Teaching argument presentation

I tried posting some of my argument presentation here, but I was unable to add an attachment - though it's not hard to add a link to a Livebinder:

Teaching Argument Writing - My Livebinder

There's a bunch of stuff there, including the rubric, the assignment sheet, a sample of Crime and Puzzlement, and the slides.

The presentation was very well-attended, and I was a little worried at the beginning that some people would be disappointed.  But no one walked out (that I saw).

Last year, I included WAY too many things in the "blurb" for the program, and I never had a chance to talk about everything that I mentioned.  For example, last year I mentioned Big 6 research strategies in the blurb and never really talked about it.  I had at least one person express disappointment.

This year, I think I was boring.  More so than last year.  Last year, I think I was rushing so fast that people had to pay attention or take a chance of getting motion sickness.

Anyway, I think this went well enough that I'm planning to try again next year, and maybe step up to a larger conference - maybe a state conference (like the IRC?).  Not sure where I'm headed from here.  But I think it was fun, and I think that people benefited from the conversation.  And I think I did a decent job showing respect for the experience and contributions of the audience.  We say that we should demonstrate our "good teaching" when we present to other teachers, but we should also show that we understand the difference between the needs of our students and the needs of an audience of adult professionals.

I enjoyed hearing from the audience members, and I think my next goal is to involve the audience without asking too much.

Engagement and Instant Feedback

So, the other day, I was giving a test and had students who were finished early and waiting for others. Not an uncommon situation, I suppose. Typically, I have several options available for these students, but a new option presented itself. I was chatting with a student - who happens to be a student who struggles to persist through difficult tasks, who can be challenging to motivate, and so on - and we talked briefly about the school alarm system.

 Our school - like many - has a security system that is activated when the building is empty. One component of this system is motion detectors. On the wall in the hall outside my classroom is a small rectangular box, perhaps three inches tall and two inches wide. There is a small red light on the box, and it lights up when it detects motion, even when the security system is not turned on.

 I told this student about the red light, and he didn't believe me. We stepped into the hall to investigate. "See, right there - that little box on the wall." He was moving, and the light was on. "Now freeze, and the light will go off." There happened to be no one else in the hall, so when he and I stopped moving, the light went off.

 "Cool!" he said. I think that was the first time I had heard undisguised interest from this student. He went back into the classroom and told a friend. They both went back into the hall, and the first student started explaining it to the second. In a few minutes, most of my class was standing in the hall, watching the light turn on when they moved, and trying to "sneak" or "ninja walk" the fifteen feet to the wall without setting off the light.

I was fascinated, so I let this continue. Almost my entire class was engaged and focused on this little red light. After 15 minutes, a few showed signs of being bored with the game, but most of the students appeared ready to play this game with the little red light indefinitely.

I thought about why these students were so interested in something so - for lack of a better word - dumb. I was pretty sure that I could be more interesting than a red light turning on and off. But why didn't they always automatically listen to me the same way?

 I think this was a nice reminder of the value of instant feedback. The kind of instant feedback that makes video games so much fun. They did - or did not do - something, and the light told them what it thought, clearly and quickly. Their sneaking was easily and readily judged good or bad. They could learn and adjust quickly. And, it was challenging. Most students couldn't move more than a few feet before they set off the red light. One student claimed to have been able to do it, though I didn't witness the success. So it wasn't an impossible or unattainable goal. It quickly turned into a brilliantly designed, yet accidental, psychological test. These kids were motivated.

 So, the ultimate question is this: how can I make my classroom more like that little red light?

Wonderopolis

Screencasting

Thanks to the new books that I recently received (Crime and Puzzlement, recommended by Hillocks in Teaching Argument Writing), I'm ready to teach a new lesson on argument writing.  I hope to use one of the visual mysteries from these books to help students craft an argument based on evidence.

To help promote engagement (and to promote this type of writing among my colleagues), I want to try screencasting this.  In Hillocks' book, he describes several lessons where students and their teacher are collaborating on a text, a kind of think-aloud about writing (sometimes called the "language experience" approach).  I want to try this, and I want them to get deeply involved in the text that we are co-constructing.  So, I'm trying to blend all of these things together.

We'll see how things go.

For now, here's a demo of the tool that I want to try using:

Here's a link to the video on vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/52945275

Common Core and Argument

So we've started the process of aligning our district standards (or "power" standards) with the newly adopted Common Core for Illinois.  This process is going to take a while, at least in my district, and it's a great conversation for teachers to have.

I have mixed feelings about national standards, and I understand that not all of the motives behind the national standards movement are wholesome, student-centered, and progressive.  However, the standards have been adopted, and they are not all bad.  There are a lot of good things about the standards, and a lot of potential for good outcomes.  I choose to look on the "bright side" here.  

For me, the best part of Common Core is the emphasis on writing.  (For example, consider standard CC.7.W.10: "Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.")  While I'm not a huge fan of "informational" writing, as a label, there is a general tendency in the standards for more sustained writing instruction.  I have always felt that writing instruction is the most challenging, the most important, and the most neglected aspect of middle school instruction.  As a high school student, I felt that writing was "easy," because I was exposed to so little academic writing, and I did well on the few assignments we were given.  It wasn't until I became a college writing instructor that I realized how little I really knew about academic writing, and how much I had yet to learn.  

Let me throw in some links here, before I forget:

Common core home page - http://www.corestandards.org/

PARCC - the Common Core state test website - http://www.parcconline.org/about-parcc

Illinois State Board of Education standards page - http://www.isbe.net/common_core/default.htm

IL Common Core ELA resources page - http://www.isbe.net/common_core/pdf/elawebsites.pdf

There's a lot out there.  I think, though, that a lot of the emphasis - at least in ELA at the 7th grade level - is on "argument."

Joking aside, it's a useful technical term that has fruitful links to colloquial understandings of the term. At bottom, an academic argument is not that different from a "regular" argument.  There are claims, moves, reasons, and positions.  Most kids are going to enter the classroom with a thorough understanding of the basic principles of argumentation, whether they can articulate those principles or not:

1.  State your position.

2.  Provide reasons or evidence for your position.  

3.  Provide counterarguments or refutations of opposing arguments.  

I like to think of "argument" as a bigger, more inclusive term than "persuasion."  TV commercials and used-car salesmen are "persuaders," but they also make arguments.  Argument is a Big Idea.

Where do we see the term in the standards?  Here are four explicit references to "argument" in the 7th grade standards:

CC.7.R.I.8 - Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient to support the claims. 

CC.7.W.1 - Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence. 

CC.7.W.1.e - Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented. 

CC.7.SL.3 - Delineate a speaker’s argument and specific claims, evaluating the soundness of the reasoning and the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

I would estimate that at least half of the rest of the standards make reference to argument-specific vocabulary (such as "claim" and "evidence"), as in this instance: 

CC.7.R.L.1 - Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

I think the most important thing about this isn't just that students are expected to learn how to write arguments, as part of a large collection of things they are supposed to learn.  Argument becomes an essential part of all of the English Language Arts - these standards come from almost all of the various strands (reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc.).  

So, learning about argument isn't just about writing instruction anymore (if it ever was).  Now, it's more explicitly tied to reading, speaking/listening, and synthesizing research.  

And that, I would argue, is a good thing.  

Debbie Miller

I just posted a long discussion of Debbie Miller's book, READING WITH MEANING, on my other blog.  Here's a link to the post if you'd like to read more.  I created this other blog, as I stated before, to kind of develop my thinking as a teacher reading professional books and books related to teaching. So, I thought that would be the best place to post my thinking.

I hope to have more to say about other books I'm reading soon, such as a book about classroom discussion that I started today - Building Literacy through Classroom Discussion by Mary Adler and Eija Rougle.  I was planning to read a book about Socratic circles, but the book I have is rather dry and wordy - this one seems both more readable and more broadly applicable to contexts other than just a single instructional practice (Socratic circles seem like one approach, while this book - about discussion - seems to be about a larger family of approaches built around discussion.  Much more useful.)

Some Updates

I just created two new blogs here, attached to this account.  I hope to funnel some of my thinking there, and connect in interesting ways here.  I've started to feel like this is a nice, public place to think and reflect on teaching/reading/writing, but that it's not an appropriate place for some of the things that I want to write about.  So, I hope to post my thoughts on teaching, technology, literacy, etc. here, while my (perhaps less interesting) other thoughts will be posted in either of the other two blogs.  

I'm a weird mix of research instincts (from being an English Ph.D. student some years ago) and the urge to write (from being a wannabe novelist/writer/provocateur since middle school), and these things are coalescing around some obscure interests, like common shade trees.  Honestly, there's not a big difference between trees and Frank Lloyd Wright, really, except perhaps people are more interested in the latter.  

So, anyway, that's what's up.  I'm hoping to post a few things here soon, dealing with engagement and motivation, some new ideas for portfolios in my middle-school classroom, and some general thinking about literacy and technology.  Big, teacher-related things.  

So, thanks for reading.