This unit is a palate cleanser — but the kind that burns a little. After the sustained literary immersion of Units 5 and 6, students shift modes entirely, moving from interpretation to argumentation. The goal here is not to write a beautiful essay about what a text means. The goal is to think more carefully, reason more honestly, and recognize — with increasing speed and precision — when an argument is trying to fool you. Including your own.
Students begin by learning the anatomy of bad reasoning from the inside out. Through the Fallacy This! assignment, they engineer intentionally flawed arguments, loading them with logical fallacies, weak evidence, and faulty reasoning — and then watch a classmate take the whole thing apart. The experience of being on both sides of that exchange is the point. It is very hard to build a convincing bad argument. It is also very hard to dismantle a convincing bad argument. Students will discover this firsthand.
From there, they move into FART — the Factual Authority for Repurposing Trust — where the stakes are higher and the scaffolding more demanding. Students construct a credible, well-researched argument on an assigned topic, then submit it to three sequential rounds of peer critique: fallacy and logic identification, Socratic questioning, and formal written rebuttal. The Socratic questioning round is not casual discussion. It is a disciplined, methodical hunt for the warrants behind claims — the unstated assumptions that hold an argument together. Once students understand what a warrant is, they begin to see them everywhere, and they begin to see how much of what passes for argument is really just a warrant no one has bothered to examine.
The Toulmin Model is introduced here as the structural spine of everything that follows. Students learn to distinguish ground/observation from claim, and to recognize that the real leverage point in any argument — the place where Socratic questioning does its most powerful work — is the warrant. This framework will be applied under pressure in Unit 8. In Unit 7, students build it carefully, at their own pace, through digital discussion boards on Google Classroom that allow for asynchronous engagement, revision, and peer response.
The unit does not ask students to win arguments. It asks them to understand how arguments work — and fail — at the level of their underlying logic.
Identify, name, and explain common logical fallacies in written and spoken arguments, including in real-world media and disinformation contexts.
Distinguish between deductive and inductive reasoning structures and evaluate the validity and soundness of each.
Apply the Toulmin Model to construct and analyze arguments, with particular attention to the relationship between grounds, claims, and warrants.
Use the Paul & Elder Socratic questioning framework to probe the assumptions and warrants beneath a claim — not just its surface logic.
Construct a deliberately flawed argument with enough craft and credibility to be convincing, then dismantle a peer's with precision.
Build a credible, research-supported argument on an assigned topic that can withstand three rounds of structured peer critique.
Engage in sustained, asynchronous analytical discussion through Google Classroom, developing the habit of thinking in writing, in dialogue, and in revision.
Examine personal cognitive biases and reasoning tendencies through structured self-assessment, developing metacognitive awareness of how they think — not just how others argue badly.
Fallacy This! Students write an intentionally flawed argument, engineered with logical fallacies, weak reasoning, and faulty evidence. A classmate then "assassinates" the argument by identifying and explaining the logical errors embedded within it. This introductory assignment builds familiarity with fallacy types, deductive and inductive reasoning structures, and the anatomy of argument from the ground up.
FART (Factual Authority for Repurposing Trust): Inspired by the mechanics of troll farms and influence operations, students construct a well-researched, credible-seeming argument on an assigned topic. The argument is then subjected to three rounds of peer assassination: fallacy and logic identification, Socratic questioning (grounded in the Paul & Elder framework), and a formal written rebuttal. This project challenges students to build arguments that hold up under serious scrutiny, and to develop the critical tools to dismantle those that don't.
Intro to Toulmin Argument Model by Purdue OWL (Link)
Warrants Explained by David Hitchcock from McMaster University (Link)
The Craft of Research Chapters 5-9 (Textbook in Class)
Special Emphasis on Chapter 8: "Warrants" (Pages 137-153)
Ethos, Logos, and Pathos Applied to Toulmin Warrants (Link)
Types of Warrants Cheat Sheet (Link)
"Why Assumptions Matter" from UC Davis Open Textbook Project (Link)
Toulmin Warrants Pop Quiz (Link)
"Love is a Fallacy" by Max Shulman (Link)
List of Key Logical Fallacies; Ones I Focus On (Link)
Fallacy This! A Task (Link)
A Cognitive Audit (Link) (Fancy Version)
How to get on a Watchlist (S2, E12): How to run a troll farm (Link)
Disinformation Warfare, Part 1 and 2 (Link for 1, Link for 2)
Tactics of Disinformation from the CIA (Link)
I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and... (Link)
The X factor: How Trump ally Elon Musk is using social media to prime voter mistrust ahead of 2024 election (Link)
FART Explained for Teachers, Admin, and Parents (Link)
Onboarding (Link)
FART Toolkit (Link)
Serious Topics List (Link)
Assassination 1: Fallacies and Logic (Link)
Logical Fallacy List (Tretyak's Top 20) (Link)
Assassination 2: Socratic Question (Link)
Excerpt from The Art of Socratic Questioning by Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Elder (Link)
Question Toolkit (Link)
Final Assassination: Rebuttal (Link)
You Are Not So Smart (Link)
Skeptoid (Link)
Wireless Philosophy: Introduction to Logic (Link)
Your Logical Fallacy Is... (link)
"The Inclusion Problem in Critical Thinking: Case of Indian Philosophy" — Anand Jayprakash Vaidya (Link)
"Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet" — Buster Benson (Medium/Better Humans) (Link)
"How to recognize and tame your cognitive distortions" by Peter Grinspoon (Link)
"Democracy in Troubled Times: Democracy in Ancient Athens" by Saint Leo University (Link)