Truth matters Teaching young students to
Civility and controversy
Truth
matters
Teaching young students to search
for the most reasonable answer
Educators must ensure that students have ample opportunities to engage
in collaborative, rigorous argumentation so they can develop the skills and
dispositions to search for truth.
By Alina Reznitskaya and Ian A.G. Wilkinson
For its 2016 word of the year, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” (Wang, 2016), referring to the
dangerous way in which many people have come to think about reality and the human capacity to know it.
In a post-truth world, claims no longer need to be justified in the sense of being tested against the best available reasons and evidence. Knowledge is seen as entirely subjective, as if there are no established methods
to judge the soundness of different arguments or to reconcile opposing opinions. In a post-truth world,
people do not value the truth or have the skills to search for it.
ALINA REZNITSKAYA ([email protected]) is a professor, Department of Educational Foundations, Montclair State
University, Montclair, N.J. IAN A.G. WILKINSON is a professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University,
Columbus, Ohio. They are coauthors of The Most Reasonable Answer: Helping Students Build Better Arguments Together (Harvard
Education Press, 2017).
Image: iStock
V99 N4
kappanonline.org 33
Neil Postman, the late educator and cultural critic,
once illustrated the dangers we face by abandoning
our commitment to truth when he made an insightful
comparison between the totalitarian societies imagined by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley
in Brave New World:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason
to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to
read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so
much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from
us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea
of irrelevance (Postman, 2005, pp. 237-240).
Postman warned that the U.S. is coming to resemble Huxley’s dystopia, a country in which people are conditioned to “take a holiday from reality.”
But he also offered a way to preserve our participatory democracy: Citizens must acquire the will and
the skill to engage in “continuous argumentation”
(Postman, 1995). Describing argumentation “as a
reason for schooling,” Postman urged educators
to teach students “how to argue and to help them
discover what questions are worth arguing about
and, of course, to make sure they know what happens when arguments cease” (Postman, 1995, pp.
73-74).
Today, there is widespread agreement about the importance of teaching students how to think through
complex problems in a deliberate, informed, and rational manner. Numerous scholarly publications and
major policy documents call on educators to help
students develop the ability to make better, more
reasonable judgments (e.g., Lipman, 2003; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2012). The Common
Core State Standards Initiative, for example, places
a special emphasis on argumentation, considering
it a fundamental life skill that is “broadly important
for the literate, educated person living in the diverse,
information-rich environment of the 21st century”
(National Governors Association Center for Best
Practices & The Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 25).
There is also a growing consensus among educators that the development of argumentation and
deep understanding of complex questions is best
supported by dialogue-intensive approaches to
instruction (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015).
From a theoretical perspective, such approaches
provide opportunities for students to participate in
discussions during which they use argumentation
to construct personally meaningful understandings about the world and each other. As students
observe, practice, and gradually internalize new
34 Kappan
December 2017/January 2018
Teachers and students who participated
in the professional development greatly
improved the argumentation quality of
their interactions.
ways of talking and thinking, they are socialized
into “an argument culture” (Graff, 2003), a system
of norms, criteria, and practices by which people
arrive at reasonable conclusions. Research on dialogue-intensive approaches, although still tentative, has corroborated this theory, demonstrating
many positive results. Studies show that after engaging in argumentation during class discussions,
students performed better on a variety of important
learning outcomes, including argumentative writing, high-level comprehension of text, and deep understanding of disciplinary concepts and principles
(e.g., Reznitskaya et al., 2009; Nussbaum & Sinatra,
2003; Murphy et al., 2009).
However, while contemporary theory and research support the use of dialogue-intensive approaches (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Resnick, Asterhan,
& Clarke, 2015), schoolchildren today rarely participate in class discussions during which they ask chal-
lenging questions, justify their views, and evaluate
the credibility of reasons and evidence (Applebee et
al., 2003; Nystrand et al., 2003). Instead of inviting
students to formulate their own views and critically
respond to those of their peers, most teachers control
classroom interactions and ask questions primarily
to assess students’ recall of given answers. Moreover,
studies show that teachers struggle when learning
how to facilitate discussions and they lack researchbased classroom resources to support their use of
dialogue-intensive approaches (Juzwik et al., 2012).
In a recent three-year project, we partnered with
elementary school teachers to better understand
their learning and use of dialogue-intensive instruction in language arts classrooms (e.g., Wilkinson
et al., 2016). Each year, we worked collaboratively
with a new cohort of teachers from public schools in
Ohio and New Jersey to design and evaluate a professional development program that enabled teachers to conduct classroom discussions about text to
promote students’ engagement in argumentation.
A total of 49 teachers and 935 students participated
in this project. Our analysis of 196 videotaped discussions, collected as part of three separate iterations of our program, indicated that teachers and
students who participated in the professional development greatly improved the argumentation quality of their interactions, both from the beginning
to the end of the school year and in comparison
to teachers and students who did not participate
(Wilkinson et al., 2016).
Our partnership with teachers also helped us
learn valuable lessons about what works (and what
doesn’t work) in a classroom. We developed specific
pedagogical principles, instructional strategies, lesson plans, and assessment tools that proved to be
helpful to elementary school teachers as they began
to learn about and engage in argumentation with
students.
moral dilemmas faced by the characters (e.g., Should
Rosara have gone to the party? Did the boy deserve
a second chance?). In informational texts, the questions typically address policy decisions (e.g., Should
students have the right to wear what they want to
school? Should the rangers have killed the bear?). Big
questions prompt students to examine complex concepts such as friendship, justice, individual freedom,
and animal vs. human rights. They invite students to
carefully study information in the text, or, in other
words, to engage in close reading.
As students discuss big questions during inquiry
dialogue, they take part in a genuine quest for truth
and develop personally meaningful judgments.
Such judgments are not simply based on the passive acceptance of the teacher’s authority. Instead,
they result from a careful evaluation of various ideas
offered by group members in response to the big
question. For example, consider an excerpt from
a discussion in a 5th-grade classroom in which a
There is widespread agreement about
the importance of teaching students how
to think through complex problems in a
deliberate, informed, and rational manner.
Argumentation through inquiry dialogue
Most classroom instruction happens through talk,
and effective teachers have a repertoire of talk to
draw from to achieve different instructional goals
for students (Alexander 2006). To promote development of student reasoning and deep understanding, we emphasize the type of talk called “inquiry
dialogue,” which is aimed at collaboratively searching for the most reasonable answer to a question
(Walton, 1998).
In our language arts classrooms, inquiry dialogue
starts with a big question that is contestable, relevant to students’ interests, and central to the major
themes raised in a text previously read by the students. In fiction texts, big questions often focus on
V99 N4
kappanonline.org 35
fered during the discussion will be expanded upon, and
others will be discarded because they cannot survive
the group’s scrutiny. The focus on building and testing ideas turns a directionless conversation into a methodical advancement toward the truth. Thus, inquiry
dialogue is neither teacher-centered nor student-centered; rather, it is truth-centered (to paraphrase Gardner, 2015), with the teacher encouraging students to
engage in collaborative and rigorous argumentation to
support the group’s progress toward the most reasonable answer to the question at hand.
The truth-seeking orientation of inquiry dialogue
helps evoke established norms, criteria, and practices
of argumentation (Gardner, 2015). For example, to
follow the teacher’s call to “test each other’s ideas,”
discussion participants need to adhere to criteria for
evaluating the quality of argumentation formulated
by scholars of argumentation, logic, reasoning, and
critical thinking (e.g., Govier, 2010). In our work,
teachers learned how to engage students in assessing
the strength and weaknesses of each other’s arguments based on four criteria:
#1. Diversity of perspectives: We explore
different perspectives together.
#2. Clarity: We are clear in the language
and structure of our arguments.
Inquiry dialogue starts with a contestable,
big question that’s relevant to student
interests and addresses a central issue
raised in a text.
teacher explained the purpose of inquiry dialogue
to students:
Our job is not just to get our ideas out so that everybody
can hear them. It’s actually to offer ideas up in the hopes
that the group can determine what the most reasonable
answer is, the best answer, the most thought-through.
So, our job is not just to share our answers but also to
consider other people’s answers. And that means that
we have to build on each other’s ideas and make connections. So the idea is to test each other’s ideas. As a
group, we should be able to think better than we can
by ourselves. Does that make sense? (Reznitskaya &
Wilkinson, 2017, p. 72).
First, note how this teacher communicated to students the collaborative nature of inquiry dialogue,
sharing the ownership of the discussion with students
(e.g., “our job is . . .,” “as a group, we should . . .,” etc.).
Consider also how he asked students to go beyond simply sharing opinions and pushed them to build on and
test each other’s ideas. This implies that some ideas of36 Kappan
December 2017/January 2018
#3. Acceptability of reasons and evidence:
We use reasons and evidence that are
well-examined and accurate.
#4. Logical validity: We are logical in
the way we connect our positions,
reasons, and evidence (Reznitskaya &
Wilkinson, 2017).
During inquiry dialogue, the teacher’s key responsibility is to support students in applying the above
criteria, thus helping enhance the intellectual rigor
of the discussion. This is a challenging task that requires sharp focus on the discussion content as well
as the ability to analyze it and intervene when necessary. To help teachers with this task, we developed
an instructional resource called the Argumentation Rating Tool (ART) (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson,
2017). The ART connects each of the four argumentation criteria shown above to a set of discussion
practices and related “talk moves,” which include
teacher questions and prompts that help attend to a
given criterion. For example, suppose that, during a
discussion, all students line up on the same side of the
issue, thus not addressing the first criterion, which
focuses on the diversity of perspectives. A teacher
can step in and use a talk move, “If another 5th grader
disagreed with you, what would be the smartest thing
she could say?” This talk move prompts students to
think about opposing views, making their arguments
more comprehensive and nuanced. Note that students do not have to accept opposing views to think
carefully about them and to explore whether they are
overlooking relevant considerations.
Importantly, stepping in to enhance the quality of
discussion through strategic use of talk moves is not
solely the teacher’s responsibility. In fact, students
should eventually do most of the intellectual work
during inquiry dialogue. This means the teacher
should model appropriate moves and then step back
to give students enough autonomy to express their
thoughts, challenge each other’s ideas, add detail to
given reasons, and find flaws in each other’s arguments. The multiplicity of voices encouraged during inquiry dialogue allows the group to self-correct.
“The community itself acts as a safeguard against
sloppy thinking and procedural mistakes. It is not
that the group as a whole is incapable of making mistakes, nor that the majority opinion must rule, but
that it is more likely that someone in the community
will challenge what they deem to be unacceptable”
(Splitter & Sharp, 1996, p. 296).
Conclusion
We began this article by stressing the importance
of truth and the commitment to both recognizing its
value and learning how to search for it. We want to
conclude by noting that searching for truth does not
guarantee finding it. Most of our current answers to
complex questions are, at best, approximations in a
long journey toward the truth. These answers will
and should be revised as we learn new information
and improve our understandings.
Yet, we must continue to strive toward the ideal
of truth and, by doing so, find better, more reasonable answers and discard those that cannot be justified with reasons and evidence. Engaging in collaborative and rigorous argumentation is a reliable,
albeit imperfect, means of searching for truth. It is
the process used to generate knowledge in a variety
of disciplines, from medicine to architecture to history, which has resulted in remarkable discoveries
and improvements of human condition. It is also the
process required to sustain the functioning of liberal
democracies.
In our work, we chose to focus on elementary
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Teachers learned how to engage students in assessing the strength and weaknesses
of each other’s arguments.
school students because they can benefit from participating in an “argument culture” from the very start
of their formal education. Even children as young
as preschool age can formulate arguments, giving
reasons and considering counterarguments and rebuttals (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981). Educational
interventions that capitalize on these emerging capacities are shown to help students further develop
their reasoning skills and enhance their conceptual
understanding (e.g., Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes,
1999). Elementary school students are capable of
engaging in argumentation, and we need to offer
them ample opportunities to acquire the necessary
commitments, knowledge, and skills and continue
on the path toward the truth.
K
References
Alexander, R.J. (2006). Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking
classroom talk (3rd ed.). York, England: Dialogos.
Applebee, A.N., Langer, J.A., Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (2003).
Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding:
Classroom instruction and student performance in middle and
high school English. American Educational Research Journal, 40
(3), 685-730.
Eisenberg, A. & Garvey, C. (1981). Children’s use of verbal
strategies in resolving conflicts. Discourse Processes, 32, 135153.
Gardner, S. (2015). Commentary on ‘Inquiry is no mere
conversation.’ Journal of Philosophy in Schools, 2 (1), 71-91.
Govier, T. (2010). A practical study of argument (7th ed.).
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Graff, G. (2003). Clueless in academe. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Juzwik, M.M., Sherry, M.B., Caughlan, S., Heintz, A., & BorsheimBlack, C. (2012). Supporting dialogically organized instruction
in an English teacher preparation program: A video-based, web
2.0-mediated response and revision pedagogy. Teachers College
Record, 114 (3), 1-42.
Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in education. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk
and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British
Educational Research Journal, 25 (1), 95-111.
Murphy, P.K., Wilkinson, I.A.G., Soter, A., Hennessey, M.N., &
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Alexander, J.F. (2009). Examining the effects of classroom
discussion on students’ comprehension of text: A meta-analysis.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 101 (3), 740-764.
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Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core
State Standards: Appendix A. Research supporting key elements
of the standards. Washington, DC: Authors.
Nussbaum, E.M. & Sinatra, G.M. (2003). Argument and
conceptual engagement. Contemporary Educational Psychology,
28 (3), 384-395.
Nystrand, M., Wu, L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., & Long, D.A.
(2003). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and
dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse
Processes, 35 (2), 135-198.
Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (2012). A framework for 21st
century learning. Washington, DC: Author. www.p21.org/index.php
Postman, N. (1995). The end of education: Redefining the
value of school. New York, NY: Knopf.
Postman, N. (2005). Amusing ourselves to death: Public
discourse in the age of show business. New York, NY: Penguin.
Resnick, L.B., Asterhan, C.S.C., & Clarke, S.N. (2015). Socializing
intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. Washington,
DC: American Educational Research Association.
Reznitskaya, A., Kuo, L., Clark, A., Miller, B., Jadallah, M.,
Anderson, R.C., & Nguyen-Jahiel, K. (2009). Collaborative
Reasoning: A dialogic approach to group discussions. Cambridge
Journal of Education, 39 (1), 29-48.
Reznitskaya, A. & Wilkinson, I.A.G. (2017). The most reasonable
answer: Helping students build better arguments together.
Boston, MA: Harvard Education Press.
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philosophy for children: Pixie (pp. 285-314). Madrid, Spain:
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Truth
matters
Teaching young students to search
for the most reasonable answer
Educators must ensure that students have ample opportunities to engage
in collaborative, rigorous argumentation so they can develop the skills and
dispositions to search for truth.
By Alina Reznitskaya and Ian A.G. Wilkinson
For its 2016 word of the year, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” (Wang, 2016), referring to the
dangerous way in which many people have come to think about reality and the human capacity to know it.
In a post-truth world, claims no longer need to be justified in the sense of being tested against the best available reasons and evidence. Knowledge is seen as entirely subjective, as if there are no established methods
to judge the soundness of different arguments or to reconcile opposing opinions. In a post-truth world,
people do not value the truth or have the skills to search for it.
ALINA REZNITSKAYA ([email protected]) is a professor, Department of Educational Foundations, Montclair State
University, Montclair, N.J. IAN A.G. WILKINSON is a professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University,
Columbus, Ohio. They are coauthors of The Most Reasonable Answer: Helping Students Build Better Arguments Together (Harvard
Education Press, 2017).
Image: iStock
V99 N4
kappanonline.org 33
Neil Postman, the late educator and cultural critic,
once illustrated the dangers we face by abandoning
our commitment to truth when he made an insightful
comparison between the totalitarian societies imagined by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley
in Brave New World:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason
to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to
read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so
much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from
us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea
of irrelevance (Postman, 2005, pp. 237-240).
Postman warned that the U.S. is coming to resemble Huxley’s dystopia, a country in which people are conditioned to “take a holiday from reality.”
But he also offered a way to preserve our participatory democracy: Citizens must acquire the will and
the skill to engage in “continuous argumentation”
(Postman, 1995). Describing argumentation “as a
reason for schooling,” Postman urged educators
to teach students “how to argue and to help them
discover what questions are worth arguing about
and, of course, to make sure they know what happens when arguments cease” (Postman, 1995, pp.
73-74).
Today, there is widespread agreement about the importance of teaching students how to think through
complex problems in a deliberate, informed, and rational manner. Numerous scholarly publications and
major policy documents call on educators to help
students develop the ability to make better, more
reasonable judgments (e.g., Lipman, 2003; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2012). The Common
Core State Standards Initiative, for example, places
a special emphasis on argumentation, considering
it a fundamental life skill that is “broadly important
for the literate, educated person living in the diverse,
information-rich environment of the 21st century”
(National Governors Association Center for Best
Practices & The Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 25).
There is also a growing consensus among educators that the development of argumentation and
deep understanding of complex questions is best
supported by dialogue-intensive approaches to
instruction (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015).
From a theoretical perspective, such approaches
provide opportunities for students to participate in
discussions during which they use argumentation
to construct personally meaningful understandings about the world and each other. As students
observe, practice, and gradually internalize new
34 Kappan
December 2017/January 2018
Teachers and students who participated
in the professional development greatly
improved the argumentation quality of
their interactions.
ways of talking and thinking, they are socialized
into “an argument culture” (Graff, 2003), a system
of norms, criteria, and practices by which people
arrive at reasonable conclusions. Research on dialogue-intensive approaches, although still tentative, has corroborated this theory, demonstrating
many positive results. Studies show that after engaging in argumentation during class discussions,
students performed better on a variety of important
learning outcomes, including argumentative writing, high-level comprehension of text, and deep understanding of disciplinary concepts and principles
(e.g., Reznitskaya et al., 2009; Nussbaum & Sinatra,
2003; Murphy et al., 2009).
However, while contemporary theory and research support the use of dialogue-intensive approaches (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Resnick, Asterhan,
& Clarke, 2015), schoolchildren today rarely participate in class discussions during which they ask chal-
lenging questions, justify their views, and evaluate
the credibility of reasons and evidence (Applebee et
al., 2003; Nystrand et al., 2003). Instead of inviting
students to formulate their own views and critically
respond to those of their peers, most teachers control
classroom interactions and ask questions primarily
to assess students’ recall of given answers. Moreover,
studies show that teachers struggle when learning
how to facilitate discussions and they lack researchbased classroom resources to support their use of
dialogue-intensive approaches (Juzwik et al., 2012).
In a recent three-year project, we partnered with
elementary school teachers to better understand
their learning and use of dialogue-intensive instruction in language arts classrooms (e.g., Wilkinson
et al., 2016). Each year, we worked collaboratively
with a new cohort of teachers from public schools in
Ohio and New Jersey to design and evaluate a professional development program that enabled teachers to conduct classroom discussions about text to
promote students’ engagement in argumentation.
A total of 49 teachers and 935 students participated
in this project. Our analysis of 196 videotaped discussions, collected as part of three separate iterations of our program, indicated that teachers and
students who participated in the professional development greatly improved the argumentation quality of their interactions, both from the beginning
to the end of the school year and in comparison
to teachers and students who did not participate
(Wilkinson et al., 2016).
Our partnership with teachers also helped us
learn valuable lessons about what works (and what
doesn’t work) in a classroom. We developed specific
pedagogical principles, instructional strategies, lesson plans, and assessment tools that proved to be
helpful to elementary school teachers as they began
to learn about and engage in argumentation with
students.
moral dilemmas faced by the characters (e.g., Should
Rosara have gone to the party? Did the boy deserve
a second chance?). In informational texts, the questions typically address policy decisions (e.g., Should
students have the right to wear what they want to
school? Should the rangers have killed the bear?). Big
questions prompt students to examine complex concepts such as friendship, justice, individual freedom,
and animal vs. human rights. They invite students to
carefully study information in the text, or, in other
words, to engage in close reading.
As students discuss big questions during inquiry
dialogue, they take part in a genuine quest for truth
and develop personally meaningful judgments.
Such judgments are not simply based on the passive acceptance of the teacher’s authority. Instead,
they result from a careful evaluation of various ideas
offered by group members in response to the big
question. For example, consider an excerpt from
a discussion in a 5th-grade classroom in which a
There is widespread agreement about
the importance of teaching students how
to think through complex problems in a
deliberate, informed, and rational manner.
Argumentation through inquiry dialogue
Most classroom instruction happens through talk,
and effective teachers have a repertoire of talk to
draw from to achieve different instructional goals
for students (Alexander 2006). To promote development of student reasoning and deep understanding, we emphasize the type of talk called “inquiry
dialogue,” which is aimed at collaboratively searching for the most reasonable answer to a question
(Walton, 1998).
In our language arts classrooms, inquiry dialogue
starts with a big question that is contestable, relevant to students’ interests, and central to the major
themes raised in a text previously read by the students. In fiction texts, big questions often focus on
V99 N4
kappanonline.org 35
fered during the discussion will be expanded upon, and
others will be discarded because they cannot survive
the group’s scrutiny. The focus on building and testing ideas turns a directionless conversation into a methodical advancement toward the truth. Thus, inquiry
dialogue is neither teacher-centered nor student-centered; rather, it is truth-centered (to paraphrase Gardner, 2015), with the teacher encouraging students to
engage in collaborative and rigorous argumentation to
support the group’s progress toward the most reasonable answer to the question at hand.
The truth-seeking orientation of inquiry dialogue
helps evoke established norms, criteria, and practices
of argumentation (Gardner, 2015). For example, to
follow the teacher’s call to “test each other’s ideas,”
discussion participants need to adhere to criteria for
evaluating the quality of argumentation formulated
by scholars of argumentation, logic, reasoning, and
critical thinking (e.g., Govier, 2010). In our work,
teachers learned how to engage students in assessing
the strength and weaknesses of each other’s arguments based on four criteria:
#1. Diversity of perspectives: We explore
different perspectives together.
#2. Clarity: We are clear in the language
and structure of our arguments.
Inquiry dialogue starts with a contestable,
big question that’s relevant to student
interests and addresses a central issue
raised in a text.
teacher explained the purpose of inquiry dialogue
to students:
Our job is not just to get our ideas out so that everybody
can hear them. It’s actually to offer ideas up in the hopes
that the group can determine what the most reasonable
answer is, the best answer, the most thought-through.
So, our job is not just to share our answers but also to
consider other people’s answers. And that means that
we have to build on each other’s ideas and make connections. So the idea is to test each other’s ideas. As a
group, we should be able to think better than we can
by ourselves. Does that make sense? (Reznitskaya &
Wilkinson, 2017, p. 72).
First, note how this teacher communicated to students the collaborative nature of inquiry dialogue,
sharing the ownership of the discussion with students
(e.g., “our job is . . .,” “as a group, we should . . .,” etc.).
Consider also how he asked students to go beyond simply sharing opinions and pushed them to build on and
test each other’s ideas. This implies that some ideas of36 Kappan
December 2017/January 2018
#3. Acceptability of reasons and evidence:
We use reasons and evidence that are
well-examined and accurate.
#4. Logical validity: We are logical in
the way we connect our positions,
reasons, and evidence (Reznitskaya &
Wilkinson, 2017).
During inquiry dialogue, the teacher’s key responsibility is to support students in applying the above
criteria, thus helping enhance the intellectual rigor
of the discussion. This is a challenging task that requires sharp focus on the discussion content as well
as the ability to analyze it and intervene when necessary. To help teachers with this task, we developed
an instructional resource called the Argumentation Rating Tool (ART) (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson,
2017). The ART connects each of the four argumentation criteria shown above to a set of discussion
practices and related “talk moves,” which include
teacher questions and prompts that help attend to a
given criterion. For example, suppose that, during a
discussion, all students line up on the same side of the
issue, thus not addressing the first criterion, which
focuses on the diversity of perspectives. A teacher
can step in and use a talk move, “If another 5th grader
disagreed with you, what would be the smartest thing
she could say?” This talk move prompts students to
think about opposing views, making their arguments
more comprehensive and nuanced. Note that students do not have to accept opposing views to think
carefully about them and to explore whether they are
overlooking relevant considerations.
Importantly, stepping in to enhance the quality of
discussion through strategic use of talk moves is not
solely the teacher’s responsibility. In fact, students
should eventually do most of the intellectual work
during inquiry dialogue. This means the teacher
should model appropriate moves and then step back
to give students enough autonomy to express their
thoughts, challenge each other’s ideas, add detail to
given reasons, and find flaws in each other’s arguments. The multiplicity of voices encouraged during inquiry dialogue allows the group to self-correct.
“The community itself acts as a safeguard against
sloppy thinking and procedural mistakes. It is not
that the group as a whole is incapable of making mistakes, nor that the majority opinion must rule, but
that it is more likely that someone in the community
will challenge what they deem to be unacceptable”
(Splitter & Sharp, 1996, p. 296).
Conclusion
We began this article by stressing the importance
of truth and the commitment to both recognizing its
value and learning how to search for it. We want to
conclude by noting that searching for truth does not
guarantee finding it. Most of our current answers to
complex questions are, at best, approximations in a
long journey toward the truth. These answers will
and should be revised as we learn new information
and improve our understandings.
Yet, we must continue to strive toward the ideal
of truth and, by doing so, find better, more reasonable answers and discard those that cannot be justified with reasons and evidence. Engaging in collaborative and rigorous argumentation is a reliable,
albeit imperfect, means of searching for truth. It is
the process used to generate knowledge in a variety
of disciplines, from medicine to architecture to history, which has resulted in remarkable discoveries
and improvements of human condition. It is also the
process required to sustain the functioning of liberal
democracies.
In our work, we chose to focus on elementary
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Teachers learned how to engage students in assessing the strength and weaknesses
of each other’s arguments.
school students because they can benefit from participating in an “argument culture” from the very start
of their formal education. Even children as young
as preschool age can formulate arguments, giving
reasons and considering counterarguments and rebuttals (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981). Educational
interventions that capitalize on these emerging capacities are shown to help students further develop
their reasoning skills and enhance their conceptual
understanding (e.g., Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes,
1999). Elementary school students are capable of
engaging in argumentation, and we need to offer
them ample opportunities to acquire the necessary
commitments, knowledge, and skills and continue
on the path toward the truth.
K
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