Rigor Is NOT A Four-Letter Word

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program my good friend, Dr. Barbara Blackburn. Barbara Blackburn, PhD, is the author of more than 36 books and is a full-time consultant who works with schools around the world to help raise the level of rigor and motivation for professional educators and students alike. Dr. Blackburn has been repeatedly named to the top 30 education gurus and was recently named to the top 10 professional development programs by global gurus. And she's the author of rigor is not a four letter word strategies for success.

[00:44]

Now in its fourth edition.

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And now our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

Barbara, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:51] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you very much. I always enjoy being here and talking with you.

[00:55] SPEAKER_01:

Well, likewise, I'm glad we get to do this so often because you write books so often and you update your books that continue to remain relevant year after year. Let's get right into the title here. Why is rigor seen as a four letter word by so many people?

[01:08] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's funny because I was actually talking to a young teacher the other day and she asked me, she said, what does your title mean? And I said, well, certainly when I was growing up, a four-letter word was considered a bad word, a curse word. And she said, oh, okay, now I understand it. And the thing is, that's how people view rigor a lot of times is it's something negative. It's something that You should curse at, you know, it's that kind of thing. And the conversation is really shifted, thank goodness, because rigor is so much more than just giving kids more work.

[01:40]

Rigor is so much more than only using it with the honors kids. You know, rigor is about for each and every student. giving them the opportunity where you have high expectations and you provide them the support and scaffolding so that they can show you they know at high levels. And that's really what rigor is. And when you think about it, it's about taking students from where they are to where you want them to be at a higher level. And I don't know about you, but that's why I got into teaching was to help students grow.

[02:12]

And that's really what rigor is.

[02:15] SPEAKER_01:

And I feel like so many of our intuitions about rigor, we draw from maybe our students who finish their work the fastest, who seem the most curious, who do the most on all of their assignments, and they seem to want more. What that we draw from the experience of working with those students is transferable? What intuitions are correct? And where does that lead us astray a little bit in thinking about rigor for all students?

[02:41] SPEAKER_00:

You know, I think that shifts into the conversational motivation, which is in this book and I've got another book on motivation. But if you think about those students that are, whether they are gifted or advanced, but those that just seem to thrive, either they have just brought their intrinsic motivation to the table or we've created an environment for them where they can become intrinsically motivated. So, for example, I remember one student I taught who was definitely high achieving and And the thing was, if she ever asked me on a project or on an assignment, if she could change the topic, could she do something? As long as it worked within the big picture, I said yes. Well, that taps into intrinsic motivation. That taps into interest.

[03:23]

What do they value? How do they see it? And a lot of times we will give that flexibility to... thriving learners, but we won't give it to struggling learners because we're too worried struggling learners aren't going to be able to do it anyway.

[03:35]

So if I give them too much choice, then that's not going to work. And the reality is that if I can give you some choice, you probably will do better because you'll be more motivated. And along with that, students who are very highly motivated, it's partly because they have been successful. They are successful students. They have been successful students. And I think with our struggling students, we focus so much on what they cannot do that we forget to focus on what they can do.

[04:03]

And can I take what they can do and help them grow with that? And I remember when I was teaching struggling learners, I taught a track system and I had the below grade level, but not special ed students. And they were really frustrating me because they just didn't seem to be very good at note-taking, whether it was from the text or from what I was teaching. And I noticed one day that Brian was doing really well. And so I went over and asked him, what are you doing? And he said, well, I know I'm going to get in trouble.

[04:31]

I don't want to tell you. And I was like, no, you're not going to get in trouble. Tell me what you were doing. And he was drawing out. the notes instead of just handwriting them. And so once I gave my students the flexibility to do that, the note-taking really improved.

[04:46]

And some of them would do notes and drawings. Some would just do drawings. But that was something they felt like they were good at in many cases. And if they felt like they were good at it, as long as they learn the content, I don't really care how they take the notes. I just care that they master the content. But I saw a difference when I gave them a choice in terms of how to take the notes.

[05:07]

Does that make sense?

[05:09] SPEAKER_01:

It seems like this is kind of a Matthew effect issue, this perpetual issue that we struggle with in education where the students who learn the most easily are already the students who are the farthest ahead and they're the farthest ahead because they learn the most easily and the students who are behind struggle the most and then we tend to take away the very motivating factors, as you said, like autonomy, like the ability to make choices that would make a difference, that would increase their motivation and help them make the progress that we want them to make. And I feel like we get in spirals in both directions, right? We get in downward spirals with our struggling students. What are some of the strategies you talk about in the book for stopping those downward spirals? Because certainly we've all heard that if we have low expectations for our lower students, then they will not make the progress that we want them to make. And sometimes we don't even like to acknowledge that we have students who are behind.

[06:01]

We like to act like everybody's in the same place, even if we know that we do have students with big gaps who are not at grade level. How do we stop that downward spiral and really start to build the momentum that maybe those students have been lacking academically?

[06:14] SPEAKER_00:

Well, you know, it's interesting because some of what we do is what we know good teaching is, but we forget sometimes that our struggling students need extra help with that. For example, I do a big section on scaffolding through visuals, and that is just like what I explained. I mean, my students did better with visuals. I found overall that All of my struggling students, but also some of my just standard students did better when they would have a graphic organizer that they could put information into. It seems like one of the things that was real helpful to my struggling students was the fact that they had information in their head. You might think they don't have information in your head, but they had information in their head.

[06:59]

but they couldn't figure out how to put it in a way that helped them learn. So if I could give them boxes, then that helped them learn. And that sounds really simple, but honestly, it was very effective. And, you know, maybe I have a couple of graphic organizers anytime we're doing comparison and contrast, anytime we're doing vocabulary. I don't do a different one every day because that's overwhelming. But, you know, I have some basic ones.

[07:25]

I use them so they understand what it looks like. I model it with them, I practice it with them, and then they can do it on their own. And even to the point where there may be independent work they're doing and they have the choice as to whether or not to use the graphic organizer. So one of the challenges about giving a choice to students about whether or not they use support tools, because I like to give them that choice, but some of the ones who need the most help are the least likely to To ask for help. So they're the least likely to want to use a graphic organizer or maybe they're embarrassed to use it because not everybody is. And so there's a lot of times that I would just go around and sort of hand them out.

[08:09]

I mean, what you really got, you were talking about paradox earlier. The paradox is that students who don't know, don't know they don't know. And so it's the same thing with extra help. If you say stay for extra help after school, if you want to, forget the whole issue with transportation and all of that kind of stuff. Sometimes they don't think they need the help. And so you want to find ways to really, I say require it, but, you know, be very subtle about making sure they're using those things.

[08:39]

I think making sure we do clear expectations. You know, one of the reasons some of your advanced students will thrive is because they know how school works. They know what you're going to ask before you ask it. And your struggling students don't. They don't have somebody at home who's modeled it. They don't have a teacher at home.

[08:56]

You know, my mom was a school secretary. My dad was a college professor after he was a teacher. And let me tell you, there was never an issue of me not being able to get help when I was at home. And, you know, if I didn't offer, they were going to ask and they knew what to do. They knew how to help. And, you know, I think sometimes we forget about the advantages some students have that other students don't.

[09:17]

For example, I was very advantaged as a student. My dad was a college professor. Now he taught health and physical education, but the library at his college, because they had an education program, they had all the textbooks there. because education majors needed to have access to it. So if dad ever really got stumped, all he had to do was go over and get the teacher's edition. and then pull out what he needed for me.

[09:39]

And at the time, I didn't necessarily appreciate it. But when I look back, I think, how privileged was I? And I wasn't privileged in terms of wealth. That was not us at all. But I was privileged in terms of education. I was privileged because my mom was the school secretary.

[09:57]

And even when I wasn't at her school anymore, she knew the school secretary at the other school, and they knew who to get in touch with. And so... that's another whole piece that we don't talk about with our struggling students. And it's why it's so important that we really work with them in ways that make a difference.

[10:16]

One more, because this was a hot topic these days, is the whole notion of the science of reading. Because there was all this controversy about reading and now there's science of reading, which is a basically a body of literature and research that makes recommendations as to what to do. And the biggest misconception with that, and I actually put this in the book because I hear this misconception a lot, is that You've got to really focus on phonics. You've got to really focus on words. You've got to really focus on that area, sometimes to the exclusion of comprehension. And that is not what the science of reading is about.

[10:54]

It is very much a balanced approach that includes comprehension. And that means if I teach ninth graders and I've got students who can't understand, comprehend, yes, I need to teach comprehension. But if they can't understand how to break down a word, I've got to do some work with that too. And it's not good enough to say, I'm a ninth grade teacher. I shouldn't have to do that. I get that.

[11:15]

I get that you shouldn't have to do that. But you know what? What do you kids need? And that's what it boils down to.

[11:22] SPEAKER_01:

I wanted to ask about that issue of the work getting more complex and students' work and thinking needing to be more complex and how we both scale up and scale back the scaffolding. Because I'm looking in a chapter where you talk about graphic organizers and especially on page 71 and 73, you have two different versions of an evidence graphic organizer for student writing. starting with an opinion and a point supporting that argument. And then in the more sophisticated version for older students, you've got multiple points of evidence and analysis and how that kind of all comes together. And of course, some of our more privileged students might be able to write a five paragraph essay without any kind of graphic organizer. And that might seem normal to us.

[12:02]

That might match our experience. But if we want to empower the rest of our students to be able to produce that kind of sophisticated writing that is at their grade level and even if on their own, they're not going to be able to. We're going to have to figure out how to use tools like this. So talk to us a little bit about using scaffolds like that and how we calibrate the use of the scaffold so that it's not restrictive, right? Because scaffolding is meant to be kind of temporary. We have to adjust it.

[12:29]

Help us think about that.

[12:31] SPEAKER_00:

OK, so let's talk. I want to specifically talk about the graphic organizer with evidence. And I want to talk about why that's important, because in a rigorous classroom, students don't just tell you something about the text and explain it. They don't just say, oh, I thought so and so was the best character because they don't do that. That's not as rigorous as you want. What you really want to do is be able to look back into the text and pull out specific evidence.

[12:57]

So I'm going to make my statement. I'm going to give specific evidence from the text. And then, and this is where we forget a lot of times, once I've really made my points with the evidence, I want to go beyond the text and pull in real life or another subject area or another text, whatever I want to pull in. So again, You know, a really thriving student can do that. They're used to that. They probably are having conversations at home about, well, have you seen this somewhere else or have we ever been somewhere that made this work?

[13:29]

You know, they have those kinds of conversations, but some students haven't. So the first graphic organizer, which is the one for older students, it's just evidence graphic organizer for older students. And we're putting it up on the Web page so you can look at it. They do their overall statement or opinion or thesis. So they write that and there's a box for them to put it in. Then they have three boxes underneath that and it's the evidence.

[13:52]

What exactly is the evidence? And they have to put their source. So did this come out of a text? Did this come out of chapter two? Did this come from this person? You've got to really do that.

[14:02]

Because again, struggling students, they don't know the things we think they know. And they definitely don't know the things we think they ought to know. So I'm going to really go back here and put where they've got to put the source. Then we've got to do the analysis. Okay, so you've got that piece of evidence. What does that mean?

[14:19]

And there's a box for that. And there's arrows connecting everything. So, you know, they know what they're doing. It's like a roadmap. And then at the end, it's so what? What is the relevance?

[14:28]

That's moving them beyond the text. So that's really important. And you might have a 12th grader who needs this kind of graphic organizer. You might have a fifth grader who needs it. It just depends on what you're doing in your classroom. But this is going to be a graphic organizer that's going to help them get to higher levels of learning.

[14:48]

Now, for younger students, and this is the second one that's posted, it's an evidence graphic organizer for younger students. And it's just a simplified version. So it's your opinion. Why? Why again? Okay, so you said why, why again?

[15:02]

And so what? Now, is it possible that I've got a 10th grader who can't handle the graphic organizer for older students? Yes, okay. I can do one of two things. I could go down to the one for younger students, but that really doesn't get me where I want to go. So if you're looking at the graphic organizer, and hopefully you are, hopefully you paused it and are looking at it, instead of having them pull three pieces of justification, maybe I just have them pull one or two so I can cover up part of it.

[15:33]

They don't have to fill the whole thing out, but I still need to get them through that thought process. So does that make some sense, Justin?

[15:43] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. You're modifying the amount of evidence in that case. You're simplifying the process a little bit. I think that speaks to the issue of optimizing what we're going for, because it seems to me that we don't have to be equally focused on everything all the time, especially if we know that a lesson is designed to build one particular skill. And focusing on everything might be overwhelming for some of our students, but we can get some good progress if we can be a little bit selective. How do you think about prioritizing the different possible dimensions of rigor or the different things in a lesson that we might emphasize rigor about?

[16:25] SPEAKER_00:

I think what I try to do is not sacrifice anything. The standard of rigor. So if we're going to do a math example, we've done this one on one of your other shows, but we've probably got some people who haven't heard it. One of the indicators of rigor is that students can recognize and explain misconceptions. Rather than doing a rote problem and then a rote word problem. and even write their own rote word problem, maybe, we want to be able to recognize and explain these misconceptions.

[16:55]

So it's the idea that for most students, my standard middle of the road students, after they've understood something, okay, this isn't throw them into it and they've never done it before. Okay. So they understand fractions. I'm going to give them three fraction problems that are already solved. And I'm going to ask them to find the one that is incorrect and Explain why it's incorrect. Solve it correctly and explain why they know it's right now.

[17:23]

Now, here's what I'm going to do with those advanced students that you were talking about that just run away with it. OK, I'm going to give them five and I'm not going to tell them how many are incorrect. They just have to figure it out and then they have to do the same thing. But here's what I'm going to do for my struggling students. I'm going to probably do an extra round of modeling with them. but what I'm going to do is give them two problems that are already solved.

[17:46]

So they're having to analyze, but at a lesser level. So they're still getting the critical thinking, but they're not having to do it as much in terms of quantity. So they've only got two and then they have to figure it out. So what I've done is I've really differentiated for all of my students using quantity. In this case, I don't always use quantity, but using quantity in this case, in a way, where all of the students have to demonstrate their learning at a level that's appropriate for them.

[18:15] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Barbara, that links up with a topic I've been hearing a lot about lately, which is cognitive load theory and the idea that students can only, you know, we can all only keep so much information in our heads at once. That's why phone numbers are a certain length and credit cards are longer than that because we're not intended to keep them in our heads. There are only so many chunks of information that students can keep in mind at once that And for students who have more knowledge, they have more pre-existing pre-built chunks and are able to kind of manage more as they get older and are able to do more and more complex work. And for students who maybe don't have that background knowledge and are not at grade level, they may have less capacity because they have fewer of those kind of pre-built units to keep in mind. So simplifying in order to focus on the relevant issue and taking away distractions and taking away clutter that would impair and compete with that working memory that students need to focus on the main issue makes a lot of sense to me.

[19:10] SPEAKER_00:

With the evidence-based piece, I would like all of my students to get to the point where they can do three pieces of evidence and analyze it. And that's the goal. But if you're struggling in my classroom, I may need you to start at one. And when you get one done, that's great. And then I move you to two. And then I move you to three by the end of the year.

[19:35]

So it may be that it has to happen over time, that it just takes longer for you to, you know, build to a point where I might wish everyone was.

[19:49] SPEAKER_01:

I'm working on a book now and I'm working in particular on a chapter with my co-author that we've kind of put off. It's been our final chapter and it has, you know, kind of a collection of random topics in it. And one little thing that I just wanted to mention that's been so helpful is to use headings and to say, okay, this is what we're going to talk about here. This is what we're going to talk about here. And under that heading is going to be page after page of detail. And I can't keep all of that detail in my head.

[20:15]

It's just too much. But those headings have just been a lifesaver in figuring out what is the argument we're really trying to make in this chapter. Do you see things like that that we could add to our assignments that maybe are not typically a part of what we would have students do in a five paragraph essay that could aid that chunking and help students kind of keep track of where they're going with their work?

[20:37] SPEAKER_00:

That's a great question. And part of what I like about it is it assumes that students would know what to do with a heading. For example, you know that if you put all the headings together, you have formed an outline of the chapter or section. Struggling students don't know that. So it's not enough to put just the headings. You've got to also teach students how headings work.

[21:01]

And I think that's really, really important. And what I do in a task is I don't always use a heading because the task may not be that long. I think headings can work. But what I use a lot is bold-faced words to give them the key things they're supposed to do. I'm giving them clues as to what's most important in that. And so I really, really, really want to know if I want three pieces of evidence, three pieces of evidence needs to be bolded so that they see that.

[21:29]

But again, I've got to teach them that that's what the purpose of the bolding is. So that would be really important, at least from my perspective.

[21:38] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Barbara, ultimately, I think where we're going with all of this is that being thoughtful about rigor and using the many tools and techniques and organizers and strategies that you share in this book and all of your other books, like ultimately where we're going with this is that we have the opportunity to raise expectations for students who maybe historically have faced low expectations. Talk to us about your hope for what educators do with this book, particularly for students who are not at grade level.

[22:05] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I hope they use it with all their students. So first, I would say I hope they use it to make a difference with all their students. My goal with this book and all of my others is always to provide teachers with tools and strategies that they can use to make a difference with their students. And so I would ask you to think about the concept of rigor. Think about the tools we've talked about. Think about the ones that are in the book in light of how does it make a difference for this individual student?

[22:38]

I mean, it's easy to think about how does it do with all students? Oh, I like that one. OK, I'll use that strategy because I like that. No, no. Think about you've got a magnifying glass and you're looking at each student. How is what you learn going to make a difference for that student?

[22:53]

And then I'm not asking you to write 36 different lesson plans, but what I am saying is to keep it in mind. And if what you realize is that this student is going to learn best if you do this, then try to figure out how you can ease that in.

[23:05] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Rigor is Not a Four-Letter Word, Strategies for Success, now in its fourth edition. Barbara, if people want to learn more about your work and see a list of all your books and some of your many tools, where's the best place for them to go online?

[23:19] SPEAKER_00:

My website, barbarablackburnonline.com, or you can Google Barbara Blackburn Rigor, it'll pop it up to you. But there are over, I have been saying there are over 100 free resources on the website, but I had somebody count them the other day and they said, Barbara, there's 147. So there's lots of them, okay? There's lots of free resources. There's templates.

[23:40]

There's podcasts. There's articles. There's just a little bit of everything. So go to it and feel free to use it.

[23:47] SPEAKER_01:

We'll check it out and we'll put the graphic organizers that we talked about for writing and evidence in the show notes as well. Barbara, thanks again for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[23:56] SPEAKER_00:

It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

[23:57] Announcer:

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