By Gerald Graff

“Hey, I’m all for teaching argument and debate,” my colleague assured me after viewing the ACE website. “But students have to know something about a topic before they can usefully debate it, and students these days just don’t.”

It’s one of the most familiar objections to organizing school and college curricula around debatable issues: until students know enough of the relevant information—as today’s students rarely do—they aren’t ready to debate such issues.     And it’s certainly true up to a point: it’s hard to enter a debate about whether income inequality is a problem or not if you lack information about what’s been happening to income distribution over the last generation.

What this way of thinking ignores, however, is its circularity: yes, students need some economic knowledge to intelligibly debate the pros and cons of income inequality, but unless they are exposed to the debate they may not see the point of acquiring that data in the first place.

One of the signature features of the services model developed and employed by Argument-Centered Education is its embeddedness. Not only is its teacher coaching embedded within schools and active classrooms, so that teachers get observation-based feedback and targeted modeling support, but its curriculum design and adaptation works from curriculum that its partner schools and teachers are currently working with and to which they are committed. Instead of importing argument-based curriculum from outside, we work to build argumentation from the inside of an individual teacher’s, or department’s, or school’s, or district’s in-place instructional content and methodology.

External curricular components can often feel like diversions from the trajectory of a course. They can be and often are tried a couple times then quietly dropped. They can generate understandable even unspoken resistance from educators who entered the profession in part because they have an intellectual passion for certain fields of learning, things they know, and have dedicated their professional lives to sharing with the next generations. And they can impair the effectiveness of an on-going and embedded professional development strategy because they restrict demonstration of the use of argumentation to an external curriculum.

In The Debatifier’s previous post we examined the ways in which debatable issues are like and unlike framing moves and essential questions, and we identified the five key criteria for the effective formulation of debatable issues:

• Openness
• Balance
• Focus
• Authenticity
• Intellectual Interest

In this post we will explore how debatable issues organize the structure and influence the full trajectory of a unit in an argument-centered classroom.

Not to pre-empt the inquiry, but the sum of it really is this: all the elements in a unit should be connectable to the debatable issue(s) in argument-centered instruction. A line should be traceable from the debatable issue(s) out to all of the activities, assignments, projects, and assessments in a unit. Debatable issues give units their thematic coherence. They give context for tasks and exercises conducted a unit, and they allow for the gradual building of understanding in a unit to then have full expression in culminating performance task assessments.