I have recently been working with a partner school’s science department and its renewable energy unit.  The unit takes a kind of “nuts and bolts” approach to the variety of energy sources that currently produce the world’s energy supply, looking at technological practicalities and some of the science and engineering — and economic — principles at work in the viability of each type of renewable energy projected to be part of the world’s transition this century away from traditional fossil fuels.  We decided to focus our argumentalization on a four-day portion of the unit that uses “Switch.”

We have been working with our middle school partners’ social studies teachers on an argument-centered project that has students studying and making arguments about the great inventors and inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries.  The project can be implemented in a middle school science and engineering unit, too.  And with some additional researching and reading, it is appropriate for a 9th or 10th grade social science classroom.  We have designed it to fit within one week of classes, so it is also a bit more compact than most classroom debate projects.

As you may know, I spent 15 years of my career building urban debate leagues, which are organized competitive debate programs in urban public school systems.  I was the founding director of the Chicago Debate League, and helped build it into the nation’s model UDL.  I was also the founding director of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, where I helped create and build up urban debate leagues in a dozen cities across the country.  When I left urban debate five years ago to found Argument-Centered Education I thought that I had spent my last hour working with teacher-coaches who prepare for weekend competitions.  Mostly true, but along came ACCIS, which in some ways does for other academic competitions what I am doing for debate with ACE.

A teacher at one of our partner high schools, Williams College Prep (Chicago), assimilated some of the resources that we’ve been sharing with and suggesting to him, and from them created an especially useful variation of his own.  AP Language and Composition teacher Thom Connor has been focusing a lot of instructional attention on teaching students to think through, articulate, and incorporate into their essays careful consideration of the counter-arguments to their argumentative positions.  He’s been teaching various ways of responding to or refuting these counter-arguments, as well.  And he designed a builder that adapts Argument-Centered Education versions into something that he feels comfortable with and that works especially well with his students.

We were recently at work with a partner high school’s science department, argumentalizing a unit in the school’s physics course.  In the unit on force, mass, acceleration, we wanted students to complete a formative assessment activity after they studied Newton’s Second Law and viewed experiments on falling objects.  The argument-based assessment came out like this.