The medical definition of rigor has an unhappy relevance to the academic one: a sudden feeling of cold with shivering accompanied by a rise in temperature, often with copious sweating, especially at the onset or height of a fever. It seems to capture some of the ways students may feel living in a school centered on rigor over engagement and relevance. To many people, rigor conveys pressure, severe discomfort, and misery. To others, it has connotations of elevated scholarship, precision, and processes that lead to new understanding. Denotatively, the word rigor justifies both.
I like one half of the definition of rigor, the part that the Cambridge Dictionary calls the condition of being “detailed, careful, and complete.” Unfortunately, we have too often in education welded together this definition with an educationally corrosive definition– ”the fact that people are made to follow rules in a severe way.”
As a result of the conflation between these definitions of rigor, conversations about education activate both simultaneously. The ambiguity inherent in the word's definition is problematic and clouds its usefulness precisely when it might be most needed. This was the case in a meeting related to a strategic planning process that I facilitated, where a board member said, “I worry that we don’t ask enough of students anymore. [When I was in school], we had rules, and we had to work hard. It was rigorous. I feel like schools have become soft.” The sentiment he expressed was honest, based on his experience; however, he was using rigor quite differently than a history teacher might use it to describe how she teaches research skills, or a chemistry teacher might use it with students to emphasize care in progressing through a lab assignment. Yet without a shared understanding of the term as it pertains to school, it would be impossible to engage the right conversation. Your school must resolve how you are using the word rigor when someone says, “We need more rigor in our academic program.”
In EXPLO Elevate’s work with schools, we spend time ensuring that the school is aligning on the specific definitions of words– i.e., strategy, mission, purpose, value, values. In truth, groups can go years without realizing they use the same words in many different ways. Failure to align on the meanings of key words can either bring groups into unnecessary conflict or, just as dangerously, it can create false agreement. (A truly rigorous approach to any strategic process requires a careful definition of terms, including, of course, defining rigor itself.)
As boards engage in generative conversations about the school’s critical work, time spent creating shared definitions is never wasted. In general, boards spend far too little time surfacing the alignment that results from activities like defining key terms. Administrative teams struggle here, too… as do departments… as do divisions. Our terms work for us when we share a common definition, but they backfire when we let ambiguity persist.
Advice to leaders: spend time defining your terms with the board and your team, communicate clearly and often about what you mean to all constituents (repetition matters!). Centrally, find the right words for everyone in your community–minimize the specific lexicon of educators when your audience is broader than that.
While I have you here…
Below is my working draft of a definition of healthy educational rigor (please take issue with it and share your view by contacting me at rpeters@explo.org):
Rigor (noun): the part of great learning that requires attentiveness, careful and documented observation, and accountability for the expression of discovery or conclusion. Rigor requires a willingness to engage in the critique of one’s work, a commitment to the success of others, and the ability to grow from various forms of challenge. Finally, students in an environment where healthy rigor is a defining characteristic enjoy a culture of shared and purposeful engagement and accomplishment.