Making Rigor Fun
by Katie Schieffer
“Snowball fight!” Suddenly, the air is filled with flying white paper balls and shrieks of laughter. This isn’t December in New England; it is August in the South. A room of fourth graders is beginning a lesson on analyzing text. Each child selects one of the paper “snowballs” scattered around the room, opens the paper, and reads the sentence starter inside. The sentence starters prompt critical thinking with phrases such as, “I’m wondering…” or, “I predict…”
The children then carefully observe the picture on the SMART Board: a boy has fallen asleep reading and a vine is growing out of his book and wrapping around his arm. “I wonder if he is going to be pulled into the book!” Emma whispered to her table. “What if that happens to us when we fall asleep reading?” asked Owen as he leaned further into his group’s conversation. The children were using these sentence starters to raise questions and make inferences as a part of their table group discussions. For the rest of the week, the children begged for another snowball fight.
More standardized testing and more challenging state standards are pressuring teachers to increase rigor. Often, when principals ask for more rigor in the classroom, teachers think of giving longer assignments or pushing children to learn skills beyond the expectations. Teaching children to think deeply and apply their learning across subjects is a far more effective and engaging way of increasing rigor.
Open Up to Open Ended Discussions
Our multiple choice culture has driven students to lose confidence in their ability to think independently. According to Blackburn (2013), “Rigor is more than what you teach, it’s how you teach and how students show you they understand” (p. 15). Therefore, we need to shift our thinking from standardized testing to real world applications. We can easily increase the rigor of an activity by removing the traditional answers A, B, C, and D from the questions and instead asking students to provide their own answers and evidence to support those answers.
Interactive read-alouds can provide opportunities for students to reflect on their reading through questioning by the teacher. For example, when focusing on characterization, we can ask students about the characters’ traits and require evidence to support their answers. They will then need to make reference to the characters’ actions, dialogue, and motivation.
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Lit Look
Katie Schieffer is a fourth grade teacher in Katy, Texas. She has been teaching for 5 years and has experience in first, second, and fourth grades. Katie passionately pursues creating a love of literacy in a rigorous learning environment for all students.
Teaching children to think deeply and apply their learning across subjects is a far more effective and engaging way of increasing rigor.