Redefining Rigor at The Harbour School

  • 2024
  • High School
Dr. Jadis Blurton, Head Of School

Go to school to teach as well as to learn, and never let your schooling interfere with your education. 
- Marcus Raskin

The child does not work in order to move or in order to become intelligent. He works to adapt to his environment. It is essential that he has many experiences in the environment if he is to do this.
- Maria Montessori

The one of The Harbour School’s five values that I find myself most often explaining is Redefining Rigor. The other four seem easily understood: we value the learning experience itself, we try to focus on the individual, we are community oriented and we focus on lifeworthy learning. But what does it mean to redefine rigor? What measures do we discard, and what measures do we add, to evaluate the rigor of a learning experience?

When we watch a two-year old or three-year old navigate their life, what is striking is that they are constantly exploring and constantly challenging themselves - sometimes much to the chagrin of their anxious parents as they climb, taste, touch and question. When dealing with preschoolers we expect these things, but we often abandon these expectations after kids enter school. We expect older students to stop exploring and questioning and teach them instead to pay attention to the limited scope of our demands. In the past, I have taught Kindergarten and I have taught university. The students in Kindergarten questioned everything and tried anything. The most intellectually challenging job in the world is that of a Kindergarten teacher. In contrast, the most common question from university students was, “Will this be on the test?”

This is not a natural result of development. Nobody has more questions about life than a Middle Schooler. Nobody is more interested in exploration than a teenager. Nobody is more desirous of learning new skills than a Primary School student. And even my university students who wanted to know what was on the test had hobbies that involved many hours of rapturous learning. But after many years of formal schooling, most had learned to divorce real (and compelling) learning from what they were supposed to do in school. So when we talk about “redefining rigor,” we hope to return our students to their preschool motivations.

To do this, we need to develop a new set of rigorous classroom expectations that is evaluated in terms of the intellectual, personal, academic and creative challenge of any experience. We want students to be asking “why” or “how,” even if - and maybe especially if - we don’t know the answers. We may have a set of content goals in mind (the answer to the “what’s going to be on the test?” question), but we also know that those goals are subordinate to the more important interests, revelations and serendipitous occurrences of the learning experiences. We have to be open to the notion that the priorities may change and understand that those changes will lead to much greater, more rigorous and more enduring learning. The answers to those test questions are quickly forgotten, but the experience of raising baby horseshoe crabs may provide background understanding and information for a lifetime.

It is true that we expect a lot in terms of rigor. We hope to drive the best possible expression of each person and of each team. Our school plays are near professional level, from the students’ performances themselves to the student team managing the lights and sound.

Our Renaissance Faire is epic, as is our Halloween competition between teachers and our Faculty Lipsync at the end of each year.

Our High School’s ISM Symposium and our Fifth Grade Global Issues Conference rival any professional conferences, and our Primary School’s Projects of Passion are fascinating expressions of students’ own interests: varied, complex, developed and well-crafted.

We make seaweed farms, create wind turbines, make things from shredded recycled plastic and study unusual things like sustainable aquaculture by actually working with sustainable aquaculture.

It’s not that we don’t think tests are useful (our Advanced Placement test scores last year were well above average both in Hong Kong and globally), but we don’t think tests are the best or only measure of learning and cannot possibly reflect the breadth or depth of a person’s understanding.

In today’s world, it is no longer possible for a teacher to know everything. And it is not useful for a teacher (or a parent) to pretend to know everything. As the mother of 17-year old Dr. Dorothy Tillman explained, “Early on, what was important was allowing her to lead and teach me things, even if I knew them already.” That strategy of following her daughter’s lead is what led to Dorothy receiving her Ph.D. at such a young age. The fact is that it is very likely that kids’ interests will take us into areas that we don’t know, and then our job is not to inform or explain, but to mentor and explore. Teaching has to be multi-directional as students can teach teachers and each other and they can learn from peers, online information, books or adult mentors. We no longer have information flow from the front of the room to the back and then ask for it to be regurgitated in the opposite direction. 

So if people ask what we mean by “redefining rigor,” explain that we expect all of our students and faculty and parents to rise to the level of preschoolers. If we actually achieved that, we would all be learning and achieving at an incredibly impressive pace.

Welcome to the 24Y25 school year! 
 


        

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