We've all had that experience, the one where we start arguing with someone and find that we disagree about pretty much everything. When two people have radically different background beliefs (or worldviews), they often have difficulty finding any sort of common ground. In this lesson, students will learn to distinguish between the two different types of background beliefs: beliefs about matters of fact and beliefs about values. They will then go on to consider their most deeply held background beliefs, those that constitute their worldview. Students will work to go beyond specific arguments to consider the worldviews that might underlie different types of arguments.

This is a pretty fun lesson that has two main parts. First students warm up by reflecting on the reasons data visualizations are used to communicate about data. This leads to the main activity in which students look at some collections of (mostly bad) data visualizations, rate them, explain why a good one is effective, and also suggest a fix for a bad one.

In the second part of class students compare their experiences and create a class list of common faults and best practices for creating data visualizations. Finally, students review and read the first few pages of **Data Visualization 101: How to design charts and graphs** to see some basic principles of good data visualizations and see how they compare with the list the class came up with.

This is Day Four of a Five­ Day unit teaching students strong research skills for a "white paper" style research paper (can be modified for any pro­con research assignment). For the purpose of this assignment, the white paper is an argumentative piece which introduces a problem and argues a solution to that problem.In this team­ taught lesson, students will learn how to incorporate sources in their paper. Focus will be on treating previous discussion of their topic as a "conversation" they are taking part in.