Teaching Debate: Portfolios for the Debate Classroom

Debating multiple topics from multiple perspectives is an integral part of the Middle School Public Debate Program. It’s part of how we try to build interdisciplinary and critical thinking skills in students. But this doesn’t just happen on its own; students need to engage in reflection and analysis while preparing to debate, during debates, and after debates. And teachers need to find a way to help students meaningfully organize their work – helping students to develop methods for approaching issues as well as helping to stem the inevitable tide of wrinkled and disorganized papers that students too often pull from their backpacks (I saw this recently from a college student, and it wasn’t pretty).

Portfolio organization for the debate classroom or club is a useful idea for teachers. Many teachers I work with already mandate that students keep their notes in a three-ring binder. This is great for organizing at tournaments, and it’s also great for when students go to high school – if students debate 20-30 topics a year for just two years, when they go to high school they’ll have a binder with articles and notes on 40-60 issues. Very useful!

I tried this portfolio concept myself this summer with a small group of students, and found that it worked well to organize their thinking and note-taking. The idea is that portfolios (binders, really- let’s not kid ourselves) are a convenient way for students to organize all their debate preparation and reflection- articles they read, notes they take, flowsheets they generate in debates, critiques of peer performance they produce, and so forth. Each topic can have its own tab, and an organizing device for each tab like a “Topic Resource Checklist.”

I’ve uploaded a version of this here, and included it in the “Resources” section of our website as a Word document so that teachers can download it and modify it as necessary. Basically, what’s included in this document are the following handouts/organizers:

The Topic Resource Checklist page, which is a kind of index page for each tab of the binder. It’s got a place for students and teachers to sign when completed.
An Issue Analysis form for students to do a “pre-think” on a topic.
A Research Log, for students to report on research they’ve done.
A Prop and Opp T-Chart, for initial organization of ideas.
A Reflection Paper assignment (there is a rubric for this somewhere- when I find it, I’ll post it as well).

Other stuff is not included in this document, like flowsheet templates (available in the Resources section of our website) and ballots (ditto). Hopefully these forms and the general “organizing” principle will be useful to teachers.