Rigor vs. Rigid

     A few years ago a fellow instructor commented to me that I was "not rigorous enough in my classroom".  When I asked him to explain this comment further, he responded that my flexibility in the classroom was making the other faculty on campus look ‘bad’.  It is true that I allow late work and am willing to work with students on deadlines. And I agree that this flexibility may cause other “less flexible” instructors to look less appealing (when the student had a choice between professors), but how does that apply to rigor in education?  Does flexibility impact the level of academic rigor experienced by students? Have we used the term rigor less in the role of academic excellence and more in the traditional definition of "rigidness"?

     I understand greatly the need for deadlines and schedules.  I teach business courses and have several years of business management experience, so boy do I know deadlines.  I just don't understand how the concept of academic rigor applies to these hard lines of full credit verses no credit for work being done based on a predefined schedule set by relentless educators.  Lets take a look at the formal definition of academic rigor, which is different that the dictionary version (the definition my colleague was using earlier), but more along the lines of academic excellence.
   Strong, Silver and Perini (2001) defined rigor as "the goal of helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging".  I love the "develop the capacity" portion of that definition - it truly defines what our role should be as educators.   Other definitions of academic rigor are more focused: meeting course objectives, excellence in instruction, ability to apply knowledge gained...  These definitions are all appropriate for that excellence, that quality in the classroom educators should be seeking.  None of these academic definitions use the words deadline, inflexible, hard, harsh, etc.
     I realize that rigor has become the new buzz word in academics – Obama has been quoted saying that we need to expect more from our students and provide “complete and competitive” education (Obama, 2009).  The no child left behind also pushed the need for more competent students and academic programs.  I can align, however, with Nilson on her feelings of instructional inadequacies when she first became a faculty member, as described in her book “To Improve the Academy” (Nilson, 2010).  When I first became an adjunct faculty member I had delusions of all my students learning every topic I taught and images of them hanging on every word as I spoke.  I learned quickly the truth in education - I had to challenge students and engage them to develop application techniques.  I had to step out of my box and be willing to relate to students and their needs.  It was not enough to follow traditional lecture models, but if I wanted them to learn, I had to stretch my own abilities as an instructor and look beyond the traditional – all in the search of this academic ‘rigor’.

     As I grew in my instructional abilities, I found that students had been abused.  Maybe abused is a strong word, but they have had some pretty bad images set upon them.  In some cases these images are warranted, but not in most. They were treated less like academic adult learners, and because of a few bad examples over the years, had all been categorized into youngsters that did not want to learn and were only looking for a grade.  There became this separation between student and faculty or student and researcher.  We had lost our abilities as educators to motivate and encourage participation in learning. A friend of mine stated it very well to me once: "I get one year older each new academic year, and they stay the same age".  This distance in age, and ability to relate, continues to divide our interests and ability to trust.  As one educator recently stated in a group of her peers "why do I need to adjust my teaching to meet my student's expectations?  they need to adjust their learning style to the way I teach".  What if we took that approach to everything we do?  We no longer consider each other's needs, but rather expect others to succumb to our ways of doing things, because 'we' are always right?
     In my experience, I have found that a little trust and reaching out to relate goes a long way with students. For example, I allow student's to challenge me on graded test answers.  As we are reviewing assessment results, if they can effectively state a case as to why their incorrect answer is correct, I give them points back.  But I do it in a way that is open and trusting.  I then send around a sheet of paper asking anyone who missed that question to write their name down and I will return the points to them.  This exercise helps improve academic rigor on several levels:  1) it helps build trust in the classroom, 2) it provides me with an opportunity to review the objectives of the assessed unit one more time, and 3) what best way for students to learn than to 'teach' me?  When they challenge an answer they have to be ready to 'teach' me why their answer is correct.  In many cases, I have students writing notes in the margins of the exams, pre-explaining why they selected one answer over another - just in case they get it wrong.   Some of you are wondering how many students 'lie' on the sheet of paper that I send around, and get additional points when they are not warranted.  Personally, I do not care if one or two students earn an extra point or two this way - as it is not worth the time to me to have all the students return their exams back to me so I can go through each one to ensure that only the students who had the question wrong get the points back -- I call this chasing nickles with dollars.  The reward here is not an additional point or two, but the ability for students to challenge me and learn.  That what this education thing is all about.
     But, out of curiosity, I did recently test my theory that students would be more honest than not with this method.  After the last exam, I predetermined that I was going to give points back for a particular question, which had been worded strangely so several students had misunderstood the correct answer.  I wrote down all the students names who did not get a question correct prior to going into the classroom.  We went through the review as normal and they did challenge me on the question I had predetermined as a point back question.  I agreed with their case and asked everyone who had that question wrong to write their name on the paper going around.  The students had also successfully challenged me on one other question on the exam, so some students were earning 2 points back.  After class, I reviewed the list I had against the student's list and had only one student who had asked for an additional point that he should not have received back.  In a class of 55, 37 of the students were to earn the point back because they answered incorrectly, 38 students had written their name down on the paper to get the point back.   Interestingly enough, the student who added the extra point, stopped by my office later that week (after I had updated their grades online) and said that he made a mistake and he should not have been given the extra point.
      I was satisfied that the trust we were building was improving their ability to be open and collaborate in the classroom.  This increased collaboration was building their ability to learn effectively,  I was reaching out to them, letting them learn on their level.  I am also very open to allowing late work when they notify me they they will be out. As a business manager and leader I found that if you give employees flexibility in the workplace (hours, work from home, etc) they become more loyal and motivated to perform.  The same is true in education.  There are several articles available that refer to this as the "changing education paradigm". Online learning, active learning, collaborative learning, all have had entrances into the education arena recently.  These new approaches allow us to employ flexibility - to help the students by meeting their needs - while still ensuring academic rigor.  I relate this to the Hawthorne studies done around 1895.  These studies done by Mayo concluded that involvement by employees increased motivation and performance.  Leadership in organizations have used this model to transition from the scientific and bureaucratic leadership techniques to one that is more participatory - Human Relations focused.  We still use these methods in organizations today to motivate and lead employees.  The active/involved learning models have been able to demonstrate increased retention of materials and improved thinking skills ( Chickering & Gamson, McKeachie, Prince).  Although in most cases measuring such things is challenging and the results reported are small, in every case there was improved student attitudes about the class and objectives.
    I have employed these techniques in my classrooms and have identified increased participation and attendance.  Both of these factors helped improve performance overall.  Rather than focusing on the hard lines of schedules and due dates -- my students will get enough of that when they get into the 'real world' -- I focus on education as an area of open collaboration, learning groups, accountability to knowledge, excellence, flexibility and yes - academic rigor.