LTEL Essential Component:
Rigor

Rigor

Long Term English Learners face both linguistic and academic challenges to engaging with grade-level standards, and by secondary school, they have few remaining years to recoup gaps that have accured over time. It is a pervastive temptation of intervention classes to slow down or water down content, yet what Long Term English Learners need the most is an accelerated, rigorous approach that overcomes gaps. Teachers of Long Term English Learners courses warn against over-scaffolding, and they hold themselves to the expectation of rigor. Students, who for years have been allowed to sit back and barely engage, have to be encouraged. Teachers must insist that the students do the heavy lifting of critical thinking, learning new skills, and pushing through their comfort zone -- with support, encouragement, and the solid belief that they can do the work. Teachers pose high-quality questions that require students to evaluate, make connections, and think outside the box. Curriculum planning, therefore, focuses on rigor and critical thinking. For example, the Sweetwater Union High School district uses a rhetorical focus in instruction, pushing students to examine and question authors' purposes and context. Other districts uses a Socratic Seminar approach. Many use graphic organizers and thinking maps as ways to discipline and guide more conceptual thinking, speaking and writing.