Language of scientific arguing....

Do you let your students "argue"????  Real scientists argue quite often...but not a drop down fight, more like a sharing of ideas.

One of my favorite books for introducing this concept is Why do Scientist Disagree? This book ties in nicely to my space unit because it is a tale of two stories.  On the left side is a story about Galileo and his argumentation with scientists about light from the moon and the other side is a modern story of scientists diagreeing.   

I try to set up these discussions based on misconceptions I hear in the classroom.  For example, I have heard "the moon causes day and night" quite often in my fourth grade class.  Rather than saying, no - that is not correct, I set up the situation with the kids and say...."What do you think? and Why do you think that?"

I set it up by introducing these question frames to guide the discussions:

• What do you think?
• What is your claim?
• Why do you think that?
• What is your evidence?
• Do you agree? Why?
• Do you disagree? Why?
• How sure are we?
• How could we be more sure?

Then it is important to also provide the sentence starter frames.

I think....

I claim....

My evidence is....

I agree with ....because

I disagree with ....because

I am sure....because

I think we could be more sure if we....

Of course, I needed to make them a little cuter too! 

To get your copy of these sentence frames on a sheet, click here.