Practicum (1)–Mapping out a better way to do argument mapping presentations

Introduction to Critical Thinking
Argument Map Presentations

I am teaching a course as a lecturer this term, but there is one lecture that I particularly have some thoughts about. It is a special session involving two things. First, peer-review. One week before the lecture, I assigned the students two passages which contains two different arguments. Half of the class got one of the passages, and the other half got the other. They were supposed to re-write the argument in the standard format and then draw an argument map to represent the argument. They would then bring their argument reformulation and the argument map to the lecture, and do peer-review with one of their classmates.

The second thing that they did was presentations. On top of the passage, I also assigned two questions to two students ahead of time, asked them to each prepare an argument answering the question, rewrite their arguments in the standard format, and draw an argument map for it.

Sounds complicated? Yes, because it is. These are the problems that arose.

(1) Peer-review
Some students paired up with someone who had the same passage, some paired up with someone with a different passage. In general, they didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to do, or/and they didn’t seem very keen on this peer-review. And I can imagine that, those who paired up with someone with a different passage, they hardly had time to read the passage and think about the argument reformulation and the argument map.

(2) Presentations
Similarly, the audience didn’t have time to understand and think about the argument being presented. It takes time to understand an argument formulation in the standard format, and it takes even more time to understand an argument map. There were times when I also needed more time to think about the map, so I can imagine that the students were probably also struggling to digest everything in such a short period of time.

The presenters didn’t seem very well-prepared either. I allowed to draw the argument map on a piece of paper rather than on the computer. That was probably not a very good idea. One presenter did it, but he used a pencil to draw it and the handwriting was very unclear.

I should have asked them to write the argument reformulation on the white board and show the argument map on the screen. Putting these two things can make them easier to understand.

Looking Forward: Improvement
I will keep a peer-review session in the future, but I may do just one passage rather than two. I will probably also keep the presentations in the session, but I won’t ask the presenter to present something different. The presented passage will be the same as what other students are working on, or at least half of the class is working on if there are two passage.

I also think that they need more time to practice. There were only two lectures on argument mapping: One is as lecture introducing it, the other one is this peer-review and presentations session. Next time, I will probably prepare three lectures for this topic so that they will have more time to practice before doing peer-review and presentations.