Creating Spaces for Respectful Argument

In designing her unit on museums and artifacts for social studies, Mrs. Patten partnered with the English language arts teacher at her school to plan how to teach civic argument writing. She was reflecting on how recent cultural and political conversations were affecting her community and was concerned that students might frequently see contentious dialogue on social media, television, and currently in school board meetings. 

Mrs. Patten and her colleague chose to frame their own practitioner inquiry around two questions, “What topics are worthy of argument writing?" and “How can be mindful of cultural conflicts in society while providing students spaces to engage in respectful dialogue?" They drew upon a chapter from Inquiry as a Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to guide them. By adopting "inquiry as a stance," their work with argument writing transformed two classrooms and offered over 100 students opportunities to grow as a critical thinkers and writers. 

Both teachers explored how they could create spaces and a framework for a culture of dialogue. Both believed in offering students opportunities to formulate their own opinions rooted in fact, evidence, and respectful listening. Both embraced possibilities for reading and writing with multiple perspectives to encourage students to deconstruct an argument into essential components and focus on how to recognize personal experience and connections. To achieve these goals, they leaned heavily on routines from the National Writing Project's College, Career, and Community Writers Program (e.g., Atwoodian Table, Harris Moves, sentence stems for writing claims and counter claims from They say/I say: Moves that matter in academic writing from Birkenstein and Graff) as well as strategies from the Library of Congress (e.g., primary source analysis) and Project Zero (e.g., "Connectm extend, challenge" and "I used to think, now I think"). These routines and strategies helped to make the moves of arguing and writing more clear to students and set the stage for respectful dialogue.

After their work together a student reflected on what they learned:

"I learned during this assignment that sometimes you have to go further into the explanation of your evidence than you had before. I learned about myself that it can be difficult to achieve when you already have something in mind that you want to stick to or keep in the piece. I think that argumentative writing is a really difficult type of writing, as it's quite difficult to create a powerful argument unless you have strong evidence and a strong claim you can defend and back up, which is the most important part of this type of writing."

At the end of the year students selected their own claims to research, wrote a persuasive piece, and spoke about in the classroom.  Both teachers felt that their middle school students developed the ability to change their initial gut claim and to disagree while still maintaining respect for their peers.