Adding Friction. A Teacher Asks: “How Do I Teach Students to Develop Rebuttals?

Educators teach argument as claims, evidence, and reasoning. They tell me that they only introduce counterclaims and rebuttals to “advanced students.” However, in my teaching experience, even young students raise questions about claims made. Whether expressed tentatively or in a formal academic argument, it is natural to check ideas against what we know or believe. Testing arguments is fundamental to sense-making.

In an academic argument, “rebuttal” is the rhetorical label for objecting to a counterclaim. A writer who anticipates and addresses “what if’s” and “why not’s” earns the reader’s respect. The interchange of raising and responding to a counterclaim reinforces the writer’s authority.

The domains “Include” and “Curate” in the National School Library Standards Framework for Learners are replete with references to investigating, understanding, explaining, analyzing, and evaluating different perspectives and views (American Association of School Librarians, 2018, pp. 35, 37).

It all makes sense if you’re involved in inquiry. Ill-structured problems, complex issues, and controversial topics, by their nature, don’t have obvious or definitive answers. Surely students can be asked to include compelling counterclaims. And yet, the process of acknowledging merit in other perspectives can seem counterintuitive to students—and, perhaps, their teachers.

Why Rebuttals Don’t Make Sense

If we (or students) define a research task as finding “the” truth, ideas that contest that truth will be marginalized. When students are limiting their searches to facts that support shallow arguments, they will be threatened by well-reasoned counterarguments. They click their way to confirmation, not confrontation.

Further, when we instruct students to amass “lots of solutions” but don’t help them devise criteria against which solutions can be evaluated, they adopt a stance of false egalitarianism. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” they announce and, by that logic, everyone’s opinions are equally valid. As Isaac Asimov expresses it: “My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” (1980, p. 19).

And even more disturbing, if students believe they have the innate capacity to evaluate solutions without the benefit of input from experts, their analysis is limited by their own horizon. The result is reflexive decision-making based on personal preferences or intuition. In this scenario, counterclaims are simply noise to block out—or just another assignment hoop to jump through. Described as the “death of expertise” (Nichols, 2017, p. x), this societal trend is a byproduct of the online democratization of knowledge (112) and consumer-focused educational institutions in which students are undereducated and overly praised (77).

Your Assignment Can Frame the Invitation

The process of identifying and assessing objections and crafting counterarguments is exactly the kind of friction needed to stimulate deeper thinking. Early in the research process, students can still be instructed to gather a wide range of reasonable alternatives to their guiding question. At this point, their investment in any particular argument is low and counterarguments are seen as qualifications, not confrontations. In fact, contrary to what one might expect, the act of “believing” our opponents opens us to insights not available to us as reflexive doubters:

“Our best hope for finding invisible flaws in what we can’t see in our own thinking is to enter into different ideas or points of view—ideas that carry different assumptions. Only after we’ve managed to inhabit a different way of thinking will our currently invisible assumptions become visible to us” (Elbow, 2006).

Finding other viewpoints can be as simple as milking sources for rebuttal references or searching the Wikipedia talk page to identify controversies surrounding a topic. Asking “Who stands to suffer or lose?” can prompt brainstorming for other stakeholders while a search on the topic or idea together with the “problems,” “concerns,” or “critical of” in quotes leads to information in which alternatives are considered. However, without subsequent evaluation, this cacophony of diverse voices will remain just raw noise.

Scaffolding the Critics’ “Day in Court”

Evaluation criteria are developed through application. If students are not yet working on their own projects, they can practice color-coding notes as strong, weak, or irrelevant within the NoodleTools template research project “Teens and Sleep: Rebuttals.” It contains a driving question, working thesis and notecards that have been colored as examples, as well as blank notecards for practice . Once students have developed their own question or thesis, ask them to create notecard piles of claims and counterclaims, coloring strong and weak evidence in their own notes.

Students working in pairs can build stronger arguments and rebuttals by role-playing their most formidable critic, or triads can play the “Devil’s Advocate” game (Dorn, n.d.) in which pairs of students take turns asking questions that address the elements of reasoning as the third student records the questions and answers onto sticky notes. They can use clustered lists of questions to prompt consideration of language and logic, alternative scenarios and perspectives, or hypothetical situations or audiences, as in these examples:

Logic and clarity

• Could you elaborate on…?
• Could you illustrate what you mean by…?
• How does this follow from…?

Relevance and significance

• How does this relate to…?
• How does this help us with…?
• Is this the central…?

Breadth and depth

• What other interpretation…?
• What tactics might mitigate…?
• What are some of the complexities…?

After recording the responses on sticky-notes, the triads code them as claims, evidence, or reasons (C, E, or R), discussing those that they disagree about. This scribing and coding process slows down their interchange and deepens information processing.

Finally, each student takes the sticky-note responses related to their topic or project, numerically weighs the strength of each piece of evidence, and re-sorts them into claims and counterclaims.

• What kinds of evidence are highly valued in this field (e.g., experimental data, eyewitness reports, legal rulings, etc.)?
• Can I make a reasonable connection between a piece of evidence and a claim or counterclaim?
• Is the evidence at the heart of the claim or only a minor support?

The student can incorporate counterarguments in three ways: concede, refute, or dismiss.

• When one concedes a valid claim, a rebuttal shows fairness.
  If a claim is justifiable, one shows reasonableness by acknowledging and incorporating it.
• When one refutes a flawed claim, a rebuttal shows authority.
  If a claim has a significant weakness, one establishes mastery by analyzing and repudiating it.
• When one dismisses a tangential claim, a rebuttal shows respect for the audience.
  If a claim is irrelevant, one gains gratitude by not wasting the audience’s /reader’s time.

Rebuttal Is a Powerful Thinking Strategy

In their daily lives, students respect people who take their objections seriously. If they notice that you don’t, they conclude that you’re either too stupid to “get” them or too dishonest to concede that their ideas have merit. Draw on everyday examples to help students recognize that rebuttals are part of sense-making. Counterarguments don’t have to be counterintuitive.

References (APA Style)

American Association of School Librarians. (2018). National school library standards for learners, school librarians, and school libraries. Chicago: ALA Editions.

Asimov, I. (1980, January 21). A cult of ignorance. Newsweek, 19. Retrieved from https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf

Dorn, J. (n.d.). For argument's sake: Playing 'Devil's Advocate' with nonfiction texts. Retrieved December 9, 2017, from http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/argument-sake-playing-devil-31105.html

Elbow, P. (2006). The believing game and how to make conflicting opinions more fruitful. Retrieved from https://www.procon.org/sourcefiles/believinggame.pdf

Nichols, T. M. (2017). The death of expertise: The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.