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By Bob Regan, OER Project Team
Washington, USA
Note: Over the next few months we'll be bringing over some of your favorite posts from the old BHP Teacher Blog. Please enjoy this piece, originally posted August 30, 2019.
What makes a great response from a student? It’s not enough to have the right answer—they have to defend it. Making a claim and supporting it well turns students into scholars, kids into citizens, shouted out answers into conversations. Now, this transformation isn’t instantaneous, but making small changes to your approach to classroom discussions will have a noticeable impact.
Just in case you haven’t heard of claim testing before, check out Bob Bain in the Big History Project (BHP) video How Do We Decide What to Believe? or the BHP activity Claim Testing – What are the Claim Testers?. Teaching World History Project (WHP)? Claim testing is a big part of that course as well. Check out the Teaching World History page for more about teaching claim testing and the activity Claim Testing – Introduction (Origins and 1750). These resources will introduce the concept quickly. However, it is not enough for students to merely watch one video or complete one activity. If you really want to see the benefit of claim testing, you need to encourage—if not insist—that students use the language of claim testing in classroom discussion.
To help students develop their claim testing skills and use the language of claim testing throughout the course, we include it as one of our progression activities. That means that students will keep developing these skills in numerous activities throughout each of the OER Project courses. It might take a while for your student to perfect this skill, but eventually, they develop the habit of explaining why a source is a reliable authority or a piece of evidence is strong.
To start, let’s talk about the most underrated of all of the claim testers: intuition. Many ignore this test since it “isn’t scientific.” Yet, asking students to articulate what their intuition tells them serves a very important cognitive purpose. It gets students to activate their prior knowledge. As they decide whether their “gut” is telling them whether or not a claim is true, they are searching long-term memory for anything they know on the topic and making it available in short-term memory. This is a critical precursor to learning. You might have to push past the inevitable “I dunno” to get a student talking. Prompts like “if you have to guess” and “what can you say about this” can help. As one student works through this, other students might have a spark that gets more of a conversation going. More than guesswork, the brain is doing essential work here that will help students retain the information.
At the same time, we should push students past simply providing an answer, even if it’s the right one. “Why?” is a great response from you here. Is the evidence strong? Do you trust the authority? If you’re able to make the justification of a response routine in your classroom, you push students past the simple yes/no or fill-in-the-blank kind of answers. This also invites other students to chime in with alternative views of the evidence or the logic in the author’s argument.
This same approach of defending responses is even more powerful when students disagree, particularly with one another. This is where real debates and conversations begin.
To help create this climate, there are a couple of simple things you can do. Did you know you can find OER Project posters—including claim testing posters—on the teacher resources page? There are several different claim testing posters available, and all of them are there (hint: for BHP look under “BHP Posters” and for WHP download the “Skills Posters” under the “WHP Posters” heading). Placing these in prominent locations in the classroom can be a helpful tool and remind students of how to structure their responses. Another idea that we love: We met a teacher recently who had the clever idea of using simple pencil erasers to remind students of the claim testers. If a student had trouble coming up with a response, she might toss them a heart-shaped eraser to nudge them to talk about intuition or an owl-shaped eraser to talk about authority.
Change in your classroom discussions will not be immediate. Your students might groan a bit when you constantly ask, “why?” They might struggle to think of reasons. You might need to think of different questions that invite deeper conversations. Stick with it—over time, you’ll see a big change.
To learn more about how to incorporate claim testing in the classroom, check out 8.2: Claim Testing in the Teaching Big History online professional development course and the BHP and WHP Practice Progression Guides and Placemats for more about the claim testing progression and activities in the course.
