Putting it all together

This will give you and your students superpowers

If this has been your first exposure to argumentation theory, you might feel a little overwhelmed. You might ask:

Why break argumentation into all these components?
And why try to teach all of these components instead of a smaller subset?

Our claim would be that this approach will give you and your students argumentation superpowers, and you can teach it surprisingly quickly.

Better than PEEL

PEEL is simple; you can fit it on a page. But it doesn't reflect the way people really write or construct arguments outside of school.

In contrast, a more detailed argumentation framework based on claim types, hierarchies, and methods of reasoning, gives students the power to analyse and write authentic arguments.

Example

For instance, here's a snippet from Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland.

What do we learn from a one-dimensional PEEL analysis vs a multi-dimensional argumentation analysis?

Indeed, the most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a racially diverse student body, that our people were there too. It is a form of amnesia in itself that our national story is built almost entirely around what this country did in two world wars, when, as Gideon Rachman has observed in the Financial Times, ‘for a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire.’ What a difference it would make if, within this story we endlessly tell ourselves, we acknowledged the truth of empire’s role. Which brings us to the imperial amnesia of our education system. It’s a challenging area to navigate because we all had an education, and the question of how much we were taught about empire quickly becomes one of competing biographies. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern exactly what, if anything, is taught to many children about empire today because academies, a fast-growing education sector, are not required to follow the national curriculum.

Empireland

Indeed, the most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a racially diverse student body, that our people were there too. It is a form of amnesia in itself that our national story is built almost entirely around what this country did in two world wars, when, as Gideon Rachman has observed in the Financial Times, ‘for a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire.’ What a difference it would make if, within this story we endlessly tell ourselves, we acknowledged the truth of empire’s role. Which brings us to the imperial amnesia of our education system. It’s a challenging area to navigate because we all had an education, and the question of how much we were taught about empire quickly becomes one of competing biographies. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern exactly what, if anything, is taught to many children about empire today because academies, a fast-growing education sector, are not required to follow the national curriculum.

Empireland

Indeed, the most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a racially diverse student body, that our people were there too. It is a form of amnesia in itself that our national story is built almost entirely around what this country did in two world wars, when, as Gideon Rachman has observed in the Financial Times, ‘for a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire.’ What a difference it would make if, within this story we endlessly tell ourselves, we acknowledged the truth of empire’s role. Which brings us to the imperial amnesia of our education system. It’s a challenging area to navigate because we all had an education, and the question of how much we were taught about empire quickly becomes one of competing biographies. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern exactly what, if anything, is taught to many children about empire today because academies, a fast-growing education sector, are not required to follow the national curriculum.

Empireland

Indeed, the most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a racially diverse student body, that our people were there too. It is a form of amnesia in itself that our national story is built almost entirely around what this country did in two world wars, when, as Gideon Rachman has observed in the Financial Times, ‘for a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire.’ What a difference it would make if, within this story we endlessly tell ourselves, we acknowledged the truth of empire’s role. Which brings us to the imperial amnesia of our education system. It’s a challenging area to navigate because we all had an education, and the question of how much we were taught about empire quickly becomes one of competing biographies. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern exactly what, if anything, is taught to many children about empire today because academies, a fast-growing education sector, are not required to follow the national curriculum.

Empireland

Indeed, the most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a racially diverse student body, that our people were there too. It is a form of amnesia in itself that our national story is built almost entirely around what this country did in two world wars, when, as Gideon Rachman has observed in the Financial Times, ‘for a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire.’ What a difference it would make if, within this story we endlessly tell ourselves, we acknowledged the truth of empire’s role. Which brings us to the imperial amnesia of our education system. It’s a challenging area to navigate because we all had an education, and the question of how much we were taught about empire quickly becomes one of competing biographies. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern exactly what, if anything, is taught to many children about empire today because academies, a fast-growing education sector, are not required to follow the national curriculum.

Empireland

A PEEL analysis doesn't tell you much more than this paragraph has a head, body, and a long transitional tail.

In contrast, an argumentation analysis reveals:

The rich variety of lower-order claim types (which could be broken down even further at the clause level)
The fact that the main claim in this paragraph is embedded in the middle (not in the 'point' position)
The extensive limiting at the end
The variety of evidence types
And more (if you continue to look)

(Note: For this example, we used the Claim types highlighter on each sentence to demonstrate the variety of statements. We've highlighted the main claim for this paragraph under Argument components.)

You can do this in 8 hours

While there's a lot here, you can cover it relatively quickly.

There are 7 argument types and 8 components.

If you think of each argument type and component as a 30-minute game, that's about 8 hours of gameplay to learn the framework.

If you played one game per week over 15 weeks you'd get through the whole framework in two terms, and you can integrate it with whatever unit content you're teaching.

Just follow the Argument prompt presets!

The three argument prompt categories are listed under 'Persuasive writing' in the Prompt Library

X-ray vision, super strength

Once you've learned this model, you'll see argument types and components everywhere.

When reading texts, you'll see structures, layers, and gaps that you might never have noticed before.

And you'll have a pathway to building arguments about any issue, at any level of sophistication.

Teaching Argument Writing with Frankenstories

Putting it all together