This week’s Text is a lesson plan, one of many, that I worked up to use with Lawrence Treat’s series of kid’s books, Crime and Puzzlement. I came across these materials in two books last year, to wit George Hillocks Jr.’s otherwise unremarkable Teaching Argument Writing Grades 6-12: Supporting Claims with Relevant Evidence and Clear Reasoning (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2017), but also in two separate papers contained in Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison’s (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). All three of these texts extolled the Crime and Puzzlement books as exemplary instructional material for teaching students to assess, analyze, and synthesize evidence in support of an argument and contention.
I ordered the first volume, broke it up and scanned texts for several of the “cases,” and tried them out in my classroom. My freshman English students jumped right into these, and clearly enjoyed them. So I knew I had to build a unit to rationalize the use of this material in my classroom.
Now, about four months later, that unit is nearing completion, and I have 72 lessons in the unit. This week’s Text offers you the first lesson plan in the Crime and Puzzlement Unit Plan. To teach this lesson, you’ll need this worksheet on the case entitled Boudoir. To “solve” the “case,” you’ll need the answer key. Depending on how you begin your class period and its duration, you may want to start the lesson with a do-now exercise, which for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Marie Antoinette’s probably apocryphal statement “Let them eat cake.”
Unfortunately, the Crime and Puzzlement books (there are three in total) appear to remain in copyright, so I don’t think I can ethically or legally post many of these lesson plans. If you choose to contrive your own material based on these books, I can post the unit plan (it’s not quite ready as of this writing) for you; it will contain the standards met, a lengthy, discursive justification for using these methods and materials, and other supporting documentation.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Mark's Text Terminal 
I have enjoyed perusing your blog’s Crime and Puzzlement series and have a question. Overall, have you found the puzzles’ questions promote critical thinking as is, or have you augmented–using Hillcock’s approach of claim, evidence, rule? I guess it depends on the lesson and the student. The Slip or Trip activity questions, which I was unable to find on your blog, could be more rigorous.
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Hi Mary. I have barely used the Crime and Puzzlement Material: I began developing them just before the pandemic, and then didn’t have a chance to use them. Like most things on this blog, I posted these as I made them. I think once I start to integrate them with other materials, then yes, they might touch on critical thinking. But promote it? I’m not sure I’m ready to make that claim, but that’s because critical thinking is a tricky business. Thanks for your comment.
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An absolutely silly question, but have you had any issues with students pointing out the names? I took one look at “Boudoir” and knew my 9th graders would have a field day!
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No silly questions here, Rebecca. I have used these things very little–they were a project I assigned myself one summer after stumbling across recommendations in two different books (one of them George Hillocks Jr.’s “Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12: Supporting Claims with Relevant Evidence and Clear Reasoning”; this book, incidentally, left something to be desired) as to their utility in teaching students to observe, and judiciously use, evidence. But yes, Lawrence Treat really poured it on when he named his characters.
Thanks for your comment.
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Thanks for the reply! I saw your mention of the Hillcock text. I’d like to take some time and pour over it.
I successfully incorperated some of the Crime and Puzzlement problems into a couple of lesson plans for my 9th graders. I am covering inferencing, backing up evidence with reason, and communicaiton with these. I have been coupling them with an idiom cartoon to start then rounding it out with a (somewhat) related CommonLit reading (mixed bag of fiction/nonfiction). I think they have merit as bellringers and can be more challenging without the questions, so I think I will keep them in the rotation!
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Well, I’m really glad to hear they’re working for you.
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Post Scriptum: Also, I think these materials are definitely, because of their humor and visuals, a good way to teach students to infer. In fact, I would say that the questions that attend these pictures drive the need to draw inferences about them in a manner that is about as effective as these things get.
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