Tag Archives: assessment

Test Less and Converse More

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How do you really know what your students know? Is a student’s learning only the composite score of tests, quizzes, papers, and projects?

Too often students in our classrooms are not children. Students are the grades and points behind their names in our grade books. In the long slog of a school year, each student in your class becomes what their line of grades says they are. A student is – passing or not passing, exceeding expectations or not meeting expectations, or the child who will always give the right answer versus the child who does all he can to avoid being asked a question. The reality of classrooms is that one student is only a single student in the totality of a teaching assignment, one amongst the many, and the speed of curricular coverage blends them all together. This is the web we weave when the only source we use to know how well children are learning are whole group assessments.

As negative as the second paragraph reads, it is the truth in too many classrooms. We prove it’s true when a parent or your principal asks how Alexa is doing in your class, and you immediately need to consult your grade book to answer. School, not just Alexa’s teachers define Alexa’s learning progression by the data in a grade book. How sad for Alexa and how sad for education. We can do better.

What do we know?

First, a child is one among many children. If the average public school teacher’s career is 14 years long and a class assignment averages 25 students, then a grade level elementary teacher teaches approximately 350 children and a secondary subject area teacher teaches 2,100 children in that span of years.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/who-average-us-teacher

It is probable that an elementary teacher who sees the same faces for an entire school day is more familiar with each student than a secondary teacher who sees the same faces for only one class period each day. However, the same portrait of what we know about our students holds for elementary and secondary classrooms – students are characterized by the grades they are assigned by the assessments the are given.

Second, we do not plan for a teacher to know each child in the classroom. In their college preparation courses, teachers learn that a teacher’s knowledge of each student’s prior school learning achievement, their so-called learning styles, their academic strengths and learning challenges, and their cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds help the teacher to better instruct each student. Theory does not always find its way into practice. The short cut answer most teacher take to the idea theory of learning about their students prior to teaching them is “I will find out what I need to need to know as I teach them.” This is not necessarily a teacher’s fault. Contracted in-service time includes several days at the beginning of the school year for a teacher to get ready for the first day of school. But after mandatory district and school staff meetings and required organizing of a classroom, there is little to no time for a teacher to study and know what they should know about their new students. Theory is pushed aside and all they know will know of Alexa is gained through daily in-class interactions in the running stream of school days.

Third, successful teaching is about the success of a statistical majority students not individual students. Instructional school goals want 80% of the students to 80% or better learning success 80% of the time in class. The Rule of 80% is commonly applied is schools using Tier 1, 2 and 3 instruction and Response to Intervention concepts. Sometimes teaching really is an industrial quality control model or at least a cattle drive.

Last, we prioritize efficiency over effectiveness. Each teacher is assigned a grade level or subject area curriculum to teach. In the continuity of PK-12 education, these are building blocks that create an educated school graduate. If the teaching of a single building block is incomplete, there are consequences to the integrity of the education. Completing the total annual curriculum is more important than assuring what is taught is learned well by all students. Emphasizing totality of instruction over quality of learning ensures that the 80% rule becomes 70% or 60% or 50%.

An alternative – talk with Alexa.

An alternative model is Socratic-like: A teacher often sits with Alexa asking Alexa key questions as a verbal quiz AND then asks Alexa to explain her answers. Alexa talks about the background knowledge of her answers, the context for her answering, her problem-solving, and her conclusions about what she knows. When done with proper frequency, this takes 15 minutes. In the aggregate of meetings with Alexa, the teacher’s conversation models what Alexa should know and how she should know it and the conversation coaches Alexa’s personal learning strategies over time. Alexa may have scored only 5 of 10 correct on a written quiz but scored 8 of 10 in an oral discussion of what she knows and how she knows it. Alexa knows more than what a quiz can extract from her.

The conversation is not a complete Socratic model. It stops with a personal assessment of what Alexa knows and how well she knows it. Instead of leading directly into personalized new instruction, the conversation informs the teacher about Alexa’s learning as well as all the Alexas in the class so that the teacher can best confirm what has been learned well by all all students and clarify or correct what has not been learned well. This modified Socratic conversation helps the teacher move the quality of learning above the 80% Rule.

Children respond to this alternative differently. Some will love the opportunity to talk with their teacher and gladly explain what they know and how they know it. On the other hand, some children will be intimidated by the face-to-face time with their teacher and not want to risk talking. These are the same children who do not volunteer in class and of whom the teacher knows the least about their personal learning using traditional assessments. As they are intimidated by all assessments, it is easier to wean them away from fear or their teacher than it is fear of a test. Most children will respond positively to their teacher’s sincerity in wanting to know what they know and how they know it.

Personal conversation models instruction as well as assessment. Children quickly learn that simple yes or no answers or one-word answers only cause the teacher to say, “Tell me more.” Children learn that conversation is like composing an essay. The teacher is looking for the second and third sentences that provide evidence for the answer the child gives to the first question. The child also learns to summarize and give a conclusion.

The conversation also instructs the teacher. She can easily understand from a variety of conversations how well her instruction caused children to learn the curriculum she taught. Some children will need clarification or correction if their learning had errors. The conversation tells her more than which students have errors in learning; she knows the dimensions of their errors. The conversation also affirms that children are ready for the teacher’s next instruction.

This modified Socratic conversation takes time. What do other children do while the teacher converses with Alexa? Individualized and collaborative learning advanced immensely with the pandemic. Classrooms have the technologies for a teacher to readily make individual assignments for students or organize a collaborative activity for groups. Classrooms no longer live in the whole group instruction only era. A contemporary teacher has the resources to provide ongoing instruction for other children while she converses with Alexa.

We get what we settle for.

The traditional model of “teach and test, teach and test” efficiently moves children through the school year’s curriculum. That model drives children from grade level to grade level and course to course. It is a “ready or not, here I come” model.

When we consider that most 4th, 8th, and 10th grade students show “less than proficient” scores on state assessments in reading and math, we should understand that the traditional model is not achieving the 80% Rule but a less than 50% reality.

The traditional model gives us an incomplete understanding of what each child knows and how well she knows it. Based on an incomplete knowledge of what children have learned, we only create an incomplete design for their next instruction.

We can do better when we use better practices.

Be Bold and Emboldened About Your 2025-26 Educational Goals

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Every new school year brings a discussion of the educational goals a school will strive to achieve for its students. This is not the time for a complete rewrite of goals; there is no time to retool for new goals. But August is the right time to confirm existing goals and ensure commitment of all school resources to achieving those goals. In the weeks before children walk into school, be bold in publicly broadcasting your educational goals for your students and embolden all educators to achieve your/their goals.

Achieving educational goals is not a New Year Resolution; be loud, be active, be honest!

Where are your school’s or your classroom’s achievement goals published today? Most often they lie in the humdrum posting of school mission statements, the finer print in newsletters, and are announced on day one but seldom to never mentioned after day one. It is no wonder that so few are achieved. We allow the busy urgency of school days to overwhelm the goals that our school business is supposedly committed to achieve. State and restate your achievement goals every week in order to keep them vibrant.

Educational goals are not like an annual new year resolution. Most of us break those resolutions before the end of January, if not before. First, educational goals are about children, not our proverbial self-promise to lose ten pounds of body weight. Instead of looking at our image in a bathroom mirror, we look at the faces of classrooms of children who are counting on our commitment to advance their education. Each child’s face stands for our promise to cause that child to learn and grow because of our work. Every time we look at a child’s face, we need to tell ourselves “Advance this child’s education today!”

Achievement goals are a public commitment

Educational achievement goals are public commitments to cause children to learn and grow. They are not silent, personal promises to give up late night bowls of ice cream. Publish your educational goals as a school and as individual classrooms. One of the reasons new year resolutions fail is that we keep them to ourselves. We do not tell anyone that we want to lose ten pounds; we make it a silent, personal struggle. Instead, we need to enlist all educators, school parents, and school community in helping our goal achievement by telling them on day one and all school year-long what we will achieve this school year for our students.

There is a positive and active snowballing effect when goals are loudly published. Snowballing occurs when a small effort begins to accumulate more mass and more membership because it is in motion. As goal achievement occurs, individuals want to be part of the snowball; they want to be identified with its positive imaging. We need to celebrate snowballing and proclaim every classroom that is joining in the achievement work.

Achievement is personal

We need to make our educational goals for children personal. Teaching and learning are essentially personal activities between teachers and children. It is extremely personal, yet we always depersonalize the outcomes of teaching and learning. We aggregate the data of goals achievement, and we drop names and drop accountability, usually because we do not achieve the goals we published. Instead, we need to keep the data disaggregated and personal. If a teacher knows that her students’ learning achievements will be averaged with all other students’ data, there is diminished urgency every day to “push” on those goals. We see data obfuscation clearly with high achieving schools whose high averaging practices hide the reality of low achieving classrooms. Or with low achieving schools whose averaging practices hide the reality of high achieving classrooms. We need to disaggregate data to make goal achievement real at the classroom level where achievement is measured. There always is a worry that disaggregation allows data to identify students. The equal worry is that fully aggregated data makes those students disappear. Let’ see – using data to effectively educate all children or using data to hide children who are never fully educated. As our practices are FERPA-compliant, we shall decide to educate all children.

Be bold with honesty

Honesty about goals and goal achievement is a necessity. Too much of our culture today is hammered by “big lying” about data and practices. Without commenting on our “big liars”, consider the big lie effects. Lying makes facts untrustworthy and fact checking is ridiculed. Honesty is what honesty does; it builds trust. We need to talk about our positive achievements, and we need to talk about when we fail to achieve the goals we set. And, after explaining our failure to achieve, we need to recommit ourselves to achieving success by honestly discontinuing failed efforts and beginning new efforts. No one likes to hear that a school or classroom failed to achieve its goals, but they dislike even more the lies that are told to hide the honest facts. Educators, parents, and community will respect honest effort with honest reporting that is followed by honest changes in effort.

This August, publish your student achievement goals. Publish the work efforts that will achieve your goals. Publish and talk about the team commitment of educators, parents, and community to accomplish your 2025-26 student achievement goals. Publish the date of your first reporting of progress on your goal achievements. And publish your commitment to every child in school that they will be goal achievers.

Be bold and be emboldening regarding your student achievement goals for the 2025-26 school year.

If test scores are that important, eliminate all else in public education but testing and test scores

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Tired of the annual and uninformed complaints about student test scores in our nation’s schools? Weary of the complaint that we spend too much money on public education only to create low-scoring students? Annoyed that politicians use public education as a partisan punching bag always taking their hardest punches at our children’s achievement in international comparisons? Peeved that while conservative critics complain about test scores in public schools, they keep shifting public tax funds to parent vouchers for private education?  

It is a wonder that critics are not as vociferous in complaining about athletics because half of the teams in any conference will have losing records for the season, some for seasons on end. Or concerts in which some voices and instruments are out of harmony. Or math teams that fail to solve any higher math problems. Or school bus routes that run late. Of too much pizza on the lunch menu. I am not encouraging complaint for complaint’s sake but simply pointing to the silo of criticism about academic test scores.

To the annual critics of public education who whine about the status of academic test scores, I propose that we give them what they want. Let’s strip everything out of our public schools but academic test preparation, academic testing, and make this the singular public education program of every school. If test scores matter that much, schools should be all about test preparation and test results.

Announcement – Tests Only Matter Schools (TOMS)

Beginning today:

  • The only educational programs approved for children in public schools will be academic instruction in preparation for annual MAPS testing, reading assessment in third grade, and NAEP testing in grades 4 and 8. All other academic instruction, arts, athletic, and activities programs are hereby eliminated from public schools.
  • Contracts for all teachers except those specifically assigned to teach reading, ELA, and mathematics are immediately voided.
  • All children from age 3 through age 13 will attend school five days a week for 40 weeks each year. School instruction will be provided in four (4) ten-week blocks with three (3) weeks of no school between each block. A school day will be four hours in duration beginning at 8:00 a.m. and ending at noon.
  • Parents of school-age children are responsible for transporting their children to and from school each day.
  • Attendance is mandatory with parental incarceration the penalty for student truancy.
  • Children aged 3 through 5 will receive pre-reading, literacy, pre-composition, and numeracy instruction every day.
  • Children aged 5 through 8 will receive reading for understanding, grammar mechanics, composition, arithmetic, pre-algebra, pre-geometry, pre-statistics/data understanding instruction every day.
  • Children aged 9 – 13 will receive reading complex text and literature, advance composition, algebra, geometry, advanced algebra, trigonometry, probability and statistics, and problem-solving instruction every day.
  • Annual MAPS testing will be used to assess each student’s progress in preparing for the national third grade reading test and the 4th and 8th grade NAEP tests. The three-weeks between each instructional block provides reading, ELA, and math teachers time to evaluate each child’s academic progress and plan personalized instruction for the next ten weeks.
  • Only children who are prepared for the third-grade national reading assessment and the NAEP tests will be allowed to take the tests. Preparation means achieving scores of 85% or better on pre-tests for these assessments. Unprepared children will be recycled in third, 4th, and/or 8th grade until they are prepared to take these assessments.

TOMS reduces the cost of public education.

The immediate cost saving will be mind-blowing, and every proponent of TOMS will beat their chest with pride.

  • Teacher and support staff payrolls will be reduced by 90% or more.
  • School administration, counseling, curriculum and instruction, and campus supervision will be streamlined.
  • Athletic, arts, and activities budgets will be eliminated.
  • There will be no need for food services or school transportation.
  • There will be no heavy budgeting for technology education, science labs, art or music studios.
  • The school’s utility costs will be minimized to HVAC, water, and sanitation. There will be no after school/evening programming.
  • School taxes will be greatly reduced. The state’s per pupil formula will fund TOMS and no revenue limit override referenda will ever be needed again.

TOMS succeeds!

The United States will top the annual lists for international student academic achievement, all children will achieve high academic standing, AND the cost of public education will be a pittance of what it is now. The critics of current public education will be able to say, “I told you so.”

Oh, and TOMS only applies to public schools. Children enrolled in private schools will have their activities, arts, and athletics programs because there are no public complaints about test scores in private education.

The lesson.

“We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.” (Isabel Allende)

And “we get what we settle for.” (Thelma and Louise)

If TOMS don’t work for you, please choose future leaders who understand that public education is an investment in our commonwealth and our commonwealth is worth the investment. We are our commonwealth.

Teach For Enduring and Expansive Learning Not Coverage. Know the Difference.

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“Your teacher covered that last year” or “this semester we will cover” still rankles my professionalism as a teacher. Teaching for coverage means nominal teaching and learning. It means spending the least amount of time engaged in teaching and learning for the sake of topical accountability. Coverage teaching is like the proverbial river that is a mile wide and an inch deep – it emphasizes breadth without depth. In my naivety as a young educator I believed that if something was worth teaching it was worth learning well and that meant deeper teaching and learning. Conversely, why waste time and energy on teaching things we did not plan for children to learn well? I still believe this.

Years ago when I heard my principal or district curriculum leader talk of coverage, I assumed they were generalizing about the amount of information in any grade level of our social studies curriculum and the finite amount of instructional time in an academic year. But they weren’t. “You can’t teach everything in your curriculum with the same level of intensity” I was told. “So, cover it all.” It took me a long and troublesome time to understand this, however understanding did not mean accepting it.

There is a line between coverage and knowing and understanding.

Early on in teacher training, we are taught Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the 1950s Bloom established six levels of thinking, learning, and understanding with labeling that helps us explain a rationale for teaching and learning designs. Seventy years later, I still like how Bloom helps me to add depth to the “wide river” of information we teach. The model below shows a revised taxonomy – the terms have been modified from Bloom’s original for clearer explanation of the cognitive levels.

bloom’s taxonomy revised – Higher order of thinking

Although there is a vertical dimension to the taxonomy, Bloom did not intend for all teaching to involve all six levels. Curriculum planners use the levels as goals for teaching and learning. Some learning, in fact most of what we learn, is meant to be at the remembering/understanding level of usage. Other learning is meant to be scaffolded into a variety of applications, or to inform careful analyses, or to evaluate options and opportunities, and to create original work. Though it looks like a ladder, a user does not use every rung to engage in higher order cognition. Instruction and learning can scaffold from understanding to analyzing, or evaluating, or creatin.

Coverage teaching is the act of “mentioning” without the explicit intention of remembering. There is a lot of mentioning in education. Synonyms for mentioning cause us to smile and acknowledge that teachers mention without teaching. When a teacher “alludes to, refers to, touches upon, hints at, speaks about briefly, broaches or introduces only,” that is mentioning. Children may or may not hear or read what a teacher mentions as an aside. Things that are mentioned are characterized as “things it is nice to know but it is okay not to know.” Like, the value of pi is abbreviated to 3.14. As an irrational number, Pi can be calculated out to an infinite number of numbers but who cares? A math teacher covers or mentions that fact but directly instructs that the usable value of pi is 3.14. Best practice does not include “mentions” in assessments of student learning, although there is a lot of bad practice in the field.

Coverage may be all the questions on Jeopardy that sound somewhat familiar but just will not come to mind.

I think of coverage as the blank space below the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy; it is the noise in the world we are not intended to remember.

Remembering and understanding is the meat and potatoes of most teaching. The information – facts, data, concepts, generalizations, and skill sets we want children to know, we teach with high intention. In the language of backward design, if we intend to test children on something, we intend to teach it well so that it will be remembered and understood.

Direct instruction is one of many teaching strategies most often used when we teach for remembering and understanding.

Children learn the alphabet and numbers, sight words and number facts early as foundational knowledge. In school we use direct instruction to drill and practice and ensure memory of these. Retention theory drives our teaching for remembering – we use immediate drill and practice/repetition to strengthen short-term memory and interval practice over time to ensure what is learned is retained and recalled in long-term memory. In a spiraled social studies curriculum, we teach US History in elementary, middle school, and high school because we want all children to know their national stories. Repetition and elaboration cause remembered learning.

Remembering is a student’s identical retelling of information or identical demonstration of what was taught. We require correct and complete retelling.

Understanding is explaining what was taught with fidelity in the student’s own words and doing the skill with fidelity in the student’s own style. Understanding is using what is remembered and making an inference about it or summarizing it in simpler language or combining several pieces of information into meaningful statement that keeps the significance and essence of what is being combined.

There also is a line between knowing and understanding what we learn and the rest of Bloom – what comes next is the so what of education.

Separating the noise of information from the teaching of remembering and understanding, gets us to the “so what” levels of Bloom where what was learned is applied, analyzed, evaluated, and built upon creatively. These four Bloom levels give us the rationale for why teaching for remembering and understanding are such a large part of our school calendar. Without foundational memory about stars, planets, moons, suns, constellations, galaxies, and a universe(s), nothing we see in the sky above us would make sense. Space would just be space. Lifesaving surgery would be butchery. Agriculture and manufacturing would just be guessing work.

Other teaching strategies become available when students have a knowledge and understanding of foundational information and skills. I use the C3 Framework for social studies as an example of instructing above the remembering and understanding line. C3 (College, Career, Civic Life) uses an inquiry process for students to investigate, expand and integrate their knowledge of civics, economics, geography, history, and the behavioral sciences.

“The C3 Framework, like the Common Core Standards, emphasizes the acquisition and application of knowledge to prepare students for college, career, and civic life. It intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” C3 uses “questions to spark curiosity, guide instruction, deepen investigations, acquire rigorous content, and apply knowledge and ideas in real world settings…”

https://www.socialstudies.org/standards/c3

This is not coverage teaching!

Parallel to C3, curricula in every school subject, from art to woodworking, builds upon information and skills students learn at the remembering and understanding levels of instruction. The front of a refrigerator in most student homes is covered with student drawings and finger paintings. Over time, shelves and walls display how student application of basic information and skills blossoms into more intricate and sophisticated art. Student art displayed in local galleries, libraries, and art shows illustrates how student artists apply of fundamental concepts and skills, analyze and interpret subjects, and create new and original art.

Tech ed students manufacture, ag students grow and cultivate, computer science students program and engage in robotics, ELA writers craft poems and stories, and marketing ed students create businesses, apply accounting, create and manage product, lead and supervise personnel in the pursuit of economic growth. Once students know and understand, they can pursue their personal interests for a lifetime.

Know and be the difference.

There is so much in a teacher’s annual curriculum and so little time that it is easy to fall into the coverage mode of teaching. But why? In today’s world, coverage learning is what any child can achieve using Google or AI.

Two centuries ago, teachers were the source of information and applied learning. A century ago, students could read books for information; it was teacher directed and interpreted learning that moved children to young adults ready for college or work. Today, information sources abound, so much so that it hard to know information from noise. Today it takes a teacher to forge information into memory and understanding. And it takes a teacher to guide, monitor, and mentor how students illustrate and expand their learning. Well-conceived and instructed learning remains a springboard for life’s successes.

There is no time or place today for coverage teaching.

Burying a Myth About Rigor – It Is Too Easy If Every Student Gets a Good Grade

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As a younger associate principal in a larger 1970s high school, I commented at a district-wide AP’s meeting that I was concerned that so many students consistently earned D and F grades, and our school would be working to improve student achievement and diminish the number of Ds and Fs. Our director of secondary education halted me with this guidance. “If every student gets good grades, the instruction has lost its rigor.” End of discussion and I fought the urge to throw my pen at him.

Bell-curved thinking consigned some students to low grades on every assessment.

One of the tools taught in my teacher preparation was how to create a normal distribution of student test scores. It was not difficult, just tedious. The result was a plotting of scores on the bell curve to achieve 2.35% of grades as As, 13.5% as Bs, 68% as Cs, 13.5% as Ds, and 2.35% as Fs. This tool was consistent. On every test, I and my students were assured that almost 16% of the class would receive a grade of D or F – every time. Voila! Rigor was ensured.

Further investigation at the time confirmed for me that bell curving was not just standard practice in our school and school district, it was Gospel. Every teacher I worked with did the math and created a normal distribution to curve student grading. Tedious work but it was the expected practice. It did not matter if the assessment or assignment was 100-item multiple choice test, a 10-item true-false quiz, a five-part essay, a speech, or a term paper, the bell curved normal distribution ruled.

Sadly, students and parents accepted this alignment of grades because that is way things were done. If a student studied harder and improved their performance the next time, their grade always was a comparison to all other students not of what they learned and 15% of students received Ds or Fs.

In that high school, I could not convince the principal or my fellow APs that we should buck the system and drop the bell curve.

Autonomy can change practices.

Time passed. As a high school principal, it was much easier to implement changes. Autonomy has its privileges. In the mid-80s I found a group of faculty who were interested in changing their usual practices to achieve different outcomes. Not all faculty were of this mind, but enough to start a new beginning. We attended conferences with Bill Spady on outcome-based education (OBE) and quickly appreciated his dictum that “you get what you settle for.” We were no longer willing to accept that rigorous instruction and learning required some students to fail. Accordingly, we adopted A, B, C, I grading. Grades of Incomplete (I) were assigned instead of Ds or Fs.

This led to a second outcome-based change in our teaching. In a traditional classroom, when a grade of D or F is assigned, learning stops. Teachers and students go on to the next lesson and what was not learned completely or was learned with errors becomes permanent. In contrast, teachers using a grade of Incomplete told themselves and students that both teaching and learning are not complete and will not be until the I becomes an A, B, or C grade. Our cadre of OBE teachers were committed to adjusting their teaching or what would later be labeled as Tier 2 teaching so that all students would achieve an acceptable level of learning.

Change does not happen easily in schools. Traditional faculty in our school held to their traditional grading practices and a cadre of teachers began using OBE concepts of teaching and learning. The cadre studied Grant Wiggins’ and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design. Curricular units were reconstructed so that the curricular outcomes teachers wanted students to achieve drove lesson planning and daily teaching.

Cadre members represented most of the school’s curricular departments and grade levels. When the cadre met, they discussed pedagogy not departmental our grade level issues. They discussed student experiences across subject lines not just within a vertical curriculum. The cadre became increasingly student-focused, especially about the challenges that got in the way of student learning. Some of these challenges were institutional and some were student specific.

Things never came to blows but the contrasting practices were noticed by all faculty, students, and parents. An OBE characteristic that became painfully real was that success begets success. Students in cadre-taught were not failing courses. In successive semesters, and student course registrations trended toward cadre-taught courses. Increased student engagement meant fewer disciplinary referrals. Students and parents wanted out of traditional practices.

Rigor redefined.

After several semesters of cadre work, I asked these teachers to define academic rigor in teaching and learning. They quickly responded with these three points.

  • Rigor is setting high quality curricular standards for student learning of content knowledge, academic skills, and dispositions.
  • Rigor is designing teaching that causes all students to succeed in achieving these standards. Time is not a limited variable. Adjustment of initial teaching is expected.
  • Rigor is accepting multiple ways in which a diverse student group can show the learning of the required outcomes.

Today, several decades of working with other cadre groups, rigor in many classrooms and schools is looking more like an OBE definition than my 1970s director of secondary education. However, Madeline Hunter taught us that in every faculty there will be Ernies. An Ernie, not gender-specific, is a teacher who leans back in a chair saying to self and others “this new discussion of rigor (fill in any other change initiative) will come and go. I do not need to change what I do in my classroom, and no one can make me.” She was right. There are Ernies in every faculty, but the cadres of higher quality teaching and learning are gaining on them.

Getting rigor right is a continuous struggle.

I always hope that lessons learned create new practices. But practices made permanent require little change in the teaching faculty. That is never the case. Forty years later and a new generation of teachers we still battle with the definition of rigor. Too many students receive permanent grades of D or F as educators continue to use D and F grades as a method of labeling student learning. Ds and Fs once again are permanent grades, even with RtI practices.

We have work to do.