A Plan for Assessing and Increasing Academic Rigor in School A central focus of schools today is to have rigorous academic programs. In order to increase “academic rigor” in a school, the school’s leadership team and faculty must have a clear definition as to the meaning of “academic rigor”. Once this has been clearly defined, the faculty and staff can work together to implement this definition. Then, school leaders will be able to assess the implementation of this definition. If I were responsible to define academic rigor in my school, I would suggest the following definition as a possible working definition. “Academic rigor means challenging each student to reach his/her highest possible academic achievement level in each grade level by supplying each student with the necessary knowledge and tools.” I would set the bar for minimum acceptable performance very high in order to create a culture of excellence, rather than mediocrity, in my school. How does one assess this? Much research has been discussed in this course about the different varying methods of effective instruction and assessment. I would follow what the current research says about “good instruction” to determine how to create an effective assessment of whether or not teachers were incorporating the definition of academic rigor into their classes. I would likely use a combination of a criterion-referenced and self-referenced evaluation models in order to provide clear guidelines for the