Welcome! This course will give you simple, practical tools to help you teach logical reasoning skills, especially the skills to help your students analyze arguments with precision and care. We will introduce you to argument mapping – a powerful, research-backed method that you and your students can use to construct, analyze, and evaluate arguments.

How this Course is Structured
This course is designed with application in mind. Starting in lesson 0, we will ask you to put on your “student hat” and work through interactive textbook material including videos, practice exercises, and summative assessments (called “mastery checks”) that were built for a wide range of middle, high school, and college students. The experience working through this student-facing material will help you feel what it’s like to learn argument mapping as your students would. Along the way, you’ll be asked to step back into “teacher mode” and reflect on how argument mapping might support your teaching practice, and complete a capstone assignment called The Disagreement Project.

About your Course Facilitators
A bit of background on your course facilitators: ThinkerAnalytix is an education non-profit organization partnered with Harvard’s Department of Philosophy. Our mission is to teach logical reasoning skills so that students can engage controversial issues with empathy and evidence. And those are exactly the skills we will practice in this course! If you ever have any questions, you can reach out to us directly through the chat function in the lower right-hand corner of this page.

Let’s get started! Take a look at the course syllabus, which gives you an overview of the course goals and introduces you to your course facilitators, and the course credit FAQ.

When you’re ready, click the “Next” button below to complete your first course reflection before putting on your “student hat.”