Student motivation is challenging. There are so many factors contributing to a student’s level of engagement and motivation that are outside of our control: how much sleep they had the night before, whether or not they ate breakfast, their home and community life, and a host of other factors.
That’s why, as educators, it’s important to us to focus on the motivational factors that we can influence. The quality and complexity of our academic tasks are one research-backed way to increase student motivation and investment.
Here’s the truth: When students feel both intellectually challenged and supported, they are more likely to engage in academic tasks.
In this blog post, we will explore the research behind high expectations and student engagement, along with practical strategies you can implement in your classroom today!
If you missed the first blog in our Literacy That Matters series, “Making Reading Relevant: Why Students Need to See Themselves in What They Read,” check it out here.
Rethinking Rigor
When students struggle or disengage, it’s easy to assume the work is simply too hard and that lowering expectations will increase participation. Though this belief is common, research tells a more complicated story.
In recent years, rigor has become one of the most frequently used and misunderstood terms in education. In many cases, it’s been oversimplified to mean things like longer texts, harder vocabulary, and more complex questions. This understanding of rigor lacks purpose, intention, and alignment.
Difficulty alone is not rigor. On the contrary, making tasks unnecessarily difficult, especially without the necessary support or clarity of purpose, can push students away rather than invite them in.
True academic rigor needs to combine content and instruction.
Rigorous content is grade-level, intellectually challenging, and thoughtfully aligned to standards. It asks students to grapple with complex ideas, rich texts, and meaningful questions that deepen their knowledge. But rigorous instruction is what makes that content accessible for all students. It includes intentional scaffolds, structures, and opportunities for practice that give students the tools and the confidence to engage in challenging tasks.
When we understand rigor as an approach to both content and instruction, we can create the conditions for academically stimulating and engaging experiences for every student.
Research on Rigor
The evidence behind teaching with high expectations and high support illustrates just how important and transformative this approach is for students.
Let’s break down exactly what some of the research says:
- Appropriately challenging academic tasks are shown to increase students’ intrinsic motivation and engagement. (1)
- Decreasing academic expectations decreases student achievement. (2)
- Teaching complex texts with appropriate support increases students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary, and conceptual knowledge. (3)
We know that teaching in ways that challenge and support students is effective, but what does it look like?
What is High-Support, High-Rigor Instruction in Literacy Classrooms?
Rigor shouldn’t be understood as an add-on to curriculum; instead, rigor should be integrated into how we design our learning experiences: from the texts we select to the tasks we facilitate.
Luckily, this doesn’t require that we overhaul our entire teaching practices; instead, with some intentional shifts in our content and instruction, we can have all students consistently engaging in academically-rich activities.
Here are four actionable and evidence-based strategies that you can implement to make your literacy classrooms intellectually challenging, engaging, and supportive.
Strategy #1: Scaffold the Experience, Not the Text
When we scaffold our students’ reading of a text, rather than the text itself, we give students the support they need to tackle complex texts.
What does scaffolding students’ reading experiences look like?
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- Pre-reading knowledge building: Provide supplementary reading, videos, and/or discussions that equip students with knowledge that will support their reading of a complex text.
- Pre-reading knowledge building: Provide supplementary reading, videos, and/or discussions that equip students with knowledge that will support their reading of a complex text.
- Vocabulary support: Identify the words or phrases that will be unfamiliar to students and define them before reading.
- Chunking texts: Rather than sending students off to read an entire text independently, start by reading a section together and discussing, then inviting students to read another section in a small group. By breaking a text into small pieces and varying their reading experience, students avoid becoming overwhelmed and shutting down.
- Model thinking: Use think-alouds, annotated mentor texts, and examples of writing drafts to model academic processes that students will need to work through complex texts and activities.
Integrating these strategies consistently ensures that students have the tools, support, and confidence to access grade-level, appropriately-complex texts.
Strategy #2: Normalize Struggle
Our high-stakes education culture has reinforced a message that struggle equals failure, that the quality of our work is tied to our worth. These pressures can be incredibly stressful for students and prevent them from taking academic risks. On the other hand, embracing mistakes as learning opportunities can improve teacher-student relationships and increase student motivation. (4)
We can combat this pressure with two basic practices:
- Emphasize feedback over grades: When every task is graded and evaluated, students can feel overwhelmed by the constant need to “get it right.” Instead, when we assign tasks with the purpose of simply giving students feedback, we invite students to take risks, make attempts, and learn from the process.
- Shift classroom culture: Our words have tremendous power. If we can explicitly communicate to students that struggle is an inherent part of learning and that growth is more important than perfection, we can shift how students approach their work. Of course, words need to be backed by action. By giving students opportunities to revise their thinking and revisit a task after they’ve developed a new approach, we also show students what these values look like in practice.
Strategy #3: Vary Tasks
How students are tasked to engage with complex tasks is an often overlooked component of rigor. When students are encountering challenging material in the same way every time (e.g. reading independently and answering analysis questions), they quickly become disengaged. This isn’t necessarily because the material is too difficult, but because the task is too redundant.
Rigorous instruction requires us to intentionally vary how students are interacting with texts. This doesn’t lower academic expectations; instead, it supports students’ ability and motivation to meet them.
Here are some examples of how to vary academic tasks while maintaining high expectations:
- Build in collaborative thinking: Small-group discussions, partner work, and structured discussion protocols allow students to verbalize ideas, hear different perspectives, and refine their thinking before moving into writing. These collaborative spaces give students different ways to approach complex texts, supporting engagement, motivation, and comprehension.
- Broaden literacy experiences: When student tasks include reading one text after another, the redundancy can lead to fatigue. Instead, when we expand our literacy practices to include thematically-aligned videos, podcasts, interviews, and other forms of literacy, we invite students to engage in content through multiple entry points, sustaining interest, deepening understanding, and supporting comprehension without lowering expectations.
Strategy #4: Create Meaningful Work
High expectations alone are not enough to motivate students. For complex tasks to truly engage students, they must also feel meaningful.
Students are more willing to invest in challenging tasks when they understand why the work matters: how it connects to larger ideas, real-world issues, or their own lives. When literacy tasks feel disconnected from purpose, students may disengage. But when work is clearly anchored to meaningful goals, students are more likely to participate in demanding learning experiences.
Creating meaningful work in literacy classrooms means:
- Clarifying purpose: Students should know what they are working toward and why. Whether the goal is analyzing an author’s craft, building background knowledge on a topic, or developing an argument, making learning outcomes explicit helps students understand the value of the work.
- Connecting to big ideas: Rigorous tasks should invite students to grapple with ideas that matter: questions about the human experience; connections to their own lives; windows into others’ experiences. When literacy instruction is grounded in big ideas, students are motivated to think deeply and engage critically.
- Designing authentic tasks: Whenever possible, literacy work should mirror how reading and writing function beyond the classroom. Writing to inform, persuade, reflect, or advocate gives students a reason to care about quality and clarity. Framing literacy as tools students can use in their daily lives gives purpose for grappling with demanding tasks.
High Expectations and High Rigor in Curriculum Design
The research is clear: lowering the bar does not lead to greater engagement or stronger outcomes. In literacy classrooms, students are most engaged when they are invited into texts and tasks that are intellectually rich, relevant and purposeful, and scaffolded with support.
When rigor is understood as both what students are asked to learn and how they are supported in learning it, literacy classrooms become places of deep investment, curiosity, and growth.
This is where curriculum design matters. At Inquiry by Design, we intentionally design our research-based English Language Arts and Spanish Language Arts programs to make high-support, high-rigor instruction achievable. All of the instructional and content demands required to make rigor accessible—from complex and relevant texts to knowledge-building, vocabulary support, and varied academic tasks—are integrated into every lesson. In this way, our curriculum directly reflects one of our core beliefs: complexity is for everyone.
If you’re interested in learning more about how our curriculum can support all of your students to thrive with grade-level, academically engaging tasks and texts, reach out to us today!
(1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920307492
(2) https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai23-836.pdf
(3) https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/15/3/389
(4) https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjep.12659