The 21st century has ushered in new tools, new technology, and rapidly expanding information.  Never before have we been living in the center of such a large tornado of information to learn and to share.  We in the educational community are charged with teaching students who will continue to live with the indefinite.  Not only do we have to be teachers of others but we have to be teachers of ourselves.  No wonder we are uncomfortable and overwhelmed at times!  It is my hope that these pages and posts become a place of wondering and learning for all of us.

One of the concepts getting much attention at the moment is rigor.  Your recent discussion of this term brought out many of the defining characteristics of rigor.  Some of them are: student-directed, engaging, open-ended questioning, persevering, interdisciplinary, collaborative and cooperative, exploring.

Rigor is all this and more.  One of the formal definitions I found is ‘Rigor means that students are challenged to understand and work with difficult concepts. They are challenged to make their own discoveries and expand their understanding about how the world works.’ (Andrew, 2008)

Over time  we are going to delve more deeply into these and other characteristics of rigor.  The ‘nuggets of learning’ that you and I leave behind will be like so many breadcrumbs that will lead us through the forest of rigor and help us and ALL of our students achieve more than we ever thought possible.