Teaching the card method in one class session

You have one session. The research paper is due in five weeks. Most of the class will start it the way most students start everything — a blank document, an introduction, a thesis they made up before the reading — and you will read thirty papers that are summaries with a claim stapled to the front.

The card method changes that, and it can be taught in one meeting, because it is not a body of knowledge. It is a handful of physical moves with cards, and once students have made the moves with their hands they do not forget them. This guide is a session plan: what to bring, what to say, what to have them do, minute by minute, on paper. Nothing in it requires software.

What to bring

• Index cards, twenty per student. Three-by-five, the cheap ones. Two colors if you can manage it (one for what they found, one for what they think); if not, one color and a pen.
• A short reading everyone has done — two or three pages, an argument with evidence in it. An op-ed works. A section of a primary source works. It has to be something with claims that can be disagreed with and facts that can be cited.
• The printable, one sheet per student, if you want the card faces labeled. Optional; blank cards teach the same thing.
• A table per group of three or four, or floor space. The method needs a surface the cards can be laid out on and seen at once.

The plan, timed for fifty minutes

Minute 0–5: the problem

Ask how they wrote their last research paper. Someone will describe the blank document and the introduction. Ask what happened to the order of the paper after that — did it change? It never does, because in a document changing the order is agony, so the order the paper has at midnight on the first draft is the order it keeps.

Say the one sentence the session exists to teach: a research paper is not written from the top down; it is assembled from pieces, and the order of the pieces is most of the work. Cards are how you get pieces you can move.

Minute 5–15: one card per thing you found

Everyone reads the short piece again with the cards beside them. Instruction: every time you meet something you might use, it gets a card — a quotation, exactly, with the page; or a fact, in your words, with the page. One line of title across the top of each card. If the title needs an "and," it is two cards.

Walk the room. The two mistakes you will see in every group: a card with a paragraph of notes on it (that is a notebook page; cut it), and a card with no page number (that is a citation error in five weeks; add it). Say both out loud to the room when you see them, because everyone is making them.

Expect six to ten cards per student from a three-page reading. Fewer means they are summarizing; more means they are transcribing.

Minute 15–22: one card per thing you think

Now the other color. Instruction: write down what you think is true about this, having read it. Each one on its own card, as a full sentence with a verb. Not a topic — the author's use of statistics — but a claim — the author's statistics come from one survey and the piece does not say so.

Then: write down the strongest thing someone who disagreed with you would say. On its own card. As strongly as they would say it.

This is the step students resist, because it feels presumptuous to have opinions this early. Say that the claims will change, and that changing them is what the cards are for. A claim on a card costs nothing to abandon. A claim in a draft costs a paragraph.

Minute 22–35: lay them out

Each group clears its table. Instruction: put the claim cards in a row. Under each claim, put the evidence cards that support it. Put each counterpoint beside the claim it attacks.

Then walk the room and ask each group the three questions that the layout answers, pointing at their table:

1. Which claim has nothing under it? There is always one. It is an opinion, and the paper is not about opinions. Cut it or find evidence.
2. Which evidence card sits under no claim? Set it aside. Research finds more than a paper uses.
3. Which counterpoint has no answer beside it? Write the answer now — it is usually another claim card nobody has written yet.

Students have just done, on a table in daylight, the thing they usually do in their heads at midnight, badly. Say so.

Minute 35–42: the thesis, last

Ask each group: what do your claims have in common? What one sentence, if true, makes all of them matter? Write it on a card and put it at the top.

Then the point that reorganizes how they think about the assignment: the thesis came last. They did not start with it and hunt for support. It came out of the claims, and the claims came out of the reading. A thesis written first is a guess; written last, it is a conclusion. Some group will have found that their claims add up to two different theses, and that is worth thirty seconds in front of the room, because it is the moment they see that the cards are showing them something.

Minute 42–48: try a different order

Instruction: photograph the table with a phone. Then rearrange the row — counterpoint first; strongest claim last; the surprising fact before the background. Read the claim titles aloud in the new order. Is it better?

Most groups will find one order clearly better than the one they started with, and it will not be the one they started with. This is the move that makes the method more than note-taking: the order is something you can try, and the photograph means trying costs nothing.

Minute 48–50: what to take away

Three sentences:

• One thing per card, one line of title. If it needs an and, it is two cards.
• Claims in a row, evidence under each, counterpoints beside. The gaps are visible.
• The thesis is written last. The order is tried more than once.

Hand out the printable, or tell them where to buy cards. Assign the reading for next week with cards: ten cards per source, brought to class.

For a seventy-five-minute session

Add two things. At minute 50, have each group write one bridge sentence between each pair of claims in their chosen order — this matters because the next thing is — and read the bridges aloud in sequence. It is a spoken outline of a paper that does not exist yet, and it sounds like one. Then, at minute 65, have each student pick up their own cards and keep them: the stack is the beginning of the paper, and the last thing to say is that they should date the cards from now on, because a dated stack is a record of the work that a finished paper cannot give them (instructor guide 2 is about why that matters to you).

What to expect afterwards

The first papers written from cards are usually shorter than the ones written from blank documents, and better organized, and their introductions are written last and say what the paper does. Some students will keep using cards for everything; some will use them once. Both are fine.

What you will not get is the paper that is a summary with a claim stapled on, because the method does not allow a claim with nothing under it to survive to the draft.

If the class uses software

Some students will ask whether there is software for this. There is — software that works from cards, keeps several orders of the same cards at once, and checks the structure (a claim with nothing under it, a counterpoint nobody answered) the way the table did. It changes nothing about the session. Teach the session on paper regardless; the moves are the method, and a student who has made them with their hands will recognize them on a screen. If your course uses such software, the one-page syllabus handout and the ten-minute assignment setup are in the instructor materials, and they say what the software can and cannot show you (nothing about anyone's work, on purpose — guide 2).