Introduction: A Restrictive Script
You can’t handle the truth!
Chances are, that familiar movie quote evokes a heated courtroom exchange from A Few Good Men. I am not a movie person but can recite that scene verbatim. The script stuck with me because that was my first Rated-R movie.
While you rewind to your first Rated-R movie, let’s fast-forward to our current classrooms. Society trusts the Motion Picture Association to rate movies, including assigning the ‘R’ to restricted films. In our schools, how often do educators rate their pedagogies, assessing how suitable or appropriate the content? Do students rate their efforts? Do we differentiate learning from compliance? (Chew, 2023). Have our shared classrooms somehow become restricted, Rated ‘R’ for Rigor?
I remember my first encounter with rigor as a restrictive academic script. My department sought to standardize a textbook for a core course, and rigor became our de facto quality check. Comparisons among publishers, pricing, and format variety all needed to align with our perception of what classified as “rigorous” content. Fifteen years later, that textbook remains standard for our department and views on rigor remain entrenched. As a result, perhaps, an ongoing rigor-relevance gap (Tushman, 2007; Birnik and Billsberry, 2008) weakens genuine efforts to evaluate quality teaching.
How might we reconceptualize rigor to more authentically design for students’ lived experiences?
But what if there were a less “restrictive" rating? How might we reconceptualize rigor to more authentically design for students’ lived experiences? Our Ignatian imagination (Baur, 2024) inspires us to do more than take a page from a restricted script. Let’s unrestrict and instead expand teaching and learning to practice what I argue is a more reflective mode of rigor.
Design Thinking in Jesuit Education
Re-rating for reflective rigor calls us to evaluate the modes of thinking we promote.
Re-rating for reflective rigor calls us to evaluate the modes of thinking we promote. While rigor in critical thinking arguably restricts outlooks, reflection in design thinking expands worldviews. Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving practice that superglues our actions to the needs of people impacted by vexing problems. Multiple design thinking definitions exist among Jesuit institutions. Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship sees design thinking as “a continuous cycle of design, starting with empathize, moving to define, ideate, prototype, and test, and then back to empathize to begin the cycle again” (“Ignatian By Design”, n.d.). Loyola University Maryland positions design thinking as “creativity that leads to change” (McCausland, 2023), and Santa Clara University offers design thinking as a “holistic approach to the development of new products and processes, emphasizing the creative, interdisciplinary synthesis of new systems that can lead to solutions for real problems.” Loyola University Chicago offers its own course in Ignatian Design Thinking for undergraduates. The course’s definition aligns with our Ignatian, pedagogical commitment to whole-person education: a collection of hands-heart-head experiences that use uncertainty to determine needs-based solutions (Beran, 2024).
Design thinking and Jesuit education humanize problem-solving and decision-making. Anchored by empathy, design thinking prioritizes people’s needs through perspective-taking. In Jesuit education, similar perspective-taking underscores our 4Cs - commitment, compassion, competence, and conscience - as essential input for cura personalis.
A restrictive rigor adds struggles, obstacles, and resistance, all pain points that motivate students to work against and around their uncertainty. A reflective rigor opens students to experiment with uncertainty.
This combined approach lets us notice two relationships students form with rigor. A restrictive rigor adds struggles, obstacles, and resistance, all pain points that motivate students to work against and around their uncertainty. A reflective rigor opens students to experiment with uncertainty. They generate new truths and discover how to develop their own scripts. Restrictive rigor forces adherence, like fitting rigid puzzle pieces into a singular picture. Reflective rigor flexes, like arranging clues in a choose-your-own-adventure mystery.
We can develop reflective rigor over three general phases of any academic term. Like a three-part movie script, the story arc proposed below aims to re-rate students' relationships with rigor. Inspired by empathy in design thinking and our 4Cs, each phase commits to students’ perceived needs for feeling compassion, competence, and conscientiousness. A How Might We (HMW) question, core to practicing design thinking (Rosala, 2021), reframes students’ desires as an inquiry for educators. The HMW question then dovetails into reflective rigor scripts. Although adaptable for many pedagogical styles, the recommendations below especially pertain to experiential learning across a range of learning contexts.
Part 1: Re-Rate for Readiness to Trust
Students enter classrooms alert to an ambient uncertainty: what could go wrong here? Past experiences with group projects, test anxiety, and other unconscious rigor-related outcomes stoke unspoken mistrust. Students want novel, exciting learning experiences where fresh thinking complements existing knowledge. Unintentionally, syllabus policies and graded requirements flame hyper-hesitation about infinite unknowns ahead. Educators hear pleas of “I’m confused.” Students are asking, “Can I trust this class?”
Student Need: Compassion for Confusion
“I want permission to experiment. I want to trust it is okay to feel and work through my uncertainty.”
Our HMW Question: Compassionate Celebrations
“HMW shape and celebrate trustworthy classroom cultures?”
Reflective Rigor Script: Beginner’s Mind
To re-rate for readiness for trust, start by building Beginner’s Mind into daily activities. Beginner’s Mind, with roots in Zen Buddhism, encourages students to approach their learning with uninhibited openness. Mistrust melts to reveal their authentic eagerness to learn. Instead of kindling an illusion of explanatory depth (Guttman, 2023), students fire up their readiness to trust uncertainty. They let down their reluctance and take action.
Importantly, educators must commit to practicing Beginner’s Mind with—not simply for—students. We must connect with students through our own uncertainties. Students trust us as the experts. A jarring but refreshing shift in power, Beginner’s Mind flips that script. As a result, assumptions fixed in personal egosystems transform into action-oriented classroom ecosystems (Crocker and Canevello, 2018).
Beginner’s Mind is not an outcome to assess but a daily, simple posture to embody. It offers a low-lift, high-impact path to the upside of trusting in readiness. To experience Beginner’s Mind, you might consider scripting experiences like the examples below near the start of your project’s timeline:
Flash Field Trips: During class, spontaneously invite students to (1) exit the classroom, (2) take a 3-minute trip near the classroom, and (3) return to the classroom. (If a classroom has multiple doors, encourage students to enter through the door they do not usually use.) Ask them to take their regular route, noticing something new along the way. Reflect on their observations as a class, highlighting patterns of evolved perspectives.
Flash Frames: Inspired by Britos Cavagnaro (2023), invite students to take pictures using their phones’ cameras. Individually or in groups, students pick an object as the photo subject. Ask them to frame the object from as many angles, directions, and filters as they can. Set a timer to prompt quantity, not quality. No possibility is too precious for these frames. Reflect on their actions as a class, highlighting patterns of evolved perspectives.
Act 2: Re-Rate for Relevancy in Problem-Solving
With readiness entrusted by students, our classroom culture is primed to address a specific type of problem. Design thinking integrates wicked problems, or ill-structured, multi-context questions without clear solutions (Buchanan, 1992). Established pedagogies including experiential learning, service-learning, and community-based projects often involve wicked problems. Guided by the Universal Apostolic Preferences, Jesuit education is built for these challenges.
Relevancy is the currency of wicked problems. Murphy and Levinson (2023) state, “The abstractions that undergraduates learn comfortably from textbooks grow ever more complicated when encountered in real-world contexts.” With unprecedented access to nonstop headline feeds, today’s students witness a polycrisis unseen by earlier generations. They intuitively brace for problematic controversies. Initial confusion aside, students want to engage wicked problems through action. With Beginner’s Minds ready, they now see wicked problems as enticing.
Student Need: Competence, but Make it Relevant
“I want classroom experiences that reflect the world’s needs. I want to be a part of the types of problems being solved in the workplace and society.”
Our HMW Question: Confident Competence
“HMW inspire confidence in competence through relevant problems?”
Reflective Rigor Script: Rose Bud Thorn
To re-rate for relevancy, invite the classroom community to frame problem-solving in Rose, Bud, Thorn (RBT). RBT stimulates strengths, challenges status quo scenarios, and advances future actions. Together, the classroom eclipses what might lean too obvious or too overwhelming. They right-size for relevancy, engaging a level of competency that is just uncertain enough.
To experience Rose, Bud, Thorn, script these prompts into the mid-point of your problem-solving timeline:
Rose: What makes this project uniquely positive? What excites you about this work? How does this experience resonate with your personal, professional, or civic aspirations?
Bud: What impact will come from this project? What does success look like for you? Who do you want to benefit from the outcomes of this opportunity?
Thorn: What will make this project too easy or too challenging? What feels like an obstacle, barrier, or pain point? What potential missteps need up-front workarounds?
Act 3: Re-rate for Reflection de rigueur
When re-rated for readiness and relevancy, reflective rigor becomes de rigueur, desirable for students, educators, and society. No longer a raison d'etre, rigor evolves from rigid rules into trusting cultures powered by problem-solvers unafraid of uncertainty. That sounds like a happy ending for filmmakers to greenlight.
Yet this script ends with a cliffhanger. Our world of limitless wicked problems requires students to accept problem-solving as perpetual. Experiential learning projects end, limited by class schedules. Wicked problems continue, indeterminate by nonstop needs. Reflective rigor taps students’ consciences, undeterred by whether an existing problem lacks a new solution or an existing solution produces a new problem. Our world needs servant leaders who conscientiously discern that difference.
When students control cliffhanger conclusions, personal transformations happen. In retrospect, when compassion and competence collided, cannonball moments widened students’ consciences. They shine new light onto new contexts.
Student Insight: Conscience for Future Contexts
“I want to feel empowered to do more and to serve others. I want to live magis.”
Our HMW Question: Consciences for the Counterintuitive
“HMW support students as lifelong servant leaders?”
Reflective Rigor Script: I will, I wish, I worry
To re-rate for reflection de rigueur, encourage students to view wicked problems as complex systems. Reflective rigor connects students’ heads, hearts, and hands to willful impacts. Even so, wishes and worries co-exist in problem-solving. Normalizing that tension turbocharges students’ consciences and diminishes uncertainty. “Where there’s a will, there’s a worry” (Beran 2024).
To experience I will, I wish, I worry, script these prompts later in the problem-solving timeline:
I will: What will you do next, in either the near or far term? Why might you commit to compassion when similar problems happen?
I wish: What do you wish for once your solution is in place? What did you wish you understood that you now understand more competently?
I worry: What about your solution makes you worry? What ethical consequences remain that test your conscience?
Closing: Open-ended Truths
Even with an inconclusive ending, a three-act script creates a satisfying commitment to re-rate rigor. As you align this approach to your classrooms, the hard truth about soft skills may appear, exposing reflection itself as wickedly challenging. However, that is a truth you and your students can handle.
Bauer, M., Sutherland, A., Kloos, K., & Murphy, M. (2024, January). The Ignatian pedagogical paradigm: A contemporary synthesis. Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. https://ajcunet.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Ignatian-Pedagogical-Paradigm-A-Contemporary-Synthesis.pdf
Beran, S. N. (2024). Think by design: Celebrating design thinking and experiential learning. Business Expert Press.
Britos Cavagnaro, L. (2023). Experiments in reflection: How to see the present, reconsider the past, and shape the future. Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed.
Birnik, A., & Billsberry, J. (2008). Reorienting the business school agenda: The case for relevance, rigor, and righteousness. Journal of Business Ethics, 82, 985-999.
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design issues, 8(2), 5-21.
Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. (n.d.). Ignatian pedagogy. Georgetown University. https://cndls.georgetown.edu/resources/ignatian-pedagogy/
Chew, S. L. (2023, August 31). Student trust in the teacher: A critical but overlooked factor in student success. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-psychology/student-trust
Crocker, J., & Canevello, A. (2018). From egosystem to ecosystem: Motivations of the self in a social world. In Advances in motivation science (Vol. 5, pp. 41-86). Elsevier.
Guttman, B. (2023, January 20). The illusion of explanatory depth: We don’t know anything. Medium. https://medium.com/geekculture/the-illusion-ofexplanatory-depth-we-dont-know-anything-222f71688eee
Kitts, C. (n.d.). Design Thinking. Santa Clara University. https://www.scu.edu/provost/core/integrations/pathways/pathway-listings--courses/design-thinking/
McCausland, C. (2023). Creativity that leads to change: Design thinking course helps student entrepreneurs bring ideas to life. Loyola University Maryland. https://www.loyola.edu/explore/grove/design-thinking-course.html
Murphy, J. T., & Levinson, M. (2023, March 23). How to embrace uncertainty in your teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-embrace-uncertainty-in-your-teaching?sra=true
Rosala, M. (2021, January 17). Using “how might we” questions to ideate on the right problems. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-might-we-questions/
Tushman, M. L., O'Reilly, C., Fenollosa, A., Kleinbaum, A. M., & McGrath, D. (2007). Relevance and rigor: Executive education as a lever in shaping practice and research. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 6(3), 345-362.
The Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm: A Contemporary Synthesis January 2024; A product of the AJCU Commission on the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. Lead author: Michael Baur. Other authors: Arthur Sutherland, Kari Kloos, and Michael Murphy
