This is being posted to an NPR website as an example of good teaching, but my concern here is that this approach is not grounded in a proper understanding of critical thinking (which is why I recently wrote Critical Thinking for Educators). The non-standard approach is something called 'claim-evidence-reason' where the reason 'explains why' the evidence supports the claim. This misunderstanding of argument form makes it impossible for students to learn how arguments work. Moreover, the examples used are often poor, in some cases literally begging the question, and grammatically incoherent throughout. That these are being used for English language learning (ELL) only compounds the problem, because students are led to misunderstand the roles of different words in day-to-day use. If you're going to teach language and logic, you need to be somewhat proficient in it yourself.
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