Teaching Argument Construction

Abstract

Most critical thinking textbooks tell students nothing about how to construct good arguments of their own. Their focus is on the identification and evaluation of other people's arguments as you would expect, since they are after all critical thinking textbooks. Although teaching students how to evaluate arguments is the primary goal of critical thinking courses, such courses also provide the ideal context for the teaching of argument construction. Writing courses sometimes instruct students in how to write an argumentative essay, but they tend not to go into any detail about what differentiates a good argument from a bad one. By the middle of a critical thinking course, in contrast, students should have acquired some idea of what makes a good argument good, so they are well placed to be told how to construct one themselves. Although learning the difference between a good argument and a bad argument goes some way towards showing you how to construct good arguments of your own, it does not go all the way. Some explicit instruction is needed. However, it is difficult to provide such instruction in a large lecture class. The best way to learn argument construction, once you have learned how to evaluate arguments, is to construct arguments and then have them evaluated either by your peers or by a tutor. How can you teach argument construction in a lecture? All that there is to say about it (given that the students already know how to evaluate arguments) can be conveyed in about five minutes. Here is a method of teaching argument construction which I have developed to suit a teaching situation in which there are two one-hour lectures and one onehour tutorial per week. The lecture class contains approximately two hundred students: each tutorial group contains between ten and twenty. One lecture and one tutorial are devoted entirely to argument construction. The lecture consists of a five-minute introductory spiel followed by an in-class exercise in which we construct arguments as a group. Then the students are given a homework assignment: of a list of statements, they are to choose one and construct the best argument they can for it. In the tutorial, their arguments will be presented to the class, and the class will make suggestions about how the argument could be improved.