Brooklyn LAB, which operates a small network of charter schools in New York City, has asked Les Lynn, founder and director of Argument-Centered Education, to join its new Academic Committee.  The Committee is chaired by Corey Scholes, director of Education for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where she advises the Foundation on strategic program initiatives and opportunities related to education.  Other Committee members include Noah Heller, a lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and Kevin Heffel, Chief Academic Officer of RePublic Schools, a network of schools spanning through Tennessee and Mississippi.

Most of Argument-Centered Education’s partnerships with schools, networks, and districts involve our three-tiered service model: curriculum re-design, collaborative professional development, and implementation coaching and support.  This year, though, we have gotten inquiries from prospective partner schools around the country who are mainly interested in access to argument-centered resources.   We are therefore now offering two Resource Access Plans.  These plans afford access to an extensive library of instructional resources for all teachers at a single school, across disciplines and grade levels.

Argument-Centered Education has been asked to present at the Fall 2017 Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) conference in Bloomington-Normal in late October.  The title of Argument-Centered Education’s talk is

Re-imagining literacy instruction through academic argument: Using controversies and debates to inspire our students and ourselves every day

The theme of conference — with which our talk will accord — is Re-Imagine: Our Passion, Our Practice, Our Profession. 

Argument-Centered Education is conducting a Next Generation Science Standards aligned professional development workshop for middle and secondary school science teachers in Chicago, titled

Infusing Argument into Lab Reports, Science Exhibits, and Scientific Reasoning Assessments

The event will be hosted by Whitney Young Magnet High School (211 S. Laflin Ave.) on Saturday, October 21st, from 9am – 11am.  It is being sponsored by the Chicago Public Schools Office of Teaching and Learning. 

Argument-Centered Education was invited to present at the 2017 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and we will be presenting as part of a panel on close reading, literacy instruction, and argumentation.  The presentation will take place on Sunday, November 19th, at 12:45pm, in the convention center in St. Louis, Missouri.

We will take this opportunity to introduce to a wider audience a method that we have designed to enable students to apply close reading techniques to the harvesting and gathering of interpretive evidence, leading to the formulation of refined and nuanced interpretive arguments about texts.