The Hidden Cost of a Calm Classroom
A Simply Great Insight
The Hidden Risk of a Calm Classroom
A classroom can look perfectly managed, and still fall short on rigor. Make your school a place where low rigor is as high priority an issue to fix as off-track student culture.
What are a few examples of a low-rigor classroom?
Students spend large chunks of time copying notes/work from the board, the teacher, or another student.
All reading is done whole class, either “popcorn” style calling on students to read or having the teacher read aloud. (Instead, mix in asking a meaty question and having students read/annotate/write independently for sections of text).
Students are “done” with activities and are sitting quietly at their desks.
The teacher only asks questions, waits for a few raised hands, gets okay answers from top students, rounds up, and asks student to copy the answers.
The teacher stands at the front of class or (worse) sits at their desk during stretches of independent work, either grading papers/getting organized or calling students up one by one to help them.
The teacher accepts so-so answers and doesn’t insist on strong, academic vocabulary.
What do we see in higher rigor classrooms? We see teachers every day who:
Put the heavy lifting on students.
Prioritize the productive struggle of the lesson.
Circulate and give great feedback.
Pre-plan what great responses look like and insist on them.
Ensure sustained bursts of independent work.
Plan "when done" activities, including our favorite: get out your independent reading book and read.
We want every single student in every single school in America to have teachers who consistently do these actions, and to achieve that, school leaders must share their expectations of teachers clearly and support them to meet them.
What's Most Important Right Now?
Teacher Preparation to Teach Rigorous Lessons
Know/Show: Are teachers fully clear on exactly what kids need to know and show by the end of the lesson?
Productive Struggle: Have teachers identified the most productive struggle of the lesson? In other words, what tasks will require students to grapple with the most important concepts of the lesson?
Exemplars: Are teachers preparing high quality exemplars for all key tasks of the lesson that set the bar for top quality work?
A Simply Great Resource
In our last newsletter, we asked what you were most interested in seeing, and the winner was "Spotlight Best Practices."
We know how important rigor is in the classroom, and we know that one way to push rigor is to improve teacher preparation. Check out an exemplar teacher preparation for a 6th grade math lesson plan to see what preparing for rigor can actually look like in practice!
Click here for a free exemplar!
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