Research-Based Argument Essay

This unit supports two or three cycles of argument essay writing – with the first cycle really being a shared writing experience that is very quick, designed to immerse students in argument and help them learn the bare bones structure of a research-based argument essay in two days. We imagine this first cycle will consist of shared note taking off of video clips and articles, followed by flash draft essays composed through shared writing. You’ll model with a shared topic for which you have a few texts.

After this introduction, you’ll invite students to work on a whole class topic (either an extension of the first, or another topic for which you have several texts), researching across texts, rehearsing and fast drafting, revising and elaborating. Exploring and working on another whole class topic will offer your students opportunities to share ideas, debate claims, and work together to interpret sources and gather evidence. This cycle will lean heavily into developing compelling claims and structuring a cohesive argument essay. Of course, if you have access to high quality text sets, and your students are ready to begin researching their own topics, you could move right into research groups on various topics. Then you’ll invite students into large-scale revision work which they can try out on both drafts.

A third cycle will invite students to do the same work with more independence – so you’ll remind students of the repertoire of research, rehearsal, and revision skills they know, and then you’ll teach into holding onto all they have learned and transferring it to new writing. This third essay topic will depend on your text availability. You might invite students to extend their research on offshoots of the class topic. Or students could move into small research clubs, on topics of their choice. If you skip this third cycle, you’ll probably want to extend some of the revision and elaboration strategies that you teach into during cycle two, so that students get more practice in skilled revision. By the end of the unit, students will have drafts of two or three essays and can choose which to publish. Help your students to become active voices in the world and allow them to imagine multimedia and print forms of publication.

A Note About Gathering Resources, and Partnering This Unit with a Reading Research Unit: This unit is unusual in that it relies on reading work. To do this form of writing, children need to read material that represents varied perspectives on contentious topics. If you are teaching nonfiction research in reading workshop, you may have enough quality nonfiction text sets for students to research a variety of topics and explore multiple perspectives on that topic. If not, in the overview of the reading unit, you’ll note that one possibility is that the class continue to read fiction for volume, and immerse themselves in a nonfiction class topic for quality, but not so much quantity, critical nonfiction reading. If this is the route that you choose to go, and we anticipate that this is the case, you will use read aloud to research a topic, reading aloud texts and digital texts that expose children to different stances within the greater debate. The TCRWP has provided a bibliography of some possible text sets and resources for more texts, online at . We will expand on this list on our website—and please contribute to it! Send suggestions to: .

Learn from the Performance Assessment to Tailor A Plan for the Unit

Before you begin this unit, you will want to carefully consider your students’ initial assessments. A quick on-demand of summarizing nonfiction and drafting part of an argument essay will give you some insight into these skills. Remember that your on-demand data will help you to make some choices among these teaching points. If you are doing a formal performance assessment, either before or after the unit of study you may find text sets, and Common Core aligned performance assessment tasks for information reading and argument writing, at the banner ‘assessments.’

Bend I: Just do it! Writers Get a Rapid Introduction to Research, Debate, and Argument

To launch the unit, the class could participate in a shared experience over two days. On day one, the class could first participate in a shared experience focused on studying the craft of debates and taking notes on the arguments. A quick and powerful way to show students an argument is to do just that - show them a video of an argument such as a political speech. Then, you will move to diving right into research that investigates sides of an issue, so that you might show students video clips or read aloud texts that show two different sides of a topic, taking notes as you go so they can summarize the arguments, and then practice debating them. Then, on day two, the class can look over the notes that were gathered on the first day, and, through shared writing, craft an essay together. So while we’ve given teaching points here, you may orchestrate your class so everyone stays at the meeting area and works in step together through investigating sides, composing a claim quickly, and gathering evidence for that claim.

•“Writers know that when we compose arguments we are composing claims supported by reasons and evidence. One way to begin this work is to research the sides of an issue and the evidence that supports those sides.”

Demonstration teaching: “Writers, during this unit we are going to be researchers, debaters and writers. We are going to study a topic, learn the different sides, or stances, within the topic, form our own stances and then craft powerful essays backing our claims up with research from the information we read. We’re going to begin this work by studying a topic together. Today, we are going to encounter some texts about the topic we will study for the next couple of days, and we are going to figure out an issue hiding in this topic and the sides of that issue. As we do research, we want to gather notes in a manner that supports claims and evidence, such as boxes and bullets.”

Teachers, you’ll want to model the kind of notes that move right to determining ideas and supporting evidence – so you might model jotting down boxes and bullets. For instance, if you are watching a video on the importance of eating well, you might jot:

Chocolate shouldn’t be served in schools

It has more sugar than unflavored milk
It tricks kids into thinking that it’s ok to drink it

Then you’ll want to read or show an opposing view and have students practice. So with a second video or article, you and students might jot:

Chocolate milk is an important part of a child’s diet

It is a source of Vitamin D and other nutrients like calcium
Kids who drink low-fat flavored milk are not heavier than non-milk drinkers

Possible mid-workshop: Researchers often debate our topics to really hash out our claims and evidence. As we do this, we refer to our notes, we listen carefully to opposing views, and we try to refute those views. Sometimes we find we want to return to our research to check some useful facts, sometimes we do more rapid reading, and often we adjust our claims and evidence to be more convincing.

•“To compose compelling arguments, researchers review our notes, rehearse our claim and evidence, and then we write fast-drafts that are as clear and compelling as possible.”

Demonstration teaching: “Yesterday we learned lots about a topic. We learned that there are different stances and different facts and research to support those stances. Usually the next thing writers do is, we take a side, and craft an essay to show our claim, or side of the argument. Using everything we learned yesterday from researching and debating, we can craft an argument. We may even be able to refute the counterargument, saying why we don’t think it’s as strong as ours.”
Possible mid-workshop: Writers draw upon the essay work we have already done in our lives. We know, for instance, how to support an idea with reasons and evidence – and now this evidence comes from our research, so we will probably want to quote and paraphrase as we go. If you have a record of prior teaching about essay structure, get this chart or collection of sentence starters out now!
Possible small group/conference: As you turn to the first body paragraph of this essay, writers put the topic sentence, or the class’ first reason for supporting this stance. Writers think of transitional sentences that set up this work like, “One reason..., followed by ‘for example… also…in addition...’ Then we often end by “As you can see...,” or “This supports the stance that...”

Bend II: Writers Become More Adept at the Structure of Argument

•“Researchers find that researching sides of an issue is sort of like figuring out sides in a fight. We investigate these sides and do some quick writing to sort out the sides and their ‘weapons.’”

Demonstration teaching: “Writers, today I want to teach you that reading texts with an eye toward investigating sides of issues is sort of like coming across a big brawl or fight. If you see a huge fight, you immediately know something is going on but there’s a lot you need to figure out. You ask yourself: What are they fighting about? Who’s involved? What does each person, or group, want? You keep watching to get clues to figure out what’s going on. Well, when you read/view texts with an eye toward understanding arguments, you’re coming across an intellectual fight. People are arguing about ideas and issues. The fight’s already started and you need to figure out what’s going on. One way to figure out the debates going on within the topic, is to ask yourself some questions as you read: What’s the issue here? What are the different stances on this issue? What is this author’s stance? We often write to sort out the sides and their ‘weapons’ or evidence.”
Possible mid-workshop: “Today I want to teach you that when we are watching a big brawl or fight, we begin to notice who is winning. Just the way we wonder who is winning in a fight, so when we read texts with an eye toward understanding arguments, we want to keep track of who seems to have more evidence or more compelling evidence to support an argument. One way to do this is through creating charts. We can create charts that compare and contrast the evidence from two stances within the debate in order to clearly see which one has more or more compelling evidence.”
Share: “Today I want to teach you that when we are preparing to write arguments, we’re not just watching a big brawl or fight. Instead, we are getting ready to enter it. You know you’re going to be in that brawl soon and you have to figure out which group you’re going to join. So, when we’re reading to figure out the debates in a topic, it’s normal to start forming an opinion right away—to start reading and immediately think—Yes, I agree with you because… or No way, I totally don’t agree with that because… You might try entering a side right now, for instance, and argue or debate with your partner.”

•“Argument writers use debate while researching to rehearse and develop claims, reasons and evidence. Then we move from debate to fast writing to hold onto our new thinking.”

Demonstration teaching: “Today I want to remind you how useful debate is as tool to rehearse and develop convincing claims and reasoning. Debate lets us try out our claims, adjust them, refine our reasoning and evidence. Collaborators in argument writing often practice debating sides of an issue, so that they can better defend a convincing claim. To get ready for debate, writers organize and categorize our notes. You might want to create categories like “reasons why this stance is right” or “compelling information.” We organize our notes into one type of categories then reorganize them in multiple ways to really know the information we have gathered and be ready to use it to argue for our stance. After we argue, we make sure we capture our ideas in writing.”
Possible mid-workshop: “To be skilled at arguing, you need to be able to imagine the other side – which means sometimes we actually switch sides in practice, and we marshal all the evidence we have to convince someone else of the opposite claim. Remember, a debate is an intellectual argument. We leave our own opinions and passions out and consider only the research we can use to show that our argument is valid. Switching back and forth lets us see which side of an argument we have more convincing and compelling evidence for.”

Possible small group or conference: Writers/debaters often call on sentence starters to help us imagine the other side, especially when we feel pretty clear about our own side of an argument but less so about the opposite side. We can push our thinking by trying out some of these prompts:
“They might want…because…”
“They might think…because…”
“They might want others to feel…because…”
“They might worry…because…”
“They might be angered by…because…”
“They might benefit by…because…”
“They might lose out if…because…”
“On the other hand, there is research to show…such as…”

Share: “After debating, writers often write fast and furious to capture some of the most compelling moments of their argument, so they can use that language and stance in their essay. We try to review in our heads all that was said, and get those words down on paper.”

·“As researchers compose and rehearse a claim, we may find ourselves siding clearly with other authors, and sharing a claim we uncovered in our research. Other times we find ourselves making a claim that is slightly different than the ones we have seen in our research. Either way we seek the clearest language for our claim by writing it different ways.”

Demonstration teaching: “Writers, as we develop our own claim, we sometimes find ourselves clearly siding with some of the authors or activists we have researched. When we do this, we’ll use many of the same reasons and evidence that they do – but we still look to sort and extend our evidence by thinking about which evidence is the most compelling, and how we may want to combine or spin evidence. Other times we find that our own claim is slightly different than those of the authors and activists we research, and we’ll use only some of the same evidence, seeking evidence as well in other places, or spinning evidence differently. For instance, my claim is beginning to be that chocolate milk should not be in schools, and I want to use evidence from sources who have argued both sides of that issue. So I’ve been writing my claim several times, and trying out different language, to make sure I get to the clearest claim possible.”
Possible small group/conference: “Researchers not only record evidence, we pay attention to the source, or author of that evidence. That means that we jot down not only ‘chocolate milk has more sugar than plain milk.’ We instead jot: ‘Jamie Oliver says that chocolate milk has 4 teaspoons of sugar.” Jamie Oliver is a chef and a nutrition expert. Saying that the information comes from someone who is informed about the topic makes our argument stronger.
Share: “Writers often write out our claim as a statement, practicing making their language as clear as possible and watching that we are not wishy-washy. For instance, rather than saying that chocolate milk should not be in schools daily but might be served once in a while, my claim is: Chocolate milk should not be served in schools.”

·“Researchers review and weigh our evidence, evaluating whether we have gathered compelling and convincing evidence. We try to capture our evaluation in writing.”

Demonstration teaching: “Writers, we know that as we develop our argument, we need to gather and marshal all the evidence that will help us support what we are saying. One way to make sure we can support our stance is by asking ourselves: do I have at least 2-3 reasons and supporting bits of evidence to support my argument? If not, we need to go back and adjust our stance, or we need to turn to our research partners and texts to gather more evidence.”
Possible mid-workshop: “I want to remind you that one way to strengthen our own argument is by refuting the counter argument, the argument against us. We can think of the evidence against us and how we might show that evidence is not telling the full story or is overlooking something else or is not as strong.”

·“Researchers often return to our evidence and sort through not only how compelling it is, but also how reliable our sources are.”

Demonstration teaching: “Researchers, we’re trying to build an argument. And, we want this argument to be solid. The other side is going to try to refute it, and we want to make sure that it will be hard for them to do that. Therefore, as we gather evidence to support our reasons, we need to think about the sources we are using. We need to think about whether or not these sources are reliable. Reliable means that we can trust them, we can stand upon their work and use it to back us up. One way that we can do this is to look at the sources and think, “What is this author’s background with this issue? What does he/she stand to gain? For instance, we studied nutrition information on chocolate milk on the TruMoo site. TruMoo is a company that makes chocolate milk. They could sell a lot of milk and make a lot of money if people believe that it is healthy. Perhaps they might slant the information so that they build their sales.”
Possible mid-workshop: “Researchers, sometimes we aren’t sure if our source is reliable. When this happens, we can look to other sources, thinking, ‘Has someone else written an article about this? Can they support this information?’”

·“As writers prepare to draft, we look over our research and decide if we will paraphrase the information or incorporate direct quotes.”