Rigor is a word that is often bandied about in education, but which is rarely defined.  There are two aspects of the term that I think are important to consider when thinking about schools and learning.  First, rigor is often associated with high levels of cognitive processing or complexity.  In 1956, Benjamin Bloom published his famous Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, providing the educational world with a widely-used framework for evaluating the level of thinking associated with an instructional task.  Bloom’s original taxonomy has been updates and modified over the years, but the basic precept has stuck that learning tasks can be organized by the amount or complexity of thinking they require from the brain.  In many educator’s minds, rigor refers to this “level of thinking.”

Second, rigor often refers to the level of disciplinary precision associated with a statement of knowledge or demonstration of skill.  If you look up the word “rigor” in the dictionary, for example, you will see definitions such as “strict precision” or “exactness.”  In this context, rigor refers to an intensity of scrutiny in evaluation.  What qualifies as rigor in this sense would be defined by the base of knowledge and skill used to assess the work of professionals within the content discipline.  We would look to historians to outline for us what it means to successfully conduct a rigorous source analysis, or we would look to scientists to define how to carry out a rigorous experimental procedure.  A rigorous assessment, therefore, would be one requiring that the student demonstrate a sophisticated and accurate level of knowledge and expertise on the topic at hand.  

During the early years of the AVID program, rigor was explained to students, among other things, as content that was “provocative and ambiguous.” I love that way of thinking about rigor.  Students have to learn how to navigate and make meaning when it isn’t given to them explicitly.  That can be a very unsettling feeling.  Students are very much accustomed to having the details and context given to them directly, and often panic when they have to navigate difficult questions and ideas on their own.  

These dueling ways of thinking about rigor came to my mind earlier this morning when I was in our IB Studio Art class, watching students create their artwork.  They had been presented with a timely and compelling task – to artistically represent the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic through the medium of a sculptured mask.  In other words, they must use the human face as the canvas for expressing the emotionality and impact of our globally disrupted lives.  Certainly a provocative and ambiguous task.   

But the rigor of this task pushed even deeper.  Students were learning to create and sculpt in a new medium, and the teacher was pressing them hard to master the relevant skills.  I watched as students struggled to form the shapes that they had captured in their design sketches.  In one moment, the teacher took up the clay modeling tools to show a student how best to shape a human eye.  The teacher provided a personalized think-aloud for the student, demonstrating how to utilize the molding tool to capture the appropriate proportions and shape.  Then, after she had done the work, the teacher smoothed over her work, erasing the progress she had made.  The student gasped.  I had to try not to laugh when seeing the obvious disappointment on the student’s face when she realized she would have to do the work herself.  “Now you try” was the directive the teacher gave before moving on to another student.  The teacher had shown what success looked like – with the corresponding precision and skill of an expert – and was asking the student to do the same.  

I overheard another conversation with a student who was struggling to get the design features of the sketch onto the sculptured face.  In this case, the teacher watched patiently, and then declared.  “Listen, you’re not drawing, if you want to draw it then you’re using the wrong medium.  You’re better off with pencil and paper for that.  You’re creating volume and shape, and it’s a different set of tools.”  

Sometimes, we tend to think about arts classrooms as soft or easy.  Elective classes.  We use euphemisms like “the hard sciences” to point out that some subject areas are just more intellectually demanding than others, or so we believe.  

The interesting thing is that in my work as an administrator, I have often found that arts classrooms are the spaces where students are being pushed the hardest to confront ambiguity, develop new skills, and then share the resulting outcomes publicly for scrutiny and feedback and further revision.  It’s some of the most rigorous work happening in schools.