Overview

Math Talks have become a go-to routine for many math teachers in their response to the new wave of math standards that call for a much greater emphasis on requiring students to justify their solutions, to communicate their mathematical reasoning, to make arguments with math, and to think critically about the mathematical reasoning and arguments of others.

Overview

There are 7.5 billion people in the world today.  In little more than 10 years, those who study population trends tell us that there will be 8.5 billion people, and a substantially higher percentage of them will be what Americans would identify as “middle class,” with the concomitant demand for natural resources to support their comfortable lifestyle.  A dominant environmental problem of our time is climate change, but there are even more long-standing questions over whether the world is running out or has acute shortages of natural resources (such as water, energy, food) that haven’t gone away just because they have been eclipsed in media coverage and American public consciousness by global warming.

This argument-based project focuses on the issue of global shortages of fundamental natural resources for the world’s population, now and in the near future.  This project addresses a set of Next Generation Science Standards, the specifics of which depend on the grade level in which it is implemented, along with literacy standards, such as those in the Common Core.  It applies the Shaping Arguments format, which we’ve introduced as a format that can be used for highly accessible, non-academic topics as a means of increasing students’ comfort-level with argument language, forms, and practices, but (as this project demonstrates well) can also be used with standard academic content. 

Overview

The National Book Award winning biography, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Macmillan, 2009), by Phillip Hoose, tells the story of a relatively unknown figure in the early Civil Rights Movement.  In March of 1955 Claudette Colvin, then fifteen, enacted Montgomery, Alabama’s first bus protest, refusing to give up her seat to a white woman.  She was arrested, spent several hours in jail, and was fined.  Her classmates and community didn’t know exactly how to react to what she did at first – it was a spontaneous act of angry protest – though within the next nine months the bus boycott became a reality.

Overview

The Debatifier has taken a close look at the legal immigration issue and its complexities, illustrating how the Micro-Macro Debates format can help students unpack and make sense of such a dense and multi-faceted issue, in part one and part two of an extended post.  This post will help teachers take an argument-centered approach to the undocumented immigrant issue.

The estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and immigration enforcement porous enough to allow the number to grow that large, have elicited a great deal of political discussion and societal debate over the past 40 years, though perhaps never so pointedly as in the 2016 presidential campaign.  This argument-centered project crystallizes the question at the heart of this national debate:

Do Illegal immigrants pose a significant threat to American citizens?

Overview

Here is a simple but profound and universally true pedagogical rule that we have (not invented but) discovered: Whatever the kind of argument-based instructional activity, lesson, or assessment you are working with, it is an essential prerequisite for its effective implementation to develop and present to students modeling resources.  Along with prompt, specific, and improvement-directed feedback, modeling may be the most useful tool in the pedagogical toolkit.

Many, probably most, varieties of argument-centered projects, activities, lessons, and assessments require students to build arguments and counter-arguments, and they require that students track arguments carefully on a flow sheet so that they know what arguments have been made by both sides, how (and whether) those arguments have been responded to, and how the argumentation is developed and can be weighed and evaluated.  (Tracking arguments is crucial if we are to bring our students into a closer and at the same time more objective relationship with the arguments they make, hear, read, and respond to.)