Not every meal we prepare (or eat) at home is elaborately planned, prepared, and presented.  Sometimes we cook “quick & easy” meals, but even these we generally aspire to make nutritious, balanced, and appetizing, too.  Similarly with our classrooms: though we strive to be planned, ready, and prepared every day, we are not always implementing finely wrought, meticulously developed curriculum.  But we should make these lessons college-directed and academically nourishing, too. What follows is an example of just such a “quick & easy” piece of curriculum, argumentalized.

One of our partner high schools recently took students to see the wonderful production of A Christmas Carol at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. So I suggested an easy-prep argument-based seminar on the day after the trip (with possibly some de-brief and short writing for follow-up the next day).

Vivian Leventis is an expert middle school teacher at one of our partner schools, the Helen C. Peirce School of International Studies.  She developed a social studies unit called “Kids on Strike” that is being implemented at the school this fall.  The unit is built around Susan Bartoletti’s 2003 study of the largely forgotten history of the extensive child industrial labor in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (at its height, more than 2 million children worked in manufacturing jobs), and the movement to organize child labor to protect kids’ rights, health, and safety.

This is the second post on Argument-Centered Education’s newly designed method of organizing teaching and learning around academic argumentation in ELA literature units.  The strategy is one we call Argument-Based Discussions Linked to Key Passages.  We recently collaborated with ELA teachers with one of our middle school partners to adapt this instructional format to a unit on Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy (1999).