Does the Common Core Allow for Creating Writing?

If you’re an ELA teacher, all of this talk about THE three forms of writing in the Common Core State Standards (argumentative, informative/explanatory, and narrative) and about the importance of college/career readiness might be a bit unnerving. After all, where is the love for the creative writing that led many of us (including me) to love ELA in the first place? From my reading of the Common Core, there seems to be plenty of room for creative writing, but our thinking about it may need to shift slightly.

First of all, many of us may need to define “creative” a bit more widely. The best arguments are delightfully creative, and figuring out how to explain something in a lively fashion also takes plenty of creativity. The same craft that we use in the traditional modes of creative writing–fiction and poetry–can be beautifully applied to argumentative and informative/explanatory pieces (e.g., great poets “cut to the bone,” and so do great arguers; great storytellers include the most telling details, and so do great explainers). Furthermore, students can develop a love for writing through these college/career-focused modes of writing, and they can also find expression for their souls in these modes of writing, and they can also find an outlet for built up creative energy in these modes of writing. Granted, drawing the creative potential out of argumentative and informative/explanatory writing will take the work and energy and thought of our ELA tribe to fully develop over the next few years.

Secondly, in the Common Core’s definition of narrative writing (found in Appendix A, p. 23), both real and imaginary forms of narrative are encouraged, including short stories, memoirs, anecdotes, autobiographies, and more. This is a realm of classic creative writing. However, the Common Core does agree with the distribution of writing purposes across grades as laid aout by the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework:

In other words, students should practice all three modes of writing K-12, but there should be a growing emphasis on persuasive writing and a decreasing emphasis on narrative.

And finally, let’s remember one of the five principles that guided the formation of the Common Core State Standards–namely, that there be plenty of room for local flexibility and teacher judgment. The CCSS dictates what students need to be able to do in order to be ready for post-secondary life–they do not dictate how we should get students there. They treats us like professionals. To me, the CCSS are a very teacher-friendly document; they say, “Teachers, here’s what needs to get done–do it as you see fit.” In fact, in Appendix A, the CCSS authors explicitly state that “the inclusion and evaluation of other such forms [of writing, such as poetry, are left] to teacher discretion” (p. 23). In other words, if you want to use a poetry writing assignment to teach a skill that you’ll be asking students to transfer to a forthcoming argument or explanation, rock it out.

And that’s the moral of the story: rock it out.

So, to answer the titular question, yes, the Common Core allows for lots of creative writing, especially if we are flexible in our definitions of “creative” and focused on career- and college-readiness.

8 Reasons that I Embrace Arguments in my Classroom

While writing yesterday’s post about the first writing anchor standard (W.CCR.1), I began to list some reasons why arguments really were a highlight of my past school year’s English and world history classes. I didn’t think I’d do anything with the list so soon… .

Until today, while I was outside in the driveway cutting some boards, two of my students from last year drove up on a red moped with a busted headlight (they live in my subdivision, and they saw me out cutting wood while  they were scooting by). During our brief conversation, they brought up the fact that, next year, they will miss the arguments we had.

“Man, they were always so intense!” said one.

“Yeah,” said the other.

So, with these eloquent reviews of last year still echoing in my head, why not discuss some reasons that arguments are a worthwhile investment of greater time and space in our classrooms.

1. They’re collaborative

Arguments beg for collaboration. Whether in pairs, in triads, in teams, or as a whole class, when students are engaged with a substantive text or topic, even the most reticent ones tend to get involved.

2. They build community

This might seem counter-intuitive if you’re thinking about arguments as solely adversarial. But arguments are more than competitive when we do them right; in fact, they’re downright cooperative. Arguments are about “getting to the bottom of things,” to borrow from Williams and McEnerney (as quoted in Appendix A). They are an expression of our classroom desire to get to the truth.

3. They promote upper-level thinking

Arguments come in high on the Bloom’s pyramid. They require us to analyze texts/topics/situation, they require us to evaluate the validity of claims, reasoning, and evidence, and they invite us to be creative. One watershed moment in our argumentative classroom last year was when students began spontaneously applauding when someone came up and gave a really creative, solid argument.

4. They build respect, civility, and humility

For my students to flourish in the college or career, I know they’ll need more than academic skills; they’ll need character. The great thing about arguments is that they can build some really valuable character strengths. During this past school year, I remember when students began vocalizing on their own that respectful arguers were more powerful than disrespectful arguers, and that arguers who were willing to concede a point were more convincing than those who stubbornly (and often stupidly) ignored any validity in an opposing claim.

Our society can always use another person who thinks of others before him/herself. Arguments can build those kinds of humble people.

5. They are a key unifying principle across academia

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the list wouldn’t be complete without it. Gerald Graff claims that students are “clueless in academe” because the unifying principle of academia–namely, that the core disciplines are different variations of an overarching argumentative culture–is obscured from them. Teaching students about this culture and helping them see it is a key way of making school more cohesive and sensible to them.

6. They are a lynchpin of democracy

We are in a time when Washington’s “Farewell Address” is creepy in its insightful warning against political parties. As the USA becomes increasingly polarized along party lines, we need the kind of cooperative, collaborative, upper-level thinking, civility, and intelligence that arguments produce.

7. They are a important for career growth

I want my students to be able to advocate for themselves; in a competitive job market, this is going to be crucial. If my kids can’t show why they are a great candidate and if they can’t analyze their job search and create a winning strategy, they’ll have a hard time getting a job. And if they can’t use those same skills while working, they’ll have a hard time advancing.

8. Everyone wins in a good classroom argument

Oh good, you’re thinking, here’s the obligatory positive ending. Before you write me off as trite, allow me to illustrate why this is a legit final reason.

For most of the school year, I always skirted past the occasional student who, at the end of a debate, would ask, “So, Mr. Stuart, which team won?” My thoughts on an argumentative classroom culture still nascent, I mostly did this because I had no objective way to determine a winner, and, for instructional purposes, I didn’t really need a winner.

But during the last week of school, I gave in to my students, and, using an online, anonymous voting system, I had students vote on the winner of one of our final debates. The results were not surprising: unlike practical all of our in-class arguments during the school year, this one ended with some hurt feelings instead of an eagerness to continue the debate in the hallways.

The moral of the story is simply that my in-class debates didn’t need a winner because, at the end of them, we all had practiced the items on the list above, and, at debate’s end, we had all cooperated in getting closer to “the bottom of things.”

May our classrooms be places where such magic often occurs.

Have a great day.

Common Core W.CCR.1 Explained

W.CCR.1–that’s the 1st College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Writing strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA / Literacy–reads as follows:

Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

Before exploring the actual standard, let’s discuss the “specialness” of argument within the CCSS.

Why is argumentative writing first?

Well, according to Neil Postman, Gerald Graff, and a bunch of other people and reports cited by the CCSS, argument is a pretty big deal.

On page 24 of Appendix A (i.e., the appendix containing evidence supporting the CCSS and a glossary of key terms), there’s a section called “The Special Place of Argument in the Standards.” It’s not a long read, but it’s packed with useful insights into why argument (and, in the early grades, opinion writing) has primacy of place in the standards. Below is my Sparknotes version of the section:

• Academia is an argument culture (Graff).
• Therefore “argument literacy” is crucial for success in academia.
• Argument isn’t about winning; instead, it’s “a serious and focused conversation among people who are intensely interested in getting to the bottom of things cooperatively” (Williams and McEnerney).
• In the the world of work, being able to back up opinions and ideas with strong evidence and sound reasoning is crucial.
• It has strong ties with research and knowledge-building, both of which are also important within the CCSS.
• It’s an important element in curriculum frameworks for numerous high-performing nations.
• It develops “capacities are broadly important for the literate, educated person living in the diverse, information-rich environment of the twenty-first century.”

 And that’s why argument comes first.

So what’s an argument, according to the CCSS?

In Appendix A, we find a meaty definition of argument. If you’ve read through Appendix A at all, you’ll easily believe that the below text was one giganto paragraph before I broke it down a bit:

Arguments are used for many purposes—to change the reader’s point of view, to bring about some action on the reader’s part, or to ask the reader to accept the writer’s explanation or evaluation of a concept, issue, or problem. An argument is a reasoned, logical way of demonstrating that the writer’s position, belief, or conclusion is valid.

• In English language arts, students make claims about the worth or meaning of a literary work or works. They defend their interpretations or judgments with evidence from the text(s) they are writing about.
• In history/social studies, students analyze evidence from multiple primary and secondary sources to advance a claim that is best supported by the evidence, and they argue for a historically or empirically situated interpretation.
• In science, students make claims in the form of statements or conclusions that answer questions or address problems. Using data in a scientifically acceptable form, students marshal evidence and draw on their understanding of scientific concepts to argue in support of their claims.
• [In elementary school:] Although young children are not able to produce fully developed logical arguments, they develop a variety of methods to extend and elaborate their work by providing examples, offering reasons for their assertions, and explaining cause and effect. These kinds of expository structures are steps on the road to argument. In grades K–5, the term “opinion” is used to refer to this developing form of argument.

If you teach ELA, history/social studies, science, or elementary, I hope the above bullet points are helpful. One way we can help students see the “argumentative culture” of academia is by teaching the ways that arguments differ by discipline.

Now that we’ve got some why and what questions handled, let’s look at the three steps contained within W.CCR.1.

Step 1: Make a claim about a substantive topic or text

For the sake of explaining this standard, let’s look at an assignment I’m preparing for Fall 2012. As part of our first trimester Odyssey unit, my 9th grade students will be reading a document that compares life in Athens and life in Sparta, and they will be arguing which polis would be the better place to live. My purposes in doing this are twofold:

1. I want them to build knowledge about the city states of ancient Greece.
2. I want them to practice argumentation.

Also, for the sake of hitting multiple strands of the CCSS in one assignment, my students won’t just be writing their arguments; they’ll be using them in a back-and-forth, whole class, graded debate.

Once they’ve had time to closely read and annotate the document, I’ll ask them to decide which polis they’ll be arguing for. For my indecisive students, I’ll remind them that the best debaters are those who can argue any side of an argument, and that they do need to chose a side.

Any time that my students make an argument, I want them thinking about these kinds of questions when they’re preparing their claim:

• Is your claim debatable? Is it intriguing? Is it clear
  • In the Athens-Sparta example, I’ll prompt them to think about how they can enhance their claim. Instead of simply writing, “Sparta would be a better place to live than Athens,” I’d push them to consider how to strengthen their language and clarify their claim. E.g., “Since I’m a woman, I would rather be dead in Sparta than alive in Athens.”
• Are there other claims that yours might be confused for? How can you make this clear?
• Do you have evidence in mind that can support your claim?

That last bullet point is key for moving on into Step 2.

Step 2: Support that claim with relevant and sufficient evidence

I teach my students that a great arguer starts with a ton of evidence, ranks it in order of relevance and strength, and then draws a line in the list where the evidence starts getting weak.

For the Athens-Sparta example, here’s a mini-list of prioritized evidence:

• Women in Athens were viewed as property. In order to live life out of the house, you had to be a  priestess or a prostitute.
• Women in Sparta were educated. They could play sports.
• Although women were assigned their husbands in Sparta, they were never viewed as property.
• In times of war, Spartan women were responsible for overseeing their husbands’ estates. This is a much more noble calling than being one more possession for an Athenian man.

If this were an argument based on multiple texts or a longer text, the list of evidence would be longer and some evidence would need to be eliminated from the argument for the sake of keeping it focused.

Step 3: Tie it all together with valid reasoning

The reasoning of an argument often usually answers why or how questions that I need to teach my student writers to anticipate:

• Why does this piece of evidence support your claim?
• Why is your claim superior to your opponent’s?
• How is your claim limited?
  • This one is key for students because they often think that argument is about winning, and that the only way to win is by making your claim appear perfect. But, unlike some kinds of persuasive writing, argumentation is based on logic and reasoning. An argument that strategically avoids mentioning any evidence contrary to its claim is always going to be a failed argument because the intelligent reader will smell a rat.

Once drafts of these Athens-Sparta arguments are written, I’ll have my students read them in pairs or triads, and then we’ll have our whole class back and forth debate.

Perhaps the biggest factor in developing “argumentative literacy” in my students has been giving them repeated exposure to reading, writing, speaking, and listening to arguments.

Even though I’ve only scratched the surface, I hope this helps 🙂

Why Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe is Worth Reading

In the summer of 2011, I spent some time with Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe. This beautiful book (which, by the way, is mentioned in Appendix A of the CCSS!) takes a serious look at postsecondary schooling, finds it disjointed and its students disoriented, and concludes that the only way for students to find sanity in academia is to see that it’s just one big argumentative culture.

In other words, Graff helped me see that a lab report in science and an essay in history and an analysis in psychology and an exposition in English… that all of these pieces of writing, when done well, are simply various types of arguments. They make a claim and they support that claim with reasoning and evidence.

And here’s why Graff is worth the read: if Graff is right (he is), then teaching kids the ins and outs of arguments–and simply the centrality of arguing in academia–is going to help them flourish outside of your classroom.

(This is a re-post of some material found in a larger post; I re-posted it for the sake of making the material easier to access when I refer to it elsewhere on the blog.)

3 Ways to Start Implementing the Common Core Today

Argument in the classroom looks like a happy version of this.

It’s not fun to learn that you’ll soon be expected to transform your curriculum to align with a 66-page document that you had no part in creating. And, although the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a lot less unwieldy than the state standards I’ve taught under so far in my career, that doesn’t mean they are as lean and mean as they should be.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe the CCSS represent a giant leap forward in standards, and they contain plenty teachers can rejoice about. However, I also think they have room for further simplification.

That being said, I’d like to propose that, instead of feeling like you need a doctor’s degree of comprehension of the CCSS before trying them out, you can begin toying with them through one of the following three simple ideas. Note that none of them require extensive planning when you first begin to experiment.

1. Create Controversy

“Argument,” they say, “is the soul of an education.”

Over this past year of teaching, I have come to fully believe that statement. In a safe classroom, students tend to love arguing about the things they are reading and learning. Arguing is a great kind of conversation for students to practice (SL.CCR.1) in pairs, groups, and as a whole class. When it is based around a text students are reading, it rewards students who engage with the text, and, thus, more of them end up engaging.

Here are some examples of arguments that I’ve see

n or heard about, from a variety of content areas, within my school:

• A math teacher repeatedly asks students “How did you get that answer? Why did you do it that way?”, forcing them to argue for the validity of their steps and solutions.
• An earth science teacher has students read various arguments about fracking and then asks students to argue for whichever side they agree with using evidence from the text.
• A US history teacher asks students to argue about whether civil liberties should take priority over national security after reading a variety of sources on the issue.
• A literature teacher asks students to debate whether, in the novel A Separate Peace, Gene is evil or merely someone who commits an evil deed.
• A world history teacher asks students to argue whether Alexander the Great was a hero or a villain.

Here are a couple that I just made up:

• A computer science teacher asks students to write code that performs a set operation and then asks students to share their code and argue which is better.
• A foods teacher asks students to argue, based on reading a couple of articles, whether it is best to use Pam, butter, or margerine to keep food from sticking to a pan.
• A woods teacher asks students to argue the best way to
• A PE teacher asks students to argue for the best way to kick a soccer ball straight or throw a football in a spiral.

If these sound too far out of your comfort range, just try to find a point in your lesson today where you ask students to argue about something–anything!–and go from there. If you’d like some deeper explanation on this point, let me know in the comments section, and I’ll write a post for you.

2. “Can you Back that Up?”

The next time you’re talking with students about what they just read, try one of these moves out:

• “How do you know that?”
• “Can you back that up?”
• “Where do you find that in the text?”
• “What’s your evidence for that claim?”

These are quick and easy questions that you can try out today when leading an in-class discussion, and they all require students to read, re-read, and support their thoughts with textual evidence. By simply asking a question, you’ll be helping students with anchor standards that deal with using supporting evidence from a text (R.CCR.1) in either written (W.CCR.1) or spoken (SL.CCR.4) arguments.

These questions spur students to read and re-read the complex texts that we’re reading in class. Believe it or not, I’ve seen these questions add life to our in-class discussions rather than drain it. Also, I want my students to get in the habit of backing up their ideas, arguments, and analyses with evidence because this is going to make their thoughts more credible wherever they go after they’re through with me. Simple questions like these help them get in that habit.

3. Ensure Participation

Before this school year started, I assumed that arguing was for vocal students, but not shy ones. However, by requiring that all of my students take place in at least one whole-class debate per unit, I’ve been awed at the amount of kids who appreciate our in-class arguments, and I’ve become convinced that I do a disservice to my shy students when I don’t call on them daily and, at least once a unit, give them a chance to contribute some form of planned speaking.

Since the CCSS has an entire strand of speaking and listening standards, getting your shy kids talking is a quick way to start implementing them today.

The easiest two ways that I’ve found to get all of my kids participating everyday are through index cards and think-pair-shares. There’s nothing sexy to either of these techniques except for how simple and effective they are.

1. Index cards: At the beginning of a course, I give my students index cards and have them write something about themselves on one side and their name on the other. This gives me a tool for learning their names at the beginning of the year, but even more importantly it gives me a deck of cards to use daily when I need to call on students during discussion or in response to a thinking exercise. On the one hand, knowing that anyone’s name could come next in the deck keeps my students at a healthy level of alertness. On the other hand, knowing that I want to avoid needlessly embarassing students, the note cards make me a bit more thoughtful about the questions that I ask. Additionally, using the index cards has allowed me to focus on asking good questions instead of keeping a mental tally of I’ve called on today.
2. Think-pair-share: Like I said, this idea is old-fashioned and lacks sexiness, but it’s a priceless way to check for understanding throughout a lesson–I walk around and eavesdrop while students are discussing a question I pose for them. In case you’re new to it: think = students independently consider the question, either through writing or in their heads; pair = students talk about the questions in pairs; share = students share their answers with the class. In the latter two modes, students are being asked to build on others’ ideas and express their own clearly (SL.CCR.1).

When these two simple techniques are used, a student will at very least practice speaking and listening skills on a daily basis in my classroom, shy or not.

CCSS Anchor Standards Mentioned in this Post:

• SL.CCR.1: Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
  • Arguing is the soul of a lot of great conversations that happen from the workplace water cooler to the college classroom. Additionally, an college and career ready person should know how to be a member of conversation rather than a deaf/dominating lecturer.
• R.CCR.1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
  • When we ask students to back up their statements about a text, we help them get in the habit of citing specific textual evidence for their claims.
• W.CCR.1: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
  • The more you ask students to argue in class, both in pairs, groups, and whole class situations, the more you’ll be able to point to exemplars of argumentation.
• SL.CCR.4: Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
  • This anchor standard is a great example of how, even though there are drastically fewer standards in the CCSS, there are some pretty verbose standards within the document. Within this anchor, I see no less than 11 things that could be taught explicitly. However, I think that, by designing various ways in which students argue, discuss, and present ideas, a lot of these “subskills” take care of themselves. When you ask students things like “Can you back that up?”, you are requiring them to use supporting evidence in a spoken argument.