Argument-Centered Education works to argumentalize curriculum that teachers and schools are committed to teaching and using.  We approach our work this way because on the basis of two fundamental convictions.

Capacity and expertise transfer is best done from the inside, not the outside

We aim to build teachers’ and schools’ permanent capacity to organize their own instruction around critical thinking and argument.  Curriculum that gets imported into schools is often unused after an initiative is offer.  And even if it continues to be used, it can be compartmentlized as the “critical thinking resource” or the “argument project.”  Working with teachers’ own curriculum illustrates in the most resonant way for teachers who argument can be integrated throughout their practice.

Argument-Centered Education has been asked to provide a two-day workshop at Homewood-Flossmoor High School (999 Kedzie Ave., Flossmoor, IL), in the suburbs of Chicago this summer.  Taking place all day on July 27th and 28th, and part of Homewood-Flossmoor University, high school teachers from across the Chicago area (and beyond), and from across disciplines, are invited to register for the course, entitled

Become an ACE Teacher with Argument-Centered Education: A Cross-Disciplinary Framework for Construction and Supporting Academic Assertions

This is an argument-based project on Lois Lowry’s 1989 young adult novel on the Nazi occupation of Denmark and its impact on a gentile and Jewish family of friends.  It asks students to study the novel in relation to debatable issues related to the central motif of bravery in the book, and then has students write a persuasive letter from the protagonist, Annemarie Johansen, to her Jewish friend in exile, Ellen Rosen, answering a question that gets to the heart of the question that the book asks: does the young Annemarie act courageously, and if so how courageously?

Overview

Templates can help students master the format, linguistic constructs, and conceptual structure of the more difficult aspects of argument writing.  Refutation of counter-arguments certainly falls into the “difficult aspects” category.  Through practice with the scaffolding device of the writing template, students can assimilate the formal aspects of written refutation so that they can cultivate the even more higher-order quality of thinking hard about why it is that the best counter-arguments against their position aren’t reasons to abandon their original position, even if they necessitate some concession and adjustment.

Partner schools of Argument-Centered Education are taking up the issue of mass incarceration in the United States in their argument-centered social science and civics classrooms.  Here’s how they’re doing it.

Overview

The United States – as President Barack Obama famously noted in a 2015 speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) – has 5% of the world’s population but about 25% of the world’s prisoners.  The American prison population went from 300,000 in 1972 to 2.4 million in 2016, according to Amnesty International.  What’s more, nearly 40% of the people in prison in this country are African-American, even though only 13% of Americans are black.