focus of the prompt, etc.). I suspect I will see overall grades increase, but I do not view this as grade inflation. I do believe this system tasks students with taking control of their learning and allowing me to serve as coach where students can continually revise their learning.

Being rigorous has, for some (I fear), become equated to making learning unnecessarily hard or challenging, perhaps resulting in hoops to jump through that will separate students by mere percentage points. That is not rigor. That’s a game, and we know students can learn how to play—or quit—a game.

This Specter of Perceived Rigor is hard to shake: If I am not talking and students are not stressed, am I being rigorous enough? I know that is foolish, but it’s been ingrained in me, and like all specters, it must be shaken loose.