this is the garden of english i'm tim freitas and today i've got a super special guest and beth hall from coach hall rights and she's coming on to talk to us about how we can actually select evidence for our argument essays so let's go get coached [Applause] all right so super cool that we are uh visited here today by beth hall from coach hall rights if you haven't actually already checked out coach hall rights on youtube you need to uh and she graciously accepted my offer to come in here and teach me how to actually get my kids to find the correct evidence or at least collaborate as we do it together but uh i don't need to speak for beth hall she could speak for herself so beth why don't you introduce yourself and then we're gonna go right into things all right awesome well thank you so my name is beth hall i am an ap lang teacher and soccer coach that's where the coach comes from from arkansas and i have a youtube channel called coach hall rights i try to focus on ap lang videos over there and i also have a growing instagram if people want to check that out as well it's just at coach hall writes just trying to help teachers and students as we navigate this crazy school year getting ready for the exam for sure well what i'm going to do here is this we're going to actually talk about collecting evidence here today but i'm going to share my screen real quick because if you haven't actually checked out the breaking down the prompt video that i did with another friend of mine uh named crystal liberty you're going to want to check that out you'll see a card up in the corner but what i'm going to ask that you i want to remind you that this is the prop that we were using in that video and we're going to actually use this prompt again today in order to collect evidence so i'm just gonna reread that with you all and then we're gonna let coach hall take over and talk about how she gets her kids to uh collect evidence and prepare to write an argument and then i'll tag a little bit on at the end but here's the prompt it says for decades movies and music have included messages or labels to signal that they have material in them that some people may find troubling advocates for such things argue this is important to prevent people from being exposed to things that they do not want to encounter however erica christakis a lecturer at the yale child study center says that free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society write an essay that argues your position on the use of warning labels or warning messages to signal potentially troubling content and then of course there's all that bulleted information down below but all it actually says is write a good essay so that's what we do indeed suggest that you do but before i actually tag on some information about what i do to get kids to select evidence we're gonna let uh we're gonna let beth uh take it away so beth why don't you share your screen and walk us through how do we do this how do we gather evidence for a prompt that looks like this all right awesome so i'm just gonna share some slides that i put together hopefully i can make this so y'all can see it um so the first thing that i did when i first started this is i had to choose an acronym and so there are several out there um if you go to the appealing teacher facebook groups you'll see chores and gopher and i think pasta was one please be told right in education what acronym has education ever turned down honestly right exactly so um i i chose chores because it seemed the easiest for my students to remember but honestly i don't really think it matters which acronym you choose as long as you have one as a guide um so in case you're curious chores just stands for current events history outside knowledge reading experiences and science so lots of stuff to remember there in some sense but they're pretty self-explanatory categories so that's the acronym that we've been using for a few years in my classroom so once you have your acronym then you need to brainstorm or at least that's what we do when i'm teaching my students so i actually like to have them brainstorm individually first so they'll see the prompt they'll write down chores or whatever other acronym they need to do on their paper and they'll just start thinking about what evidence they can use i've tried it both ways i've tried having students do the thesis first and then the evidence and that worked for some students but for most of my students the evidence first and then the thesis even though it seems kind of backwards actually leads to a stronger essay for them so i've been doing it this way with some success for a couple years now so i want to just chime in just real quick because i think that's actually an important move to make a lot of times because a lot of times we have gut reactions to kind of an argument and that's that's a good thing to have right but when we then want to just jump in with our gut reaction typically there's a lot of emotion that's tied there and when we want to have a really solid argument you know we want to make sure we have evidence to back that up that's not just emotionally motivated so i actually think that sounds like a really strong idea to gather evidence even if they have an initial reaction to gather evidence now just one real real quick question here right when you have your kids kind of brainstorming individually what's the biggest um what's the biggest kind of interruption that typically comes up the first time that they do this do your kids have a typical struggle the first time that they actually start using chores um i think it kind of depends so um that's what i have the second bullet point there because i have a lot of questions from students the very first time they do it they're like okay do i need to have an equal number of entries for each letter and i tell them no because i quite frankly don't care that it's equal i just kind of want them to start thinking about stuff and sometimes depending on the prompt you might not have like let's say reading you might not have a lot of evidence that supports that and that's okay um and also they ask like do i need to have an entry for all the categories or can i skip one if i don't have any ideas and i tell them that's fine because it's really not about having like the everything filled out or like equal numbers it's about just kind of getting the ideas on paper and of course you'll have a couple students who are like oh i can't think of anything and you know i just kind of tell them you got to write something yeah and there's always personal experience now when i first started teaching i told my students like you know don't use personal experience but because it's not always convincing now i'm more open to it i've made a shift but the one thing i tell them i don't want to see if at all possible is i don't want to see hypotheticals because those are not very convincing right i tell my students all the time hypotheticals suck right and it just so happens that most of my kids are the first time that they start writing out their evidence they always bring me to a hypothetical and i'm like all right guys whoa you gotta chill out here um just one other note about the uh personal that kind of personal self as evidence you know some some prompts are tailor-made for that other prompts are not and it's really important that the kids you know kind of look look for that but one other element about that is is that um i've in my body paragraphing video that will come out later on come out later next week i want to give an example of a body paragraph that actually has a personal example as an effective piece of evidence but i do agree that if you can use something that is not just saying i live in my own little world and that's all i know it is better to pick something out that's going to be a little bit more academic but we'll talk about that in a little bit too so it's part of my interruption i do appreciate that but i think that these are some issues that a lot of people kind of run into and even kids right um and the acronym is a great springboard to get past those issues yeah absolutely because um honestly our students are different too so um a lot of my students in ap lang do take a push and so if they take aps history they're usually depending on the prompt able to tie it to some sort of historical you know event or something um obviously not all prompts are like that but the students who come from maybe like an on level history class or maybe like a less like rigorous class they might not have as much like specific evidence which we could talk about later and so sometimes for those students the personal experiences if they're relevant i mean that's the key word but if they're relevant they are more convincing um i remember i had a student who she's playing college softball now and we were doing the unknown prompt and like all the all our peers were talking about like these different like historical examples and she's like coach hall like i don't i don't know any of this stuff and i was like okay what do you know well and she's like softball and i'm like okay what's the unknown in softball and she just went off like spouting all these different examples from like personal experience in the olympics and i was like okay so you do have evidence there it might not be the same as the people sitting next to you but you're not writing their essay you're writing yours and i think that kind of mentality really helps now a quick question here real quick just because of the way that you told that little anecdote do your students actually call you coach hall yes that's incredible southern thing but like um yeah if you're a coach at least in the south i guess yeah then you typically get called coach like even like so they don't call me mrs hall like they think that sounds weird no kidding yeah that's great so i don't know if it's like that elsewhere in the country but yeah it's like uh it was actually kind of like a badge of honor the first time like i got because i was hired as a teacher first and then i became a soccer coach and when the kids started calling me coach it was kind of like okay i like this that's it oh that's great that's great so once again part of my interruption but i appreciate you know the clarification there and uh maybe i can start getting my kids to call me coach i don't know they look at me and they'd be like shut up and then they walk out of my room anyway so sorry for that interruption one last name totally fine okay so this third step here this is something that i started doing i think last school year because my students were choosing a lot of general evidence and i looked at the rubric and i just tried to show them roby okay let's pull out the keywords in this rubric now you're talking about the rubric that we're using the standardized rubric that's used by scoring on the ap exam right yes yeah so we're in row b of course yes okay so the college boards rubric i had them pull out kind of like key words and they pulled out like generalized evidence somewhat specific and specific and of course we want specific evidence because it's more convincing so what i had them do is after they did chores i had them go through and label each entry so if they could give me like generalized evidence of it they would put a g if it was somewhat specific then they would put an ss and then an s for specific and that was all up to them like so like their own interpretation of it like play to your strengths i guess is kind of the methodology here so for a student a like they might talk about something and they might be able to be really specific about it but student b it might be generalized so it's just kind of getting them to sort through their evidence a little bit and favor the evidence that's more specific yeah that's great so um just to give an example based on like the prompt that you had showed earlier um let's just say like for generalized evidence ratings like that that really vague there media ratings right that is are we reading food are we reading who knows what we're rating absolutely right is it like two thumbs up are we talking five stars is it pg-13 like what is ratings so that would be really general and of course some students that might be the initial thought process like after reading the prompt they might think oh okay ratings well we can actually build to something a bit more specific so somewhat specific might be movie ratings um i kept it really simple there but you could kind of expand on that and then a specific piece of evidence um i found a forbes article that was talking about how like the movie frozen is rated pg but like it's actually a lot tamer than movies from the 90s that were rated g even more so i don't know if you've have you ever seen the movie the black cauldron i think maybe not the whole thing but i i know what you're talking about because i think that's an 80s movie and i'm pretty sure that was rated g and oh my gosh i can't even believe what goes on in that movie so yeah i totally understand where this is going yeah like um the article was talking about how like in the lion king there's like you know they're eating like a dead animal carcass and like that's like not exactly kid friendly depending on your age yeah and so i don't know i thought that was interesting and you could actually take this evidence and maybe use it differently depending on what your thesis ultimately is like maybe we are becoming softer as a culture or maybe we're doing the right thing by changing the ratings a little bit so you can kind of like go either way with that but that's much more specific than saying ratings right and you know and also you know we've got those specific examples of the lion king and frozen um and you know maybe you know we could even get even more specific by talking about the kind of you know violent images from the lion king and then the images that are considered violent and frozen that aren't aren't half as vicious um so oh that's that's a great example of trying to get kids there and you know uh even getting them to recognize hey maybe even though i just thought of ratings i can give them a scaffold to say oh good can we get a little bit more specific can we get even more specific and then really trying to push kids to write with specificity that's a great idea yeah so when students tend to only give like general answers because part of this is it's like bullet points on a piece of paper and so they might not be able to go as in depth the first time so i like this idea of okay let's take a general idea and make it somewhat specific make it specific but as they get like more practice with this they can like i've had kids write like i don't know um american revolution and to me that's really general obviously but then like if i ask them okay but what would you talk about about the american revolution for whatever prompt we're doing yeah and then they'll be like oh okay well this person did this and there's this law and like the so they they can maybe just do a bullet point but as long as they know that they can be specific about it um i don't necessarily have them like plan every single thing right this is really like a quick thing in class like they'll do it independently and then i like to shift to whole class or at least like in a normal year with face-to-face instruction um we shift to whole class because then they can hear each other's ideas and usually someone will say something and then everybody will be like oh yeah and then they'll like add it too because they just didn't think of it the first right yeah and that is kind of nice to have there as well so yeah that works out really well yeah so then what they do at least like what i've tried in the past is they'll look at their evidence that they've labeled like specific so they put an s by it and if they can pull maybe like three to five examples pieces of evidence whatever you want to call it that they gave an s that's usually going to be the evidence that ends up in their paper um not always um and sometimes i have had students need to use like the ss category somewhat specific because they just didn't have enough or something happened so i mean it is what it is but um when they're kind of like narrowing down their evidence i ask them to um first of all make sure that their examples are appropriate for the task um and then secondly we want to figure out like what is the like relationship between these pieces of evidence and is there any kind of like line of reasoning because they might have a couple things that they know a lot about but they might not be like related at all so it might be too big of a jump in the line of reasoning so some of the things that i have them look for might be chronological order um that typically comes into play with like history or current events um cause and effect maybe um similar or contrasting causes or outcomes um and then like maybe a progression of ideas going from like small scale to large scale um like personal to universal or vice versa depending on the examples you could totally flip that order if you wanted to and that would be a great way to also teach transitions too because if it works chronologically let's get the chronological language in our topic sentences if it works on a cause and effect and that can actually help them um if they think about their evidence that's going to help them not only formulate the order of their thesis but also their topic sentences and the essay itself too these are excellent points for thinking about how to arrange evidence and then produce the essay itself yeah and those questions like you can ask them they sometimes they might not understand line of reasoning super well i think even some of us appealing teachers were kind of like okay yeah we get it but it's hard to explain yeah but you can ask a kid like okay um let's say um you're gonna talk about the american revolution in world war ii you know a lot about both for whatever prompt this is well which one would you talk about first because though in the same body paragraph well they're going to probably say american revolution and if you ask them why they'll be like well because it happened first right so just getting them to realize those nuances the same for when kids bring up like personal evidence because that can sometimes be tricky to know where to place that in the argument right so like are you gonna lead with that and then go to this like broader example from like i don't know current events or history or something or are you gonna start broad and go to more specific um because those topic sentences are really important that idea of like transitioning from paragraph to paragraph absolutely this helps them as they're narrowing it down to like three to five um because i don't know that you could really choose more than five i think that would be like too much for for 40 minutes of course i completely agree so three to five um just because some of them might be related and they might go in the same paragraph or whatever so three to five but getting them to figure out okay what can i write about effectively and specifically is it appropriate for the task which i mean usually it is but i think you and i can both name some topics that we've seen kids write about that are not appropriate yeah i will i will talk about some of that evidence soon enough yeah so then like what's my line of reasoning because i think if we're going with this idea of planning the evidence first like brainstorming it and then working back to a thesis um we want to have that line of reasoning starting to like form a little bit in this planning process yeah absolutely and i also think too that um that it also can help kids to realize that they might have to change their thesis if they realize they have more evidence to support a different position and they should probably support that different position at least on the essay to write a better art i mean on the exam to write a better argument as opposed to then they can then rethink about it in their lives a little bit later you know you're not glued to the position that you write about on your ap language yeah absolutely because otherwise it feels really forced sometimes you're like oh i wrote this great thesis but then i don't really have the evidence to back it up and my students i had a kid ask once he's like because i said you know you don't have to argue what you truly believe like they're not going to know and he's like are you sure and i was like i promise you the ap police will come knocking on that door right like nobody's gonna know um our school does pay to have the essays sent back like in a normal year so i was like technically like i might know but like i'm not gonna like come and hunt you down and because you know i think sometimes kids sort of have it in their head that like there's this like answer they're supposed to give and you know and i don't know i could kind of see where that line of thinking comes from but like at the end of the day your job is to be convincing like it doesn't really matter what you argue because your reader's supposed to be unbiased we're just looking at like did you complete the task and how well so it's it's you know now that being said like there are times where you know we want to reign it in a little bit but um yeah i i've had conversations with students because they were so worried that like the ap police were coming and i was like no no no no such thing they don't even exist so um now that that that works out great especially thinking about the the ordering of this and the picking of it yeah absolutely so i think that's it for my slides um i'm just gonna stop sharing i guess yeah and what i'll do is i'll bring up mine um and what i'm gonna do is i'm actually you know i'm gonna piggyback off of what you had to offer uh because it's it's excellent um and what i want to look at here though is i want to look at the um okay i think i should be sharing my screen do you see my screen up there yes you're sharing it gotcha um what i'm going to do is this i'm going to just go over here right um i i do have my kids select evidence in a very similar manner to yours i'd have them change the acronym just a little bit because like i said earlier there's no acronym that education doesn't love but you're going to notice that i've got this image right up here on my screen that just is called the strongest human argument and the reason why i have this here is because one of the things that i introduced to my kids is that when they produce uh their evidence that they're picking out i really want them to think about their audience first right and the reason why is because i mean they could pick out whatever evidence they want but if they don't think about their audience and who they are and their backgrounds and their values and their beliefs and their needs and their wants and desires then the essay is not going to be entirely effective and one of the examples that i have is a few years ago there was a prompt that was given out about the value of the unknown and i had a friend who was reading it he was like i've read so many essays that use finding nemo as an example and although finding nemo might fit as an example first of all it's fiction uh second of all it's a children's movie and this is an ap exam right so i actually have my kids before they pick their evidence i have them start by thinking about who their audience is and the reason why is because they do this in their life as well right they don't just go in and say mom i'm going to the movies tonight you can't do anything about it a lot of times before they make their claim they need to kind of prove that they deserve to go to the movies that night so mom and dad won't fight about it right yeah absolutely and i love it because it's tied into the ap lang standard you know um because i bring this up a lot with rhetorical analysis like with you know the the speaker in the audience like what is the audience's background or shared values because you know with rhetorical analysis the writer tailors it to their audience and they make rhetorical choices so i love this because it's basically teaching students you know what hey now you're the writer you have an audience you have to make rhetorical choices and maybe finding nemo is not the best example right especially for the ap exam so what i'm going to do super quick is i tell my kids your ap readers when we think about their backgrounds values beliefs and needs i'm like guys let's talk about this right now i'm going to mention things in an entirely holistic manner so if there's any teacher watching this and you're like that's not me that's okay we're thinking about things holistically but when i think about the backgrounds of ap readers we know that they're either professors or ap teachers so they're well educated individuals right they clearly value education and because they're teachers they most likely value civics as well right the other thing too is that i tell kids all the time especially because i work in a rather conservative district i tell kids look at you can write whatever argument you want but you need to be prepared for the idea that nationally teachers are on the whole collectively more moderate to liberal and because of that you need to think about if you're going to have an argument that is more conservative in nature you know you need to not not you don't change your your laurels here or your morals about that but you have to think about evidence that somebody that might disagree with you actually accepts because this is going to be the case and i'm like and if the person already agrees with you if they hold the same kind of you know mindset that you have they're going to agree with your evidence anyway if especially if it's stuff that the opposing side would accept so i always try to get kids you know what if you're re doing this for ap readers right who's your audience educated individuals they care about civics potentially more on the politically liberal side and they really want to see your reasoning and your ability to engage with the world around them or sorry around yourself and i bring that up too because you know how you mentioned earlier that you kind of were leaning away from that kind of personal experience it's not bad to include but you don't necessarily want your entire essay to have that unless the essay really has an opportunity to have that like the value of the unknown prompt you could write an entire essay about yourself and use multiple examples and have it score very high i completely agree with that but that's the first place where i start with my kids yeah i agree i had to have similar conversations with my students not recently but a couple years ago you know teaching in arkansas you can imagine that um students are a bit more conservative not all by any means but you know um i had to tell a student hey um you know the bible might not be the best evidence for this particular prompt um not saying you are wrong or right or anything but um and i also told them like hey um you know politics might not be the best thing to bring up either like just because sometimes it can come across in a way that you don't intend so just i don't know it was awkward to tell that to kids but i had to be very honest with them and they appreciated the tip and i said like i'm not telling you you can't but i i feel like it's my job to caution you just right absolutely and there and there are times when these examples work perfectly but kids really have to set it up uh in that way as opposed to just being like i'm gonna just commonly accept that you think that this is entirely valid and so it's right it's about getting them to make choices about who their audience is collectively on the whole right not everybody lives in arkansas not everybody lives in massachusetts and now we have to try to say how do we reach the broadest audience and what do we know about the broadest audience on the whole so the next thing that i have the kids do is i get the kids to think about the prompt and they haven't even written their thesis for me yet but i say what do you want your audience to understand about your feelings about this prompt so kind of you know you had a gut reaction what do you want your audience to understand and they'll write that out in a little simple sentence and then i'll say great now you're going to take an acronym and you're going to try to pick out your evidence that your audience will accept that you can then actually illustrate or support with this evidence and that's actually going to uh lead me to the next slide that i'm going to show in just a moment but after the kids pick out evidence i then say okay now you need to write out what do you want your audience to do because that's going to be your conclusion but that's for a different that's for a different video so i make them go through these questions first but this third bullet point here you're gonna notice that as i shift over right um what i do is i get i go back to their planning and once again i had a planning video that you can actually see up in the cards right above my head and when i have the kids break down the prompt i have them identify the positions and assumptions that show up in the prompt and i also have them kind of mark whether they initially agree with that or not if they think that they can have evidence to support that kind of like what you do with general evidence somewhat specific evidence and specific evidence and then i give them you know they think about their positions and and all of the information in the prompt that was given to them and then i give them this little organizer and i appreciate our conversation the other day the organizer with the type with the wrong image in it my bad but i appreciate the conversation you and i had the other day when you were bringing up this idea of general somewhat specific and specific because that is the language in the scoring guide and i have my kids remember their acronym it's just one letter s it's just s cubed right all of their evidence can come from their subjects that they learn in school elements of society underneath my little copy and paste right here it says mass media and sports by the way uh so subjects their society and their self right they could talk about personal experience secondary anecdotes and at all costs i ask them not to use hypotheticals but sometimes they just do and so when we think about the prompt that we're looking at if we're talking about uh movie ratings i actually have an example here of me picking evidence for a movie rating where i've got society this is mass media and i listed it as somewhat specific and i said media rating so on yours you put ratings i said media ratings on movies video games and music what's nice is that if we can get kids to at least identify the somewhat specific that's what they could put in their topic sentence right so we can say hey your topic sentence has to be an indicator of what you're going to specifically talk about in your body paragraph so we have this nice little organizer here they're like okay i'm checking off something from the box so it will work i can label it somewhat specifically and then they go on to describe it and and true specifics here and you'll notice that i'm talking about netflix and anoa homes and then i always click down here and i say okay is it acceptable for your audience yes or no why or why not and if they check the no box they know that they're gonna most likely have to take that evidence out now if i have a student who does indeed have um you know uh a piece of evidence and it's like this will work but i don't think it's audience appropriate but i know i can make it work kids are their own writers but we're just trying to prepare them to say hey listen we just want you to be as specific as we can and we want you to be as purposeful as you can as well and i just have another rating i mean another one here when i was thinking about ratings on things and how people can get offended and not endure things right i also have that moment when uh starbucks turned their christmas cup from having a tree on it to red and you know everybody flipped out and there was this huge war on christmas and i was like whoa i didn't realize people were gonna respond like that uh i don't think starbucks necessarily did either um and something that was supposed to be inclusive became rather divisive not necessarily on purpose and so i've got these examples in here just as examples of you know charts that you can give kids that kind of use that language from the chart and we want to get kids all the way in the right hand side as they write on their essays itself um but that's the only difference that i have you know if you look at chores you could put all of what chores stands for right into any of these s's here i just typically stick with that one letter only because um on a high you know high stress situation i'm like hey maybe if the kids can just remember one letter we're good you know yeah absolutely so um please note folks uh i'm in full support of what coach hall does i i gotta tell you beth right every time i think about your first name i'm like ah it's just coach hall you know um and and being in support of that i do things just a little bit differently by introducing that audience as being a unifying factor of that evidence right but here's honestly i think you combine these two methods and you've got a solid way of getting kids to plan out evidence for their argument papers to get them to be as specific writers as possible so before i sign off here beth is there anything else you want to add honestly i think we covered it um i think we gave people you know a couple different methods um to narrow stuff down but i think the key is just practice and modeling it with students because even though they might have done arguments in previous classes and younger grades um the expectations for ap are a little bit different so just kind of modeling it and i mean i personally um teach synthesis before argument but that's partially because of a state reason we have um the synthesis is for our school it's their mock exam so i don't i don't really think you you could go wrong either way but just reminding them that you know argument is a very integral part of the course um so whether you do argument then synthesis or synthesis an argument or whatever obviously rhetorical analysis has to go in there somewhere but getting kids to realize that part of what we're trying to do is learn how to construct a coherent logical argument and that really does come down to the evidence to an extent no absolutely right and actually correlating that evidence to make sure that it actually flows together i remember i once had a kid write about um you know certainty and doubt and he talked about deflategate with tom brady because i'm in massachusetts and then he talked about magellan and i was like you know his argument was great he was like certainty and dough are inversely proportionate and i was like wow that's a great relationship but the examples don't really correlate could you have given me magellan and galileo could you give me magellan and darwin or something like that and he chose deflategate and magellan and so trying to establish that correlation was a little bit hard but i am incredibly grateful that you decided to join us here today hopefully you'll be able to do something together again and uh it was an absolute pleasure well thank you for the opportunity so those are just some ways that you can actually work on selecting evidence uh through acronyms and kind of organizers and planners uh at the garden of english one of the ways you can actually support us is by picking up some of the posters that we offer and you're gonna notice that i'm gonna put a couple of the images on the screen probably like here here and here depending on how they i can get them to edit and pop up but we do have posters that really help kids focus on picking audience centered evidence and pertinent evidence that will relate to claims you don't just have to buy posters in order to support the garden of english in fact the easiest way you can do it is by pressing subscribe and then perhaps even sharing our video you can always follow us on facebook you can also like us on instagram and follow us on instagram um and once again you can just watch the videos and try to get something from them as well and tell people where to mouth that's how they used to do it in the old days the days when i was a kid so anyway um thanks for joining us here i'm another huge shout out to coach hall um for giving us some excellent information on how to get kids to pick their evidence and i hope that i see you all soon as we continue our argument unit our next video will be probably about outlining the argument and then we'll move to body paragraphing so you all have a great one [Music] you