Increasing Rigor for Below-Level Secondary-School Students

“Increasing the rigor of learning tasks to align with the expectations of the Common Core State Standards presents challenges for many educators, particularly for middle and high school teachers of non-proficient readers,” say Rosemarye Taylor (University of Central Florida/Orlando) and Rebecca Watson (Orange County Public Schools) in this article in Principal Leadership. Materials geared to low-achieving students tend to have questions and activities that are heavily scaffolded and focus on literal recall rather than high-order thinking. 

That means teachers have to come up with their own ways to get students applying, synthesizing, analyzing, and evaluating. In many classrooms Taylor and Watson have visited, students aren’t being challenged to apply learning, construct knowledge, read between the lines, and communicate well. Some examples:

• A middle-school teacher asks her students to suggest a higher-order thinking question for the book they’re reading, Lord of the Flies. A student says, “Evaluate the island,” and the teacher accepts the answer with no comment and moves on.
• A teacher asks students to summarize when she really wants them to analyze (take apart and put back together).

And some teachers believe their low-achieving students are not capable of higher-level thinking because of language issues, special needs, or low self-esteem and motivation. “The empathy and concern that teachers have for their students may, in some cases, result in lowered expectations that impede teachers’ willingness to develop and use rigorous learning tasks,” say Taylor and Watson.

They suggest four ways teachers can enhance rigor for middle and high-school students who are behind:

• Scaffold instruction. Give students lots of support as texts are introduced and reduce scaffolding as students become increasingly successful. In other words, classes move from direct instruction to guided practice to independent practice. “Students must achieve independent practice to demonstrate proficiency with the target skill or knowledge,” say Taylor and Watson. “If they do not demonstrate it during instruction, they will most likely not demonstrate it on assessments.”

• Add parallel texts. Below-level students who are reading below-level texts should also have on-grade-level texts containing the same content and similar vocabulary. This challenges students, builds confidence, knowledge, and vocabulary, and helps them feel more on level with their peers. 

• Add rigorous tasks. With materials that don’t challenge students, teacher teams need to work collaboratively to develop complex tasks and think through how to teach, model, and get students to practice them and work toward independence. 

• Develop and implement benchmark scales. Teachers should be able to observe and measure the level of their students’ thinking, say Taylor and Watson. They recommend a 

4-3-2-1-0 scale for each major skill with descriptions of what achieving the benchmark looks and sounds like. Here’s an example for working with text features:

    4 – Edit or create new text features that provide information more helpful to comprehension 

          than those in the text.

    3 – Explain how specific text features do or do not improve comprehension of the text.

    2 – Write how specific information from text features is used in the text.

    1 – Underline and label text features.

    0 – Underline text features.

“By identifying acceptable evidence in advance of the instruction,” they say, “teachers’ instruction and language [become] more precise.” 

“Raising Rigor for Struggling Students” by Rosemarye Taylor and Rebecca Watson in Principal Leadership, October 2013 (Vol. 14, #2, p. 56-59), no free e-link available; the authors can be reached at rosemarye.taylor@ucf.edu and Rebecca.watson@ocps.net. 

From the Marshall Memo #506