There's a buzz word that's been thrown around educational circles for a while like a bowling ball in a game of ping pong. I don't know if I have ever heard a word used with such brutally vague precision.
If you're a teacher you've probably heard it. Your professional development most likely has been sprinkled with it. Your evaluator might have insisted that the lessons you teach have it.
I actually had an administrator who was evaluating me ask me where it was in my lessons. She wasn't being malicious, she was expressing the reality that she was clueless to what it was. A district administrator asked a colleague of mine where it was in her objectives she had posted on her whiteboard.
The word is rigor. Lesson are supposed to have rigor, and students magically transformed by rigor. I have yet to sit in a professional development session where vigor was specifically identified. No one says where it is exactly that you as a teacher apply this all powerful entity called rigor. But, if you don't have it, you can get a below standards evaluation.
This is what I think: rigor, shimgor.
I actually had an administrator who was evaluating me ask me where it was in my lessons. She wasn't being malicious, she was expressing the reality that she was clueless to what it was. A district administrator asked a colleague of mine where it was in her objectives she had posted on her whiteboard.
The word is rigor. Lesson are supposed to have rigor, and students magically transformed by rigor. I have yet to sit in a professional development session where vigor was specifically identified. No one says where it is exactly that you as a teacher apply this all powerful entity called rigor. But, if you don't have it, you can get a below standards evaluation.
This is what I think: rigor, shimgor.
