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.
