Argumentative Writing in the Home-Stretch

By: Chloe Kannan

Hello TCRWP followers, Language Arts Masters, and Middle School Educators,

It has been awhile since my last post. If you are a teacher, you know how crazy the year gets. Right after this unit finished, we jumped into memoirs in 7^th grade, took a nose-dive into a tech integration project with memoirs after that, and 8^th graders dove into “You Choose” writing units. With one child turning in a 39 page draft of dystopian story, I knew that giving feedback to kids needed to be the priority. I have 2 weeks of school left, and I hate not finding out the ending. Especially to a good story…

Someone on Twitter asked a short time back, WHAT HAPPENED in that unit?

I look at the screen shot below and sometimes I think I am a teacher psycho.

How can you possibly teach an argumentative unit with two papers and a project-based learning aspect in 12 instructional days? You also have to give draft feedback on both papers. And then you add another content area and their standards to the equation.

The answer is you just believe in your colleagues, your curriculum, your kids, and of course, your own judgment.

March Madness is Upon Us: Measles, Mumps, Hep B, Pertussis, Diptheria

We had five class days to get this paper done. Spring Break was coming upon us fast (beginning of March), and we had to give time to prepare for their final school-wide PBL presentations. If you remember from earlier posts, students had to write an argumentative science research paper addressing the World Health Organization; students needed to argue that their disease needed to be the priority for the upcoming year to be eradicated through vaccine. Considering at the time, all of these diseases were reappearing in the United States, it was a perfect paper to do alongside science.

We had built their argumentative skills, and science had been doing source evaluation. Now it was time to combine forces.

I gave the science department a basic outline that could help kids plug their research and findings into after they had selected their disease.

Students brought that outline to mine and Velicia’s classes and we gave them one 80 minute class period to draft, reminding them of all of the argument skills they had already learned.

The next few days was a whirl-wind (Each number below will represent a class period)

1. We walked kids through a mini-lesson on how we take research and make it compelling enough to become an argument. We didn’t want science fact sheets!

Then we did flash debates orally. They found compelling evidence from their drafts, caucused, and debated with a peer. They incorporated new evidence for homework

2. Students read through a peers’ paper with a different disease, found his or her strongest evidence, and made a counter-argument orally. Then the student incorporated this new counter-argument into their paper.

3. We taught organizational structure by walking students through different options. We modeled with different diseases and then asked students to think about which structure made sense for their paper. They talked it out and then wrote a paragraph justification for the structure they chose. Kids worked together to give feedback on the structure.

4A. Run-Ons and Fragments: The True Argumentative Horror Story- Language Usage is always a fun one. We took sentences out of kids’ actual papers and kids worked to fix them. Then they had to fix each other’s and then their own.

4B. Connotative Language Part Two: We had fun showing them how severe some of their language was in some of their papers and how this would NOT work in a science journal for the WHO:

Attacking your body and gripping onto your cilia, the terrifying disease starts to torture you inside out. Once the wretched creatures have reached their desired location, they release harmful toxins that damage the cilia and cause inflaming in that region.

Kids then worked to fix connotative language in their paper and students gave feedback.

During this time, Velicia and I worked frantically to give individual feedback in documents. Many kids met with us individually before school, after school, and during lunch to ask about feedback and to get more clarification.

Then the papers were due and we had a project-based learning event to somehow get together in one class period before the kids presented in front of the school…

One more post to come…I will discuss how TCRWP Units of Study can help you leverage curriculum, the results of our unit, what we can learn from working with other content areas, and the final PBL Presentations.

When Authentic Learning Starts to Sink: Get Life Boats, Don’t Call the Cruise Off.

This is our third post in a series of entries that chronicle our experiences, hiccups, and successes in using the Teachers’ College Reading and Writing Project 8th Grade Writing Unit of Study to help us execute a 7th Grade PBL Unit with our Science department.  We are writing this blog to show teachers how we can use these units to enhance curriculum even if you are not in a Project School, to show the merits of Balanced Literacy, and a deeper look at authentic learning.

By Chloe Kannan

On Friday night, Velicia came over and we finally sat down and took a breath. I poured ourselves each a glass a wine and we toasted. “To the best unit we have ever taught and the most growth we have ever seen from kids in writing.”

That was the best glass of wine I have had in a long time.

We have all had that toast and glass of wine. But for some, with the realities of standardized testing, top-down initiatives, and people cutting time from your classes, it becomes more difficult than ever before to plan and execute authentic literacy. But it can be done working smart.

So, what exactly happened to our rigorous, authentic learning excursion- aka grabbing Mary and Cornelius’ TCRWP unit of study curriculum books and giving a unit a go….

I guess we need to rewind.

This post will detail all about the first half of the unit, the hiccups, what we did to fix them, and the results we had going into the second half of the unit. I like the metaphor of going on a cruise (we are too close to Spring Break)

Part One: We are on the Cruise Ship- The Beginning of a New Unit

The first bend was all about building their argument skills. They had none, and they had NO base in argumentative writing. We were on a time-crunch. The kids are on block-scheduling and with school interruptions taken into account, we only had 12 instructional days per class to make this unit happen. Sound familiar?

So we had the kids for homework outline their paper on role-playing simulated violence games, but I knew that this wasn’t going to be enough for the kids to be motivated to write the paper. In the past, they had written a paper over the course of days. Flash-drafting in class was going to kill them. But we had a plan to get them excited.

A few days earlier, I remembered I had a primary source on this topic: my fiancé, Nick Kilstein. He played the game in high school, and he was the best story-teller I knew.

I walked into class and announced that there was another primary source giving a 15 minute presentation on his experiences and that they all should furiously write notes as he would recount his gripping story and sequence of events of his life: you know…the usual events of getting into car accidents, friends bugging each other’s backpacks, creating elaborate full-scale plans of attack. The kids were so excited.

Then the kids asked the question I had been waiting for: But Ms. Kannan, we planned this essay already. What if we decide to change our claim because of this primary source?

 Well, that’s the real world. We incorporate NEW evidence and revise our claim to fit our new thinking.

The kids were ready. The kids were engrossed, asked hard questions, and many had to end up following up later through email to incorporate more evidence to fit their arguments. It was a perfect supplement to the unit.

They flash-drafted and finished for homework. For kicks, Velicia and I looked into one class period’s documents.

And oh God, those papers were a mess: High-achievers, EALs, academic support. Guilty as charged- All of them had major gaps.

So much for authentic learning…Now, these kids were excited for the content, but oh NO, these papers are a disaster zone.

 The doubts set it: 8^th grade unit for 7^th grade? Crap, we didn’t do literary essay with them. Is this why it isn’t working? Maybe this isn’t possible. What are we doing? Is the 5 paragraph essay model laughing at our stupidity? Can we just go work office jobs instead?

 The desperation became comical in common planning. SO SCREWED, we moaned.

But of course, we refused to let this fail.

 Part Two: GET THE LIFEBOATS, NOW- Back to the Basics

1. After looking at these drafts, Velicia and I set one major goal for this paper. We would only focus on ideas and organization. We would focus on language usage (run-on sentences everywhere in all papers) and their word choice in the second half of the unit.

After the messy drafts, I had the kids come in and I handed them a blank sheet of paper. I want you to write down your claim at the top in a HUGE box with your 3 reasons listed below. Then I want you to pass the paper to someone next to you and they will put either a check or an X next to each of the reasons. Check for the ones that make sense. X for the ones that don’t. Your reasons must support your claim.

“If I want a transfer to Ms. Pernell’s class because it won’t be as distracting for my learning and I list less homework as a reason, does that make sense?”

I try to be funny…

This solved many of the problems with the paper making sense. Kids realized that much of their reasoning was not actually arguing for their claim.

Then, I checked through each one individually myself and conferenced with them. Some changed up reasons, other revised claims completely. Awesome.

2. We somehow had to teach counter-claim and we then were finding kids were not explaining their evidence.

When kids saw counter-claim in the exemplar paper from the actual unit, it seemed daunting. Not just for them, but for us. The kids had NO experience in counter-argument, and how the heck were we going to get to the point where they could not only just write it for this paper, but in a science paper. AGH.

On top of that, we found in kids’ papers, they weren’t actually explaining their evidence. They didn’t understand that evidence had to be really explained to justify their claim. We didn’t have much time, and we knew we needed to do this.

Velicia and I teach at the same time next door. Great in a situation like this. We each taught a 30 minute lesson and switched classes after each segment. I did the explaining evidence and V did the counter-argument.

Counter-Argument was a whole lesson on how we acknowledge “haters.” Yes, I am serious. Acknowledging haters and explaining that you have to get them out of the way. Velicia did this through talk of course, but then actually had kids through transitional phrases write a counter-argument paragraph in class. At the same time, she taught them options of where to put it. Organization and ideas, combined! Check!

For me, I went back to the whole idea of going up to our principal and wanting to switch into Ms. Pernell’s room. “Ms. Curtis, listen, Ms. Kannan’s classroom is distracting. For example, she doesn’t even wear shoes.”

For one, I don’t wear shoes, but the kids figured out real fast that I wasn’t really explaining the connection of the reason between not wearing shoes and the claim that Ms. Kannan’s class is distracting. The kids laughed and got it, highlighting parts of their papers that needed more explanation of evidence. I fed them transitions of how we introduce evidence- For example, for instance

And fed them some transitions of analysis- this demonstrates, this shows, this conveys.

 Boom. We got the kids back on the life-boats.

 Part Three: Looking back at the Cruise Ship with Humility and Pride- Analyzing Results

That cruise ship was a mammoth. The kiddos cranked out a paper in just a few instructional days. 6 to be exact. These results would determine how we would move into the second half of this unit to write the Science Paper, the most difficult and technical piece of writing they would have to do. We still furiously gave comments before they turned in this paper on ideas and organization, so we hoped they would make some major changes…

Did the lifeboats work? Was the cruise worth it?

So we got the papers back. The results were all over the place. For an average class, 2 kids exemplified the standard, 4 met the standard, 5 approached standard, and 3 didn’t meet the standard. (We designed our standards-based rubrics based on Writing Pathways from TCRWP)

 I was proud. I couldn’t believe how great they were, that fast. The power of formative feedback is incredible; actually staggering how Velicia and I looked at papers and gave the feedback made a difference. Don’t look at them all at once. Too much work. But doing it in waves really helps instruction and your kids.

But there were some problems:

1. While overall organization made sense, there were problems with the internal organization of paragraphs. Some paragraphs were still HUGE and lots just didn’t make sense and were hard to follow.

2. Many kids made up evidence. Some of my highest-level students were using their own conclusions as evidence from either my fiancé or the article they read.

3. Connotative language was not taught. So the papers were either too informal or the language was too strong (high-achievers)

We ended up meeting with each kid individually to really discuss in-depth what worked and what didn’t in this paper. We did this as they wrote the science paper… This helped the kids set goals for the science paper, the second half of our unit. It also reminded us of what we need to spear-head moving forward.

We were ready for the hardest teaching excursion either of us had ever taken. And our kids were ready too…

More to come…

Bringing Calkins and Science To Unite in Curricular Glory: The Vision

By Chloe Kannan

We love teaching Middle School reading and writing. We, like many other devoted and passionate Language Arts teachers, are obsessed and dedicated followers of the Calkins Readers’ Writers’ Workshop model.

Being workshop devotees, we constantly want our students engaged in the art and process of reading and writing. This work needs to be meaningful, authentic, relevant, and personal. We want them to cultivate a true passion for this work and we hope that our students will begin to understand how the world of reading and writing can shape their lives in a whole new way.

During my first year at the American School of Bombay, I had the opportunity to witness kids falling in love with the killer openings of personal narratives, engaging in spoken-word, and finally feeling comfortable to unveil their deepest hopes. I saw kids who hated reading with fiery passion become life-long readers. I watched kids who read 3 books the year before read 22. It was beautiful and our curriculum was great (thanks to my colleague Carol who has been doing workshop lessons since the early 90’s. True Dumbledore.). Look at how much we accomplished in an 80-minute period every other day.

On the other hand, I did not feel like we were laying the ground-work for critical thinking in writing that they would need in our future world. We weren’t getting kids to reconcile opposing view-points, they weren’t addressing counter-claims, they were still committed to the five-paragraph essay, and they couldn’t understand why nuance mattered so much in their writing.

As a result, we found that kids were going into 9^th grade and IB with real struggle. Sure, they loved to read and they could write flowery pieces with passion- all great things, but they didn’t have the critical thinking, argument, and analysis practice to bring everything they knew full-circle. They rambled and wrote in circles. My kids were passionate, but we needed kids to have the critical thinking tools to defend themselves. We needed to raise the bar in writing. We needed the power of something relevant, and something where writing would be the medium in which to argue really difficult issues.

So this year, my new colleague, Velicia Pernell, and I were committed to do argument. And we were going to give it everything we had.

Last summer, I went to Reading and Writing Project’s Summer Institute. And of course, during lunch, I went to the store hoping for another resource that could help sharpen our curriculum. I knew I wanted less narrative and more argument and analysis. And then, Christmas came.

The brand new writing units were sitting on the table. Santa had come. How was I supposed to know these would be there? I would have begged my principal to let us have the whole department purchase it. Alas, I could only afford one out of my pocket. I decided to buy the 8^th grade one to start with. In my mind, we could try one to two new units, see how they went, and then decide if we wanted to buy more the following year.

It was my second year and we didn’t have a 7^th grade argument unit on the books. I read through the 8^th grade position papers unit written by Cornelius Minor, Julie Shepherd, and Mary Ehrenworth and I was just overwhelmed with joy. And once I met Velicia, the argument curriculum queen, I knew we were going to eventually run with this. I just didn’t know how. We have a lot of initiatives at our school, and we just wouldn’t be able to fit in the research component. And we knew we wanted to do this right. If we were going to do it, we weren’t going to half-ass it.

We did know that we could do it after our famed book club unit where our kids discussed and argued over texts. That would at least give them some practice in doing argument work before-hand. We also had kids do responses to reading in the fall. Again, not a formal unit, but kids at least knew “claim” and “evidence.” Analysis was lacking and the kids struggled during those months to master it.

We really didn’t want to do a position paper on yes or no to “school uniforms.” Ugh. We needed this to be relevant. “CURRICULUM GODS, GIVE US AN ANSWER. WE WANT OUR KIDS PREPARED FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY, BUT WE WANT THIS TO BE THE GREATEST UNIT EVER. PLEASE.”

And then, Santa came again with the greatest gift we could have asked for in late autumn. The 7^th Grade science department came to us at a faculty meeting and begged for a cross-curricular PBL unit. Bingo. We had won the lottery.

So, I know what you might be thinking. Teaching an 8^th grade unit to 7^th graders with no foundation in argument and also having science content on top of it. Are you guys out of your mind?

Well, why not? We want the content relevant, we want connections across classes, and we want kids actually prepared for the 21^st century. And we were willing to do whatever it took for the kids to have this opportunity.

Science was doing a unit on disease. In the fall, the kids play a zombie-unit video game that the science team designed where kids are learning about the content, the real-world issues of disease, and they have different challenges where they have to use that knowledge in various contexts. It was relevant and they wanted to do a deep-dive of the diseases in more depth starting in January.  We had to unite.

The Unit Design:

Now, what exactly were kids going to argue that was relevant to today? It took some time to develop an essential question that worked but, here we go:

Which disease should the international community focus the most effort on stopping through vaccination?  You are asked to write to a coalition of doctors and produce a science-based research paper that supports your position. You must acknowledge why this disease should be the priority over the others up for consideration.

The following diseases science selected were based on which diseases were resurfacing throughout the world and have been all over the news lately. Talk about relevant:

• Mumps
• Measles
• Rubella
• Diphtheria
• Tetanus
• Pertussis

Science provided us with the content they wanted to see kids use in order to justify their positions. This would be the criteria (not listed here) that kids must include in their paper.   In turn, we gave science the learning outcomes we wanted to see throughout the unit and in the final paper:

Writers will rethink their positions as they research where they will be choosing, situating, and explaining evidence. They are going to learn to work with counter-argument in order to be principled and fair to multiple points of view. They will contextualize the issue and highlight its complexity, develop its history, and define the scope of their particular argument in their papers and final presentations.

Similar to the TCRWP’s unit, we divided this into two bends for both science and Language Arts:

In Language Arts, we are building their argument skills in the first bend using the lessons and texts from the unit. In Science, they are teaching them source evaluation and research. In the second bend, Language Arts will attack the paper using the skills they learned in Bend 1, and Science will do shorter mini-lessons based on the content that is missing or where kids need help.

I know what you are thinking now…This isn’t a PBL unit. What are kids going to actually be doing at the end to bring this argument paper to life?

At the end of the unit, students will find partners in their class who also wrote their position paper on disease. They will be responsible for using their final research papers, and reconciling viewpoints in order to create a visual or short presentation detailing their findings. Students groups will also create short pitches where they must convince stakeholders to prioritize their disease for the international health organization. Our kids are being asked to put all their argument skills to the test orally, visually, and using a research paper to ground it. The school will then vote on what they think. As kids present their findings in the cafeteria at small tables, stakeholders will look at their options in order to make the best decision. They will fill out a ballot on the way where they will mark their vote and write one reason to justify their decision.

At our last logistics meeting, the four of us were officially super stoked about the vision for this project. It was a curricular unit dream: rigorous, engaging, relevant with three of the greatest teachers working by my side. It would be SO awesome, SO AMAZING, and SO EPIC.

We kicked off the unit the first day back from winter break.

We taught the first lesson and…

MORE TO COME FROM VELICIA PERNELL.