This is a small set of recommendations for incorporating – or upgrading the presence of – academic argument and argumentative literacy in  a high school biology course’s evolution unit.  Argument-Centered Education is working with partner schools on designing and implementing several of these strategies currently.  Each of these strategies is directly aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, as we demonstrate below.

Overview

Refutation is probably the most under-appreciated, under-taught, and the most essential and irreducible of all of the components of academic argument.  To Argument-Centered Education, refutation should be broadly conceived, but very rarely omitted from argument-centered instruction, or held off till later.

Defined capaciously, refutation is anything a writer/speaker does when they differentiate their own view from that of another view.  In effect, when someone is agreeing with a difference, or partially agreeing, or partially critiquing, or anything else they do other than 100% complete agreement, we understand this as “refutation.”  Writers or speakers are asking that their view substitute for the other person’s view — even if their view is the other person’s view plus or minus some small correction, etc. 

Invention Convention is an education non-profit in Ohio that sponsors and organizes a STEM program in which (mainly but not exclusively middle school) students use basic principles of engineering and science to create their own invention that addresses a problem or gap in the marketplace that they have observed in their everyday lives.  The program’s success is founded on both the practical and hands-on mode in which students actually produce a prototype invention, and of the open-mindedness and creativity that it fosters in students. 

Overview

We have helped support partner schools in tackling the immigration issue in Micro-Macro Debates this school year, and we have observed patterns in student academic performance and teacher implementation practices that we’ve shared with those schools.  Regular readers of The Debatifier might recognize this technique — one that we both employ in our partnerships and encourage partner teachers to use in their classrooms — as the “analytics” that are a form of direct feedback to students around themes of proficiency and deficiency demonstrated in a classroom.

Overview

Thanks largely to the 2016 presidential election, the immigration debate in the U.S. has exploded.  What has always been a controversial and multi-faceted issue — literally since the founding of the nation — has become a politically contentious, widely-protested, and complex debate, being played out everywhere from the halls of power in D.C. to the nation’s airports to small town and mid-size city public squares to social media platforms of all kinds.

Argument-Centered Education sees in the public controversy over immigration an excellent opportunity to harness its energy, urgency, and immediacy for the benefit of social science or even informational text oriented English language arts instruction.  By bringing crucial debates such as this one into our classrooms, we teach students the critical thinking and critical literacy skills that they need — that our society needs — to pursue truth, to distinguish fact from propaganda and spin, to make rational and evidence-based evaluations and judgments.  Students become better citizens this way, and they are more likely to be civically engaged.  And bringing debates into the classroom lets us have our cake while we eat it too: these are the same college-directed reasoning and evidence-evaluation habits of thinking that standardized testing — PARCC, Smarter Balanced, the New SAT, the PSAT, the latest iterations of the ACT — are increasingly designed around.  Well-designed and effectively implemented argumentation curriculum on a complex issue like immigration is the key to both civic engagement and college readiness.