​​​​Jason Wakeman​

In my teaching, I do my best to engage in reflective practice. It's important to explore new strategies and content, to plan for future lessons, and so on. Yet reflecting on previous lessons can be equally productive, sometimes more so. 

As part of my masters thesis (see the tab above for more info) I conducted a pilot lesson in which our sophomores would use argument mapping to explore the essays they had written on "Sonny's Blues," the same essays discussed in the previous artifact. In the lesson I introduced the argument mapping strategy and then had them map their peer’s essays. Once they had produced maps we used them to discuss the relevance and truth of the supports in the argument.

To the right you will see a gallery with three argument maps produced by students during the lesson.

Reflecting upon the lesson several things stood out to me. Firstly, the actual process of mapping the arguments was too trivial. Most students simply converted the graphic organizer structure we had been using for the essays into an argument map. The overall theme took the place of the main claim, topic sentences for the beginning, middle and end of the work branched out from there followed by evidence and commentary. For the task to really be meaningful, my students would need to look at more inferential texts or texts with more complex arguments. 

Secondly, while guiding small group discussions, it was clear that the process of discussing relevance and truth was a struggle for most students. They felt comfortable discussing the amount of evidence and even the style of appeal--a previous teacher had introduced them to pathos, logos and ethos--but discussing whether a specific statement supported a claim was not something they knew how to do.

Based on these observations I shifted my plans for our fourth quarter unit. I selected more texts, generally pieces of journalism, in which the author’s argument was not laid out explicitly. I also incorporated time for me to model evaluating relevance, as well as time for them to practice the process.