I ran across a Time (online) article which presented me with tow quite different feelings. First off, the article: Why Arguing Improves Students’ Reasoning Skills, which presents some very well reasoned justification as to why this is a good idea in education… My first reaction was one mild euphoria…I have been trying to add this to almost every class I have taught (especially in middle school, a place which has the most naturally disputatious people on earth).
American educators agreed last year that argumentative reasoning should be taught in schools when those in most states adopted the new Common Core State Standards, a state-led effort to establish educational benchmarks to prepare kindergarten through 12th grade students for college and career. Reaching a similar consensus on how to teach the art of arguing, however, hasn’t been as easy. But a new study published in the journal Psychological Science could offer a solution in the form of dialogue.
Researchers Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell created a new curriculum for teaching reasoning skills that emphasized discussion and tested it on 48 sixth graders. A comparison group of 23 students in a separate class were taught through more traditional, solitary methods of reasoning using techniques such as essay-writing. It turns out that arguing with others is more effective than arguing on paper.
"Children engage in conversation from very early on. It has a point in real life," explains Kuhn in a press statement. Fulfilling a writing assignment, on the other hand, largely entails figuring out what the teacher wants and delivering it, and to the student, she notes, "That’s its only function."
Why Arguing Improves Students’ Reasoning Skills
http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/17/why-arguing-improves-students-reasoning-skills
My next level of perspective I got from this article was one of frustration, in that these are such self evidently obvious good reasons to have this as part of a curriculum…why is it being introduced now?!?!?! I now am of two feelings about this, 1: this will be good for the students (actually it may be great for the students), and 2: the fact that this is just now being brought forth as a radical, new idea to implement in our schools circumscribes why I got into teaching at this point in life…sigh.
I found a few related links, which are mostly filled with jargon, and seem to obfuscate the validity in develop the art of debate and dialectic in college:
Key Critical Reasoning Skills: Strengthening and Weakening Arguments
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/05/11/key-critical-reasoning-skills-strengthening-and-weakening-arguments
Resources from College Online: Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Argument
http://www.abacon.com/compsite/instructors/conline/developing.html
