What Makes Learning Rigorous?

Many homeschooling families wonder if their child's learning is rigorous enough.

But what does that mean?

Is it just giving them more and ever-harder work? Or expecting them to handle additional classes on top of the ones they already have? How about asking them to figure out new concepts all by themselves, without guidance or support? Not really.

Rigor is not about overwhelming our children with loads of work, doling out inflexible assignments, or holding them to unrealistic expectations.

When we talk about making learning rigorous, we're talking about a particular alignment of content and quality that challenges our children intellectually and keeps them engaged with their learning by allowing them to deepen their understanding and apply what they’ve learned.

Where this alignment is found is highly dependent on the individual child's needs, current knowledge, interests, and stage of development. As with most things in homeschool, a rigorous education will look different for every family. But there are some common characterstics or rigor that families can keep in mind.

Critical, Complex Thinking

One key element of rigorous learning is critical, complex thinking. This means that children are not just rote memorizing facts or information, but they're analyzing that information, they're comparing and contrasting ideas, and they're learning to draw their own conclusions.

For example, instead of just reading a book and completing a worksheet of questions about what was read, a complex thinking assignment might instead ask for the child to put themselves into the shoes of a story's antagonist and try to defend the decisions they made.

Depth of Understanding

With a rigorous education, parents move beyond the basic concepts and surface levels of learning. Encouraging and supporting your child through deeper dives into subjects helps build their ability to analyze, reflect and build connections.

This could look like breaking concepts into their parts and patterns, comparing and contrasting ideas from multiple sources, dissecting more advanced texts, or carefully crafting and managing their own learning projects.

Meaningful Engagement

Before your child can learn at deeper levels, they need to be able to engage with the material. A child who can "do the work" but doesn't really care about it or understand it's impact, is usually not a child that is benefitting from rigor in their learning.

Think: that child who can pass all the tests but then quickly forgets what they studied or cannot connect the ideas they learned to new situations. They did what they needed to get by, but they didn't absorb it or build a connection to it.

A child engages with a subject when they make meaningful connections to it, whether on a personal level, community, or global one. This helps them move from surface level understandings to deeper thinking and creativity with the ideas that they've absorbed. Real-world examples and problems are great for helping with this.

Will your child connect at the same level to every subject or topic they ever study? Probably not. But they can begin with an area of strong interest, learn the foundations, and then dive deeper from there.

Keep reading here to learn about signs that your child may need more rigor in their learning.