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.”

Overview

Taking an argument-centered approach to preparing for and to writing the SAT Essay may seem like a no-brainer. After all, the prompt, which is always the same, asks you to explain how a passage’s author builds their argument, to analyze the rhetorical techniques that they use to persuade their audience.  The prompt always suggests to consider the author’s use of evidence, reasoning, and stylistic elements in the passage.  These are all features of course of argumentation.   But since the prompt also tells you quite clearly not to make an argument about the topic of the passage (“Your essay should not explain whether you agree with the author’s claims . . .”), the form of writing you’re being asked to do is generally called rhetorical analysis and it is usually taught as something quite different than argumentation.

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?

What does “critical thinking” mean?  What does it mean to think critically?  Kenneth Burke, in his A Grammar of Motives, had a name for words or phrases with the cachet and power that the term “critical thinking.”  He called them “god terms” — “names for the ultimate of motivation.”  No god term in education is defined as variously, or is as elusive, as “critical thinking.”  But one of the most influential definitions remains one of the original ones.  Education theorist Edward M. Glaser was building on the work of American philosopher John Dewey when he wrote in An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking (Columbia University Press, 1941):

The ability to think critically, as conceived in this volume, involves three things: ( 1 ) an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experiences, (2) knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, and (3) some skill in applying those methods. Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life. 

There is a lot packed in to this definition, and rightly so.  But we like to distill, to concentrate, functions like “appraising evidence,” “evaluating arguments,” “recognizing the existence (or non-existence” of logical relationships,” “putting to the test conclusions and generalizations,” and “rendering accurate judgements.”  We look to the Greek root of “critical” — kritikos, a critic, one who makes judgments — and we condense critical thinking to the process of judging the validity, meaning, truth, or quality of the object of study.  And when reading or listening in an academic context, that very often means subjecting the text or speech act to the skeptical, evaluative thinking — what is it communicating and why should I believe it?  what is the argument and what is its basis?  what is the author saying and why might they be wrong (or, if the text holds up, what are they likely to be right)?