Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Grades 6-12. Jim Burke

such missteps by asking them to research carefully.

       Lack of Clarity. Academic arguments often reside in formal papers. Sometimes, students will be so convinced that their audience wants a certain level of formality in writing that they overdo it and lose clarity and precision.

       Hasty Assumptions. As with faulty logic, overgeneralizing (say, about a historical era) can lead to a weak argument. Help students be precise.

      Mental Moves

      Argue

      1 Make a ClaimWhat is my position?

      2 Support the ClaimWhat evidence best supports this position?

      3 Anticipate OppositionWhat might an opponent of my position claim?

      4 Consider Your AudienceWhat type of appeal will best convince my audience?

      5 IntegrateHow will I structure my discussion of claim and counterclaims?

      During: Practicing Argumentation

      For younger students, use a modified Venn diagram to introduce the concept of argument, using the labels below (“agree” and “disagree”) or similar labels such as “pro” and “con” for the two sides:

      You might try using hula hoops on the floor and allowing students to present oral claims and counterclaims while standing inside one; then ask what someone in the overlapping section might say. Alternatively, you could use the middle section as an “undecided” section in which students can stand until they are forced to make a choice and explain why (see the “get off the fence” activity in the section on discussion that follows).

      For older students, you may wish to discuss the importance of audience and Aristotle’s triangle of persuasive appeals, including ethos (trust and authority), logos (reason and logic), and pathos (emotion and values). Make it clear to students that pathos is a tool more often reserved for persuasive argumentation, while academic arguments generally rest on ethos (e.g., quotes from a text) or logos (e.g., a reasoned line of thinking).

      ELL Focus: Do This One Thing to Help

      Ferlazzo and Hull-Sypnieski (2014) suggest having ELL students translate key words, such as problem, cause, effect, solution, and reason, into their native languages. Then ask the students to find key details or evidence related to each of those concepts. They also used sentence starters—in English—to help the students get going: “The main problem is that . . .” Once students have begun in this way, structuring an argument may be a less overwhelming task.

      Discussion, Presentation, Technology, and Multimedia

       Discuss. To get students thinking about claims and counterclaims, try a get-off-the-fence discussion.→ First, come up with a series of arguable statements or questions about a text or topic. Example: Romeo and Juliet are not truly in love; they’re infatuated only with one another.→ Have students who agree with the statement move to one side of the room and students who disagree move to the other. Balance discussion by calling on each side in turn.→ Students who are undecided may stand in the middle of the room but may not speak. At the end of the discussion, have these students choose a side and explain why.→ After you’ve discussed several statements, have students write down their thoughts, including noting any convincing arguments made by other students, places they changed their minds, or new ideas about the topic. Use these notes to come up with a claim and counterclaim as a class.

       Track. Once students have practiced identifying claims and counterclaims, teach them to create a table in Microsoft (MS) Word or to use columns in MS Excel in order to create T charts. This use of technology not only allows students to catalog pros and cons, for instance, but also provides them a tool for organizing and reorganizing that material to find the most effective argument.

       Present. When students share material with the class, ask them to include a counterclaim as part of the presentation, perhaps devoting one slide to this task. Encourage them to use this moment in a presentation as a chance to involve the audience by asking for feedback or discussion on a point.

      YouTube Moment: The online world is robust with argumentation, from political speeches on YouTube to blogs to posts and comments in online forums. Students need to learn to navigate these arguments. Choose a video with user comments (you will probably wish to screen the comments for appropriate content before using them with students) and ask students to look at those user comments for appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos and to evaluate the effectiveness of each. Ask if each is an argument or a persuasive/opinion piece. How do they know? Present their findings to the class.

      After: Producing Arguments

      Student Example 1: Argumentative Writing

      The ninth grade reading list at Anton’s school included a number of canonical texts with a common motif: Sophocles’ Antigone, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. At the same time, Anton’s social studies class discussed the civil rights movement and, specifically, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Because the idea of resisting laws cut across their disciplines, Anton’s English and American History teachers decided to assign a cross disciplinary assignment focused on an argumentative task. The assignment unfolded in three steps.

      Step One: Discussion

      In social studies class, Anton and his peers participated in a fishbowl discussion focusing on the question “What makes a law just or unjust?” The fishbowl procedure worked this way:

       Four to five students sat in an inner circle and discussed their answer to the question.

       The other students sat in an outer circle and took notes on points raised in the discussion.

       When an outer circle student wanted to contribute a point, he or she would tap one of the inner circle students on the shoulder and take that place, while the speaker returned to the outer circle.

       The teacher monitored the discussion, encouraging new speakers to add points by asking if anyone could add a different point of view.

      Step Two: Claim and Counterclaim

      The next day, Anton’s English teacher took students to the computer lab and allowed them access to online versions of all three of the plays they’d read that grading period. He had them work in pairs to find two lines in the texts, one that supported the idea that citizens should obey laws and one that supported the idea that citizens should resist unjust laws. When several of the pairs struggled to come up with lines, the teacher offered two suggestions: first, the students were allowed to summarize actions or scenes in the play instead of writing down a specific line of text, and second, they could use the search function to look for specific words in the online texts.

      

      Anton and his partner searched the online text for the word law in all three plays. From those, they chose the following two lines from Antigone:

       Citizens should obey: “I will obey those in control. That’s what I’m forced to do.” (Ismene)

       Citizens should resist: “I’ll lie down there forever. As for you, well,