In this exercise/activity, students work on their own and in groups to generate and evaluate questions and claims based on their observations or notes from an outside-of-class learning experience.

Objective

To turn students’ observations into claims and questions; to evaluate stronger and weaker questions/claims; to plan for an essay using students’ own observations as a key source.

Key Terms

claims; questions; experiential learning; place-based learning

I. Before Class: Solo Work

After you return from your outside-the-classroom experience and before you return to class, read through your notes to prepare for discussions in class.

  1. Write down or highlight points in the notes that document moments you found particularly surprising or striking.
  2. Formulate and write questions about what you observed.
  3. Move through your whole set of notes and write any patterns or trends you identify that you think may be significant.
  4. Write comments about how your observations may be related to other course materials and previous class discussions.

II. Group Activity: Generating and Evaluating Potential Questions from Observations

  1. After you get into groups, one of you should make a Google doc through his or her BU email account and then share that doc with your group members and your instructor.
  2. All group members should share the highlights from their notes that they prepared.
  3. In your group Google doc, work together to come up with five different questions that could lead to potential claims/arguments. Work together as a group to discuss, develop, and refine each of the five questions.
  4. As a group, read through your five finished questions from the in-class activity. Choose one that you think is the most likely to lead to a strong, arguable claim. Copy and paste that question to the class Google doc that your instructor will share with all the groups.
  5. As you read through the posted questions in the class Google doc, use your original group Google doc to respond to each of the other groups’ questions through the checklist below.
    • Are you fairly sure you understand the question or are there aspects that seem unclear? Is there phrasing that could be revised to make a clearer question?
    • Using the question as originally phrased (and not your revision if you created one) collaborate to develop a working claim based on course topics for a paper of the length that you have been assigned. Look at your working claim and figure out a counterargument you would need to acknowledge.
    • If you have extreme difficulty developing an arguable claim and cannot do so, write a few sentences explaining why coming up with a claim was difficult. Was it due to the structure of the question? What aspects of the structure? The content of the question? Some other reason?
  6. What strategies for evaluating and developing questions and claims do you notice from the process of looking at each question and creating (or not creating!) each claim?
  7. Move through the rest of the questions in the class Google doc and respond to the three questions above for each one.

III. After Class: Solo Work

Focusing back on your notes, find material that you highlighted in order to brainstorm a working question and claim for your upcoming place-based argument.

  1. Consider how some of the points you chose as particularly surprising or striking could suggest a trend on which you could focus a question and claim.
  2. Look through the initial questions you formulated and consider whether any of them or a combination of them could be shaped into a question that could lead to a claim.
  3. Look back at your notes about course materials and choose a specific quotation or central concept that you think you could respond to through a question and claim focused on details from your observations.
  4. After developing your working question and claim, evaluate it based on the criteria and strategies the class discovered through the in-class activity.