Comparing and contrasting the policies, practices, achievements, and failures of national governments around the world.  This political angle most social science educators and education administrators would identify as essential content in a high school global studies course.   And Argument-Centered Education is currently demonstrating how it can be effectively argumentalized, heightening student engagement and its college-directedness. 

By Gerald Graff

[To read part 1 of this essay, click here.]

Teaching the debate, whether over patriotism or any other contested political topic, seems to me fundamentally more democratic than “teaching for social justice” where democratic controversy may be advocated but not enacted and modeled. But teaching the debate is not only more democratic, but more likely to clarify the mysteries of the intellectual world for those many students to whom phrases like “teaching for social justice” are unintelligible academic jargon. There is something misplaced, after all, about attempts to introduce radical intellectual positions to students who have not yet learned the practice of taking “intellectual positions,” students who have not learned to enter an intellectual discussion and have a shaky grasp of basic political terminology like “radical,” “conservative,” “left,” right,” and “center.”

By Gerald Graff

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the former World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag our our window. Definitely not, I say” The flag stands for jingoism, vengeance, and war. She tells me I’m wrong — the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way, we’re both right.

— Katha Pollitt, “Put Out No Flags,” The Nation, October 8, 2001

What should American students learn about patriotism? First and foremost, that the concept is profoundly controversial. How controverisal, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is suggested above in the opening of an article by Katha Pollitt that appeared in The Nation in October of that year. The passage also suggests a way of teaching contested concepts like patriotism that I have championed for some time: Teach the debate itself about such concepts, present students with opposing arguments and ask them to form their own positions.

Argument-Centered Education is conducting a professional development workshop on Saturday, February 27th, 9am – 12pm, at Whitney Young H.S. (211 S. Laflin Ave.), on the use of an argument-centered approach to the teaching of mathematics in middle and high school.  More specifically, the workshop will examine the new methodology of Math Talks and Number Talks, and explore the ways that argument-centered instruction can help make sure that implementation of these teaching formats, in addition to deductive reasoning and other argumentional activities, can enrich mathematics teaching and make math classrooms more college-leveled.

Argumentation has a prominent place in the Common Core, and is pulled out specifically in Math Practice #3 (“Construct Viable Arguments and Critique the Reasoning of Others”).  More broadly, leaders in mathematics instruction are pursuing the ways that math and argumentation theory converge in order to deepen students’ mathematical thinking and fuller comprehension of math processes and practices.

Registration for the 2/27 is easy: simply send an email to info@argumentcenterededucation.com.  This workshop is being sponsored by Chicago Public Schools’ Office of College and Career Success.

Many schools have recently completed their semester-ending final exams. Teachers I was working with yesterday, for instance, told me that they were done with 85% of their essay grading from finals. They reported feeling both a kind of relief that they could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and a surge of motivation to finish, get their grades in, and feel that sense of accomplishment at having fully completed the semester.

This focus on the end of the semester got us thinking about posting on a couple of recent examples of argument-based assessments that we at Argument-Centered Education have developed with our school partners this year. What follows are two samples of assessment tools that have been used recently in our partners’ argument-centered classrooms. These tools can be used or adapted as is – they have been implemented successfully and are ready for wider use – but they can also be taken as models of the ways that argument-based instruction can connect to, generate, and be back-designed from argument-based assessments.