Setting Rigorous Standards in Teaching

WHAT DOES RIGOROUS INSTRUCTION LOOK LIKE? 1. High Expectations for All Students • Challenging but Achievable Goals: Teachers set high standards for student performance, encouraging students to stretch beyond their comfort zones while providing the support they need to succeed. • Student Accountability: Students are expected to take responsibility for their learning. They should be able to articulate what they’re learning and why it matters. • Depth over Surface: Students are encouraged to engage with content at a deep level rather than just memorizing facts. This involves asking questions that require more than simple recall. 2. Active, Student-Centered Learning • Problem-Based Learning (PBL): Students tackle real-world problems that require critical thinking and collaboration to solve. They engage in inquiry, exploration, and research to find solutions. • Hands-On Activities: Instruction often includes interactive, hands-on learning opportunities that allow students to apply concepts in practical ways. • Discussion and Debate: Rather than just being passive recipients of information, students are encouraged to engage in thoughtful discussion, debates, and group work. This promotes the development of communication skills, critical thinking, and the ability to consider multiple perspectives. 3. Deep and Complex Content • Advanced Thinking Skills: Rigorous instruction challenges students to use higher-order thinking skills like analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information (Bloom's Taxonomy). Students are asked to make connections between concepts, draw conclusions, and develop arguments. • Real-World Connections: The material taught is relevant and connected to real-world issues, situations, or challenges, helping students understand the practical application of what they’re learning. • Multiple Perspectives: Students are exposed to diverse viewpoints and sources of information, encouraging them to think critically and form their own well-reasoned opinions. 4. Scaffolded Support • Differentiation: While the overall expectations are high, rigorous instruction provides the necessary support to meet students at their individual levels. This could involve providing extra resources, modifying tasks, or offering different forms of guidance (e.g., visual aids, collaborative groups, etc.). • Scaffolding: Teachers provide structured support initially, then gradually remove it as students gain confidence and mastery. This helps students work independently while still feeling supported. • Formative Assessment and Feedback: Teachers use ongoing assessments to monitor progress, providing timely and specific feedback to help students improve and deepen their understanding.

The school leaders getting the best results aren't necessarily the smartest, hardest working, or charismatic. Sure, it helps to be smart, hard-working, and charismatic. Something more important? A bar of excellence. When leaders have an immovable bar, they address any gap between their vision of excellence and current reality. A piece of trash on the floor? They pick it up in stride while walking. Students in the hall without a pass? They kindly address -- and watch the student walk back to their class. (And they follow-up with the teacher!) A teacher who is "winging it" without strong intellectual preparation? They meet that day with the teacher, reset expectations, and prep the next day's lesson. Busses that are consistently late? They call (or ensure someone else calls) the bus company every day and persist with emails and unannounced visits to the bus company until the problem is solved. Hearing a teacher raise their voice with a class? They immediately walk over, diffuse the situation (often offering to take over the class for a few minutes), and meet with the teacher that day to both reassert expectations and support the teacher with the skills necessary to handle tricky situations. A class where only 70% on task? They real-time coach the teacher to get to 100%. A teacher sitting at their desk while students are doing independent work? They ask they teacher to get up and walk with them, modeling how to give feedback to student work ... and then observing the teacher do the same. Seeing 9th grader do work that 4th grades could do? They real-time coach in the moment to quickly move to more rigorous work and meet later that day with the teacher. In short, these leaders have a standard of excellence. They are bothered by gaps in excellence. The hair on the backs of their neck stand up when they see low rigor, poor planning, off task students, or systems not run to fidelity. And most importantly, they take action! Two Notes: 1) I focused on gaps between the standard and excellence. Great leaders are equally excited when the standard is met, and teachers know that praise given is authentic and excellence-aligned. Just as these great leaders give the most adjusting feedback, these leaders also give the most praise, 2) Having great systems for coaching, PD, lesson preparation, and school culture and staying ultra-consistent with these systems makes keeping the bar high a lot easier. :)

I’ve stopped using the word “rigor” in my teaching. Because if I’m honest, I usually meant “difficulty.” And that’s not the same thing. A lot of what we call rigorous is just hard without help. → It’s longer readings. → More assignments. → Tighter deadlines. → Zero scaffolding. → Higher stakes. → Less clarity. That’s what I call hazing with a gradebook. Real rigor is cognitive challenge with support. It’s making students do the hard thinking: → Define the problem precisely. → Choose criteria before choosing solutions. → Make assumptions explicit. → Test ideas against evidence. → Revise based on feedback. → Explain their reasoning like an adult. And then actually building the ramps: → Models and examples. → Constraints that focus attention. → Checkpoints and feedback loops. → Rubrics that make quality visible. → Practice before performance. → Tools (yes, including AI) that reduce busywork so thinking can increase. If students are drowning, they aren't learning. If students are comfortable, they aren't growing. The target is “productive struggle.” High standards. High support. If you’re defending rigor by saying “they need to toughen up,” you’re protecting a system that confuses suffering with learning. I'm curious - if you teach. How do you define rigor in one sentence?

Are we grading what students know, or what we hope they know? The research is clear, and school leaders need to be honest about it. 📊 ~43% of all grades awarded at the college level are now A's, up from just 15% in the 1960s (Rojstaczer & Healy, 2012)  📊 59% of students with A averages score below college-readiness benchmarks (ACT, 2020)  📊 ~70% of K–12 teachers report factoring in effort or attitude, not mastery, when assigning grades (EAB, 2021) Grade inflation is not kindness. It is a delay of consequences. When we give a student an A they did not earn, we are telling them, and their family, that they are prepared. The next grade level, the next school, or a university will tell them otherwise. Here is what rigorous, accurate grading actually looks like: ✅ Grades reflect mastery of standards, not compliance, effort, or personality ✅ Every grade is supported by multiple, diverse points of evidence, not a single test ✅ Assessments operate at higher cognitive levels, requiring analysis, application, and creation, not just recall ✅ Formative assessment is frequent, purposeful, and used to adjust instruction, not just to fill the gradebook ✅ Rubrics are shared with students before instruction begins, and success criteria are never a secret ✅ Grade distributions reflect genuine learning curves. A class full of A's is not a sign of great teaching. It is a sign that the ceiling was too low. A healthy grade distribution in a truly rigorous school looks something like this: ~20% A's, ~30% B's, ~30% C's, ~20% D's, and F's. If your school looks dramatically different, it is worth asking why. As Joe Feldman writes in Grading for Equity: "A grade is a communication tool. It must accurately convey what a student knows and can do, not how the teacher feels about the student." The most loving thing we can give students is an honest picture of where they stand, while there is still time to do something about it. To every school leader, instructional coach, and teacher reading this: the culture shift is hard. The conversations are uncomfortable. But the students in front of us deserve accuracy more than they deserve comfort. What is one grading practice your school is working to make more rigorous? I'd love to hear what is working. #GradingIntegrity #Assessment #AcademicRigor #SchoolLeadership #VisibleLearning #GradeInflation #CurriculumDesign #EducationalLeadership #K12Education #TeachingAndLearning

If we want our students to succeed, we have to develop our teachers to be more than just classroom managers. I visit schools all the time. Most of them have focused classrooms. Few of them have rigorous classrooms. Kids are happy. Teachers have great relationships with them. But rapid learning happening? Not so much. The reason? Most teacher development stops at classroom management. If you're a teacher who has strong -- or even just stable -- classroom culture, chances are you're likely left alone so your coach can focus their attention elsewhere where there are bigger fires to put out. Not sure where to start when coaching your teachers on rigor? Here's where to start: 1. Understand the most important conceptual understandings of the unit -- unit plan to identify the big ideas of the unit and identify the critical lessons that'll help students understand those ideas. 2. Focus on the most productive struggle -- identify where the most rigorous portion of each lesson is, the part of the lesson most aligned to the grade-level bar students need to reach. 3. Create exemplars and criteria for success -- write and grapple over what truly excellent work will look like for students and what criteria you should see in student work. 4. Plan for independent practice -- make sure there's a plan in every classroom for meaningful independent practice that involves focused work time for students with a clear bar for excellence. 5. Plan to address misconceptions -- determine where students are likely to get confused and what you'll do to unscramble that confusion. Classroom management is not the goal. Learning is. If we’re serious about achievement, we need to get just as serious about coaching for rigor.