Rigor in the Remote Learning Classroom

Instructional Tips and Strategies

Barbara Blackburn

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000246353
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Méthodes pédagogiques

Learn how to keep the rigor and motivation alive in a remote learning or hybrid K–12 classroom. In this essential book, bestselling author Barbara R. Blackburn shares frameworks and tools to help you move online without compromising the rigor of your instruction. You'll learn…

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• how to create a remote culture of high expectations;

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• how to scaffold so students reach higher levels of learning;

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• how to have students collaborate in different settings; and

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• how to provide virtual feedback and deliver effective assessments.

You'll also discover how common activities, such as virtual field trips, can lack rigor without critical thinking prompts. The book provides practical strategies you can implement immediately to help all students reach higher levels of success.

1
Rigor and Remote Learning

Remote learning has increased in popularity with schools. As we talk about instruction in the remote classroom, we tend to discuss the logistics or tools that will help us teach. Sometimes, focusing on ensuring rigor is forgotten. Another issue is that everyone seems to have a different understanding of what rigor means, especially what it looks like in the remote learning classroom. In this chapter, we’ll look at the myths and realities related to rigor, as well as vocabulary and beliefs of remote learning. As a baseline, when I discuss remote learning, I am talking about any learning in which the teacher and student are in a setting that is not traditional.

Myths About Rigor

First, let’s look at misconceptions about the concept of rigor. There are ten commonly held beliefs about rigor that are not true.

Ten Myths About Rigor

• Myth 1: Lots of homework is a sign of rigor.
• Myth 2: Rigor means doing more.
• Myth 3: Rigor is not for struggling students or those with special needs.
• Myth 4: When you increase rigor, student motivation decreases.
• Myth 5: Providing support means lessening rigor.
• Myth 6: Resources equal rigor.
• Myth 7: Standards alone take care of rigor.
• Myth 8: Rigor means you have to quit doing everything you do now and start over.
• Myth 9: Rigor is just one more thing to do.
• Myth 10: Rigor is not for early childhood or primary students.

As you think about your current instruction in a remote learning environment, consider each of those myths. Which are most common during remote learning? Each of these is a popular myth, but there are several that are not specific, but particularly applicable to remote learning. I find that Myth 2 about doing more is quite common when teaching remotely. With pressure to feel like we are doing “real teaching,” we sometimes give more work, rather than focusing on quality. I also find that Myth 6 about resources is a typical belief related to remote learning. Your school or district may have purchased a program, and we simply assume it is rigorous. That may or may not be true. Finally, Myths 3 and 5 are especially applicable for remote learning. Students who struggle, whether they are students with special needs, English learners or any other student who needs extra help, are capable of rigorous work. They simply need additional scaffolding, strategies that will support learning in a remote setting.

What Is Rigor?

You may have heard some of those myths about rigor. But when we delve into what rigor really means, it is focused on student learning.

“Rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels; each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels; and each student demonstrates learning at high levels.”

(Blackburn, 2018)

Notice we are looking at the environment you create. The trifold approach to rigor is not limited to the curriculum that students are expected to learn. It is more than a specific lesson or instructional strategy. It is deeper than what a student says or does in response to a lesson. True rigor is the result of weaving together all elements of schooling to raise students to higher levels of learning. We will look at a brief description of each of the core areas in what follows, but we will explore each area in more depth, providing specific activities and strategies, in upcoming chapters.

Expectations

The first component of rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels. Having high expectations starts with the recognition that every student possesses the potential to succeed at his or her individual level. Almost every teacher or leader I talk with says, “We have high expectations for our students.” Sometimes that is evidenced by the behaviors in the school; other times, however, faculty actions don’t match the words. There are concrete ways to implement and assess rigor in classrooms. As you design lessons that incorporate more rigorous opportunities for learning, you will want to consider the questions that are embedded in the instruction. Higher-level questioning is an integral part of a rigorous classroom. Look for open-ended questions, ones that are at higher levels of critical thinking. It is also important to pay attention to how you respond to student questions. When I visit schools, it is not uncommon to see teachers who ask higher-level questions. But for whatever reason, I then see some of the same teachers accept low-level responses from students. In rigorous classrooms, teachers push students to respond at high levels. They ask extending questions. Extending questions are questions that encourage a student to explain their reasoning and think through ideas. When a student does not know the immediate answer but has sufficient background information to provide a response to the question, the teacher continues to probe and guide the student’s thinking rather than moving on to the next student. Insist on thinking past the concrete, literal answer.

As you can see, by probing further and expecting more complex responses from students, whether in a video session or through written questions in a chat, teachers can assist them in gaining deeper meaning and making more thorough connections. The first answer students give is oftentimes quite concrete and literal, but if you consistently push them to peel back layers and apply higher-level thought processes, they will eventually realize you expect high-level thinking and begin doing it naturally. This will increase the level of rigor in your classroom. We’ll explore expectations in a remote classroom in more depth in Chapter 3.

Scaffolding for Support

High expectations are important, but rigorous remote learning classrooms assure that each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels, which is the second part of our definition. It is essential that teachers design lessons that move students to more challenging work while simultaneously providing ongoing scaffolding to support students’ learning as they move to those higher levels.

Providing additional scaffolding throughout lessons is one of the most important ways to support your students. Oftentimes students have the ability or knowledge to accomplish a task but are overwhelmed by the complexity of it, therefore getting lost in the process. This can occur in a variety of ways, but it requires that teachers ask themselves during every step of their lessons, “What extra support might my students need?” It is up to the teacher, as practitioner, to anticipate where students may hit roadblocks and to react in the moment in providing additional stair steps for students as needed.

Examples of Scaffolding Strategies

• Asking/using guiding questions during a video presentation or in written form for independent learning.
• Preteaching vocabulary with independent materials prior to a video presentation.
• Providing graphic organizers to help students process text.
• Highlighting or color-coding steps in a project.
• Modeling with think-alouds with a recorded video.
• Accessing prior knowledge or providing prior knowledge through a virtual tour.
• Employing an “I do—we do—you do” approach as a gradual release of responsibility.

If a particular standard requires second-grade students to understand the water cycle but a student has difficulty accessing the grade-level text, perhaps the teacher can offer a short biographical/documentary video to build background knowledge and then diffuse the difficult vocabulary in the text or provide guiding questions that naturally chunk the text. These scaffolding strategies will allow that student to reach the same end goal, which is mastery of the standard.

Similarly, if a student with special needs struggles with writing, but standards require skills in narrating a story, a teacher might first break down the elements by allowing the student to draw the sequence of events using Sketchboard then tell the story verbally in his or her own words using the picture sequence and finally attempt to write the story on paper. Afterward, the students may need to read a mentor text and circle the descriptive details that enhance the story, use a graphic organizer to brainstorm descriptive details to include in his or her own story and finally add in the details that seem to fit well. These activities would be the “in-between” steps to help the student achieve the standard of being able to use sequencing and descriptive details to tell a story. Chapter 4 will provide a range of scaffolding strategies you can use with any grade level and content area.

Demonstration of Learning

The third component of a rigorous classroom is providing each student with opportunities to demonstrate learning at high levels. There are two aspects of students’ demonstration of learning. First, we need to provide rigorous tasks and assignments for students. What we’ve learned is that if we want students to show they understand what they learned at a high level, we also need to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate they have truly mastered that learning at more than a basic level. Many teachers use Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK; Level 3 or above is rigorous). I prefer Webb’s DOK for a more accurate view of the depth and complexity of rigor, and we’ll explain that more fully in Chapter 3.

Examples of Guidelines for Rigor for Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK)
Bloom’s Taxonomy	Webb’s DOK Level 3
Analyzing	Does the assessment focus on deeper knowledge?
Evaluating	Are students proposing and evaluating solutions or recognizing and explaining misconceptions?
Creating	Do students go beyond the text information while demonstrating they understand the text?
	Do students support their ideas with evidence?
**Please note that although the verbs are important, you must pay attention to what comes after the verb to determine if it is rigorous.	Does the assessment require reasoning, planning, using evidence and a higher level of thinking than the previous two levels (such as a deeper level of inferencing)?

Second, in order for students to demonstrate their learning, each one must be engaged in academic tasks. In too many classrooms, most of the instruction consists of teacher-centered, large-group instruction, perhaps in an interactive lecture or discussion format. The general practice during these lessons is for the teacher to ask a question and then call on a student to respond. While this provides an opportunity for one student to demonstrate understanding, the remaining students don’t do so. Another option would be for the teacher to allow all students to think–pair–share, respond electronically with a thumbs up or down, post answers in a chat or on a shared document, or answer polls that tally the responses. Such activities hold each student accountable for demonstrating his or her understanding. You’ll find information, including sample tasks and assessments, in Chapters 3, 5 and 6.

Remote Learning

Now, let’s turn our attention to remote learning....

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Rigor and Remote Learning
• 2 Planning for Rigorous Learning in the Remote Classroom
• 3 Expectations in the Remote Classroom
• 4 Scaffolding and Support in the Remote Classroom
• 5 Demonstrating Learning in the Remote Classroom
• 6 Rigorous Assessment in the Remote Classroom
• 7 Challenges Related to Rigor and Remote Learning
• 8 Continue the Conversation
• Bibliography