Ninth grade social science classes at one of Argument-Centered Education’s partner high schools ended the school year conducting a rather fully developed argument-centered project on teens’ social media use.  The debatable issue:

Teens social media use makes teens less social. 

There was an interest in closing the year with a project that brought together strands of academic argument studied and practiced during the year with a topic that students would find appealing, perhaps a little entertaining, and with which they’d already be familiar.  Since teens are purported to spend nearly nine hours a day on social media according to a 2015 study by the organization Common Sense Media (!), this debatable issue has the familiarity criterion covered.

El Deafo (2012) is the popular and subtly powerful autobiographical graphic novel by Cece Bell.  It tells the author’s story of growing through the middle grades circa 1980, having just been struck mostly deaf by meningitis.  The protagonist is shown grappling with how disorienting is her disability at first, then with its social and emotional impact on her early adolescence.  The work is notable for its honesty, charm, and surprising poignance.

With one of our partner middle schools this year Argument Centered Education developed the Argument Writing Response Activity (AWRA).  Teachers at this school wanted to be sure that the year ended with an argument writing project that brought together some of the skills-building work they had been doing in classroom speaking and discussion, especially in the second semester.  AWRA has students make interpretive arguments, respond to other students’ arguments with counter-arguments, and respond to the counter-arguments of their peers.  AWRA in effect takes portions of a spoken debate and asks students to put their point/counter-point in written form, enabling students to recognize and enact the underlying bond between classroom argumentative discussion and debate, and academic writing.

One of Argument-Centered Education’s partner schools is implementing a highly innovative piece of curriculum in its U.S. History classes.

Called the Website (Re)Construction Project, it has students create argument-based web pages, on the course’s website, about an issue related to the Reconstruction period or the Civil War.  Student web pages take a position on the debatable issue formulated specifically for the topic that they choose (or students can formulate, for instructor approval, their own commensurate debatable issue).  Their designed webpages support that position with 2 – 4 evidence-based arguments.  Evidence is required to come from a blend of primary and secondary sources, with weighting going to the primary.  Each student’s webpages must also address and refute at least one strong counter-argument. Students are encouraged to use historical photographs, newspaper and personal accounts of the period, and other artifacts to create a visual theme on their webpages, one that “rhymes with” their argumentative position.

Fundamental to coherently argumentalizing literacy curriculum is solving this puzzle: how will debatable issues or essential questions actually and effectively organize all aspects of a unit, including content delivery, discussion, performance tasks, and assessment.   There are many means to building in this coherence to unit planning and implementation, of course.  What’s important is to use tools that are applicable to the dimensions and resources specific to the unit and its curricular approach, but that also fulfill the generalized purpose of tying all elements of a unit, whether loosely or tightly, back into its driving arguable questions.

Beatrice exceeds her [cousin] as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December.

— Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.185-187

Shakespeare was more than a little in love with the month of May, in Much Ado and elsewhere.  Teachers, not so much — despite the narrowing chasm that the month portends to summer and its mostly more relaxed rhythms.  The reason for teachers’ coolness toward the “Rose of May” (Hamlet, IV.5.133) can be named in a single word: assessment.  May is testing season, and with that comes a flurry of misgivings, about misuse, overuse, curricular de-railment, unwarranted and discouraging final verdicts.