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Superintendent’s
Message...
Say “Yes”
and then figure out how to make it work.
---Wayne Hunnicutt*
There are a lot of things we
agree on as educators. We agree that all children deserve a “high
quality education”. We agree that it must be “challenging
and rigorous”. The problem is agreeing what that looks like.
What does a “high quality” education look like? What
does rigor look like? Do we know what teachers and students do in
a more rigorous classroom? Do we know what kinds of student work
would be evidence of rigor?”
Here is a definition of rigor:
“Rigor is the goal of helping students to develop the capacity
to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and
personally or emotionally challenging.” (Strong, Silver, Perini,
2001) Does that help? Probably not. Tony Wagner says, “Rigor
in the classroom, is invariably tied to the larger questions of
what society will demand of students when they graduate, what it
means to be an educated adult, and how the skills needed for work,
citizenship, and continuous learning have changed fundamentally
in the last quarter-century.”
So here is what we know about
the skills and content areas that will be growing in importance
in the next five years. According to a survey, employers want employees
who can think critically; are knowledgeable with information technology;
have a sense of health and wellness; can collaborate; are innovative;
and take responsibility for their personal finances. So how does
that look in the classroom?
To meet the challenge of understanding
what rigor looks like in the classroom, (and let’s add relevance
and relationships into that mix too), will take a different approach
of how we do our work together and spend our time at meetings. We
need to use that time to assess the steps we are taking to advance
our vision and values in the day-to-day operation of our schools.
We need to examine the evidence we gather to assess our effectiveness
in reaching our results. Much more of our time and conversations
at every level must be in the classroom. We must see models of rigor.
We must have conversations about those models of rigor. We will
need to think through for ourselves what rigor is, rather than having
someone give us the answers.
Next year, starting with our
retreat in August, we will begin the third phase of our LD7 leadership
training. This is the “application” phase. Directors
and school administrators will spend more time walking through classrooms,
dissecting every class in terms of level of rigor, and calibrating
their assessments. Perhaps we will need to construct a rubric for
assessing rigor at all grade levels. Eventually, we will calibrate
our assessments to the point that there is a frequent level of agreement
about the level of rigor we observe in classrooms. As a result,
we will begin to have a common understanding and language of rigor
that we have constructed for ourselves. Then we can replicate this
process by having discussions of what constitutes rigor with our
own faculty members---and devise new ways of working with students
as well as each other.
I look forward to our collaboration
in the coming school year because I anticipate that it will bring
us closer to the problem that we are trying to solve. We have been
nibbling around the edges, but I think we are now ready to jump
in and apply all our experiences to the challenge of improving the
instructional core. That challenge is also our vision. We are committed
to ensuring that all children in LD7 receive a quality education
so that they learn the skills and develop abilities which will help
them function successfully on the job and in their daily decision-making.
Achieving that vision requires saying “yes” to developing
a shared understanding of rigor and figuring out how to make it
work in our classrooms.
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LD7
Parent Newsletter
