Students practiced their persuasive argument skills while learning about the mystery genre,through the completion of a web quest. Their task was to determine the nominee for the "World's Greatest Detective" from a list of ten well known fictional detectives. They worked in teams of three. Each team member was responsible for choosing one detective to research, and then report on to the other members of the team. They read short stories or novellas featuring their chosen detectives and used online resources to uncover the detectives' profiles, which assisted them in providing logical persuasive arguments for their detective being named as the World's Greatest Detective. To organize their arguments students used a graphic organizer -"Persuasion Map". Each team could only nominate one, so the students had to make a very persuasive oral argument to their teammates! Once each team selected a nominee, they generated a persuasive argument for the team's chosen detective using Google Slides. Students viewed each presentation and scaled them from 1 - 5 based on the strength of the argument presented. The presentation with the highest score had their detective named as "The World's Greatest Detective".
Students completed the "Team Information" sheet, "Detective Profile" sheet, storyboard for the slide presentation and "Presentation Scaling". In addition students will complete a self reflection sheet answering the questions: What did I learn? How can I use this knowledge in my life? Did our team work well together? What could I do to be a better member of a team in the future?