Bobcat Stories

Reimagining Rigor: Lessons from a Nebraska Highway

By Chip Miller

Upper School Division Head

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear a story on National Public Radio about a man named Paul Torrence. I was driving through Nebraska at the time, and there are few places more conducive to listening while driving. The story just washed over me. Paul Torrence had decided to study something he called “Creative Intelligence.” The Creative IQ he developed was intentionally set in contrast to the more standard IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, that we have emphasized for far too long. There were interviews with people Torrence had studied in the mid-twentieth century, and there were interviews with others who had worked with those people. As it turned out, the people whom Torrence identified as having a high degree of creative intelligence were extremely successful professionally. More importantly, they identified themselves — and were identified by others around them — as extremely happy. A review of those who scored well on the standard IQ test did not effectively predict either professional success or happiness.  

There I was, virtually alone in a sea of corn, realizing that I had spent decades as a teacher looking for the wrong things. I had been teaching the wrong lessons, emphasizing the wrong traits, measuring the wrong outcomes. 

Torrence made a clear distinction between what he called “divergent thinking” and “convergent thinking.” Convergent thinking, so often emphasized in a traditional education, looks for the correct answer, the one answer, the “right” answer. Convergent thinking lends itself to standardized tests. In many ways, it is easier for a teacher to emphasize convergent thinking in a classroom. It is easy to measure. It is easy to design and grade tests when we are looking for a single correct answer. There is also something to be said for the fact that teachers can feel better about themselves, about their own intelligence, when they are the owner and arbiter of the one true answer.  

Divergent thinking, on the other hand, embraces a wide range of answers to specific questions. It embraces complexity. The goal is not to narrow thinking or to limit possibilities, but rather to broaden our understanding. Divergent thinking fosters innovative approaches to new and unexpected situations. It emphasizes adaptability. Divergent thinking also creates space in which students are allowed to be smarter than their teachers. When we talk about things like growth mindset, critical thinking, or student agency, we are talking about divergent thinking.

Schools that seek to emphasize creative intelligence, with an understanding that developing a creative mindset effectively supports both individual happiness and professional success, must create space in which students learn to ask useful questions, collaborate with others in seeking a range of answers, and think for themselves on a very high level. Schools often talk about “inquiry-based learning,” but to be truly inquiry-based requires not simply that we ask questions. The key to effective inquiry-based learning is that it is the students who are asking the questions, and there is an expectation that students learn to ask open-ended, increasingly complex analytical questions as they seek to understand themselves and the world around them. In Bosque School, I have finally found a school that understands this. 

I have spent years working at other schools, wondering when and how our students stop asking questions and start looking to their teachers for all the answers. The passivity implied is deeply troubling. This is not the reality at Bosque, however. It has been clear to me from the moment I set foot on this campus that our students know how to ask useful, effective questions. They know how to seek answers for themselves. Where curiosity can be smothered in so many academic settings, it’s clear that for Bosque students, curiosity continues to grow.  

For me, this emphasis on inquiry, curiosity, and creativity is at the heart of Bosque’s challenge to, and redefinition of, the word rigor. For so many teachers, rigor is about things being difficult. These are the “bell curve” teachers who measure the difficulty of their own classes by the number of people who earn a “C” or below. Yet a crucial question for any school should be whether the goal is to show students how smart the teacher is, or to create space in which students become smarter. The emphasis must be less on what to think and more on how to think. In keeping with that emphasis, a “rigorous” education would be one that demands that students are always thinking. By that definition, Bosque School has the most rigorous pedagogical culture I have ever seen.