The Compelling Factor

Yesterday, I read NYT's piece on swapped identical twins The Mixed Up Brothers of Bogota. It was a compelling and fascinating read, as the comments on the article attest, and there are so many aspects to consider but I keep coming back to why?

What makes something compelling?

Yes, this article has the dream telenovela-ness to it. The story of identical twins who are switched at birth, in this case creating two sets of fraternal twins, is so good that even Shakespeare embraced it as a plot device in Comedy of Errors. Who doesn't love a good mistaken identity story?

But there is something more. Susan Dominus spends a fair amount of the article talking about the science of twins, or the research related to twins. She brings up ideas of nature and nurture along with current thinking around epigenetics. That ability to connect this personal story to larger ideas of science becomes critical in building an understanding of why this story matters. What are the larger implications, which is the fundamental "so what?" question we often draw on. She does this artfully in the organizational structure of the piece. She starts with discovery, encounter, revelation then moves to science. Then back to the narrative of consequences of those revelations and more narrative. It's a similar structure to what Atul Gawande does in his writing, one that I find appealing. A little bit of narrative makes the informational writing go down.

For me, also, this story is so riveting because there are implications about where the root of our personal successes may lie. As a country built on the post-Enlightenment ideals of rugged individualism, we believe that personal success is related to our own individual resilience and work ethic (which is the same idea that makes it so hard to understand what privilege is). We might believe that there is a genetic component, but we rarely acknowledge the environmental.

Here, then, is a story about four men who are encountering the direct effect of fate, as a Classicist may say, in their lives. Would William be different if he had been raised with his "true" mother (and let's let that sit there for a while, that difficulty in understanding what "true" parenthood and family are) in the city as opposed to the crushing grind of poverty in the country. Doors closed because of his environment while for Carlos they opened.

I can't begin to understand the emotions that this news must have brought. What happens when you are faced with the fact that you've been screwed by "fate"? Does it explain things or make you feel rage or both?

To me, that wondering, the sense of what this all means is precisely what makes for a compelling read.I prefer work that brings up questions, about our place in the world or how things work and what implications might be for further thinking. This article definitely brings all of those wonderings to the fore.

I am now thinking about how I might pair this up with other pieces in order to teach. Obviously the Comedy of Errors connection is ripe. But what else might I use? I wonder if it would be good for something on family? And if so what? I definitely will think about teaching it this year.

Violence and Games

A few summers ago someone at the UCLA Writing Project handed me a Lucy Calkins book about accessing and teaching the Common Core. Calkins is known for working with lower grades and for working with teachers, but the book was interesting enough. She talked about handing out articles to read with teachers, not about teaching, but just good solid nonfiction. One she recommended was a piece called "Shoot Out" about a high school assassin game. Calkins walked readers of the book through a way to talk about the article and helped me frame some ideas about Close Reading.

I love to use this article both with students and in leading professional development. I think it is nuanced enough that the first read gives a misleading understanding. To have readers revisit the piece, multiple times, especially around the diction used to describe the game itself and then the students' skills really forces students to use a text to make sense of more ambiguous and nuanced reading.

This piece is especially great with an article by Steven Johnson that was in the LA Times. This piece is an ironic yet fact filled open letter to then-Senator Clinton about violence in videogames. Johnson is known for his book Everything Bad Is Good for You which my friend David and I used with a study group around pop culture in the classroom. In the op ed piece, readers are asked to deal with sarcasm, which is often tricky for them to do in writing and it serves as an interesting companion for the "Shoot Out".

As ever, text sets are so much more interesting and exciting to deal with because they offer students multiple ways to think about a topic. These two articles work together, but they are also strong pieces to examine individually. Morevoer, they avoid the pitfalls of thinking about violence and games solely in the context of videogames nor are they simplistic Violent-Games=Bad articles. If you want to see what sorts of writing, along with the other pieces (a satire that Lucy Calkins mentioned called "The Great Office War" along with a Mother Jones article and a PBS piece) then please feel free to see the handouts from a presentation I gave at the With Different Eyes conference.

Icarus

I have often taught a text set of art pieces and poems related to Icarus. These include the Brueghel painting, a Dali piece and a Matisse along with poems by Auden, Williams, Anne Sexton, and Edward Field.

What might be an interesting and diversionary nonfiction piece to include might be this piece on two BASE jumpers who died in Yosemite this spring. The writing isn't particularly moving, though there is something to be said for the unvarnished way it is written, with terse syntax almost detracting from the spectacle of the article, an interesting mirror to the idea that the NPS is also trying to keep the spectacle out of the parks.

There is, though, I think, an echoing overlap between the themes of the Icarus story in its various guises and the desire of these men to fly. I am not sure what a good prompt would be, perhaps a found poem of the article moving to a poetic retelling of the events?

While in the car with Cathy on our way to professional development today, we had this very involved conversation about the pain of learning and what is necessary to learn. We ended up thinking about two intersecting continua, one that would be a scale of intellectual generosity to intellectual rigidity and the other would be engagement to rejection. I would love to do tons of interviews with teachers and code what teachers think provide successful students. I'm not sure what we might find, but I wonder if it falls along those two continua.

On my way home, then, I began to think more about Maria Popova and her work at Brain Pickings. By reading around her blog, I came to a post on the difference between wisdom and knowledge. In some ways, she describes a "ladder of knowing" similar to Bloom's Taxonomy, but then she gives this lovely explanation

Information is having a library of books on shipbuilding. Knowledge applies that to building a ship. Access to the information — to the books — is a prerequisite for the knowledge, but not a guarantee of it.

Once you’ve built your ship, wisdom is what allows you to sail it without sinking, to protect it from the storm that creeps up from the horizon in the dead of the night, to point it just so that the wind breathes life into its sails.

She goes on to say that the stories offer the opportunity to explain why given knowledge (and experiences) matter, to see the bigger picture.

I wonder if I can find something of hers for my students to begin the school year with?

Literature and the Internet

I have been attempting to clear out the backlog of un-listened to podcasts. Last week, I decided to work through On Being, which I love 50% of the time. Krista Tippet had interviewed Maria Popova, the woman behind Brain Pickings, which is a blog that I need to read more often because it challenges my thinking whenever I do read it. There are so many ideas worth discussing that Popova brings up, but the one that really blew my mind was around literature.

MS. TIPPETT: I mean, I wonder — someplace you said, “Literature is the original Internet.” And I wonder if that image of your grandfather is precisely what you're describing.

MS. POPOVA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, in this — I guess, seeing these books of his added a different layer of understanding to this thing which I've been saying for a while. And originally, I meant it in the sense of — you know, you look at a book and then, in it, every footnote and allusion and reference is essentially a hyperlink to another work. Except it only works backwards. It only goes back in time, you know? And marginalia or this sort of — it goes back and forth because it is the present mind conversing with a past mind. So it's a different kind of hypertext, I guess.

I have struggled at times to explain why allusions expand a text. In one way, they are ideas building on previous ideas from, what Popova calls, the common record. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulty that inexperienced readers have is that they don't have enough experience with the common record to see how the ideas are building. The corollary is that students also have difficulty building their own ideas within their writing.

This idea of allusion as hyperlink and literature as the internet is one that has been intriguing me all week. In fact I was so excited to share it with co-worker. She also pointed out that "allusions were what you HAD to do as author -- it was about how you established your credibility to even write your work." Oh my! (Did I mention that my coworkers are amazingly smart?). Allusion then becomes a part of rhetoric, which is forcing me to reconsider some what I know about ethos.

The podcast is definitely worth an hour of listening. Another intriguing part:

POPOVA: I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. And critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism. But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. And I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.

Yes. This is giving me food for thought because I've been reading Peter Elbow's work on Believing and Questioning and I'm in the middle of pondering an article around doubt for a Writing Project piece.

Sports Revisited: Football and Native Americans

Last year, as a response to a student, who, at 5'4", was convinced he was destined for professional basketball, we created a text set around sports. Since then, we've been listening for and working with other texts that relate to sports.

One of the questions we get when we talk about argument is how does this apply to literature. I realize that this is a blog about nonfiction, but I have been thinking about how we integrate literature with nonfiction and what argument looks like within that context.

To that end, a nice addition to a text set on sports is "At Navajo Monument". This poem, by Sherman Alexie, is based on a photograph by Skeet McCauley.

The poem is a really wonderful extended metaphor with horses and football that creates images that challenge our conception of Americanism.

An amazing companion piece is Radiolab's amazing podcast on American Football. This piece focuses on the football team from the Carlisle Indian School and the experiences the team had playing against a variety universities. I loved learning tidbits about Pop Warner's ideas for how to win (for example, sew pockets in the jerseys to hide the football). What I loved is how this story shows the historical background of football, how the game became a proving ground for the sons of men who had fought in the wars against Native Americans, how Carlisle students take this elite sport and turn it into something that allows them to fight back. Also check out the great photos that go with the story.

These two pieces work great together. I'd love to integrate them into an argument prompt on whether or schools should support athletic programs. I think it is interesting, culturally, to bring these two pieces in because it forces a very different perspective on the value of sport.

California English Article

Cathy and I had an article accepted for California English. Thought we'd share it with you here: That’s Why: Examining Reasoning and Justification by Kathryn Gullo and Catherine Underwood

“That’s why, Miss.” Kathryn took a moment, looking at Kenneth, the 8th grade boy who was deeply in trouble. This phrase confused her because it was used as the answer to the question “Why would you think it’s okay to put gum in Eunice’s hair!?” without any intermediate information. She didn’t know it but “That’s why, Miss” would be the answer to some of the thorniest questions she posed in class. This elision was not always an attempt at dissembling. Instead it was the wholesale summation of a type of reasoning that could be summed up more succinctly as “duh.”

Kathryn thinks of Kenneth’s declaration each time she is asked to consider text-based writing and the Common-Core trifecta of claim, evidence and reasoning (Kathryn also claims “I also thought of his pat answer for his explanation of his thinking whenever I read the comments on a post on the internet”). Many casual arguments, on-line or in homes, include claims (like orders or opinions) and at least allusions to evidence. Less commonly, however, do they include well-developed reasoning. Well-developed reasoning, however, sits at the heart of argument. Argument begins with an assertion, a claim where you want to direct the audience. Evidence should be relatively indisputable, such as data or a quote from a text. Look-up the data or page number and no debate should continue. The audience can find footing in it. Solidly constructed reasoning shores up the claim with the steadiness of evidence. It carries the audience from the evidence to the claim.

Understanding how to support a claim with appropriate, adequate and accurate evidence along with clearly articulated reasoning and justification is at the basis of academic thinking. In fact, a quick scan of the words “claim,” “evidence,” and “reasoning” show up repeatedly in the Common Core standards and the Next Gen Standards in Science. In the English Language Arts standards claim is written 110 times, evidence 136 times and reasoning 46. In the math standards there are 71 instances of the use of the word reasoning, and in science the word evidence is used a whopping 440 times. The intellectual work in academic argument is engaging with and using these concepts. For the past few years, our journey has been delving into the world of evidence and reasoning both with our students but also with our co-workers. The guiding question for our work has been and continues to be “how do you get students to reason?”

Where We Started

Both of us teach Advanced Placement English, Literature and Language respectively. While we had different assignments, we’d often co-score, sharing the frustrations and joys of papers. It was gratifying to share the pain and to have someone help talk through what we each noticed. Co-scoring was more than just sharing someone else’s pain; instead it was for us to learn and to validate. In 2010, we worked with our department to create and give a school-wide benchmark assignment, based on the AP Language synthesis prompt which we co-scored as a team. What we noticed is that our students’ mistakes could be categorized as either missing a piece of the prompt, misreading critical components of the text, or, most often, merely providing summaries of the text.

Armed with this information, it was easiest to address problems with the prompt. A few targeted minilessons and consistent practice helped there. We also used a wider variety of reading strategies to ameliorate some of the misreading. Addressing the summarizing problem, the problem of students merely using evidence without justification, was a bigger and more intimidating task.

In January 2014, a small team from our department participated in a project focused on argument at the Institute for Standards, Curricula and Assessments. As participants, we worked with a data set from the National Science Teachers Association, and we worked with argument whiteboards. This process, of stepping away from a traditional print text to look at data was liberating and extremely fruitful and the work we did was transformational for us. The argument whiteboard, as adapted from NSTA’s Scientific Argumentation in Biology by Victor Samson and Sharon Schleigh by Charlotte and Day Higuchi, is a two-column graphic organizer that is simple in the best way possible. Students provide evidence on one side and justification on the other. Like the best graphic organizers, it is not especially the boxes that matter, but it provided a framework for us to explicitly teach reasoning and justification. Part of the beauty of this framework is that it separated the variables of claim, evidence and reasoning so that we as teachers began to see where confusion in students’ thinking actually lay.

In Our Classroom

Our first realization was that working with data sets simplified some of the problems with students not understanding the reason. If you are given strictly numbers in a chart, the comprehension issues tend to fall into issues of understanding greater underlying concepts and not the usual reading comprehension issues. Our students started with looking at data around snakes and guppies and birds. Some understood the process, but most others were still muddling through. Without being biology teachers ourselves, we realized that we could not adequately answer what types of thinking underpinned the students who did got it. We used the argument whiteboards with texts, including speeches, articles, poems or whatever we were reading but when only a few students would be able to explain how their textual evidence supported their claims, we were not always able to formulate the right question to move their thinking forward.

In Writer’s Seminar, which is a class we co-taught, Leon, one of our students, attempted to explain his reasoning. Kathryn presented the idea of selecting car colors for a new car model. She presented the idea that the majority of the cars in the parking lot are white, grey or silver. Leon said, “Then make it white.” After we probed his thinking he attempted to explain. “White is popular, “ he said. Catherine looked at him and said, “Yes, since white is more popular....” He finished her sentence by saying, “...if you want to make money you should be sure to make one white.” Eureka. There it was.

Reasoning is not merely explanation of the data. Explanation often provides recapitulaton, not reasoning. To get to justification, a student has to add something more. Reasoning requires that students talk about the evidence and talk about the claim. Reasoning is the center of the Venn diagram; reasoning is the link. Therefore, in their reasoning, they must say something about the evidence and something about the claim. To move them there, we began to look for words and phrases that could goad articulation of reasoning: therefore, since, in order to, in spite of.

This breakthrough in our own understanding along with constant models, both student generated and our own, prompted a leap forward for our students. With the new school year, we were more methodical and explicit teaching argument with argument whiteboards, and we began working with teachers in other disciplines in our school. To support students, we realized that students must practice first in lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy with knowledge and identification before attempting the creation of explicit reasoning on their own. We generated several example argument whiteboards and had students sort and categorize pre-written evidence and justification. Then we removed some evidence (while leaving the justification) and some of the justification (while leaving the evidence) and began having students compose the missing pieces, which allowed them an opportunity to see how each piece influenced its pair. Then we had students complete another argument whiteboard that had the justification, but students had to locate the evidence that allowed the justification. The last supported iteration was to provide the evidence and have students create the justification.

Shaping Our Practice

The biggest lesson for us has been that breaking this thinking task into its attendant parts is cognitively demanding. Previously we would scribble a “so what?” in the margin of the paper, which rarely resulted in a student really understanding what we are asking. Writing conferences have always been more fruitful because a teacher can continue to probe a student’s thinking to eventually get to their reasoning. Unfortunately, it’s also time consuming and difficult to schedule writing conferences with all 200 students on a roster.

We have noticed that coming up with a claim prior to thinking about evidence can have a deleterious effect. Often, teachers create prompts where we ask students to start with a claim, and then work backward to prove it. Students rely on impressions to create a claim then hunt for support. However, if an argument whiteboard starts only with evidence, then students must depend on actual reasoning in order to come up with a claim. This works best if students do not have preconceived ideas or opinions about the topic. Once the students already has an opinion, then it is too easy to make statements about a topic without reasoning to get there.

When teaching this process, it is best to start with accessible texts. This past winter, we relied on the podcast Serial. Serial was high interest with many debatable aspects, which was ideal. For the most authentic and interesting work in argument, students need a question whose resolution creates a need for reasoning. A claim that states an undisputed fact does not demand evidence and justification. The claim must explore a concept that is either mysterious or disputed. In socratic seminars and in argument whiteboards, students grappled with a variety of disputable aspects of Serial: information on Adnan’s innocence, the effect of podcast genre on this story, the appropriateness of Sarah Koenig’s reporting.

Our next step is more frequently to have students begin to question each other’s reasoning in a formalized way. We would like students to begin to articulate why they have discarded evidence or what other claims they had considered. Day Higuchi calls these questions “probing skeptic’s questions” and we believe that by answering such questions, students will experience another dimension of reasoning.

Not knowing an answer is very uncomfortable. The process of good reasoning requires us to delay landing on an answer. It requires us to doubt any preconceived ideas and seek for why an answer might be wrong. They must delay an answer. In order for students to deeply reason, they must sustain doubt. They must learn to enjoy the muddle of looking for holes in a theory. If we want students to deeply reason we must make this process of reasoning the main point of academics.

Serial Revisited

Cathy and I taught Serial, using what I wrote on this post as a guide. I wanted to share one of my student's argument whiteboards and one of Cathy's students.

The first example is from my class. My students were relatively new to argument whiteboards. As you can see, this student is using some justification, but it's still not fully developed. In fact, she has a little more summary than I would hope to see. While I think she chose a question that is definitely worth considering and her ideas are good, I am not sure she has sufficient explanation to justify her claim.

Cathy's student is one who had worked with argument whiteboards for over a year.

The second part of the example shows the more complex thinking with positing of what MIGHT be the case. The question she examined is entirely debatable and moot, and yet the evidence is not quite strong enough to make a solid case which makes this an interesting exercise in justification.

York and Fig

Marketplace has been running a series on gentrification in Highland Park called York and Fig. I am not sure how I might use this, but there are so many ideas around gentrification, urban renewal, and capitalism that might be interesting to consider. I think this would be a cool piece to integrate with an economic class or a set on the working poor. Another aspect with this series to consider is how the writers become part of the story. Similarly to Serial, at what point are the reporters a piece of what is being reported; in this case the first part of the story opens with the tagging of the bureau that the Marketplace reporters are moving into.

Text Set: Spanking

I have taught many a unit on punishment or juvenile justice. While the topic is certainly interesting, I find that I am increasingly drawn to stories around punishment that impacts my students more directly, namely spanking.

Full disclosure, as a parent, I do not spank my children. I was, however, spanked or at least threatened with spanking as a child. What makes this a powerful topic to explore as a reader and writer is how decidedly ambivalent I feel.

Digression: for me, the most interesting argument work I do with students is around topics about which I feel ambivalent. In thinking about this, I think, perhaps, it's because argument is best where there is a level of ambiguity, nuance or doubt. Arguing about facts is useless. But arguing about what facts indicate is always way more interesting.

Five Thirty Eight ran a piece on spanking in light of the arrest of Adrian Paterson found here. What they highlight are the changes in trends of people who support spanking. The tables provide an opportunity for students to look at how the support has changed and who has stronger preferences. For a stats nerd, they also provide a link to a regression analysis to see the connection between the various characteristics, which could allow for a quick discussion of causation vs. correlation.

These trends, though, need to be viewed with some more analysis. This Po Bronson article from Time Magazine adds some context. It's an excerpt to the excellent book that he and Ashley Merriman wrote called NurtureShock. This piece is trying to examine if outcomes are better for children who have never been spanked. I think he makes some assertions around progressive parenting that are worth probing.

When I read the chapter from NurtureShock with students, we discussed the question of whether or not children should be spanked. I was fascinated at my students' responses. I think I assumed that they would be anti-spanking, but many made compelling claims that it was necessary to teach children right from wrong. I think when I teach this again, I may try to find one more text (two texts feels like a too flimsy set), perhaps a short story, or an excerpt from Huck Finn that deals with spanking.