Arguments and Claims Lesson Plan Teacher(s): Ms. Chao Subject: Social Studies/ELA Lesson Title Grade: 8 Given a Claim, Rate the Evidence (The 14th Amendment & Ferguson) Featured Newsela Article Ferguson's police and courts targeted African-Americans, report says (1010L) Police departments weigh the benefits of using officer-cams (1080L) Learning Objective Example statement(s) about what students will learn from this particular activity. Today I am learning … rate evidence on a spectrum based on how well it supports a claim. So I can … understand what makes some pieces of evidence stronger than others. I know I understand when … I have rated my evidence using the color coding system (Green = Strongest, Yellow = Strong, Red = Weaker) and explained why I gave it that rating. Students will be able to … rate the strength of evidence that supports a given claim using an evidence spectrum and explain why a piece of evidence is stronger or weaker than others. Learning Standard Include the standard that this activity helps teach. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.8.1 Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.8.1.B Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant evidence, using accurate, credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text. Lesson Content How will you introduce the lesson to your students? How will you teach them the skills they need to be successful? How will you allow students to practice the skills they learned with Newsela’s Write + Quiz feature? How will you assess mastery? Direct Instruction: ● ● Example sections and sentence starters to guide your planning. ● Yesterday we examined the experience of African-Americans living in Ferguson County, Missouri, in 2015, in light of the 14th Amendment, by reading the Newsela article: Ferguson's police and courts targeted African-Americans, report says (1010L). We then looked for pieces of evidence to support yesterday’s claim: “The Ferguson county police department's practices violate the 14th amendment rights of African-American citizens and must be changed.” and you annotated the evidence you found by using a “because” statement to explain how your evidence supported the claim. Today we are going RATE the evidence that we found, because not all evidence is equally strong - as you probably already know, some evidence is stronger than others. For example, let’s say Mr. N is on trial for the murder of Mrs. X. During the trial, a neighbor testifies that Mr. N always hated Mrs. X because Mrs. X always played music very loudly at night. That’s evidence #1. Another piece of evidence, #2 is Mr. N’s bloody fingerprints found all over the crime scene, including on the knife found next to Mrs. X’s body. Which piece of evidence is stronger, 1 or 2? Give students a moment to think about it and/or briefly discuss with an elbow partner. Call students back to attention and ask again, “which piece of evidence more strongly supports the claim that Mr. N is guilty of killing Mrs. X?” Ask students to explain why they think that evidence #2 is stronger than evidence #1. Discussion points might include: ○ evidence #1 doesn’t necessarily mean he killed her, he could have just been annoyed. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ evidence #1 is not as directly linked to the murder of Mrs. X because it is someone else saying that Mr. N hated Mrs. X. there are plausible explanations for why evidence #1 can be true and Mr. N is innocent. evidence #2 is more directly linked to the murder. evidence #2 cannot easily be explained away. it’s easy to explain to someone why evidence #2 could mean that Mr. N murdered Mrs. X. Modeling: ● ● ● ● ● So now we’re going to rate the evidence using our text evidence that we found from yesterday’s reading. So let’s review our claim, which is: “The Ferguson county police department's practices violate the 14th amendment rights of AfricanAmerican citizens and must be changed.” Now everyone please pull up the article Ferguson's police and courts targeted African-Americans, report says (1010L) on your laptop and silently take about 57 minutes to review the text evidence that you selected and review your annotations. (5-7 minutes of students’ silent review time) Teachers can take this time to circulate and/or gather formative assessment data by reviewing student annotations and having mini-conferences with struggling scholars. Call the class back together to review what pieces of evidence were gathered. If there are common pieces of evidence, which there will be, take a class poll to see how many other students also chose that particular piece of evidence. Choose 3 pieces of evidence chosen by students to highlight and discuss. Now we are going to rate these 3 pieces of evidence. GREEN = Strongest, YELLOW = Strong and RED = Weaker. Discuss with the class why each piece of evidence should be given a GREEN, YELLOW or RED rating. Here are some examples you could use: ○ “The report found that police searched people without a legal reason, abused their authority and routinely violated civil rights.” This piece of evidence directly supports the claim that the Ferguson county police department’s practices violate the 14th Amendment rights of AfricanAmerican citizens and must be changed because the evidence goes directly to the point of violating the rights of African-Americans. The 14th Amendment says that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In this piece of text evidence, it says “police searched people without a legal reason” which is a direct example of “depriving a person of liberty, without due process of law. So I would give this a GREEN for Strongest. It’s pretty difficult to rebut that, it’s easy to explain, and it goes directly to the claim. ○ “The investigation found seven racist emails that had circulated among police and court employees from 2008 to 2011. One of them depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.” This piece of evidence is disturbing. When I read this, it really struck a chord. Now breaking it down, I think it’s a strong piece of evidence because it shows that people on the police force and court employees held clearly racist beliefs. However, it was only 7 emails and it doesn’t show that the police department’s practices violated the rights of African-Americans directly. Instead, it shows that this was very likely to have happened and shows that at least some police had a motive to treat African-Americans unequally, which would violate the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Therefore, I’d give a YELLOW for Strong. ○ “Also, the report says Ferguson used its police and courts to raise money. Often, this came at the expense of people who were poor and ● ● African-American.” This piece of text certainly shows that Ferguson’s police and courts seemed to have particularly affected African-Americans, however, I’m not sure how directly this links to the claim that the 14th Amendment rights of African-Americans are being affected. It’s not clear if this means that African-Americans were being deprived of property (money?) without due process of law. Since the link to the claim is not as clear and direct, I’m going to give this text evidence RED for Weaker. ○ So as you can see, after I gather my evidence for the claim, I then want to examine the evidence and rate it, to figure out how strong and how directly linked to the claim it is. Check for Understanding: “So let’s review: Our claim that we are supporting is what? Cold Call or ask for student volunteers. Answer: “The Ferguson county police department's practices violate the 14th amendment rights of AfricanAmerican citizens and must be changed.” The 1st piece of evidence was: “The report found that police searched people without a legal reason, abused their authority and routinely violated civil rights.” and I gave it a GREEN for strongest evidence. Why? Call on student volunteers or cold call. The 2nd piece of evidence was: “The investigation found seven racist emails that had circulated among police and court employees from 2008 to 2011. One of them depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.” I gave it a YELLOW for strong evidence, but not as strong as the 1st piece. Why? Cold call or ask for student volunteers. And the 3rd piece of evidence was: “Also, the report says Ferguson used its police and courts to raise money. Often, this came at the expense of people who were poor and African-American.” I gave this a RED for weakest evidence, and why did I do that? Cold call or ask for student volunteers. And the 3rd piece of evidence was: Your GOAL for today, is to look back at the evidence you have highlighted from the Ferguson's police and courts targeted African-Americans, report says (1010L) article, and using the GREEN, YELLOW, RED highlighting system I just ● showed you - you are going to rate each piece of evidence as Strongest (GREEN), Strong (YELLOW) or Weaker (RED) and in your Newsela annotation, you are going to tell me why you rated it GREEN, YELLOW or RED. Remember your annotation must include a “because” statement and be written in complete sentences. You should have at least 3-5 pieces of rated evidence and annotations explaining your ratings. Extension: Read the second article: Police departments weigh the benefits of using officer-cams (1080L). Find text evidence to support the claim: “Mandatory use of police body cameras are an effective method of keeping police officers accountable.” Highlight the text evidence in YELLOW and write an annotation answering the question: How does the text evidence you highlighted support the claim? Next rate, each piece of evidence using the GREEN, YELLOW, RED rating system and complete annotations explaining why you gave each piece of evidence its rating. Student Practice: ● Students now open their own Newsela article through their account and revisit the text evidence they already highlighted from the article: Ferguson's police and courts targeted African-Americans, report says (1010L) ● Directions: Teacher Note: Share as Instructions when assigning article to class. ○ Go back and look at the text evidence you highlighted in yellow to support the claim: “The Ferguson county police department's practices violate the 14th amendment rights of African-American citizens and must be changed.” ○ Now for each piece of highlighted evidence, ask yourself, “How strong is this evidence? Does it directly support the claim? How closely does it link to the claim? ○ ○ Give the text evidence a rating of Strongest (use GREEN highlighter), Strong (use YELLOW highlighter) or Weakest (use RED Highlighter). In the box next to the highlighted text, write your “because” statement answering the question: Why did you rate this piece of text evidence GREEN, YELLOW or RED? Reminder: this statement/statements must be in complete sentences. Guided Questions: Teacher Note: The Guided Questions in bold are the focus questions for the targeted skills in this lesson of determining the strength or weakness of text evidence. However, the unbolded questions, which are from the previous lesson, are also necessary foundations to help students recall what constitutes “text evidence.” ● Is the evidence closely linked to the claim/issue? ● Is there strong rebuttal for the evidence? ● Does the evidence require lengthy explanation? ● Why did you highlight that piece of text as evidence? ● How do you know that it is evidence and not a claim? ● How does this piece of text evidence support the claim? Assessment: ● Students will complete reviewing their highlighted text evidence and have at least 35 ratings and explanations in the annotations explaining why each piece of evidence was given a particular rating. ○ ✓+ shows mastery: Student demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes certain pieces of evidence stronger than others and is able to give clear rationale for every rated piece of evidence. ○ ✓ shows meets goal: Student demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes certain pieces of evidence stronger than others and is able to give a clear rationale for at least 2 pieces of rated evidence. ○ ● ✓- shows that intervention may be necessary to help student with understanding what makes evidence stronger/weaker in light of the claim. Extension students: students will complete the same exercise but with the second article. Assessment standards are the same as above. ○ ✓+ shows mastery: Student demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes certain pieces of evidence stronger than others and is able to give clear rationale for every rated piece of evidence. ○ ✓ shows meets goal: Student demonstrates a clear understanding of what makes certain pieces of evidence stronger than others and is able to give a clear rationale for at least 2 pieces of rated evidence. ○ ✓- shows that intervention may be necessary to help student with understanding what makes evidence stronger/weaker in light of the claim. Accommodations What scaffolds can be included to support learners? Can you anticipate different reading levels for students? ● ● ● ● ● Reading Level adjusted to each student with IEP’s reading level based on latest Student Progress in Newsela binder or other reading assessment & teacher observations. Include pre-highlighted example with annotation. Provide the Guided Questions for today either on a handout or in annotations. Include sentence starters in annotations for struggling scholars. Pull homogeneous group of lowest readers who need additional intervention for targeted in-classroom targeted instruction. Extensions How can you support high level learners? Can you anticipate reading levels and Writing Prompt to challenge? ● Provide on-task focusing prompts. ● ● ● Increase reading level for scholars whose Student Progress lexiles are higher. Students will rate a minimum of 5 pieces of evidence. Read the second article: Police departments weigh the benefits of using officercams (1080L). Find text evidence to support the claim: “Mandatory use of police body cameras are an effective method of keeping police officers accountable.” Highlight the text evidence in YELLOW and write an annotation answering the question: How does the text evidence you highlighted support the claim? Next rate, each piece of evidence using the GREEN, YELLOW, RED rating system and complete annotations explaining why you gave each piece of evidence its rating.