Claim-evidence-reasoning template for high school

This is a template to help high school (or middle school) students to get practice at identifying a claim, selecting evidence, and writing up the reasoning for the link between the two. The sentence frames in the left hand column guide their writing.

What’s the routine that goes with this tool? This is used near the end of a unit. Students who have been working in small groups throughout the unit fill in the left hand column. The “claim” in this case is one defensible statement about the anchoring event–it should NOT be a full explanation. Then one of the students takes the “first draft” of the argument to another group (everyone rotates in the class). The other group’s aim is to understand what the argument of the first group is (more good intellectual work!) and provide advice back to them about how to improve the claim, the evidence, or the reasoning. The individual student listens to the advising group’s recommendations and returns to his/her own group to create a revised version of the argument.