Struggling with Rigor

I really didn’t like that r-word, rigor.  In my experience many educators couldn’t clearly define what rigor was or what it looked like. Rigor seemed to get misapplied. Assign more work. Be inflexible with deadlines. Read text that was too difficult. Or my favorite I saw a lot of times, just make students write essays. Fortunately, I stumbled across a video with Larry Rosenstock founder of High Tech High Schools. (Skip to 12:10 in the video if you want just the definition part.) These were some of the first schools to implement project based learning. Rosenstock’s definition of rigor spoke to me. I’m paraphrasing but basically, rigor is when passionate adults bring students along to engage in inquiry like adult practitioners.  How do we know rigor when we see it? Are the students doing work was worth doing.

So how could we support teachers wanting to engage students in the kind of work that is done in the “real world.”  Voila- the performance tasks were designed. Are they perfect, of course not. Are they pure project based learning? Not completely, but we hope they offer our partners a starting point complete with rubrics. The performance tasks are written with the students as the audience, so it limits what we can relate in that short writing and differentiation sometimes gets left out. So I wanted to use this venue to relate a little about differentiation and the performance tasks.

Many Product Possibilities

The products that are created in the performance tasks can be differentiated in a number of ways. Museum displays can be done simply on tri-fold boards or in a virtual medium. Museum displays, photo essays, and scrapbooks could become a series of Instagram posts. Several of the performance tasks ask students to create reports, digital slide shows, or briefings.  All of these can be accomplished in a variety of ways besides just Power Point.  Experiment with screencasting or videocasting.  Advertisement campaigns can become social media campaigns. Let students explore ways to present or showcase the product, anything besides just standing in front of the class talking. Keep in mind that the process is more important than the final product. It’s during the process that the learning takes place.

If you want to learn more about project based learning check out PBL Works. We will have more on implementing performance tasks into your instruction in later posts and your ESC specialist is a great resource also. Reach out to them if you want some support and encouragement trying out something new. And please leave us some comments about your experience with the performance tasks.