 it’s a poor and narrow description. I get the idea of challenging, wicked problems but rigour also suggests a very strict approach and leaves little room for creativity and serendipity. Those aren’t the only things we want for our students either. But my concern is these kinds of terms often inherintly suggest a very specific “back to the basics” “teach these kids a Lesson” type schooling that frankly misses the mark. I understand what you’re saying I just think that word has too many bad connotations to those outside of education. Relevant, authentic and engaging might be a better way to describe what we want as a general framework.
Thank you for this excellent post. Two related points strike me. First, the example and inspiration of the committed teacher are central to the model of rigour you suggest above, which corresponds to John Hattie’s Visible Learning meta studies. Secondly, as with the comments about the use of the very term ‘rigour’ above, students’ understanding and then mastery of a vocabulary and language appropriate to that lesson and subject are vital. I use vocab books in L6 and U6 History lessons for this very reason. Students have to know how to be rigorous and intelligent in their own terms, without language getting in the way: it’s a sat nav helping them around the road blocks and dead ends of their understanding of a topic. Although perhaps sat nav is not a great analogy…must be more rigorous.
I like your use of “rigour” – I think it’s starts with the teacher; if we impose this “rigour” on ourselves, our students can’t help but respect and respond to it. The “rigour” that we impose on ourselves shows our level of commitment and respect for our students; it is a daily attitude of mind and behaviour, starting with us.
I read this & the subsequent comments with great interest. ‘Rigour’ strikes me as one of those words which has been politically-damaged, a stick sometimes used to beat teachers who are media-perceived as lazy & lacking the rigour of days-gone-by.
The one part of your post that dismayed me is nothing to do with your ideas but linked instead to the current fiasco we’re facing as English teachers. One of the ways in which you characterise rigour is knowing what a nailed on A* answer looks like. I thought I did but now I question that – following this January’s GCSE Language paper we won’t even know what an A* is because the results will be marks only, not grades. I hate it that such machinations remove an aspect of my ability to be rigorous. I suppose what I’ve realised through the course of this lengthy response is that it’s my responsibility to keep pushing against the irregularities of the system and to create a sense of rigour which isn’t damaged by the paradox of a system which simultaneously prevents the very thing it demands.
I’ve been re-reading this post and the comments and agree with the concerns about the way current Ministers, Ofqual and Ofsted use the term ‘rigour’, almost like a solution to any education problem that they come across. I think that you Dawn are absolutely right about teachers fighting back and claiming the word for themselves. Tom is trying to facilitate this for you.
Fantastic article – will be sharing with colleagues.
Reblogged this on Always learning.
Fantastic blog on the importance of challenging in the classroom.
Different population trajectories are expected to impact the signature of neutral and adaptive processes at multiple levels, challenging the assessment of the relative roles of different microevolutionary forces. Here, we integrate adaptive and neutral variability patterns to disentangle how adaptive diversity is driven under different demographic scenarios within the Iberian wolf (Canis lupus) range. We studied the persistent, the expanding and a small, isolated group within the Iberian wolf population, using 3 MHC class II genes (DRB1, DQA1, and DQB1), which diversity was compared with 39 microsatellite loci.
Both the persistent and the expanding groups show evidence of balancing selection, revealed by a significant departure from neutrality at MHC loci, significant higher observed and expected heterozygosity and lower differentiation at MHC than at neutral loci, and signs of positive selection. However, despite exhibiting a significantly higher genetic diversity than the isolated group, the persistent group did not show significant excess of MHC heterozygotes. The expanding group, while showing a similar level of genetic diversity than the persistent group, displays by contrast a significant excess of MHC heterozygotes, which is compatible with the heterozygote advantage mechanism. Results are not clear regarding the role of drift and selection in the isolated group due to the small size of this population. Although diversity indices of MHC loci correspond to neutral expectations in the isolated group, accelerated MHC divergence, revealed by a higher differentiation at MHC than neutral loci, may indicate diversifying selection.
Different selective pressures were observed in the three different demographic scenarios, which are possibly driven by different selection mechanisms to maintain adaptive diversity.
Genetic drift and natural selection are often seen as two counteracting evolutionary forces across populations [1]. In large and stable populations, where the random effects of genetic drift are limited, balancing selection maintains high levels of adaptive variation affecting population fitness and evolutionary potential [2, 3]. By contrast, in small and isolated populations, or within the context of demographic events such as bottlenecks, genetic drift is predominant, masking possible effects of natural selection [4, 5]. Neutral molecular markers allow assessing interactions between demographic history and genetic diversity [6], but do not provide direct information on selective processes [7, 8]. Thus, evidence of selection and adaptive potential is best approached by contrasting neutral and functional molecular markers (e.g., [9, 10]).
In vertebrates, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is the prime candidate for pathogen resistance genes and contains some of the most polymorphic functional loci [11, 12]. The exceptional level of MHC polymorphism is believed to be driven by the antagonistic coevolution with pathogens and occurs through pathogen-mediated balancing selection [11, 12]. Beyond its clear significance in modulating pathogen resistance [2, 13, 14], MHC genes have been shown to influence other biological traits such as maternal-fetal interactions, kin recognition, life-time reproductive success and mate choice [15,16,17,18]. MHC is intimately linked with factors likely to affect individual fitness, population viability and evolutionary potential in changing environments. Thus, patterns of MHC diversity have been repeatedly used in a conservation context in populations of particular interest [19,20,21,22].
In Europe, abundance and distribution of large carnivores (bear, wolf and lynx) have been dramatically shaped by humans during the past few centuries. Although persecuted and driven to or close to extirpation in several countries, most of the remnant populations have stabilized or even expanded recently [23]. One example is the Iberian wolf (Canis lupus), which erstwhile ranged over most of the Iberian Peninsula, but after decades of severe human persecution became confined to small and fragmented populations, representing about 1/5 of the former population range [23,24,25]. In the 1970s, the Iberian wolf population was estimated to be reduced to ca. 700 individuals, mostly restricted to the northwestern region [23, 26, 27]. After the 1970s, the population started to grow and expanded southwards and eastwards (Fig. 1) [28]. Currently, the Iberian wolf is considered under a stable or positive demographic trend [23]. It occurs in a core area where the species have always persisted in northwestern Iberia [26, 27, 29], and the adjacent re-colonized area (the expansion front), alongside two small and isolated populations [30,31,32]. Such a complex demographic history have translated into a cryptic population structure in the Iberian wolf at small spatial scales, with moderate level of genetic differentiation, including the differentiation of the re-colonized area [33].
Remarkable MHC class II variability has been shown in wolf populations [34,35,36,37]. However, results vary regarding the predominant role of selection over neutral forces. Some studies provided evidence that wolf MHC diversity is maintained by balancing selection, including studies on populations under demographic decline [34, 36], where parasite resistance was suggested as the possible driving force [36]. In contrast, MHC diversity in the bottlenecked wolf population of Scandinavia was shown to be compatible with neutral evolution [38]. Although MHC variability patterns of small and isolated populations may differ from that in large and outbred populations, the power of balancing selection acting on MHC can be outweighed by demographic events, such as bottlenecks and fragmentation with consequent genetic drift [38, 39]. Hence the signature of selection and/or population demographic effects is expected to vary across populations under different demographic histories, challenging the assessment of the relative role of different microevolutionary forces [40].
In this study, we integrate neutral and adaptive diversity patterns to disentangle how adaptive diversity is driven under three different demographic within the Iberian wolf range. Taking into account the genetic population structure of this population based on neutral markers [33], we used the permanent wolf range (i.e., persistent group) as the baseline for demographic stability and compared it to the population dominated by the re-colonization process after the 1970s bottleneck [27] (i.e., expanding group) and to the remaining small and isolated population in the South of Douro River in Portugal (i.e., isolated group). For the persistent group we expect to find natural selection acting to maintain adaptive variation at a stronger intensity than genetic drift; and therefore MHC diversity is expected to exceed neutral diversity. In this scenario, we can either detect balancing or diversifying selection. We may observe balancing selection when MHC exhibits lower population