Inquiry Project

Unit: Argumentative Writing

Topic: High School Start Times

Driving Question: How do early starting times for High School affect students’ learning?

Lesson 1: Grabber and Introduction

One 50-minute class period

Introductory grabber: The lesson starts with the teacher introducing the students to the article Do Schools Begin Too Early? by Education Next. Students will be required to describe the various start times for High Schools as well as some of the results found on sleep studies. The students will then write down the pros and cons to schools that start earlier and schools that start later (e.g. busing costs, standardized test grades, after-school activity times, etc.) The students will then be asked to pick a start time to advocate for: earlier than 7:30am, 8:00am, or 9:00am. The students will then group up with the other students who chose the same start time.

(these are a few of the results from testing this subject pulled from Education Next.) http://educationnext.org/do-schools-begin-too-early/

Individual Research: The students will be asked to find at least 1 other article to base arguments around at home. The students will come to school the next day with at least 2 more unique arguments with supporting evidence from the article(s).

Culminating Activity:

Two 50-minute class period

Debate Activity: The students will have an open debate about the different start times and discuss in detail the various implications of changing a school’s start times. There will be 3 separate debate groups that will be mediated by the instructor.

Day 1: on the first day, the students will take their articles and evidence to their group and organize their ideas into a list of possible pros and cons. They will be asked to think critically in order to prepare for possible rebuttals from the other groups. The students will have to collaborate on an introduction to establish their argument as well as a few main points that their debate team wants to cover (containing all relevant information). By the end of the day, they will also establish who will introduce their proposal and who will represent their debate team (panels of 5 students).

Day 2: On the second day, the students will get into their groups for 5 minutes in order to go over their arguments. After the 5 minutes, the students will send their representatives to their respective panels (each panel is a set of 5 adjacent desks, and there are 3 panels throughout the room facing the center). The teacher will set some ground-rules for the debate: etiquette, which groups will go in what order, and time-frame. After that, the teacher will ask for each of the panels to introduce their argument. The teacher will then open up the debate for the students and help to moderate the discussion. At the end of the debate, the class will be asked to draw their own conclusion based on where the discussion went.

Debrief:

In response to the debate, the students will have to write a response to the arguments they heard. The response will be focused on how they came to a conclusion about starting times using evidence brought up by other students. The response is one page in length, and will be due the next day.