When faced with students who have learning skills, styles, and backgrounds very different from their own, teachers can promote academic rigor by engaging in reality pedagogy. This approach proposes seven strategies, or Cs: Cogenerative dialogues (in which teachers solicit feedback from a dissimilar group of students); coteaching (in which students are called on to teach); cosmopolitanism (in which students take over some of the operational activities of the classroom); context (in which teachers incorporate their knowledge of the community in everyday instruction); content (in which both teacher and students grapple with a topic); competition (in which students compete in nontraditional ways to show what they know); and curation (in which teachers and students study classroom videos to identify practices that negatively affect student learning). The author notes that the only "true path to academically rigorous classrooms" is through building strong student-teacher relationships.