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.

Integrating Music Into High-School History Classes

             In this article in Social Education, Philadelphia teacher Dave Marshall describes how he first introduced music in his history classes. As a new teacher, he occasionally played a pertinent song to start a class – for example, Edwin Starr’s “War” before a lesson on Vietnam protests. Then he began building an entire lesson around an in-depth analysis of a song – in one case, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”

            From there Marshall progressed to having students study several related songs – for example, five songs on climate change, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Childish Gambino’s “Feels Like Summer.” This brought depth and passion to class discussions and students’ presentations and essays.

            Marshall came up with the CALM acronym to help students analyze a song more thoughtfully:

• Context – What is the relevant historical and musical background?
• Artist – What aspects of their life and past work inform this song?
• Lyrics – Which lines seem important and why? Are there any allusions?
• Music – What are the most notable musical elements, and what do they achieve? 

He found that after students watched him model the acronym with one song, they loved deconstructing a song of their choice (see the article sidebar for a CALM analysis of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”).

            In 2023, Marshall wondered, “What if, instead of enhancing my curriculum with songs, the music drove my curriculum?” While continuing to teach his regular U.S. history course, he launched a senior elective, Music and U.S. History, which he says has been the most rewarding course of his 18-year career. “The elective opened up exciting new opportunities for student choice and voice, especially for student presentations.” Two students taught a joint lesson on Taylor Swift’s impact on feminism and the music industry. The elective now has four thematic units: Race and Racism, Protest and Patriotism, Climate Change, and Gender and Sexuality (here’s the full syllabus and the 84-song Spotify playlist compiled with students’ help).

            A popular activity in the elective has been having seniors teach a music-themed history lesson to the school’s fourth graders – one group featured John Lennon’s “Imagine” and H.E.R.’s “Change.” Elective students have also crafted their own playlists of 4-5 songs on a topic, writing a paragraph on how each song spoke to the theme and then tying them together in a unifying essay.

            Through his occasional use of songs in regular history classes and an elective course on music in history, Marshall has found three significant benefits:

• Engaging reluctant students – “Several students who were apathetic throughout my 11th-grade U.S. History course dove into our music-based lessons in twelfth grade,” he says. One student got excited about the culture surrounding historical events, while another “learned to be curious about a song and its background, and how that interacts with the time in which it was created, the artist who created it, and the listener.

• Building important historical skills – Without even realizing it, students are doing primary-source analysis when they place a song in historical context and parse its lyrics. One ambitious student wrote her final paper on which had more impact on gun violence – protest songs or political speeches. Marshall cites evidence that infusing music into core academic classes improves long-term retention of course content and develops social-emotional and problem-solving skills.

• Making interdisciplinary connections – A full-class discussion of Nina Simone’s three-minute song “Backlash Blues” touched on: (a) the history and structure of the 12-bar blues; (b) the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes; (c) how the Vietnam draft disproportionately affected low-income Americans and people of color; (d) Simone’s biography from a documentary they watched; and (e) the history of segregation and redlining (from the line, “You give me second-class houses/And second-class schools”).

            Marshall closes with four caveats for teachers who might want to include music in a regular history course or teach an elective: 

• Think carefully about the lyrics and themes of potentially controversial songs and communicate the rationale for using them to students, families, and administrators.
• Establish class norms and expectations, ideally brainstormed with students.
• Counteract students’ tendency to immediately declare their likes and dislikes by sharing De gustibus non est disputandum (there’s no accounting for taste) and focusing on a CALM analysis instead.
• Devote plenty of time building the skill of close listening. Like close reading, this takes effort, practice, and modeling. 

With these cautions in mind, Marshall strongly encourages the use of songs in history classes. “With intentional structure and practice,” he says, “my students honed their historical skills, learned key content, and had fun in the process.” 

 “‘Songs Make History’: How Music Boosts History Students’ Skills and Engagement” by Dave Marshall in Social Education, November/December 2025 (Vol. 89, #6, pp. 352-357); Marshall can be reached at davem@friends-select.org.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1114 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Promoting Positive Self-Talk in Kids

             “You never know what’s going to stick in the littlest minds,” says Angela Haupt in this article in Time. She lists five ideas that therapists she interviewed wish every child would internalize:

• Listen to your shoulder angel. A helpful image for children is a devil on one shoulder giving bad advice (it might feel good but isn’t) and an angel on the other shoulder telling them to do the right thing. Children need to know they have the power to decide which one they’re going to follow.
• Bullies are just showing how they feel about themselves. “Mean people’s words and behaviors are a reflection of what’s going on inside of them, not you,” says author/therapist Amy Morin. This gets a child seeing there’s something else going on with this person that they don’t know about. Bullying is still wrong and needs to be dealt with, but empathy helps a child not take name-calling and bullying so personally.
• Asking for help is a kind of bravery. Becoming increasingly independent is important for children, but they can’t figure out everything for themselves and need to know there are times when being vulnerable and reaching out is the best thing to do.
• Just because you have a thought doesn’t make it true. A common misconception is that everything that pops into kids’ heads has equal value. They need to understand that this isn’t true and treat random (especially negative) thoughts with curiosity, like an investigator.
• You are loved for who you are, not what you do. When kids get too wrapped up in their performance in a softball game or a piano recital, messing up can be taken as a judgment on their worth as a person. A key message from adults is that these activities aren’t their identity. “The sooner that message becomes imprinted on a kid’s brain,” says Haupt, “the less likely they are to lean into the anxiety and perfectionism that could chase them for a lifetime.” 

 “5 Things Therapists Wish Every Kid Knew” by Angela Haupt in Time, November 10, 2025

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1112 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Schools = Community

 [Re “Rural School Boards Feel Pressure Amid Ed Reform Speculation,” October 1]: 

Act 73 entrusted members of the Commission on the Future of Public Education with a solemn duty: to preserve the voice of communities in governing their schools. That voice cannot be reduced to a survey or replaced by centralized decision-making outside the community that funds its school — and this state — through taxes. It must remain a vote: a deliberate, warned democratic act by those whose children, future and identity are bound to that schoolhouse. 

Local control is not a privilege; it is the foundation of legitimate government under the Vermont Constitution and U.S. Constitution. Removing a community’s right to vote on its school’s fate denies consent of the governed and violates due process under 14 V.S.A. §1 and public participation rights. A voice without a vote is a hollow gesture — an illusion of democracy. 

Closing a school reshapes a town’s civic, social and economic fabric. Such action must be approved only by a warned local vote. Anything less is unjust, unconstitutional and arguably illegal. If the legislature removes this right, it will not withstand legal or moral scrutiny. The people of Vermont will remember who silenced them. 

Closing schools also damages children, fails to save money, deepens inequity and erodes communities. These closures harm students, waste resources and weaken Vermont’s rural heart.

Committee members should stand with the people — the parents, teachers and children whose liberties depend on your judgment. 

 Eric Pomeroy, PEACHAM 

Source: Letters to the Editor (11/5/25) Seven Days (scroll down to see this letter)

Rethinking Homework

            In Chapter 7 in their book, Mathematics Tasks for the Thinking Classroom, Grades K-5, Peter Liljedahl and Meagan Giroux say most teachers know that homework isn’t working. One comment: “Students who don’t need to do their homework are the ones who do their homework.” So why do teachers keep assigning it? Some common responses: 

• It’s school policy. 
• Parents expect it.
• Students need practice.
• Grading homework means there are fewer grades assigned to tests.
• This is how it’s always been done. 

But student compliance is typically abysmal. One study found that when students know homework will be graded, 22 percent do it with fidelity; when it’s not graded, that figure rises to 31 percent. 

            When pressed for more-substantive reasons than parental and bureaucratic expectations and past practice, teachers say they want homework to be:

• A safe place where students can make mistakes and learn from them; 
• A chance for students to see if they can do classwork on their own; 
• A way to check their understanding. 

These are good reasons, say Liljedahl and Giroux, but when they asked students why they do homework, none mentioned those three. Instead, kids said:

• It’s for grades.
• My mom makes me.
• My teacher makes me.

“The reason that homework doesn’t work,” say the authors, “is that the gulf between what teachers want to achieve with homework and why students do it is massive. If we want homework to work, we need to narrow this gulf.”

            Fifteen years of Building Thinking Classrooms research led to a different approach: rebranding homework for students as checking your understanding (CYU), with these provisions:

• It’s not practice. 
• It’s not an exercise. 
• It’s not an easy way to get grades. 
• The purpose is to check and improve understanding. 
• It’s not assigned, collected, checked, or graded.
• Instead, students are given an opportunity to do check-your-understanding questions.
• As much as possible, that opportunity is during class. 

            “When this rebranding and these practices were put in place,” say Liljedahl and Giroux, “we saw students doing CYU questions for the right reason – to check that they understood rather than for grades. They would take ownership for their own work while at the same time they made use of the knowledge of the students around them as resources to check their answers and get help when stuck.” Because the check-your-understanding questions were ungraded, there was no incentive to “cheat” or divvy up the work among friends. The process incentivizes learning over compliance and grades, and researchers found that 60-80 percent of students seized the opportunity – much better than typical compliance.

            But what about the 20-40 percent who opted out? They were probably the same students who, with mandatory graded homework, didn’t do it, cheated, or did it purely for grades and not for learning. Liljedahl, Giroux, and their colleagues were not content to let these students make bad decisions that were not in their best interests: “This is the nature of childhood,” they say. “It is the job of the adults in these children’s lives to not only encourage them to make better decisions, but to create situations where they are more likely to make better decisions.”

            Here’s how they modified the check-your-understanding process. Toward the end of a lesson, the teacher writes questions on the board at three levels of difficulty: Mild, Medium, and Spicy. Students are told: 

• These are your CYU questions. 
• You are going to sit down and do some of these. 
• Choose where you want to start. 
• Do your own. 
• Check your work with the students around you. 
• If you need help, get help. And if someone else needs help, give help. 

This structure - working on your own together – helped students feel safe about making mistakes. Telling students to decide where to start, the researchers found, was much more productive than asking students to choose which questions to tackle. When told to choose where to start, students answered more questions, and if they faltered, it was easy for the teacher to prompt them: “Okay, so where are you going next?”

            This structure also promoted a growth (versus a fixed) mindset in students. “Students with a fixed mindset,” say Liljedahl and Giroux, “view evaluation and assessment as a description of who they are, whereas students with a growth mindset view evaluation and assessment as a description of where they are. To promote a growth mindset, then, we need to make sure that activities such as self-assessment help students understand where they are instead of who they are.” Asking a student, “Where are you going next?” nudges them toward a growth mindset.

            Being able to choose Mild, Medium, and Spicy was also significant. Rubrics and performance scales often use terms like Novice, Master, and Expert, which describe students on their level of expertise – a who fixed mindset. Mild, Medium, and Spicy describe the tasks, not the students, and the colloquial language is non-evaluative and nonjudgmental. A year’s experimentation with this approach in more than 100 math classrooms from K to 12 showed huge impact on students’ desire to do the tasks. Researchers heard comments like: 

• I’m doing one mild, one medium, and then I’m going straight to spicy.
• Can we have another spicy one? 
• I think I’ll start with mild and see where I go from there.
• I got to medium. 

“They were engaged,” say Liljedahl and Giroux. “In fact, we have observed numerous lessons where students wanted to stay and keep working well after the bell to leave has gone.” Why? Three key elements:

• Choice – Students could decide where to start and how far to go.
• Mastery – Success created confidence and momentum to try something harder.
• Challenge – The ladder of difficulty got students into the zone of productive struggle. 

Productive struggle is “a state rather than a trait,” say the authors. “In order to enter this state, students need to have encountered challenge after success. Once this state is entered, however, it begins to feed on itself. With every success comes the desire to take on more challenge. And the greater the challenge, the greater the feeling of success. The students are enjoying feeling successful at things that are challenging and they want to keep it going – they want to go from mild to medium to spicy."

            For the great majority of students, this structure is very successful – but some students are paralyzed by the initial decision of where to start and need a nudge to get going. The teacher saying Why don’t you start with this mild one is usually enough to get them started, and then they pick up momentum. There are also students who were not paying attention during the lesson or whose skills are below the mild level, and they’ll need additional help and their own sub-mild questions (which are still called mild).

            A few students are at the other end of the spectrum – they think they’re ready to go straight to spicy, but they haven’t built confidence and mastery with the easier questions. These kids need to be coached to start with easier questions and stay in a state of productive struggle. And there are students who really are ready for the spicy level and can use an additional challenge. Liljedahl and Giroux advise against creating a fourth level (Extra Spicy, Habanero, Flaming Hot) because this leads other students not to venture past medium. For hard-charging, high-achieving students, they say, keep the three levels and put up additional spicy questions that will challenge them – but use the same label.

            During check-your-understanding time, a lot of the help comes from peers, but teachers still need to circulate, say Liljedahl and Giroux. It’s a great time “to work the room to see where students need the individual support, encouragement, and challenge necessary to complete the learning for the day. Along the way you will gather a ton of informal information about where individual students are in their learning that you can use to either inform your teaching or to inform your grading.”

            If students are allowed to look at each other’s work, won’t they just copy? That will happen, say the authors, if check-your-understanding work is treated like an exit ticket and collected and graded. A critical element of the CYU time is that it’s voluntary and ungraded; if it is, there’s very high participation and “cheating” shouldn’t happen.

            Should the mild/medium/spicy questions be printed out on paper? “No!” say Liljedahl and Giroux. “Doing so creates two major problems.” First, the check-your-understanding process becomes another worksheet, which triggers a predictable response from students: they treat it as something they’re accountable for rather than responsible for. Second, CYU questions need to be the teacher’s on-the-spot reflection of what actually happened during the lesson, not what they wanted to happen. If the CYU questions are put on paper and run off before the lesson begins, the mild/medium/spicy questions might be off target. What’s spicy today might be medium tomorrow.

            It is important, the authors add, that check-your-understanding questions are mostly done in class. Relying on CYU questions being done at home is a “losing proposition,” they say. “Some will do them. Some will not. Regardless, doing them at home means they are away from the guidance and encouragement that you can provide.” The great virtue of a high-involvement check-your-understanding time is that students are taking responsibility for their own learning and achieving mastery in an environment with lots of challenge, choice, and support.

            What if parents want regular homework? Liljedahl and Giroux suggest describing the CYU process to parents and explaining why it is so effective at getting children actually learning. If parents insist on homework, direct them to resources with work students can do for them (not the teacher). “Parents’ desire to have homework,” say the authors, “should not affect your professional judgment of what is best for your students.”

“How to Have Students Do Check-Your-Understanding Questions” by Peter Liljedahl and Meagan Giroux, Chapter 7 in Mathematics Tasks for the Thinking Classroom Grades K-5 (Jossey-Bass 2024); Liljedahl can be reached at liljedahl@sfu.ca. 

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1109 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Recommended Graphic Novels About History

            In Social Studies and the Young Learner, Jennifer Smith (Texas Christian University) and Marla Robertson (Utah State University) recommend using historical graphic novels (fiction and nonfiction) to supplement social studies content. They suggest drawing students’ attention to the front and back matter and the way authors use textual and visual features, including color, typography, images, thought balloons, sidebars, graphs, and charts. Smith and Robertson list these examples of graphic novels on historical topics: 

The American Revolution: 

• One Dead Spy by Nathan Hale, grade 3-8 
• Lafayette! by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8

The Civil War:

• Big Bad Ironclad! by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8
• The Underground Abductor by Nathan Hale, grade 3-8 

Exploration and Westward Expansion:

• Donner Dinner Party by Nathan Hale, grade 3-8
• Major Impossible: A Grand Canyon Tale by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8 

The Spanish Flu/The Flu of 1918:

• Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918 by Don Brown, grade 5-12
• Gemma and the Great Flu: A 1918 Flu Pandemic Graphic Novel by Juliet Gilbert, illustrated by Dan Freitas, grade 3-6 

World War I:

• Above the Trenches: A World War I Flying Ace Tale by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8
• Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood: A World War I Tale by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8 

World War II:

• Raid of No Return: A World War II Tale of the Doolittle Raid by Nathan Hale, gr. 5-8
• Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix, gr. 5-12 

The Holocaust:

• Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust by Loic Dauvillier, illustrated by Marc Lizano, grade 1-6
• Run and Hide: How Jewish Youth Escaped the Holocaust by Don Brown, grade 7-12 

U.S. Disasters/Tragedies:

• Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans by Don Brown, grade 5-12
• In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers: The Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, and Years After the 9/11 Attacks by Don Brown, grade 7-12 

Immigration and Refugees:

• The Unwanted Stories of Syrian Refugees by Don Brown, grade 9-12
• When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, grade 3-12 

“Historical Graphic Novels: Three Concepts to Highlight for Comprehension of Historical Information” by Jennifer Smith and Marla Robertson in Social Studies and the Young Learner, September/October 2025 (Vol. 38, #1, pp. 21-27); the authors can be reached at jennifer.m.smith@tcu.edu and marla.robertson@usu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1107 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.