Gold medal-winning book reclaims a dreaded buzzword
In PK-12 education circles, it’s hard to find a word that has been more universally reviled than “rigor.” According to a 2023 Education Week survey of teachers, principals and district leaders, the term took the top spot on its list of least favorite buzzwords.
While he’s no rigor detractor, Professor James Marshall from the San Diego State University Department of Educational Leadership (EDL) appreciates the sentiment behind the vitriol.
“The lack of a consistent definition might be okay to a certain point,” Marshall explained. “But when rigor is used punitively — for example as an accountability tool for teachers and leaders — you find yourself being held accountable for something that lacks definition and that everyone sees differently. The result is frustration. And we know frustration typically results in no change in practice, and a return to doing it the way we always have.”
So what is rigor, really? That’s exactly what Marshall, and his EDL colleagues and co-authors Professor and Chair Douglas B. Fisher and Professor Nancy Frey attempted to answer in their book “RIGOR Unveiled: A Video-Enhanced Flipbook to Promote Teacher Expertise in Relationship Building, Instruction, Goals, Organization, and Relevance,” which was published last year.
The text was so well received that this summer, it received the Gold Medal in the Education category at the 2026 Independent Publisher Book (IPPY) Awards.
Rather than equating rigor with longstanding rigor-related myths like assigning more homework or making work more difficult, the book offers a framework that emphasizes practices such as building strong teacher-student relationships, making learning relevant, establishing clear goals and providing high-quality instruction. Rigor in teaching and learning, as defined by “RIGOR Unveiled,” means challenging students with high expectations, engaging them in deep and meaningful learning experiences and supporting them to achieve their full potential.
The book’s framework includes five components — relationships, instruction, goals, organization and relevance — each with five indicators. The framework was crowdsourced in interviews with teachers, education leaders and experts. It was then tested via observations in 84 classrooms, which found its use had a demonstrated relationship with academic growth in reading. The validation study was published in the Journal of School Administration Research and Development (JSARD).
Perhaps most importantly, the framework is meant to be a coaching tool, not a punitive one.
“When we created this framework, the number one thing we wanted to avoid was it being used evaluatively with teachers,” Marshall said. “This was never intended — and we specifically say this in the book — to be an accountability tool or a judgment tool. We believe any educator should be able to find things they're already doing in these 25 indicators. So the idea is to validate current practice that aligns with rigor while also discovering areas that they’ve never had time to think about and implement.”
If the book’s framework was meant to respect teachers, its unique design was intended to respect the time of busy educational leaders. Marshall notes this is the first book by the Corwin Publishing Group that is tabbed. It is also aligned horizontally, so it can be centered as a flipbook around which teacher teams collaborate and engage. Each indicator of rigor also has a corresponding QR code that links to one of over 150 video examples provided by the authors.
Marshall called the IPPY gold medal particularly validating, as he and his colleagues aspire to make research translate to practice.
“This book is an example of taking what we know about effective learning environments, focusing it and then translating it into something that’s highly accessible to practitioners,” Marshall said. “To know these ideas can and are influencing what goes on in classrooms to the benefit of teachers’ and students’ success in school — that's what we're all in it for.”
