Structured Academic Controversy: Lunches

On Friday students completed a Structured Academic Controversy. It is a strategy that has students collecting evidence from multiple sources and using that evidence to create and support a claim. In this case students learned about how some school systems are banning lunches from home and requiring all students to eat school meals.

What is important about this strategy is that students did not learn until moments before the debate which side they would have to defend. Consequently, the preparation for the day had students attending to both sides of the issue.

Structured Academic Controversy–Recycling

Today we concluded our Pro/Con readings on recycling and divided ourselves into partners for our Structured Academic Controversy. We started the work last week when students annotated articles on recycling and identified a “super claim.” This was followed by students sharing the evidence they found and then today we divided ourselves into partners and randomly were assigned a position in favor or against our super claim.

Using Pro/Con to get ready for our next SAC

We started the week reading about the pros and cons of recycling to get ready for our next Structured Academic Controversy (SAC). We continue to use this method so that students develop perspective taking and civic responsibility.

We are also using text annotating to go with our reading. This will help facilitate the process of making claims supported by evidence.