Dock or Sail?

Ok, when I first started teaching, rigor… who? what? I was just trying to teach and keep my ship afloat, totally unaware that rigor was supposed to be part of the voyage. So, to keep things smooth, I stayed on the side of surface-level knowledge, which, of course, only got me surface-level thinking and surface-level work samples.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the surface. But you don’t serve well when you dock there for a while. In fact, you’re not sailing at all, your boat’s just sitting in the water.

Eventually, I decided to dive - yes, dive, right into deep thinking with some project-based tasks. And you guessed it… I drowned.  Overwhelmed and gasping for air. So I scaled back, tried some strategic thinking, then dove again… and yep, still drowned! LOL.

For a long while, my boat stayed anchored around DOK 1 (and sometimes 2 on a brave day). It wasn’t until someone showed me (not told me - but showed) what DOK 3 and 4 actually looked like that I started to swim instead of sink.

Here’s what I learned:

Surface is easy.

Strategic takes planning.

Deep means you have to choose wisely — and well.

But here’s the wild part… I once sat in a professional development on rigor that ironically felt like a DOK 1 session. I remember thinking, “How are we asking teachers to deliver DOK 3 and 4 instruction when the PD itself is barely hitting DOK 1?”

C’mon somebody.

If we want high-level teaching, we need high-level professional development. Because…

DOK 1 professional development = DOK 1 teaching = DOK 1 student learning.