Argument-Centered Instruction in the AI Era

Generative AI has upended the traditional English classroom. Students can now outsource summary, analysis, and even essay drafting to tools that produce competent prose in seconds. What AI cannot do is stand is present and defend original claims about literature or informational readings, weigh contested evidence in active dialogue with teens, and defend interpretive positions under live intellectual scrutiny. This is the domain of argument. // This poster presentation makes the case that argument-centered instruction (ACI) offers English teachers a coherent response to the AI moment — not by resisting the technology but by re-anchoring instruction in the live evidence-based reasoning and critical peer dialogue. Drawing on classroom work in Chicago-area high schools and beyond, and on the debatification framework developed by Argument-Centered Education, the poster maps the essential moves of ACI — debatable questions that coheres a unit, teaching content and skills through argument, and deploying argumentation formats that make learning visible — onto the specific literacies students now need: distinguishing generated text from earned thought, thinking critically about evidence and sources, and building interpretive positions they can actually own and defend. // Attendees will see concrete artifacts from partner classrooms, including debatable questions and selected passage sets for canonical and diverse literary texts, methods to maintain the viability of argumentative writing, and protocols that put AI in a productive rather than corrosive relationship with student thinking. The 15-minute presentation will close with a discussion of how English departments can begin retooling assessment and instructional planning around argument as the discipline's most AI-resilient — and most intellectually generative — commitment.