What is academic rigor? Why are the 2 words put together? Academic as defined by Encarta has to do with the scholarly and intellectual. Rigor is severity or harshness: unrelenting strictness or toughness in dealing with people or things and an unwillingness to make allowances. So what does it mean when you put the 2 together? Why would we want to put severity on being scholarly? Who would be motivated to learn something where there was inflexibility in how it is done. And who would decide how this is done – to me? To our students? I had lots of questions after our recent MS Faculty meeting on areas we would like to improve at our school.
I am torn by the dialog around academic rigor when it comes to the Middle School Philosophy. I really would like to see students who are rigorously engaged in their own life learning. What I think is a better definition would be academic vigor. But how would we do this? We must take into account the adolescent learner. I found lots of summarization about this topic from http://ceep.crc.uiuc.edu/poptopics/middle.html.
Developmental needs of young adolescents
Reed and Rossi (2000) conducted survey research with 321 rural (n = 101), urban (n = 119), and suburban (n = 101) sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders in an attempt to identify their developmental needs and wishes. These researchers reported their results and organized them into three categories. The first category was the “search for personal identity,” which included wishes such as wealth, fame, material goods, popularity, concern about conflicts in social relationships, wishing people would be nicer to each other, and better family relationships. The second category was “life in school,” with high academic achievement being the most common wish. Students wished that they earned all A’s. Students also expressed a desire to be a part of sports teams, and urban children generally wished for better resources during after-school time. The final category was related to “life and health” (not dying, staying healthy) and real-life societal and global issues such as world peace.
Reed and Rossi (2000) suggest that service learning is one way to integrate some of these early adolescent wishes into the curriculum. They also suggest that teachers create themes and integrated curriculum that emphasize conflict resolution, justice, identity, and violence prevention. They suggest that because many middle school students express concern about homelessness and violence, for example, conflict resolution training could be incorporated into service learning activities designed around service to homeless children and their families. Also advisor-advisee sessions (small groups of students meeting with one teacher throughout the year and discussing issues of personal concern, engaging in team-building activities, etc.) can provide a setting for implementing activities related to these concerns.
This web site presented more information on academic rigor and the middle school student:
According to the National Middle School Association (1995), effective middle schools curriculum should be exploratory, integrative, and challenging. Belair and Freeman (2000) state that “early adolescents succeed more and learn best when they are required to be practitioners of knowledge rather than just receivers of knowledge” (p. 5). The challenge to those who believe in the middle school movement is to prove that academic rigor and responsiveness to the developmental needs of middle school students are not mutually exclusive.
In another position paper, Anfara and Waks (2001) discuss middle school curriculum philosophy and the contrast between academic rigor and developmentally appropriate practice for young adolescents. They state that middle school students need experiences that allow them to apply knowledge. They also suggest that information should be presented in a way that stresses the relationships between subjects. They believe middle school students need to see the applicability of knowledge to their own lives. Presenting knowledge for its own sake as a short-term goal does not work with middle school students because (1) this approach offers little context to students, (2) the material has little motivational power, and (3) difficult curricular content must be watered down to be comprehensible, robbing it further of its usefulness.
Anfara and Waks (2001) conclude that a subject-oriented middle school is not appropriate. In their view, emphasizing academic rigor makes middle schools into watered down junior high schools, which were not successful models in their view. As mentioned in the research section below, these researchers believe that middle school research that does not lead to convincing results with regard to academic achievement is flawed, perhaps because the actual middle school model is rarely implemented correctly. They argue that developmentally appropriate academics can be rigorous and measured without relying on achievement tests grounded in isolated academic disciplines. They want educators to stop the pendulum from swinging back to subject-focused middle schools and junior high schools from the current middle school interdisciplinary curricular approach.
Finally, in a paper that describes one school district’s effort at middle school curriculum reform, Thompson (2000) concludes that the public and some educators misunderstand the standards movement. She feels that critics of the middle school philosophy conclude that because project-based integrative learning does not look like traditional (didactic) teaching, it must not be rigorous. In Thompson’s view, critics of middle schools appear to want to see more lecture-based learning (e.g., would prefer to see students learning about buoyancy from a textbook and lecture-and-discussion format rather than through a demonstration done in a swimming pool or other body of water). An important current challenge for middle schools is to align curriculum in ways that are integrative, exploratory, and engaging, while simultaneously helping students score well on standardized tests (Thompson, 2000).
I believe it is also important to be passionate about learning ourselves as teachers and model this. Students should see our love of learning all the time, that we should be a over zealous about it. I think we also need to remember our mission statement - a place where kids are pursuing their dreams and enhancing the lives of others. Look at our mission awards and think about how easy it was to place kids in the Academic area of our awards. What should we really be trying to improve as a Middle School?
personally experienced. They bring new faculty in and put them in a hotel while they work on finding the perfect place that will be their new home and learn about the new place they will live. They really meet your first needs of Maslow’s Heirarchy. Then after 10 days of addressing our basic needs we spent a week at school - learning about the systems, technology training, meeting important people, getting into our classrooms, ect. Next week we meet all the returning teachers and work on the learning processes our students will be involved in. And school starts a week after that. Wow - we will be ready for our students and able to meet their basic needs! Thanks, SAS!
