Seven Practices That Make Argumentation Work

Two teachers can hand out the same argument template on the same day and produce two different lessons. In one classroom, the template puts the grounds behind a claim in front of the class so the claim can be examined and revised. In the other, it becomes a worksheet to fill in and turn in for points. The tool did not change. The teaching did.

We have spent two decades building materials that give students something to argue about. Curricula, instructional models, graphic organizers, talk supports, technology-enhanced environments. That work matters, and the research is clear that well-designed resources can create conditions where argumentation takes hold. The research is just as clear that resources are not enough.

My new article in Education Sciences, which is free to read, takes up that gap. It names seven foundational teaching practices for scientific argumentation, defined as forms of work a teacher can learn, rehearse, and refine across grade levels, content areas, and curricula.

The seven practices, and how they fit together

The practices are not a sequence and not a checklist. They stand in three relations to one another.

Practice 1, creating and leveraging instances of uncertainty, supplies what everything else operates on. It is the work of designing tasks whose evidence supports more than one defensible account, then holding off on adjudicating long enough for those accounts to be developed and compared. A class with nothing genuinely at issue has no rival accounts to make public, to represent with a tool, to judge against criteria, or to disagree about.

Practice 2, framing joint enterprise, converts that opening into a problem the class owns. It is the work of negotiating with students what the class is trying to figure out and how the class will know when it has figured it out. An uncertainty the teacher engineered but students experience as the teacher’s puzzle produces compliance, not argumentation.

Inside that frame, four practices do the work.

Practice 3, making argumentation public, and Practice 4, introducing and mediating argumentation tools, put rival accounts where the class can examine them. One is about what goes on the record. The other is about keeping a tool tied to the disciplinary purpose it was built to serve.

Practice 5, establishing and refining shared criteria, and Practice 6, developing and maintaining norms for critique and disagreement, supply the two standards a class needs. Practice 5 governs what counts as adequate reasoning. Practice 6 governs how disagreement is conducted. Classrooms routinely have one without the other. A class can be scrupulously civil while having no shared account of what makes one argument stronger than another, and a class can hold sophisticated criteria that no one dares apply to a classmate’s work.

Practice 7, noticing and responding to student reasoning and needs, determines what happens next. It sits outside the ordering because it is the responsiveness the adaptive half of every other practice depends on. A teacher cannot take up an opening she has not registered as an opening.

The practices overlap in enactment, and that is fine. A single question that surfaces a disagreement between two groups can make thinking public, sustain an uncertainty, and respond to something just noticed. What justifies naming them separately is that they fail independently, and each failure calls for a different response.

Enactments that resemble a practice without doing its work

Because these practices are described generally enough that you will recognize them in what you already do, each is paired below with what the article calls a near-miss. These are documented patterns, not hypotheticals.

Practice	What instantiates it	What resembles it
1. Uncertainty	The task is built so the evidence supports more than one defensible account, and the teacher holds off on adjudicating	A question with a known answer, treated as uncertainty until the expected answer appears, then closed
2. Joint enterprise	The class works on a question it is trying to settle together and on how it will know when it is settled	The teacher announces an objective, says students will argue like scientists, and ends when the class reaches the right answer
3. Making it public	Claims, evidence, grounds, and the points where accounts diverge go where the class can see and revise them	Groups present finished arguments in turn to the teacher, with no way for one group’s thinking to bear on another’s
4. Tools	The teacher models the thinking a tool makes visible, then adapts or sets it aside when it stops helping	The tool is distributed, completed, and collected, and quality is judged by whether the sections are filled in
5. Shared criteria	The class builds a written account of what makes an argument acceptable, applies it to student arguments, and revises it	A rubric supplied at the start of the unit, used for grading, unchanged by anything students produce
6. Norms for critique	Disagreement is ordinary and directed at ideas, and the teacher intervenes on how a critique is made	Norms posted as rules for respectful talk, with the teacher redirecting whenever an exchange gets uncomfortable
7. Noticing and responding	The teacher recognizes an unanticipated idea or emerging disagreement as an opening and changes what comes next	The teacher circulates, acknowledges contributions warmly, and proceeds with the planned sequence

If one of those right-hand cells stings, that is the table working.

There is no single set of criteria to teach

Science does not reason in one way. Kind and Osborne, drawing on Crombie, describe six distinct styles of reasoning, each carrying its own criteria for what makes an argument acceptable.

Style of reasoning	What the criteria attend to
Mathematical deduction	Whether the representation captures the relevant quantities and whether the derivation follows validly
Experimental evaluation	Whether the comparison isolates the factor claimed and whether the difference exceeds ordinary variation
Hypothetical modeling	Whether the mechanism explains what is observed and generates expectations that can be checked
Categorization and classification	Whether the sorting features are applied consistently and whether the categories do explanatory work
Probabilistic reasoning	Whether the sample supports the inference and whether uncertainty is represented rather than suppressed
Historical and evolutionary reasoning	Whether the account is the best available explanation of the traces, and whether independent lines of evidence converge on it

A class that has developed criteria for one style has not developed criteria for another. That is why this practice recurs across a year instead of getting checked off in September. It is also why a style-agnostic template cannot, by itself, tell a student where a particular argument is most open to challenge.

Worth noticing in that table: what schools commonly present as the scientific method draws on only two of the six.

Things to Keep in Mind

•             Uncertainty that is merely “we do not know the answer yet” rarely generates argument. Students need a sense of what would count as making progress on it.

•             Pressure to resolve uncertainty usually comes from the students who already hold the expected answer. Yielding to it forecloses the work for everyone else.

•             A record that shows what students concluded without showing how they got there gives the class an account to accept, not an argument to weigh.

•             Watch whose phrasing ends up on the board. An idea recorded in the teacher’s words can circulate under a student’s name in a form its author would not recognize.

•             Direct, individual, oppositional disagreement is one convention among several. The question is not which register is correct but whether the class recognizes more than one as available.

•             Notice whose ideas get critiqued. A classroom where canonical claims are beyond challenge while student contributions face sustained scrutiny reproduces the authority structure argumentation could otherwise help examine.

Equity is inside the work, not alongside it

In a practice aimed at producing an account of a phenomenon, you can ask about equitable participation from outside the disciplinary question. You can ask whether participation in a modeling lesson was well distributed without that bearing on what makes a model adequate.

Argumentation does not allow that separation. Its object is an account and the standard by which accounts are judged, and a standard for adequate reasoning is simultaneously a determination of whose ways of justifying a claim count as justification. Raising the intellectual demand without widening the range of reasoning that can meet it does not produce rigor. Widening participation while leaving the standard unexamined does not produce equity.

That is also why equity is not an eighth practice in this set. A practice named separately is a practice that can be skipped.

What if the curriculum, pacing, and assessments are not yours to set?

Most teachers work under standards, adopted materials, pacing guides, and assessments that specify what students will be held to, and those specifications usually privilege one style of reasoning. You can know that an argument built from traces of the past is rigorous on its own terms and still have to prepare students for a test that does not.

The article describes the practices at their fullest realization, because that is what a specification is for. Each one also has a floor.

•             A teacher who cannot select her own phenomena can still decline to resolve the uncertainty a required phenomenon contains until competing accounts have been compared.

•             A teacher working from a scripted sequence can still record where two groups’ accounts diverge rather than only where they converge.

•             A teacher issued a mandated template can still ask what disciplinary grounds would make the evidence in it acceptable, which satisfies the form while restoring what it leaves out.

One response is available to nearly everyone, regardless of setting. You can tell students plainly that the standard being applied is a requirement of a particular institution rather than a fact about how good thinking works. Saying that the state assessment will want a claim, evidence, and reasoning in a particular form, and that this is one community’s way of settling what counts rather than the only defensible one, costs nothing in coverage and changes what students learn about that standard’s authority.

None of these are diminished enactments to be apologized for. They are the practices operating at the floor, and a teacher who does only these things is doing the work.

What this means if you teach with ADI

The seven practices are deliberately not tied to any one model. A teacher running a storyline unit, a model-based inquiry unit, or an ADI investigation can each engage in the work of making argumentation public, though the routines will differ.

That said, if you facilitate ADI lessons, you already have structures built for several of these. The argumentation session makes argumentation public. The tools students use to build an initial argument need mediating, not just distributing. The explicit and reflective discussion is where criteria get built and revised. Peer review and revision are where criteria get applied to real student work.

What the practices add is language for what you are doing inside those stages and a way to tell whether it is going well. That language travels to the days you are not running an investigation, which is most days.

Read the article

Sampson, V. (2026). Teaching practices for scientific argumentation in K–12 classrooms. Education Sciences, 16(9), 1506.

Published open access and free to read and share: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/16/9/1506