Designing for Argumentation: Learning Outcomes From Teacher-Research Collaborations in Science, History, and Literature

• In Event: Researching the Promise and the Challenges of Teaching and Learning Argumentation Across the Disciplines

Abstract

Purpose

This paper details design work with three teachers in the disciplines of History, Science and Literature and explores opportunities the designed lessons and units provided for students to build their capacity for and facility with disciplinary argumentation. This work is part of Project READI, a five-year, multi-institution researcher/practitioner collaboration designed to generate instructional interventions that support adolescents to engage in evidence-based argumentation (E-BA). The design work of each partnership will be presented to illuminate the different ways texts, tasks and classroom practices supported argumentation work outlined in the CCSS. The presentation is then contextualized with vignettes of student engagement in argumentation activities during enactment of the designed lessons.

Theoretical Framework

Disciplinary literacy practices require students to engage in specialized ways of reading, thinking, and conveying information (e.g., (Alvermann & Moore, 1991; Goldman & Bisanz, 2002; Snow & Biancarosa, 2003). New approaches to instruction enter the classroom through the deep understanding and ownership of teachers (Coburn, 2003). Drawing on these principles and the framework of design research (Brown, 1992; Cobb, et al., 2003), described as lying at the intersection of research and practice (Reinking & Bradley, 2007), we collaborated with three teachers as design partners. These teachers were selected from an ongoing community of practice engaged in an inquiry into E-BA. The design process was particular to each teacher’s instructional ecology and thus varied.

Data Sources and Methods

This paper draws on three loci of data collection: conversations between researchers and practitioners, classroom observation data, and artifacts of student work. Using constant comparative analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 1990) aided by Nvivo 9 software, 58 classroom observations, 29 teacher interviews and 17 collaborative design sessions were analyzed using both emergent and theoretically driven coding schemes. A team of researchers honed codes on a subset of field notes and video segments to attain sufficient reliability (Cohen, 1960). Through this process, we identified telling cases from design partnerships and classroom enactments illustrative of the work students and teachers do that leads to productive instantiations of EB-A. These moments were then further analyzed using discourse analytic methods (Erickson, 1982; Norris, 2002; Ochs, 1979) to provide insight about the specific elements of talk, gesture and bodily posture that supported these instances of EB-A in the classroom.

Findings

Our analysis revealed that teacher-researcher collaborations are productive ways to shorten the time lag from research to classroom practice; however, not without extensive engagement on the part of both the researchers and teachers. This gives rise to questions about scalability and sustainability, and what would be necessary to propagate this work. Nevertheless, this work produced positive student outcomes in line with the spirit of the CCSS. Specifically, students increasingly engaged in close reading, grappled with text and with one another’s ideas to understand and make complex arguments, and evidenced disciplinary reasoning processes when reading and discussing text. Collaborative design work therefore presents a model for the type of work necessary to prepare teachers and classrooms to succeed under these standards.

Authors

• Stacy A. Marple, WestEd

• Cindy Litman, WestEd

• Cynthia L. Greenleaf, WestEd

• Willard R. Brown, WestEd

• Gayle Cribb, WestEd