One of Argument-Centered Education’s high school partners’ 10th grade U.S. history classes are immersed right now in preparing students for their U.S. Constitution exam.  “Time to take a break from our argument-centered projects,” a teacher opined.  “Our Constitution exam curriculum is dry and content-heavy.  We just to have to fill the kids with the facts about the articles, sections, and amendments, then they reproduce what they’ve learned.  We’ll get back to debatification in February.”

Understood, was our first word.  Our next two: But wait.  We’d like the chance to work with your U.S. history teachers and classes to demonstrate a way of understanding an argument-based pedagogy that applies to contexts in which objectives are information-heavy and seek to instill in students the foundations of knowledge that will enable them later to engage in substantive academic or public debates.

Argument-Centered Education has a new poster out for classrooms, offices, hallways, everywhere 6th – 12th grade education happens.  Called ‘The Language of Argument,’ it is a convenient reference source for short, direct definitions of the key terms used in academic argument, critical thinking, and classroom debating.

You can order your copies on the Argument-Centered Education Products page, or by contacting us directly — info@argumentcenterededucation.com or 312-848-2271.

From the Outset

Renowned educators and education writers Jim Burke and Barry Gilmore have put together an eminently useful resource binder for teaching what they identify as the most essential “academic moves” in K-12 education: Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness. This study and collection of resources on the “15 must-have skills every student needs to achieve” germinated from the authors’ day-to-day opportunity, they tell us, for reading and reflecting on the problems and prompts handed out to students by their teacher colleagues.

What are we actually asking our students to do in classrooms across disciplines? How do these directions interact with the requirements of current standards such as the Common Core or the new SAT? And how can teachers be assisted in becoming more intentional about teaching the precise academic skills their assignments and assessments demonstrate that they most value? These were the generative questions of the book. Burke and Gilmore wish to bring “consistency and clarity to the language” of school work, “the language of learning.” They quote Argument-Centered Education founding advisers Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein in saying that they intend for their resource binder to lay bare the “‘deep, underlying structure, [the] internal DNA’ common to the academic and cognitive moves” that students must learn to make, across all subject areas.

On first blush, you wouldn’t think that Sid Fleischman’s 2006 biography of Harry Houdini, Escape!, would be ripe for debatification, particularly as the centerpiece of middle school reading unit. But it turns out to present a solid demonstration that argument can productively organize curriculum far beyond obvious controversial issues.

Argument-Centered Education worked with a middle school partner to argumentalize its five-week unit on Escape! for its English language arts classes, using the five steps.

Daniel Hale Williams Prep School of Medicine is the latest school to forge a substantial partnership (sealed in November) with Argument-Centered Education in school year 2016. In the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s south side, Williams Prep’s slogan is that it is “The Pipeline for the College Bound,” and its commitment to incorporating academic argument throughout its curriculum and instruction demonstrates that this far more than simply a label.

“We are committed at Williams to preparing our students for access not only to college, but to selective institutions,” according to Principal Jullanar Naselli. “Bringing on Argument-Centered Education to help us infuse academic argument across disciplines is helping us walk the talk. We’re excited by this partnership and what it’s bringing to our culture and classrooms.”