Teachers in this school have been engaged with the Quality Talk program, which builds teacher’s skills at asking discussable questions and developing students’ skill at APT to a point that the teacher can turn control over to students. 

When students debate whether the Titanic would have been as famous had it not sunk, they are generating their own claims about why things become famous. Several students argue that it is the disaster that caused the fame: no sinking, no fame. 

If these students had been writing brief answers on a worksheet, they could have finished quickly and thought no more about it. But because this is a discussion, they have to confront a counterargument: it would have been famous anyway because it was a great ship that was written about in the news of the time, and it was the first ship of its kind. Students rebut this counterargument: today there are many ships like it, and we don’t know anything about them. So if it had survived, it would just have become one of many. This is an entirely logical rebuttal. The pro-fame student insists that being first means it would probably be in a museum, even if there were others that were better today. She argues that being first matters. 

As the discussion progresses, the pro-fame student lets go of the argument that it would have been famous because it was great, seeming to accept the counterargument that there are many greater ships today; thus, it would not be notorious by today’s standards. But she doubles down on the argument that it was first. There was no effective counterargument to the importance of being first. The student points to museums, which do indeed preserve artifacts of many “firsts,” connecting her own experience to the discussion.

These students have clearly had practice with APT; they directly address each other’s arguments, press each other for evidence, and self-regulate their turn-taking. With these well-established practices in place, we are able to see clearly the capability of students to generate rather than simply repeat ideas. By sharpening their arguments in this manner, they are learning new things and developing cognitive skills that can be used in all content areas. 

The teacher has asked students to review the documents, and decide whether evidence from the documents supports the argument that the expressway proposal was motivated by racist and classist intentions (the orange team) or not (the pink team). Before this class is dismissed, some students will have changed their position. As you watch, consider what might have led to that change.

The teacher is new to the profession. As part of a program to earn a Master’s degree, he is being supported to teach history through a central historical question rooted in the interpretation of primary documents. As with many teachers who are new to APT, he does a lot of explaining himself rather than turning the discussion over to the students to ask each other to clarify. 

Students are asked an open-ended question, and have very different perspectives on how the Crosstown Expressway would affect Philadelphians of different races and income levels. But their responses are constrained by the discipline: there must be evidence from one of the documents to support the argument. Students’ beliefs or opinions are not an acceptable source of support for a historical argument. Though beliefs may drive the interpretation of the evidence, the evidence is essential to the quality of the argument.

Students could have addressed the question individually, putting their argument in written form. Perhaps they will do that for an assignment. The benefit of the discussion is that students hear each other’s perspectives and strengthen their own skills by responding to each other’s counter-arguments. 

• One student argued that the Crosstown Expressway was not racist on the grounds that anyone of any race could use it to get wherever they wanted to go. 
• Another countered that the Crosstown Expressway was racist because it was separating the white downtown community from South Philadelphia, which was becoming increasingly Black. 

These are two very different claims, and the discussion makes students aware of this difference, and of the requirement that a strong argument must address counterarguments. In the full clip (see archive), several students change their position as a result of the debate, demonstrating that students are learning to see things differently because their arguments were challenged, or other arguments were more persuasive.