Seven Things To Know About Jennifer Fletcher’s Teaching Arguments

To follow are seven things to know about the book Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response. Once point for all seven chapters. There are many great points throughout this book but these are some of the biggest points that I got out from each chapter.

1. When getting ready for any conversation it is important to listen. Listening helps to prepare yourself for the conversation.
2. Start out by doubting and believing an issue and then move on to making a stance on the issue. From starting out this way students can come up with defensible assertions for students writing.
3. Kairos is about the immediate social space and situation in which arguments must be made, including what’s expected in terms of propriety or fitness for the occasion. This chapter there is a lot talking about how to understand it, introduce it to high schoolers, and how to get students to use it.
4. Newspapers are the best start to get students to learn about audience. They can compare and contrast different newspapers to learn how to figure out audience through the writing.
5. Students need to learn that text can have a primary, secondary, or even a tertiary purpose. There is a difference between school writing and real-world writing. In real-world writing writers can start out talking about one thing and by the end be talking about something different.
6. It is important to teach students to figure out the answers to their questions. For example, if a student asks if they have to use sources or they can use I a teacher showed their students recent scholarly articles and books from English students and challenged them to find their answer from looking at those. This will help the students in the long run.
7. The last chapter dears to speak about a topic that would not be in most books. They discuss strategies for teachers to promote students’ academic identities and habit and as they call it “Aristotle’s guide to becoming a good student.