Jennifer Gonzalez runs a popular edu-blog and podcast called Cult of Pedagogy that is consistently thoughtful and features a distinctively bouncy, novel, and practical voice.  

Otis Middle School (Chicago) social studies teacher Elizabeth Valente has adaptively re-designed our resources into what she calls an Evidence Catcher for the project we have been working together on in her argument-centered ancient Greece unit this semester.  The resource represents another exemplar of our goal that teachers at our partner schools acquire the capacity to design and deploy their own argumentalized and critical thinking enriched curricular resources.  Ms. Valente has agreed to share this resource, at which it is well worth taking a closer look.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

— Elie Wiesel, Night (1960)

We can take an argument-centered approach to almost any unit in the middle or high school curriculum.  And we should, if we believe the empirical research on the impact of getting students discussing critically and writing argumentatively about the important topics of study in their classes.  Or if we believe the standards-writers, who, as they continue to want to guide 6th – 12th grade classrooms toward global norms of rigor and authentic college/career preparation for all, continue to elevate the place of academic argument and critical thought throughout instruction.

We can even take an argument-centered approach to a unit on perhaps the most undebatable, unspeakable episode of historical evil of the 20th century, the Holocaust.  Studying an extreme historical event like the Holocaust limits the range of choices but formulating a debatable question is based on the same criteria with this subject matter as it is for others.  The debatable question or issue must be open, balanced, focused, and authentic.  When the unit of study concentrates on a single extended text, as the one is that we’ve been working on with a couple partner schools, the debatable question must be one that is being asked by the text.  A debatable question that can successfully argumentalize study of a text is one that the author is asking through the text, at some level.  The debatable question that we established for Night is woven throughout the work, and surfaced explicitly in the epigraph above.

Did the Nazis succeed in committing deicide through the Holocaust, according to Night, by Elie Wiesel?

Brady Gunnink, who teaches AP Language and Composition at ACE partner school Jones College Prep in Chicago, came to me earlier this semester with a challenge: can we work together to build a strategy with supporting resources that can help his AP Comp students improve their writing on the Free Response essay questions on the AP exam? Students, he said, often find the third question of the three FR questions the most difficult; it is the one for which there are no sources or texts and students are asked to write an argument in response to an abstract or philosophical proposition (e.g., philosopher Alain de Botton has said that humorists play a vital role in society in that they are able “to convey with impunity messages which might be dangerous or impossible to state directly’ — write an essay taking a position on this viewpoint).  The outcome of this collaboration at Jones and my work to create a writing strategy is the topic of this post.

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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.