Overview

Lesson Procedure

65-75 minutes of class time across 5 phases.

1. Warm-Up5-10 minutes
2. Direct Instruction20 minutes
3. Guided Practice20-25 minutes
4. Independent Practice15 minutes
5. Closure5 minutes

1. Warm-Up5-10 minutes

   Warm-Up Prompt

   "Think of one piece you wrote for a history or science class under a tight deadline and one you had weeks for. Which would you rather hand to a stranger who knows the subject, and what, exactly, did the extra time buy you?"

   Take four answers and push each one: did the extra time go to writing more, or to rereading and changing what was already written? Read the standard aloud and underline "(time for reflection and revision)." Then hand out Text 1, the joint assignment sheet that Anika Vasquez, an invented senior, received from her Physics and U.S. History teachers. Students mark each piece with its time frame and reader and circle the one instruction on the sheet that is about reflection rather than writing.

   Teacher note: the case study concerns a real accident in which seven people died, including Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire social studies teacher chosen for NASA's Teacher in Space program. Introduce it with that in mind.

   1Physics and U.S. History, Grade 12: The Challenger Case Study

   2On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff, and all seven members of its crew died. Over the next four weeks you will write about why it happened, once as a physicist and once as a historian. The four pieces have different readers and different deadlines on purpose.

   3Piece A, U.S. History, in class, one sitting of 25 minutes (Week 1, Tuesday). Using the summary of the January 27 teleconference that we read on Monday, explain why the launch was approved. Reader: Mr. Hartigan.

   4Piece B, Physics, due at the start of the next class (Week 1, Thursday to Friday). Write up Thursday's O-ring demonstration: method, results, a graph and at least one limitation. Reader: a physicist who did not see the demonstration.

   5Piece C, one sitting of 30 minutes (Week 3, Thursday). Write an abstract of no more than 150 words for the Senior Symposium program. Readers: families, students and guests from the community. Write it from your Week 2 draft, before you revise. If you cannot state your argument in one sentence, your draft does not have one yet.

   6Piece D, the case-study paper, about 1,800 words (Weeks 1-4). Question: Engineers had evidence that cold weather endangered the booster seals, so why did that evidence not stop the launch? Full draft due Week 2, Friday. Week 3, Monday to Wednesday: no work on the paper. Revision memo due Week 4, Monday. Final paper due Week 4, Friday. Readers: both of us, one reading as a historian and one as a physicist.

   7Ms. Oyelowo and Mr. Hartigan

2. Direct Instruction20 minutes

   Work through the examples, then read the two short-time-frame pieces. Text 2 is Anika's 25-minute response for her history teacher, handed in as written. Text 3 is her physics lab write-up, written over two days, with Diagram 2 as its Figure 1. For each, students note the reader's discipline and one convention the piece follows: a history response makes a claim about causes and answers a counterargument; a lab write-up separates method, results and discussion and states what the data do not show. Ask students to mark any sentence in Text 2 they would check before it appeared in a longer paper, and hold their marks until Guided Practice.

   Then show the time log and Diagram 1, which divides each piece's writing time into stages. Ask what the shape of the bar for Piece D says about how the extended time was spent.

   • Reading a discipline task

     Engineering class: "By 8 a.m. tomorrow, send the team a 150-word summary of today's wind-tunnel test for the design review."

     Result: Time frame: a day or two (overnight). Purpose: report results so the team can decide. Readers: engineers who know the model, so the summary leads with the result and the one number that matters, then the conditions of the test; no background on how wind tunnels work.

   • When more time would not help the reader

     A lab group notices on Tuesday afternoon that a hot plate's switch is cracked. The science department asks for a written incident note before the next class uses the room on Wednesday morning.

     Result: A single sitting is right. The reader needs an accurate, short note today: what was found, where, what was done (unplugged and labeled) and who was told. An extended time frame would only delay a reader who has to act.

   • What rereading after a break finds

     Draft sentence for a history paper, reread after four days: "The Hindenburg exploded because hydrogen is dangerous."

     Result: Revised: "The Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, and the hydrogen that filled it let the fire spread in seconds; what first ignited the gas is still debated." The break let the writer see a vague cause, a missing date and place, and a certainty the evidence does not support.

   • A revision memo entry

     The same Hindenburg change, explained to a teacher.

     Result: Change: replaced "exploded because hydrogen is dangerous" with the date, the place and the role of hydrogen, and added that the source of the spark is debated. Reason: a history reader expects a precise event and a cause stated no more strongly than the sources allow. Stage: found when rereading after a four-day break.

   • Placing the break in a four-week window

     A paper is assigned on Day 1 and due on Day 20 of a four-week window. The draft will be complete on Day 10.

     Result: Days 11-13: no work on the paper. Day 14: reread the whole draft, write a one-sentence statement of the argument and a revision memo. Days 15, 16 and 18: revise, one memo item per session. Day 19: edit and read aloud. The memo comes before the revision, so the rereading decides what changes.

   1Plan (minutes 0-5): Claim: they chose the schedule over safety. Evidence: engineers said no launch below 53; Thiokol reversed after a break; "management hat." Counter: data unclear?

   2The launch was approved because NASA ignored its engineers. On the night of January 27, 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company that built the shuttle's solid rocket boosters, warned that the rubber O-rings sealing the booster joints might not work in the cold. They recommended against launching if the seals were colder than 53 °F, the coldest the seals had been on any earlier flight. NASA managers pushed back, and during a break in the call, Thiokol's managers talked without the engineers. One executive told the engineering vice president to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat. Thiokol then recommended the launch. The next morning the temperature was below freezing, and the seals failed.

   3Some people argue that the managers honestly believed the data were unclear, because the engineers could not show that cold always caused damage. But the managers still should have listened. The launch had already been postponed several times, and that pressure explains the decision.

   1Method. We squeezed small rubber O-rings from a hardware store, each 3.0 mm thick, to half their thickness in a C-clamp. Each ring stayed clamped for two minutes in a water bath at 0 °C (ice water), 20 °C (room temperature) or 40 °C (warm tap water). We released the clamp and measured the ring's thickness with calipers 10 seconds later. We tested three rings at each temperature.

   2Results. Colder rings recovered less of their thickness (Figure 1). Ten seconds after release, rings at 40 °C had returned to a mean of 96% of their original thickness, and rings at 20 °C to a mean of 91%. Rings at 0 °C returned to a mean of only 62%, and all three recovered less than any ring at the warmer temperatures.

   3Discussion. A seal that springs back slowly may leave a gap when the joint around it moves. Our results show that these rings lose much of their resilience between 20 °C and 0 °C. They do not show how the booster seals behaved: our rings were hardware-store rubber, not the material used in the boosters, and we did not test them against hot gas under pressure. The Challenger launch air temperature, about 2 °C (36 °F), was close to our coldest bath.

   Anika's time log for the four pieces, in minutes (invented)

   Piece	Plan	Draft	Reread and reflect	Revise and edit	Total
   A Timed response	5	18	2	0	25
   B Lab write-up	15	60	10	15	100
   C Abstract	3	15	6	6	30
   D Case-study paper	80	320	160	240	800

3. Guided Practice20-25 minutes

   Now follow Piece D. Pairs read, in order, the Draft 1 section (Text 4), the abstract Anika wrote in one sitting after three days away from the paper (Text 5), her revision memo (Text 6) and the revised section (Text 7). They build a chart with three columns: What changed, Memo item that explains it and Which reader it serves (the historian, the physicist or both). Every row must quote Text 4 and Text 7.

   Debrief with two questions. First, the assignment told Anika to write the abstract "before you revise." What did that order make possible? Second, find one change in Text 7 that the memo does not explain, and say which reader it serves. Return to the sentences students marked in Text 2 and ask which of them the memo also addresses.

   1Draft 1, from the section "The Night Before," written on Wednesday of Week 2:

   2The evidence against launching was strong, but the people who had it did not have the power to decide. Thiokol's engineers had seen damage to O-rings on earlier flights, including soot that had blown past a primary seal on the coldest earlier launch, in January 1985. In the teleconference they presented charts that tied the cold to that damage. Our physics demonstration showed the same thing: at 0 °C, rubber rings returned to only 62% of their thickness after ten seconds. The seals were supposed to close the joint in a fraction of a second, so at 36 °F there was no chance they would work. The managers overruled the engineers. The shuttle program was under pressure to launch on schedule, and managers at NASA and Thiokol put that pressure ahead of safety.

   1On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing its seven crew members. The night before, engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company that built the shuttle's solid rocket boosters, had warned that the rubber seals in the booster joints might fail in the cold. This paper asks why their warning did not stop the launch. It argues that the decision turned less on the engineers' evidence than on who was allowed to judge it: the engineers could only recommend, and the managers who decided asked them to prove that launching was unsafe rather than to show that it was safe. The paper draws on the findings of the presidential commission that investigated the accident and on a classroom demonstration of how cold rubber recovers after being squeezed.

   1To: Mr. Hartigan and Ms. Oyelowo
   From: Anika Vasquez
   Re: Revision memo for the case-study paper, Week 4, Monday

   21. What the abstract showed me. On Thursday of Week 3, after three days without looking at the paper, I sat down to write the symposium abstract. The one-sentence argument I ended up with, about who was allowed to judge the evidence, was not the argument of my draft. Draft 1 argues two things at once: that the physics made failure certain, and that the managers valued the schedule over safety. The abstract's argument is better than either, so I am rebuilding the paper around it.

   32. "The Night Before." I am cutting "there was no chance they would work." Rereading it cold, I saw that it claims more than my evidence shows. Our demonstration used hardware-store rings, as my own lab write-up says, so in the paper it will explain why the engineers were worried, not prove what happened inside the booster.

   43. The schedule. Draft 1 says the managers "put that pressure ahead of safety," but I have no source that shows what they were thinking. I will describe the pressure and let the commission's finding about the decision process carry the argument.

   54. Temperature. In my Week 1 timed response I wrote that it was below freezing at launch. The air temperature at launch was about 36 °F, after a night below freezing. I have checked every temperature in the paper.

   1Revised, from the section "Who Judged the Evidence," Week 4:

   2The engineers who understood the seals best could recommend, but they could not decide. On the evening of January 27, 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol presented charts showing that O-rings on earlier flights had been damaged, including on the coldest earlier launch, in January 1985, and they recommended against launching if the seals were colder than 53 °F. NASA managers challenged the recommendation, and the question in the discussion changed: instead of asking the engineers to show that the launch was safe, the managers asked them to prove that it was unsafe. The engineers' data were real but incomplete, because damage had also appeared on some warm flights, and incomplete data could not meet that test. During a break, Thiokol's managers conferred without the engineers and reversed the company's position. The presidential commission later found that the decision-making process itself was flawed. Classroom demonstrations like ours show why cold rubber worried the engineers, since it springs back slowly, but the decision turned less on the physics than on who had to prove what.

4. Independent Practice15 minutes

   Hand out Text 8, the plan, notes and timed paragraph of Julian, an invented classmate whose case study is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Each student writes (1) a diagnosis of Julian's plan: where it gives time for reflection and revision and where it does not, and (2) two sentences of his timed paragraph that his own notes contradict or do not support. The homework and the quiz also use Text 8.

   1Julian's plan for the case-study paper, Physics and U.S. History. Topic: the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

   2Week 1: read sources and take notes. Week 2: keep reading. Week 3, Monday to Thursday: write the whole draft. Week 3, Friday: write the abstract. Week 4, Monday: revise and edit the whole paper. Week 4, Tuesday: write the revision memo. Week 4, Friday: turn in.

   3Notes, Week 1: The bridge opened on July 1, 1940, across the Tacoma Narrows in Washington State. Its deck was unusually narrow and shallow for its length, and it rose and fell in moderate winds, which earned it the nickname "Galloping Gertie." On November 7, 1940, in a wind of about 40 miles per hour, the deck began to twist, then tore apart and fell into the water. No person died; a dog left in a car on the bridge was killed.

   4Timed paragraph, U.S. History, one sitting of 20 minutes, Week 1: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed only a few weeks after it opened, which shows how quickly engineers could be proven wrong. The designers wanted a light, graceful bridge that would cost less to build, and they got one. But the deck was so narrow and so shallow that the wind could move it, and drivers noticed the motion right away. In November 1940 a violent storm twisted the deck until it broke apart. The collapse changed how engineers design suspension bridges, and later bridges were tested with models in wind tunnels before they were built.

5. Closure5 minutes

   Exit ticket: (1) Write the one-sentence argument of a longer piece you are working on now in any history or science class. If you cannot, write the question the piece is trying to answer. (2) Name the day you will reread that piece after a break, and one thing you expect to look for.

Differentiation Strategies

Assessment Guidance

1. Question 1 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   In the assignment sheet (Text 1), which instruction gives Piece D its time for reflection rather than more time for drafting?

   A"Full draft due Week 2, Friday." B"Readers: both of us, one reading as a historian and one as a physicist." C"Week 3, Monday to Wednesday: no work on the paper." D"Question: Engineers had evidence that cold weather endangered the booster seals."

2. Question 2 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   Why does Text 1 tell students to write the abstract (Piece C) "from your Week 2 draft, before you revise"?

   AWriting a one-sentence argument from the draft tests whether the draft has one argument. BThe symposium program had to be printed before the final papers were due. CAn abstract written after revision would be too long for the program. DThe teachers wanted a short piece to grade during the three days with no work on the paper.

3. Question 3 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   In her 25-minute response (Text 2), which sentence states a fact that her revision memo (Text 6) later corrects?

   A"Thiokol then recommended the launch." B"The launch had already been postponed several times, and that pressure explains the decision." C"One executive told the engineering vice president to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat." D"The next morning the temperature was below freezing, and the seals failed."

4. Question 4 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   Anika's timed response (Text 2) opens with "The launch was approved because NASA ignored its engineers." What does the rest of her own response show about that claim?

   AIt is fully supported, because the engineers recommended against the launch. BIt is too simple: the managers heard the engineers and argued that their data were unclear. CIt is contradicted, because Thiokol's engineers recommended the launch. DIt is irrelevant, because the response is about the launch schedule, not about the engineers.

5. Question 5 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   In Text 3, by how many percentage points did the 0 °C mean fall short of the 20 °C mean?

   A5 percentage points B34 percentage points C29 percentage points D32 percentage points

6. Question 6 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   Using the time log in Direct Instruction, what share of Anika's time on Piece D went to rereading and reflecting plus revising and editing?

   A50% B30% C20% D40%

7. Question 7 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   Which sentence from Text 3 limits the claim for a physicist who did not see the demonstration?

   A"Colder rings recovered less of their thickness (Figure 1)." B"We tested three rings at each temperature." C"A seal that springs back slowly may leave a gap when the joint around it moves." D"They do not show how the booster seals behaved: our rings were hardware-store rubber."

8. Question 8 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   Text 4 (Draft 1) says the demonstration showed that "at 36 °F there was no chance they would work." Why does Anika cut this in her memo (Text 6)?

   AThe launch temperature given in the sentence, 36 °F, was wrong and had to be corrected. BIt claims more than her evidence shows, because hardware-store rings are not the booster seals. CA history paper written for Mr. Hartigan should not include any physics at all. DHer physics teacher asked her to remove all of the classroom demonstration data from the history paper.

9. Question 9 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   According to the memo (Text 6), what problem did writing the abstract reveal in Draft 1?

   ADraft 1 argued two things at once, and neither was the argument the abstract ended up stating. BDraft 1 ran far longer than the roughly 1,800 words that the assignment sheet allowed for Piece D. CDraft 1 had no evidence at all from the presidential commission's findings on the accident. DDraft 1 used the wrong launch date for Challenger.

10. Question 10 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    Where in Text 7 does Anika carry out memo item 3, about the schedule claim?

    AShe adds that the engineers presented charts on the evening of January 27. BShe keeps the claim that managers put the schedule ahead of safety but adds a source. CShe drops the claim about the managers' motives and cites the commission's finding about the decision process. DShe moves the schedule claim into her lab write-up.

11. Question 11 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    In Text 7, which sentence answers a physicist reader's likely objection to Draft 1 (Text 4)?

    A"The engineers who understood the seals best could recommend, but they could not decide." B"During a break, Thiokol's managers conferred without the engineers and reversed the company's position." C"NASA managers challenged the recommendation, and the question in the discussion changed." D"Classroom demonstrations like ours show why cold rubber worried the engineers, since it springs back slowly."

12. Question 12 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    Text 7 adds that damage "had also appeared on some warm flights." What does this addition do for the argument?

    AIt shows that cold weather had nothing at all to do with the damage to the booster seals. BIt explains why the engineers' incomplete data could not meet a demand for proof. CIt corrects the launch temperature given in the timed response. DIt shows that the managers ignored the engineers.

13. Question 13 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    What is the main weakness of Julian's plan (Text 8) for an extended piece?

    AAll revision is crowded into one day, and the memo comes after the revision instead of before it. BHe spends the first two full weeks only reading sources and taking notes before drafting. CHe writes the abstract before he revises. DHis paper topic, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, belongs to engineering class and not to history at all.

14. Question 14 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    Which sentence of Julian's timed paragraph (Text 8) is contradicted by his own notes?

    A"The designers wanted a light, graceful bridge that would cost less to build, and they got one." B"But the deck was so narrow and so shallow that the wind could move it." C"The collapse changed how engineers design suspension bridges." D"The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed only a few weeks after it opened."

15. Question 15 of 20 · Short Answer

    In one sitting of 10 minutes, rewrite the results of Text 3 as two sentences for the Senior Symposium program, whose readers are families, students and community guests.

    Show model answer

16. Question 16 of 20 · Short Answer

    Anika's timed response (Text 2) begins with the plan she wrote in its first five minutes. Name one thing the plan did well for a 25-minute history response and one weakness in it that her revision memo (Text 6) later exposes.

    Show model answer

17. Question 17 of 20 · Short Answer

    Write one revision-memo item, in the style of Text 6, for a change between Text 4 and Text 7 that Anika's memo does not explain.

    Show model answer

18. Question 18 of 20 · Short Answer

    Anika uses the class demonstration in both Text 3 and Text 7. Explain how she writes about it differently for the physics reader and for the history reader, quoting each text.

    Show model answer

19. Question 19 of 20 · Short Answer

    Using Julian's notes (Text 8), write in one sitting of 12 minutes a museum label of no more than 80 words about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge for visitors aged 12 and up.

    Show model answer

20. Question 20 of 20 · Short Answer

    Diagram 1 shows that drafting took 72% of Anika's time on Piece A but only 40% on Piece D. Using Text 6, explain what the rest of Piece D's time produced and why that is what the standard means by an extended time frame.

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These standards connect to WHST.11-12.10: prerequisites to review first, parallel standards at the same level, and next steps that build on it.

Standard text: Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy. © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.