Education is, let's face it, a pretty buzz-word heavy place. When I started working in this field, as the program director for a non-profit in Seattle, I felt like a total outsider at meetings where it was just understood that we would all know what the various acronyms stood for. Not knowing an IEP from an LEP from a GED (okay, I knew what that last one meant) made me seem, I think, vaguely incompetent in the eyes of the district personnel I was forever meeting with and working with. That's the nature of the shibboleth, though. You've got to have something, preferably arcane, to distinguish your in-group from everyone else.
But jargon's not all bad. After all, you can just make up your own.
So, today's class is about distributed learning. You may have heard this term used in different contexts. For example, many people use it to refer to what used to be called distance learning (you can read about this use of the term here, here, and here - used by the Army, no less, the undisputed world champion of jargon). But I think there may be a more interesting understanding of the terms that we can divine from, of all places, the world of computing.
I'm sure someone will correct me about this, but as I understand it, distributed computing is a kind of parallel computing, where different parts of a program run at the same time on different bits of the same (or different) computers, breaking up a larger problem into smaller bits to solve the problem more quickly. But in distributed computing, the assumption is made that different elements will have different environments with different capabilities. Like the differentiated students in a debate class or club.
This is, depending on your perspective, either a benefit or obstacle to tournament preparation.
To recap: if you're a MSPDP coach, about a month before the upcoming tournament, you get a list of four or five topics from your league president. Students who go to the tournament will debate all of the topics. And they won't know what side they'll be on. So, really, students have to be prepared to debate 8-10 positions (4-5 topics * 2 sides). This is a lot of work for the average student, let alone the struggling or unmotivated student. One common approach that teachers use is an "every student for themselves" type scenario, or an "every team for themselves" scenario. But I want to suggest that there's another, more efficient way to organize for research- a way that incorporates peer instruction and oral communication.
It requires sharing, which is sometimes tough. The idea is that you organize students into small groups with facilitators to research and prepare "issue briefs" (more on issue briefs and what debate notes should look like next week) that they will share with other groups. If you've got a 20 of students, you could have groups of 4 working on each topic, including preparing arguments for both sides. One senior student functions as an "anchor" for each group, making sure that younger or more inexperienced students stay on task. It's important to split up teams in this process, to avoid clubbiness and to prevent tunnel vision on the part of any given team.
Students have some period of time (1-2 weeks depending on your aggregate instructional time & other factors) to produce their issue briefs. Then those are swapped with another group, which is charged with poking holes in the arguments given and offering feedback. Then the briefs go back to the authors for revision (Peer editing - it's got uses far beyond torturing students in an English 101 class!), before final presentation to the class and swapping with everyone.
If students are keeping a debate notebook - which they should, see my post about that here - you can photocopy the final briefs in time for insertion, review, and perhaps even a practice debate or two before the tournament. Much more efficient, plus it gives your senior debaters a chance to take the lead in instruction. I've seen this in action in a classroom or two, and it's neat to watch students present their arguments to their larger squad while getting grilled by fellow teammates who want to make sure that all their bases are covered ("But what if they say ..."?).
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