Thinking Differently About Rigor in Classrooms

      “In education, rigor refers to the level of cognitive challenge and academic demand placed on students in their learning experience,” say James Marshall, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University) in this article in Journal of School Administration Research and Development. “It involves teaching, learning, and assessment processes that encourage students to understand deeply, think critically, and apply knowledge in complex, novel, and meaningful ways.”

       Marshall, Fisher, and Frey push back on five common misconceptions about rigor in K-12 schools: 

• Rigor means more homework and harder tests. True rigor, they argue, is about the quality, not the quantity, of the work students do.
• Rigor is only for “gifted” students. On the contrary, it’s about appropriately challenging all students.
• Rigor is just about academic content. In fact, it’s about work across the curriculum, including the arts and humanities.
• Rigor means traditional, teacher centered pedagogy. “This view neglects the effectiveness of interactive and student-centered teaching methods in promoting deep learning,” say the authors.
• Rigor precludes creativity and enjoyment. Actually, they say, “true rigor should engage students’ interests and passions, integrating creativity and enjoyment with challenging content to motivate and enhance learning experiences.”

      Marshall, Fisher, and Frey then present the RIGOR Walk – a tool (and acronym) for designing, observing, and enhancing effective classroom instruction. Here are the components: 

• Relationships – Positive interactions between teachers and students, and among students, are essential to good learning, say the authors. “Such relationships foster a supportive and trusting atmosphere where students feel safe to engage, inquire, and learn from their errors.”
• Instruction – Effective classrooms transcend the traditional teacher-centered, lecture-based model, selecting from a wide repertoire of evidence-based strategies that serve to foster and scaffold effective learning. A key component is checking for understanding and constantly fine-tuning instruction.
• Goals – Aligned to grade-level expectations, these provide clear direction for a wide range of activities, a roadmap for teachers, a detailed description of learning outcomes, and a way for students to assess their progress, seek feedback, and ultimately succeed.
• Organization – “A well-organized classroom environment provides students with predictable structures and routines,” say Marshall, Fisher, and Frey, “which can significantly enhance their learning experience by reducing distractions and confusion.” Part of this is access to learning materials, flexible grouping, and accommodations. The classroom environment can be seen as a “third teacher,” alongside the instructor and classmates.
• Relevance – This “extends beyond merely informing students about the future utility of their education,” say the authors. “It encompasses the creation of learning experiences that are responsive to students’ backgrounds and lived experiences, making the learning process personally significant. Tasks within the educational setting must therefore be meaningful, integrating real-life contexts that resonate with the students’ own experiences. Relevance includes students’ lived experience and cultural background and is best manifested when students can articulate what the curriculum means to their lives and futures.

      Marshall, Fisher, and Frey have begun the process of validating the RIGOR framework through classroom visits and further research. So far, they say it has good face validity and is helpful in rehabilitating the idea of rigor among teachers and leaders. 

“RIGOR Walks: Development and Initial Validation of a Framework to Support Rigorous Learning Environments” by James Marshall, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey in Journal of School Administration Research and Development, Spring 2025 (Vol. 10, #1, pp. 13-20); the authors can be reached at marshall@sdsu.edu, dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu, and nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1117 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

What We Capture - and Lose - with All the Photos and Videos We Take

      In this article in National Geographic, Emma Magnus says it’s great that we now have so many easy-to-access digital images – kids’ birthday parties, vacation trips, family gatherings, weddings, selfies. With our smartphones always within reach, we’re capturing more of our lives than any previous generation; one woman estimates she has about 150,000 pictures in the cloud.  

      This plethora of images may be affecting our “autobiographical memory,” says Magnus, which “is central to how we understand ourselves” – a mental reservoir to which we refer when we think about our lives. Photos and videos can help with reconstructing our life story, jogging our memory about details and emotions we might otherwise forget. Remembering is an interaction of what we actually recall and all the images we’ve off-loaded onto hard drives, smartphones, and social media. 

         All of this reduces the cognitive load of trying to remember everything, but it may also weaken our ability to recall details unless we look at those images. “As a result,” says Magnus, “when we turn to digital images to reconstruct an event, those files don’t just support our memory. They feed back into it, becoming part of it and subtly altering it… They’re shaping which moments we remember, how vividly, and how well we interpret our personal histories.” There are also photos we delete – snapshots of an ex, a bad night out – and those are deleted from our mental hard drive as well (except for those that refuse to leave)

      There’s another wrinkle to our prodigious picture-taking: relying on a camera to capture an event can detract from appreciating the moment, in the same way that concentrating on filming a concert can reduce our enjoyment of the music. And what if we never look at the thousands of photos and videos we’ve taken? Most people don’t review and organize their digital material because it’s overwhelming, so there’s a double loss – being less present in the moment, and then not revisiting the images we’ve taken.

      “Of course, outsourcing our memories to technology is nothing new,” says Magnus. “Human civilization is built on technology created to preserve and export what’s in our heads: Instagram, floppy disks, the printing press, even language itself. But tech is temporary. Hard drives will fail and social media companies will fall, and while that may not make them worth avoiding, today’s memory repositories have so much capacity – and are so integrated into our lives – that we stand to lose more when they inevitably fail.” Does that mean that if our phone is stolen or left behind in an Uber and there’s no backup, part of our brain is gone?

      “Many of us have conditioned ourselves to instantaneously, almost unconsciously, rely on our phones to capture moments,” Magnus concludes. “Capture the highlights all you want, but remember that the moments that shape you may not be the ones on your camera roll.” 

“Are We Reaching Photo Overload?” by Emma Magnus in National Geographic, December 2025 (Vol. 248, #6, pp. 96-99)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1116 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.