As you, my fellow teachers know, rigor is a relatively new buzzword in education.  Teachers have of course been trying to make their classes more rigorous for a long time – and while the concept is certainly not new, the focus on this most nebulous of terms is.

To most of us, if someone says a class is rigorous, we automatically think “hard”, and most likely “fast-paced”.  I would have to say that many of the general education classes I have been in and observed at the well-known public school where I teach are indeed rigorous by this definition.  Students are introduced to concepts and given time to practice, work, debate, and discuss.  Similar ideas and corollary concepts are presented without pause soon after, without a whole lot of process time or review of the previous day’s material.  If that’s not enough, homework, papers or projects are simultaneously assigned, just to make sure all the information is crammed in before the test.  It’s all very stressful and I honestly have no idea how students thrive…but somehow they do.

Special Education has long been left out of the debate on rigor, probably because even approaching the subject in any meaningful way sparks debate that frankly nobody wants to touch with a ten-foot pole.  This sounds like a humongous cop-out, but finding the time to discuss the definition of rigor, what it looks like, and what specifically the term entails within a special education classroom does not exist within the confines of a typical school day.

Whether we want to or not, the subject needs to be discussed.  If our special education students are to be afforded the same opportunities as their general education peers, then some level of rigor needs to exist in every class.  Issues of equity arise when we do not sufficiently incorporate appropriate academic rigor in order for our students to be able to handle the challenges of entering a workforce that is vastly different from the one us forty and fifty-somethings entered years ago.

While this is a bit of an oversimplification, when special educators say their courses are rigorous, what they mean is that they try and mirror the general education curriculum as much as possible.  This complicates our job and makes many elements of what should be a valuable and well-thought out curriculum inaccessible.  The curriculum was never meant to be the same for students who need to be pulled out for academic reasons.  Otherwise every class would be an inclusion situation, and not every child within special education is able to handle such courses.  For those of us with separate classes, our job is to narrow the curriculum to the essential, non-negotiable skills we feel every child must know in order to achieve proficiency in a certain content areas, and to incorporate the requisite rigor so that students are prepared for the demands of the “real world”.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, author Tony Wagner advocates for a new definition of rigor, one that incorporates the essential skills for students to be able to succeed in a challenging, complex, ever-changing economy.  I’m glad that he further defines these ideas, titled the Seven Survival Skills, as transferable to the collegiate world and both the blue- and white-collar workforce.  These are the skills that we need to incorporate in our classrooms daily.

And why not? It’s already given that we can’t keep up with the lightning pace of the general education classroom.  It’s already given that we can’t cover the same content in the same way as the general education curriculum.  So why not do something that will actually benefit our students?  To be more clear, instead of saying that we “can’t” cover this, or “can’t” do that, we need to say “shouldn’t”.  It is unwise and surely a disservice to our unique population to do exactly what the general education classrooms do.

Without going into a ton of detail, the Seven Survival Skills are as follows: Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving, Collaboration across Networks and Leading by Influence, Agility and Adaptability, Initiative and Entrepreneurialism, Effective Oral and Written Communication, Accessing and Analyzing Information, and Curiosity and Imagination.  A closer investigation of these skills and how they could be honed to be used with in a special education classroom could be the focus of future posts, but if you want further detail at this point you’ll need to read the book.

As much as I tried to read the book objectively, the special educator in me reacted strongly at several points throughout the book.  In the section discussing teacher and administrative training programs, I felt totally debased.  How dare he say that all my training and everything I have done up to this point has done little to nothing to help my students meet the demands of the workforce!  This guy whose experience has primarily been in educating and administering in affluent, lily-white schools.  What does he know about the students I teach – the underserved, the under-educated, the (largely) forgotten?

Sorry, but that’s how I felt.

Further reflection allowed me to see Mr. Wagner’s point more clearly.  The blame for American students being so woefully behind does not rest solely on teachers.  We are working hard, doing our best everyday given the tools we have learned, either in our teacher-training programs or on the job, painfully aware that our students are slipping in comparison to the rest of the world but unaware how to change it.  So we march on, doing much the same thing year in and year out, but trying harder than ever to add a bit more to the curriculum, and cover more ground.  The blame does not rest solely on administrators either, who are doing everything they can as well, and genuinely have the students’ best interests at heart.  If all this is true then I still think we are part of the problem, despite Mr. Wagner’s efforts to keep us largely off the hook.  If the majority of the blame lies with an entrenched, outdated, unwilling-to-change public school system, then teachers, administrators, and unions are  major players in why things are so bad.  We need to be the agents of change, rather than wait for some politician with little to no direct contact with the daily life of a teacher to tell us what to do.

The Common Core gets us there, I think.  If you analyze the curriculum items at any level within the Common Core, and check out some of the performance activities and tasks that correlate with such items, then you begin to see the correlation with the Seven Survival Skills.  It is getting us there, but in my mind is still overloaded with “stuff to be covered”.  If we can get beyond teaching to a standardized test, then we can start to minimize the curricular items and really begin to cross reference with the skills actually needed to engage in the modern world.

Finally, back to Special Education and what scares me about this whole thing.  I worry that our students have not been exposed to any form of academic rigor in most (but not all) of their classes.  I worry that suddenly being asked to think critically, problem-solve effectively, communicate wisely, and analyze information – in addition to learning content  – is going to be too much.  I worry that despite laws designed to protect our students and in the face of documentation that is supposed to provide special education kids with every educational opportunity, the cycle of academic disappointment and low expectations across the board will continue.  Increased expectations and actual academic rigor may further disenfranchise our population even more than they are currently, and I worry that we will lose them.

We can change this.  Even us, the much-maligned, badly educated educators.  We can do  things in our classes everyday that will help our students be better prepared for the new world of work, and maybe even help them prepare for a life of constant learning.  Perhaps this starts with knowing what they are passionate about, or perhaps it starts with teaching them to ask good questions.  I have some ideas, but am no means an expert – as should be abundantly clear from reading any of my blog posts.  We’ll see what happens in 2016.