Pop Up Claims - Developing Ideas Worth Writing About

This post features Bayan's experiment with an activity cribbed from Dave Stuart, Jr.’s Let’s Make Teaching Better called “pop up debates”. Stuart’s process calls for single arguable point, but we focused instead on coming up with claims and verbally reporting those opinions with the rest of the class. We wanted to build confidence to come up with and publicly share opinions worth knowing.

This semester, we are studying Kevin Nadal’s book Filipino American Psychology. Together, we read the first two chapters. Chapter One provides a super brief sketch of Filipinas and Filipinos in the United States, demographics, how we got to the US, and the psychological impact of our history and place in US society. The second chapter focuses on Filipino values. As very few Bayan students had any formal coursework on Filipina/o American issues, we needed shared pool of knowledge these chapters offered.

After working through those chapters, we briefly examined the themes of the other chapters. Topics ranged from Racial and Ethnic Identity Development to Gender/Sexuality/Sexual Orientation, from the Model Minority Myth to Colonial Mentality. Subsequently everyone selected two to read beyond the ones we had studied together. We read these new chapters with the aim of teaching what we discovered with each other.


When students returned to class, we did a few rounds of reciprocal teaching, students sharing their notes, reflections, thoughts and feelings about the chapters they read. We used the “wagon wheel” protocol (sometimes called "inside/outside circles") , doing several rounds where students shared what they took away from the chapters and why they thought the chapters were important. 

For the second half of the period, we did a modified version of a “pop up debate”. Students composed on index cards the claims that derived from their readings, an opinion they believe would be worth exploring. We used the stems outlined below to get started on a claim, reasoning, and a evidence, i.e., a quote from Nadal’s text. 

After folks composed two claims - some came up three - we began the verbal portion of the process. When they felt moved, students “popped up” and read one of their cards to the class. It took a tense moment or two before anyone felt moved to pop up, but as more and more Bayan scholar spoke, that tension dissipated.

Students addressed a range of topics worthy of investigation. Several Bayani noted mental health, including suicide, as a crucial issues facing Filipino Americans. Others identified sex, gender, and/or sexual orientation as topics to explore. Many claims combined ideas from several chapters.

Every single student was able to take in material and compose a claim based on that material, and to use Nadal’s text to support that claim; they took in information, came up with opinions, and based those opinions on their reading. And though students hemmed and hawed at sharing, once a few courageous students popped up, just under half the class shared one of their claims.  

Their next step was to elaborate upon their claims at home. This meant at least one more quote from Nadal's book to support each claim and to provide more thoughtful reasoning for their claims than could be captured on an index card (Claim/Evidence/Reasoning). In effect, they were to come up with mini-essays, super short compositions that test out their initial ideas. 

We posted and shared these “pop up” claims on Padlet so we could see the variety of claims and to be inspired (or fed!) by each other’s mini-essays. Eventually, students will have to select a single thesis to develop a more elaborate, fleshed out essay. You can see the Padlet below for their compact arguments. The entries are drafts - in the vein of author Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" - and they are all strong and admirable enough to be developed into essays worth reading. We share our preliminary thoughts with you now, to practice putting our opinions out in public and to share with Bayan friends and allies how we use composition skills to deepen and broaden our knowledge about Filipina/o American issues. We welcome your comments!