Student: So the quote reads, “I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself at all.”

Student: With the evidence, we can see that he really doesn’t care about school, because if he was, he would start applying himself more.

Mary: I’m very persuaded. We do have another challenger. Let’s hear it.

Every time I do an evidence scavenger hunt with the class, I always feel like I’ve tricked them in some way.

Student: If he’s saying he doesn’t have any qualms.

Mary: We’ve spent an entire period writing and refining paragraphs, and they somehow think we played a game.

Student: He tore up the paper. I wasn’t sure later—

Student: Yeah, yeah, that one too.

Mary: In 10th grade, I have to teach students how to write essays. One of the best quotes that I’ve read about writing is that writing is something like cement, and that after a certain point, it sets. And then if you want to go in and make changes after that point, you need dynamite, basically, to explode it out again. And that’s what was happening with my students. They were not really interested in going back and looking at making big changes in their writing.

A lot of times what I see students do is, they’ll make a claim, but they’ll sort of skip too quickly past their evidence.

They do a paragraph out loud as a group, and in an evidence scavenger hunt, we’re weighing together whether their paragraph works or doesn’t work. We’re working with it while it’s still wet, right? We’re working with it while it’s still moldable, while they haven’t quite fully formed the idea yet.

We’re going to find evidence for this game in Catcher in the Rye. OK, here we go.

I will make sure that the claims are debatable.

I want you to prove or disprove that Holden cares about school.

And I will also introduce the paragraph format that I want students to use.

Claim, warrant, evidence, analysis, link back.

And then I’ll tell the students that their response has to be in the form of that paragraph, and that each member of their group has to give a different part of the paragraph. And that forces the engagement of the entire team.

It looks like we have a first.

Student: We believe he doesn’t care about school because he doesn’t really care about his grades.

Student: “It’s all right with me if you flunk me. Still, I’m flunking everything else except English, anyways. Respectfully yours, Holden Caufield.”

Student: The quote proves that Holden doesn’t care about school because he told the teacher that he’s already flunking every single other class, and he wouldn’t really care if he flunked this class, even though this is the only class he’s doing good in.

Mary: They did first. Who can do better? I’m going to give you 30 seconds right now to try to beat them. Students will go for the first piece of evidence they find, but then when they hear this other group that had this response that was much more nuanced…

Student: So the two pieces of evidence just explain how Holden doesn’t care about school because he’s failing a lot of classes, and he keeps on jumping out of different schools.

Mary: And that brought in this other whole aspect. They’re sort of blown away by that in the moment, and they’re impressed by that.

Student: They gave two pieces of evidence.

Mary: They gave two pieces of evidence. Was it better than the argument we heard first?

After doing this activity today in class, I know that I’ll see a marked change in everyone’s paragraph writing, because they’re doing more of the thought process of evaluating what they have on the page, and does it make sense? And is this thing that I wrote actually supporting the claim that I’m making? And how do these things fit together?

What else could we compare?

It’s making it explicit to them, the process that I’m doing and evaluating their work.

Do you see the nuance of the argument they were making?

And I think for a lot of students, that actually feels pretty mysterious and arbitrary. They just get a grade back from a teacher and they’re like, I don’t know. She just said, find evidence, so I found evidence, right? Until you’ve actually tried to weigh evidence that way, and been the one to be evaluating it, you don’t really have a sense of whether it was effective evidence or not.

Student: I feel like they had a really strong reasoning, which like, actually made everything about their claim make sense. So I think that group did the best.

Boston Latin Academy