Parent Teacher Magazine Charlotte-Mecklenburg School March/April 2019 | Page 7

‘Noisy, happy classrooms’
ThinkCERCA engages students to develop critical thinking
The six-word question before Sarah
Franklin’s ninth-grade English class at West
Mecklenburg High is deceptively brief:
Should robots care for the elderly? As the
timer on the classroom display screen ticks
down, students huddle together, looking
at their laptops. The room buzzes with
clustered conversations.
The timer bell clangs and Franklin,
who has been moving around the room
to monitor student progress, steps to the
front.
“Make sure you’re not looking at
your phone right now because you need
to pay attention,” she tells her students.
“Tomorrow, we’ll have a two-team debate.”
One student says, “That sounds cool.”
It is – and it’s just one step in the
carefully constructed learning program
called ThinkCERCA that Franklin is using
to engage her ninth-graders. The program
launched in all CMS high schools this year
after a pilot at a few schools in 2017-2018.
CERCA is an acronym of keywords summarizing the steps students follow:
Claim, Evidence, Reasoning, Counterarguments, Audience.
At its core, ThinkCERCA teaches students how to think critically – one of
the most important 21st-century capabilities needed in the global workplace
and also one of the hardest to teach because it requires multiple skills
working almost simultaneously.
ThinkCERCA breaks down those skills into clear, choreographed steps,
making them accessible to students regardless of background or proficiency.
Students are given a rigorous text that is grade level-appropriate to read.
Then they make a claim based on what they have read. Next, they gather
evidence from the text to support that claim and explain their reasoning.
Then they work out the counterarguments to the claim, and how to civilly
address them while using language appropriate for an audience. Through
these steps, the program uses argumentative writing to nurture critical
thinking.
“ThinkCERCA is breaking it down to build up – it breaks writing down into
the skills so they can write something they’re proud of,” said Ann Hopkins,
who teaches ninth-grade English at Providence High and was part of the pilot
program last year. “I like the scaffolding, the process of pulling the ideas out
of kids.”
As the starting text for her students this year, Hopkins is using “The
Flowers” by Alice Walker, a coming-of-age story. She will have her students
pair it with a poem and a nonfiction story about lynching victim Emmett Till.
She says the program is more engaging than “writing essays all the time”
and she has benefited from it as well as the students. “ThinkCERCA has a
bank of best practices – I’ve been teaching for 35 years and I got a lot of
great ideas from it!”
Her enthusiasm is shared by Franklin, who says one of her favorite parts
is the program’s flexibility that allows the teacher to select an area of focus
based on the student’s work so far. “It’s one thing,” said Franklin. “They don’t
get overwhelmed.”
She also likes the feature that allows her to insert comments into each
student’s work as they move through the CERCA steps. “They need structure,
not just a number,” Franklin said. The feedback is specific and immediate,
showing students how to improve their writing and thinking.
Like Hopkins, Franklin was one of the teachers in the pilot program last
year.
“My favorite part is that their writing appears next to the grading screen,”
she said, displaying on her laptop a split screen with student work on the
left and a grading rubric on the right. “They give you lots of ways to use the
platform. There’s lots of support.”
Hopkins likes the variety the program offers in ways to pull students into
the lesson.
“It’s a conduit for argumentative writing. It offers layers of stuff. There
are ways to engage them,” she said. “I put them in small groups and hold
them accountable for their contributions to the discussion.”
ThinkCERCA comes by its ability to stir teachers’ passion honestly –
its roots lie in founder Eileen Murphy’s own passion and commitment to
empower all students. She was the founding chair of the English department
at Walter Payton College Prep, the top-ranked high school in Illinois. After 15
years of teaching, she moved into administration, serving as the director of
curriculum and instruction for more than 100 top-performing schools in the
Chicago Public Schools district.
In that role, Murphy began to see how powerful a tool technology could
be if it were joined to a strong foundation of instruction in critical-thinking
skills. After developing the ThinkCERCA framework, she tested it in Chicago
schools using paper forms. The advanced digital platform to monitor student
progress was added in 2013 after ThinkCERCA won a spot in Impact Engine’s
accelerator program for social-impact startups. Today, the Chicago-based
company has clients in all 50 states and around the world.
“It’s really a matter of equity – we can’t let education become a resource
that is only available to those with income and other advantages,” Murphy
said. “With ThinkCERCA, all students can gain the skills that will make the
difference in today’s workplace – the ability to think critically, take a position
on an issue and defend it. That’s good for them and good for all of us – it’s
basic to democracy.”
Independent research has shown impressive results for the program.
The Chicago nonprofit LEAP Innovations studied ThinkCERCA along with five
other programs in 15 Chicago schools that were a mix of public, charter and
Catholic schools. Researchers noted that ThinkCERCA was “fairly unique as
an edtech tool” because of its focus on critical-thinking skills. “Our results
showed a statistically significant, very large impact of a 6.29 point gain …
equivalent to almost an extra year’s worth of growth,” the study found.
Atlantic Research Partners studied ThinkCERCA in the Chicago Public
Schools as a whole (Chicago, the third-largest public school district in the
country, is one of the largest users of ThinkCERCA). Atlantic found that
students in grade levels with significant use of ThinkCERCA outperformed
their peers nationally on standard testing at all elementary and middle
schools (high schools were not studied), with “a strong linkage between high
program usage in classrooms and improvement in [test] growth.” Similarly,
a Gates Foundation-funded study in March 2016 by SRI Education found that
use of ThinkCERCA was linked to increases in writing scores for fifth-graders
in California and Georgia.
These results were part of the reason that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
decided to use ThinkCERCA.
“We know that we have to move all students ahead while moving low-
performing students faster than high-performing ones – that’s the only way
to close the achievement gap,” said Dr. Chris Triolo, executive director of
teaching and learning. “The feedback from our teachers has been positive
and we are excited about using this program to strengthen our students’
critical-thinking skills.”
At West Meck, it’s too early to measure yet if ThinkCERCA will move
Franklin’s ninth-graders ahead. But the energetic and enthusiastic
participation observed in her classroom earlier this year left little doubt
that at least one goal of ThinkCERCA has been achieved: The program’s
exhortation to teachers to “Create noisy, happy classrooms.”
Parent Teacher Magazine •March/April 2019 • 5