I recently caught up with my dear friend and colleague Allison Zumuda at the ASCD Annual Conference. We got to talking about student engagement. Everyone says that they want to see more students actively engaged in their learning but few teachers or administrators really understand what true student engagement is or what it looks like. [...]
Case Study: Rigor and the Common Core
October 10, 2012
This summer, John (Our Vice President) called one of our clients to schedule some workshops for the year. We’d worked with this particular school district for several years and were familiar with some of their needs, but as is always a part of our process, we asked them to share with us what their current [...]
Shift Happens
July 16, 2012
By: Valda Valbrun In December 2007 we ran this article in our e-newsletter. Valda Valbrun a former English Teacher and Principal is currently an Independent Consultant. Recently at a principal’s meeting we joined the YouTube nation, logged on and watched a six-minute publication called Shift happens. For obvious reasons the title caught my attention, but [...]
Vocabulary Strategies
June 25, 2012
By: Shauna Brown Leung One of the challenges common to all teachers focused on increasing rigor in the classroom is getting students to master the vocabulary of the content. Teachers throughout the country tackle this feat by giving students lists of “key terms” to define for each unit. Some require flash cards, others ask students [...]
Case Study: Rigorous Unit Planning
May 11, 2012
Recently in one of our rigor workshop series, I worked with two teachers – Elise and Sylvia — who were planning a unit on Harriett Tubman for second-grade students. Prior to the workshop, these teachers had worked to plan a unit. Their unit appeared rigorous on the surface but they wanted to find ways to [...]
What is Rigor?
April 16, 2012
Whenever we deliver a rigor workshop, one of the first questions we get is “What is rigor?” While everyone agrees that rigorous instruction is important, few agree on what rigor is. In most cases, educators believe that they know rigor when they see it without really having a fully defined idea of what it looks [...]
PD Case Study: Rigor at Woodmont High
April 11, 2012
Because our professional development at Mindsteps™ is fully customizable, how schools implement our work looks different from school to school. While the concepts and principles are the same, how each gets implemented is highly individual to each teacher. Here is how one school has used our workshops and materials on rigorous instruction* to create a school-wide focus [...]
Rigor Requires Rigor
April 11, 2012
Just the other day I was helping a group of teachers plan rigorous units. As we were creating essential questions and thinking through the standards, I asked what I thought was a simple question: Why are you teaching this? The teachers were stumped. They had no idea why it was important that students learn the [...]
Classroom Strategies Case Study: The Stop Doing List
November 8, 2011
I’d seen this before. Teachers who are working so hard that they eventually get burned out. They want so badly to do the right thing that they end up doing everything.
Seven Myths About Rigor
January 13, 2011
Unfortunately, over the years the term rigorous has accumulated a lot of baggage. The following are seven myths about Rigor. Myth One: If you have rigorous standards, you have a rigorous course. Rigor isn’t as much about the standards as it is about how you ask students to reach the standards. There are times when [...]
