Looking to Increase the Level of Rigor? Start With Relevance

A few weeks ago, I read a post on social media diminishing the role of relevance in learning. Essentially, the original poster—who is a teacher—was saying that when you focus on making sure the material feels relevant to students, you lose rigor. I have found the contrary to be true. I use relevance to cultivate curiosity and interest so we can then dive deeply into the material. In other words, relevance opens the door and ushers student thought into the realm of rigor. Here’s how that plays out in my classroom.

Start at the end

I’m having fun this year. In addition to my role as a curriculum supervisor, I’m teaching a college prep elective course about education to a group of 11th graders. For me, starting at the end means that by the end of the unit, I expect every student in my class to be able to create and explain a diagram of the interdependent relationship between the achievement gap, the discipline gap, and mass incarceration. In essence, my students are wrapping their minds around the process known as the school-to-prison pipeline—they just don’t know it yet. This is a challenging goal for college-level students, let alone 11th graders. The first step is to make such a rigorous assignment relevant to their lives.

Find the relevance

Every time I reflect on the question, “How do I motivate my kids to embrace this complex and challenging learning?” the answer is the same: “Step into the world where your students live. Relate to the kids so the kids can relate to the material.” I need to create tethers from the world of the content into the world of my kids. In this case, I see two clear links between the class material and my students:

1. Students are a part of the education ecosystem where at least two out of three of these disparities—the achievement gap and the discipline gap—simmer.
2. Students have a variety of relationships with families, friends, teachers, coworkers. At the high school level, relationships are important and intense.
3. Find a universal theme in the content. In this case, the focus is on relationships.

You can just as easily do this for any English language arts or social studies lesson at the middle or high school level by finding a universal theme in the content. Whether it’s love or conflict or power and corruption or justice and revenge or individual rights versus responsibility to community, grasp your theme tightly and take it with you into the world of your students.

help students connect relevance and rigor

This is my favorite part of the process: attaching the tethers from the world of content to the world of students with a sturdy, relevant hook that will hold up when rigor begins to tug. We begin every class with a writing prompt. Here’s my warm-up: “Think about your personal relationships—with family, friends, coworkers, or others in your life. Do your interactions with people shape your relationships, or do your relationships shape your interactions? Explain your reasoning and include an example from your own experience.”

After the students write for five minutes, a turn-and-talk fills the room with everything I want to hear:

• “Relationships shape interactions…”
• “No, interactions shape relationships…”
• “No, I think it’s both…”

I live for these moments. Listening to their conversation means that I have the buy-in I need. Now I can briefly tap some students to share out, so I can connect student examples of relationships and interactions to the bigger idea of how systems interact with one another.

Moving from concrete to abstract

Next, we work together as a whole class on a cause-and-effect activity designed to scaffold students from concrete personal relationships to the abstract relationships between systems and processes.

The activity starts with a scenario. First, I present them with the prompt, “A student is bored and a bit lost in math class,” and we work through it as a class. Later, they work in groups on this scenario: “A teacher interprets a student’s tone as disrespectful and defiant.”

Students work together to answer the question, “What happens next in this scenario?” One chain of events targets what should happen to get to a positive outcome. The other focuses on what could happen to lead to a negative outcome. Students puppeteer hypothetical life outcomes for an imaginary student. One group’s negative scenario results in the imaginary student dropping out of school. Another group dooms him to expulsion. One group foresees a future of crime and prison for the student. For some reason, every group uses the pronoun he/him when discussing the unfortunate outcomes of this fictitious kid.

After we come back together as a class to discuss, I task students with identifying (1) the relationships present at each stage of the positive chain and (2) the disparity most closely associated with each stage of the negative chain.

Initially, the most common response is the relationships between student and teacher. I push the students to think about other relationships that could influence how the teacher or the student responds. Parent relationships immediately surface. Some students point out that the relationship between the teacher and a principal or administrator could also affect each outcome.

The two most common disparities mentioned by every group are the achievement gap and the discipline gap. Students make clear connections about how disciplinary action that takes a student away from class impacts achievement. Some connect this scenario with evaluations about the role of bias and not understanding students in each disparity. Only one of the groups has connected this scenario with mass incarceration. Class—and the beautiful generation and movement of student thought—ensues right up to the bell.

The lesson that follows begins with a warm-up prompt about interdependence. The kids use their cause-and-effect models as a reference to draft an explanation and diagram of the relationship between the achievement gap, the discipline gap, and mass incarceration. Students receive feedback, revise, and then compare their ideas to existing models of the school-to-prison pipeline.

For middle and high school teachers, the question must become, “How do I motivate my kids to embrace learning?” This question is critical, because we no longer live in a society where children are expected to simply be seen and not heard. Students in the 21st century do not simply embrace learning because they are sitting in a classroom. Rigor without relevance is boring at best. The relevance creates the connections necessary for students to embrace more rigor.