Technolandy

Day 144 (of 2025/26) rigor. 

Loved this share I heard to start the week: Partners In Education sometimes has “too much flexibility”

There’s a familiar refrain drifting through staff rooms and comment sections: kids today have less. Less stamina. Less focus. Less grit.

Maybe. But that feels like diagnosing the weather by looking at one cloud ☁️

I paused when I heard that line from Partners In Education suggesting we might now have too much flexibility. That idea sticks a bit. Not because flexibility is wrong, but because it raises a sharper question: when does flexibility stop being supportive and start becoming… fog?

Because structure, at its best, isn’t a cage. It’s a scaffold. It gives shape to effort. It signals that something matters. But again, at it’s worse it is a cage and makes people think (as I also saw today) that it is better to teach the subject… not the students… 

And that’s where my brain keeps circling back to rigor.

Not rigor as volume. Not rigor as compliance. But rigor as meaningful attention sustained over time.

The easy culprit is screens. They’re the flashy villain in this story. But what if that’s only the surface? 

What if disengagement isn’t just about distraction, but about disconnection?

And what if, at times, that disconnection is less about capacity and more about choice?

That’s a harder place to stand as educators. Because if it’s purely ability, we intervene with support. If it’s choice, we have to examine the ecosystem we’ve created.

Which brings me to the old Stanford marshmallow experiment.

It’s often used as a tidy parable about self-control. Wait now, get more later. Simple.

Except later research complicated that story. It suggested that one of the hidden variables was trust. Did the child believe the adult would actually come back with the second marshmallow?

If the system feels unreliable, choosing the immediate reward isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s a rational decision.

So I keep wondering:

When we push on deadlines, are we really pushing on time… or are we pushing on trust?

Do students believe that:

• the work is worth doing?
• the timeline is meaningful?
• the feedback will matter?
• the system will hold up its end?

???

• Are they testing the system that says “learning” is most important and they’ve heard ‘we know’ that it happens at different times and paces… When we say that and then give a zero… well, not the lesson that the adult intended…

Because rigor without trust can feel like arbitrary pressure.

But structure with trust? That’s something different. That’s where focus can take root.

Maybe the tension isn’t flexibility vs. structure.

Maybe it’s this:

How do we design learning environments where structure signals belief, flexibility signals respect, and both are grounded in trust?

And maybe the bigger question underneath it all:

If students are opting out, what are they opting out of… and what would make it worth opting back in?