The following unit plan is appropriate for grades 10-12 and can be adjusted to fit the ages and abilities of students in the classroom. The goal is to teach argumentative writing that goes beyond just arguing whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. We want to teach students how to see the nuances in every issue and understand that agreement and compromise are possible.
This introduction to argument is intended to be used before students get into the research and writing process. Students should already have been introduced to basic ideas of rhetoric and argument.
Note: This is a work in progress, but I want the resources to be available as I add to them. Therefore, if you are getting this with initial publication, I will possibly add more resources later.
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Why spectrum?
When we get offline and start having real-life, in-person discussions with people, we start to realize that most of us have some common ground on even the most controversial topics. Get into a lengthy conversation, and we may even discover some heterodoxy from our most vocal opponents.
One of the things I have struggled with in my high school classrooms is getting students to see the nuances in the most controversial topics. When pollsters interview people on issues ranging from the environment to tax structure to abortion, they don’t just publish two numbers. Usually, they publish up to five percentages, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” We should be showing our students how to see their own argumentation in the same light. We need to give them permission to not agree 100% with every resource they find. They need to be able to see counterarguments as challenges to their argument, not as polar opposites.
After years of teaching research and argument and failing to get students to understand what I meant by “argument spectrum,” I finally devised a series of exercises to get them to start seeing how most issues have multiple perspectives shaped by a variety of factors.
Introducing Spectrum
Full disclosure: I used ChatGPT to create my initial spectrum activity. After a year of tinkering with different LLMs to better equip myself to deal with students who are desperately resorting to LLMs to complete their work, I think I would instead use Claude to create my initial spectrums. However, the perspectives compiled by ChatGPT gave me plenty to work with and cut down on my research by a lot. I knew what I wanted, and it saved me several hours of Google searches and article reading in preparation for class.
I selected three different topics that I felt were controversial enough for debate but safe enough for classroom discussion. I asked ChatGPT to place 10 different arguments on a spectrum from “progressive” to “conservative.” I made sure to point out that I was working with traditional definitions of conservative and progressive.
Using this Google Slides presentation as part of class discussion, I broke the class into three groups and had them place these slides in order on the spectrum before I gave them the debatable answers. Watching my students debate where to place the arguments on a line from conservative to progressive was eye-opening for all of them. It forced them to practice argumentation, listening, and nuance. Going through the answers as a class led to further discussion about why different arguments would go in different places on the line. I pointed out how counterarguments could be made along the spectrum, as one idea might challenge another idea while still finding common ground.
Finally, I had them complete their own spectrum for their research using the attached Google Slides template. I had my students use SchoolAI (my school has an account) to discover the different perspectives that fit their own selected issues. This helped them see the many different perspectives before I sent them to our school databases to do their own research. However, I’m toying with ideas for how I can get them not to use any kind of LLM to complete this assignment in the future. Unfortunately, while I’m becoming increasingly AI-averse, I do believe that this is one assignment where the use of LLMs can be incredibly helpful in synthesizing data across the Internet. It is also happening in a closed system where I can see everything they are doing in SchoolAI, which is helpful.
Thoughts moving forward
My Dual Credit Composition teaching partner and I discovered that this activity did help several of our students break out of binary thinking, but we are working with high school students, and this is a lesson that needs constant reinforcement. By the time several of our students finished their final paper in the first semester, they were still falling back into binary thinking, especially as they struggled with their counterarguments. Some continued to fall back into those same patterns second semester when we had them write a far more complicated argument paper, which convinced us we needed to circle back during the second semester and build off of those first-semester lessons. This year, we plan to gradually work in the spectrum during the course of the semester, gradually building up to the ten points we want them to analyze before they write their argument paper.
If we want our students to be better at argument and civil discourse, we need to show them how it is done. That starts with showing them that humans are far more complicated than online platforms make it seem.
Now your turn
What have you done with your classes? Share with fellow teachers below.