Digital text sets for argumentative writing

I really like what the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project is doing around argumentative writing, particularly the work collecting both digital and print resources at different grade levels to help students research and take a stance on a high interest topic such as whether competitive sports in schools are beneficial or harmful.

Two of my favorites are videos that Mary Ehrenworth highlighted at the October Saturday Reunion  giving two sides of the issue of chocolate milk being served in schools, the first showing truckloads of sugar being dumped on a school bus as a vivid illustration of the way serving chocolate milk in schools is an unhealthy decision and the second featuring a smiling representative of the Midwest Dairy Council explaining all the benefits of drinking chocolate milk. (I just saw Forks Over Knives. Can you tell which side I'm on?)

Teachers are always asking for resources: for persuasive writing topics, it's important that they be recent. TC is constantly collecting and organizing these resources as well as quality samples of student work that can be used as mentor texts. I recently showed this link to teachers in an after school class around close reading and they were really enthusiastic: one of them recommended the set in the 2012-13 collection on cyberbullying.

Some teachers are worried that students will come home telling parents that a teacher has taught them a controversial topic with a bias towards one side. These text sets allow students to weigh both sides of a topic and come to their own conclusion.

Readwritethink lesson on persuasive writing

In our booktalk podcasting assignment, I've been working with teachers and students on how to "sell" a book that they would recommend to other students. During the college football season, the TV was on at home more than I would like. One thing our family ended up doing was talking about funny ads. Now that we can play them on the Droid, we can look up and share a funny commercial with each other whenever we feel like it. We all laughed at the Piggy Geico commercial, and then I had to revisit one of my favorites, the Old Spice commercials, which Solana thought were hilarious.

Our enjoyment of the commercials made me think there must be a way to bring in the creativity and humour of advertising to help students write better leads for their booktalks. One of the teachers I'm working with thought we could introduce the different types of advertising (bandwagon, etc.) as a springboard for ideas. Although the main goal is improving student writing, looking at persuasive techniques in advertising is also an important lesson in critical media literacy.

I haven't found any great lists of advertising techniques for use in the classroom online, although this site's list of examples does use visual cues. My favorite resource so far is a lesson on persuasive writing from readwritethink that uses a more sophisticated description of persuasive rhetoric that is used in advertising or any persuasive argument. It might be adaptable for a younger age group and for the booktalk assignment.