Where is the rigor?

As many of you know, I talk a lot about the Saline Area Schools’ Compass.  I talk about the Student Attributes to students, staff, parents, community members and other educators. It is vital that the Saline community, along with the SAS teachers and students, understand what the Compass means and what it means to be challenged.  

One of the topics that comes up frequently – mostly from staff and parents – is the issue of “rigor.”  I am asked, “Where is the rigor?”  First, this inquiry highlights a general bias that skill development is not rigorous. There is a perception, a preconceived notion, that skill attainment is fundamentally easier or “less rigorous” than developing content knowledge.

I get it… I convinced myself that Listerine worked better than Scope at freshening my breath and killing germs because it tasted worse.  Harder is better – that is perception.  Alka-Seltzer had to work well because it was hard to swallow.  It’s normal to feel like that and to apply that same analogy to learning.

My response to the question of rigor tends to run along these lines: we need to think about difficulty as it relates to the end product and value of the task.   Looking the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (below), you can see the eight student attributes from the SAS Learner Profile/Compass embedded in top three levels – Analyze, Evaluate and Create.  If we focus on instilling the attributes, we are also focusing the most rigorous phases of demonstrating knowledge.