Creative Solutions: Through Collaboration and Debate
My students need pocket portfolios to organize written materials, highlighters for annotating text, and non-fiction text to read to find evidence for debates
FULLY FUNDED! Mr. WARD's classroom raised $169
This project is fully funded
My Students
Every week our Looking for an Argument class examines a current social issue. We begin the week with a debate on the issue, then students take a stand on the issue, conduct research to find evidence to support their position and finally write a persuasive essay.
Students come to our transfer school from all over NYC.
They are usually over-age and under credited. They have a wide variety of academic skills and consistently struggle with literacy and writing. Reading non-fiction text and then using it effectively in writing are skills our students have not developed. Our Looking for an Argument class is designed to teach students how to read text to find evidence to support a position they are taking on a certain issue. We introduce a social justice current event, then students debate the issue based on their basic understanding. The rest of the week they research their position to find appropriate evidence to support their argument and then use that evidence to write a persuasive essay. Each week the goal is to have our students develop the skills for writing well-developed paragraphs using details from non-fiction text.
My Project
We want our students to create a writing portfolio of their debate preparation, research materials and final essays with feedback. Each student will be given a portfolio and highlighter; the reading tool will be available for our special needs students. We will then use excerpts from the non-fiction text for the students to read and annotate to find evidence. They will analyze the evidence to support their thesis and write their well-developed essays. Once a week the class will not only discuss the pros and cons of the issue, but also the process leading up to their written project. We will take each students best essay to create a class anthology and have them read them during the end of term work share.
Donations to our project will help our students organize their assignments, annotate excerpts from the donated texts and provide the fundamental materials needed to create a well-developed anthology of social justice issues.
Students with special needs will use the reading tools to assist them with the assigned texts. The routine and structure of Looking for an Argument helps our students develop the reading and writing skills needed for constructing persuasive arguments.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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