Teaching Debate

They like us!

Though normally this blog is devoted to classroom practices that use debating, rather than to competitive interscholastic debating, I thought I'd take a moment to note that the Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP), which I administer, has been recognized  by the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, as a Civic Learning Example. See our program summarized here. So far, we're the only debating program they've recognized, and I'm delighted.

As I've mentioned previously here and elsewhere, I do think that civic education is essential. Not that we need more things to integrate into our already overstuffed and overmanaged curricula, but civic learning is a Big Idea in education that, used properly, can help us organize any number of things better - from inquiry projects to direct instruction to service learning. And the core ideas of civic education are, really, the core ideas of universal education -- the idea that we should have a society of informed, active, vocal citizens who will make a difference in national and transnational communities.

And debating is one of many ways that teachers can accomplish these goals. So, I'm happy to have the endorsement of the  folks at the CCMS.

“Stay Calm and Don’t Yell”: The Gubernatorial Debate

As Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides prepare for their first and only debate tonight, it may be helpful for them to take some advice from experts in the field. These young experts, aged 11-14, engage in dozens of debates every year, on topics that range from NAFTA expansion to the war in Iraq. They are participants in Claremont McKenna College’s Middle School Public Debate Program, the largest and most rigorous middle school debating program in the world.

Candidates may be heartened to know that hundreds of young students are paying close attention to their campaigns and speeches. Eight of these young experts recently met to advise the candidates for a debate that could make or break their run for the state’s highest office. The students were split on who they thought might win the debate, but drew deeply on their debate experience (nearly 250 debates among them) to give advice to both candidates, including “Keep eye contact” (Heather Durham, Chino Hills) and “Stay calm and don’t yell” (Rebecca Dizon, Long Beach). The panel of budding pundits organized their advice into three categories:

1. Answer the Other Side’s Arguments
Bucking the tradition of political debates in this country, in which debates contain more unconnected oratories than active clash of ideas, students felt strongly that the candidates should answer the arguments made by the other side. “If you don’t answer the opposing arguments, then you’re just engaging in a parallel set of assertions,” said Justin Davis, who was the elder statesman of the group as a recent graduate of Nicolet Middle School in Banning.

Dizon agreed: “It shows that you can think on your feet. Also, if you don’t answer you opponent, people may get the impression that you don’t know what you’re talking about.” But Ben Sprung-Keyser, from Los Angeles, pointed out that the candidates should apply this advice carefully. Candidates, he said, should be careful not to seem defensive. “To answer every argument, big and small, will allow the debate to be conducted on your opponent’s turf. Instead, you need to drive home your own themes and arguments while still seeming responsive.”

2. Make Your Arguments Seem Important
Candidates need to make sure their arguments seem credible and authoritative. “Don’t use an argument that you know is weak,” advised Durham. “It is better to have two strong arguments than five weak ones.” Jake Sonnenberg of Los Angeles concurred, saying: “Anyone can give a list of arguments, but explaining why they matter can mean the difference between a winning argument and an irrelevant one.” As to how the candidates should go about showing the importance of their arguments, the students felt that select stories were very powerful. “In a political debate, you need to give arguments emotional weight,” said Sprung-Keyser. “Talk about lives, hopes, dreams, whatever you want – but move people.”

3. Use Evidence to Support Your Ideas
Middle school debaters learn that an argument has three parts: an assertion, reasoning, and evidence. They also know from their debate experience that empirical support for logical analysis is essential and often lacking in debates. That may be the reason so many of the students felt that the candidates should pay attention to evidence in Saturday’s debate. “Phil Angelides and Governor Schwarzenegger should definitely provide evidence in the debate,” said Davis. Jenna Blinkinsop of Palm Springs took this further, arguing that “without evidence, everything you say is just an opinion.”

While other young Californians will be kicking a soccer ball or surfing the Internet on Saturday night, these students and hundreds more like them will be glued to the TV, watching the debate. They will be paying particular attention to details and techniques that many adults might not even notice. Ultimately, they will be looking to be inspired as young Californians and future voters.

Vanessa Wilcox, from Palm Springs, summed up the group’s advice this way: “The most important things to remember in the debate are to be passionate, confident, and think about what is truly important to Californians. If you are confident in what you are saying and you are convincing, you can sway a lot of voters.”

In particular, candidates may be able to sway the next generation of voters, as Wilcox pointed out: “People are looking for leaders who are enthusiastic and down to earth. As a young Californian, I would suggest thinking about all age groups. We are the future of California.”

Thoughts on Current Issues in the Classroom

A lot of teachers that I talk to are interested in doing more to integrate discussion of current events into their classrooms, but aren't sure how to do it. Some feel constrained by district-mandated pacing guides that squeeze out this kind of content, while others feel that they wouldn't even know where to start with such a project. Still others are concerned with the controversies that might be created by including particular current events in their classrooms.

Fortunately, like a lot of curriculum changes, this kind of move can be accomplished on an incremental basis, allowing teachers to experiment with different approaches. For example, teachers can integrate current events discussion into a unit plan, using examination of current events as a way to reflect on the past (as in a social studies or history classroom) or as a way to teach basic literacy skills through reading, writing, and speaking about nonfiction texts (as in a language arts classroom). Teachers can effectively use current and controversial events instruction to address a wide variety of standards and even mandated content, but this often means that they must work carefully and incrementally to integrate this new approach in their classrooms.

Part of the problem, particularly in the middle grades, is that the average student has very little information about the world, particularly about current events. Many adults find this frustrating and perplexing, and there is a temptation to therefore omit current and controversial events instruction entirely. This is a missed opportunity to teach the component parts of current events in a way that will help students understand not only the issue in question, but also other issues that they will encounter later in life.

Teachers can plan for current events instruction just like they might plan to teach a novel or any other content. What follows are five brief suggestions for planning, as well as some resources for finding information to use in class.

1. Select an issue. Try to choose current events that have meaningful connections to other course content - for example, if you are reading Farewell to Manzanar, you might consider following this with a short unit on Guantanamo Bay, encouraging students to compare and contrast the different decisions to detain individuals. Alternately, you might use materials to explore the broader issue of civil liberties in wartime, such as the materials available here, on the outstanding Justice Learning site.

If you're just starting to integrate current events instruction into your classroom, start with current events that are not super-controversial. If you are determined to teach "flashpoint" type issues, such as gay marriage or stem cell research, it is best to start small so you have a handle on how to handle controversies as they arise in class. Be aware that including "flashpoint" type issues (anything having to do with religion, usually, or sexuality, but there are lots of issues that many might find scandalous to include in a classroom) in your classroom may create controversy or get you in trouble. Keep in mind that you're trying to teach students how to be effective democratic citizens, and that it's okay to start off with more manageable issues as "training wheels."

2. Break the issue into parts. Consider the component parts of the issue, and consider how you might effectively sequence those parts in a classroom to maximize uunderstanding. Then you can sequence your unit appropriately and choose materials to assist in learning key concepts. For this, it helps to think like a middle school student. There are a lot of ideas about the world that adults take for granted, but which are pretty opaque to your average 7th or 8th grader. Consider this example, from the outstanding educational website produced by the World Bank Group.

Trade allows people to buy goods and services that are not produced in their own countries. In addition, the money countries receive from exports helps determine how much they can afford to spend on imports and how much they can borrow from abroad.

In the site itself, clicking on "exports" and "imports" takes you glossary definitions, which is helpful. But even this short explanation of the function of trade may be difficult for students to process without examples. This is an opportunity for scaffolding, so a teacher could build in a trade simulation or other practical example for students to demonstrate mastery of the concepts here.

3. Build a list of relevant vocabulary words associated with the issue. Don't forget to include vocabulary instruction as part of your current events instruction, just as you would any other instructional topics. Keep a running list from readings and research, and teach those words just as you would any other vocabulary words.

4. Pick readings that will be accessible and also challenging. For many teachers, this is one of the hardest parts of current events instruction. You'll have to read a lot of articles, chapters, and other materials in order to find readings that will represent a balanced and informed set of perspectives. But, the upside is that you'll only need a few readings (normally) to create a meaningful context for students to be able to discuss the issue. I think it's useful to teach students how to read a newspaper editorial as part of this process. In a subsequent post, I'll talk more about how to teach editorials in class, and give some examples.

5. Have a culminating activity. There should be something that students do with their information about the event. This could be writing an informative or persuasive essay, working on a group presentation or project, engaging in roundtable discussions or debates, or any other ending activity. Perhaps students could write letters to the editor of a newspaper stating their position on an issue, or write responses to an editorial that they read, agreeing or disagreeing with the author.

To help, I've included this short list of some of my favorite websites for gathering information.
Sites for information about the world
www.justicelearning.com
www.nationmaster.com (http://www.nationmaster.com/lps/intro.php)
www.understandingusa.com
http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/docnews.html
http://www.findlaw.com/
http://firstgov.gov/
http://youthink.worldbank.org/

Resources for accenting lesson or unit plans
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
http://www.educationindex.com/education_resources.html
http://landmark-project.com/index.php
http://21cif.imsa.edu/lesson_browse

Topic Switching, Part I

I'm often asked about one of the distinctive features of the Middle School Public Debate Program, which is that in competition, students debate diverse topics throughout the academic year. In fact, they do not argue the same topic more than once during a yea of competition. They may, of course, have multiple practice debates on a single topic; in addition, topics may recur from year to year. As you can see from our topic lists, there are certain topics that are perennial favorites, due to the sustained relevance of the issue, new developments in the law and politics, and the significance of the issue in the lives and behaviors of middle school students. These include such topics as the use of cell phones in schools, the death penalty, foreign policy in the Middle East, and the influences of television and video games. But topics are not repeated in competition during a year. There are a few reasons for this, and I want to lay them out briefly for anyone who might be interested in our rationale.

First, it's important to note that most of MSPDP instruction happens in the classroom rather than at tournaments. Tournaments are like labs for a science class -- an opportunity to apply what you've learned and try it out, so you can reflect on that experience in the regular class or through writing reflections like lab reports. Students don't learn about the topics at the tournament. Or, rather, they shouldn't -- if they're learning about the topics at the tournament, it's really too late. This means that effective coaches organize teaching and independent student learning before a tournament to help students work in small groups to form ideas and share them with the rest of their group. This learning should be active and assessment, ideally, is portfolio-based.

Over the course of a year, if a student debates at all tournaments in their league, they will have debated between 20 – 35 topics. The list of topics they will have debated normally spans an extraordinary variety of ideas, perspectives, policies, and philosophies. Most students will not have personally done the research on both sides of all these topics (effective coaches organize for peer sharing and group evaluation -- for more on this, see the articles on tournament preparation in our updated Teachers' Guide) but they will have at least considered the basic issues on the topics. And as students become more experienced, they inevitably conduct their own research and survey the issues with their partners. The MSPDP sets very high expectations for students -- it is the most rigorous and challenging program for middle school debating – it is designed to be that way. At the same time, it is tremendously accessible for students. Part of the reason for this is that changing topics for each debate both challenges and excites students. Students are interested in events that demand excellence and a new degree of difficulty. They are also intellectually curious. The MSPDP exposes them to a broad variety of issues and sets expectations for issue mastery in short amount of time; this is stimulating for even the most jaded student. And all kinds of students can and have succeeded in the program, from the most socio-economically disadvantaged, from special education, ELL, and speech apprehensive students, to the most privileged.

So, I want to make a few quick points about the pedagogical rationale for “topic switching,” the practice of changing the debate topic for each competitive debate. In this post I'll deal with the argument that topic switching promotes the development of interdisciplinary and critical thinking skills. In Part II, I'll analyze some other justifications for topic switching.

Most people involved in educational studies and curricular planning agree that students should become critical thinkers. Although there are considerable differences over what is to count as critical thinking, there is at least a general consensus on the skills associated with critical thinking. This operational definition offered by Chambers, et al., is typical : “First, students need to develop the cognitive skills of critical thinking. These are interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, and self-regulation. Second, students are encouraged to develop a critical disposition in that they are willing to set aside personal biases and to be open to multiple views” (2000, p. 58.).

Although the obvious answer to the need for students to become critical thinkers is to teach the skills, this is not as easy as it might sound. E.D. Hirsch, for example, has argued that an emphasis on teaching so-called meta-cognitive skills may (in and of itself) be overestimated in terms of its learning outcomes; especially as such a strategy may displace subject-oriented learning in the classroom. Critical thinking skills instruction in the abstract does not necessarily lead to transfer outside of the thinking skills classroom.

The need for skills that transfer to situations outside the classroom is cited by former American Psychological Association President Diane Halpern, who argues that “critical-thinking skills should be used to recognize and resist unrealistic campaign promises, circular reasoning, faulty probability estimates, weak arguments by analogy, or language designed to mislead whenever and wherever they are encountered” (2001, p. 282). Students must be able to reach outside of their immediate and accessible context to deal with problems that arise in unfamiliar contexts. They must be able to apply information from a familiar area to an unfamiliar area. Margaret Donaldson has called this kind of thinking "disembedded thought." Even though our schools are, in many ways, designed to teach students to engage in disembedded thinking, it's not easy to apply information into unfamiliar domains – this requires practice.

Students, even reasonably well educated college students, are not good at applying information or skills learned in one domain or topic area to another domain or topic area. There is ample evidence to support this claim (see, for example, Klaczynski, Gelfand, & Reese, 1989; Reed, Ernst, & Banerji, 1974). The challenge for educators seeking to facilitate transfer across domains is to find ways to optimize challenges for students and to create opportunities for the meaningful inference of general reasoning tools that will help students as they encounter unfamiliar issues and  situations in school and in life.

Thinking skills may be taught best with reference to diverse content in addition to explicit instruction. As Halpern notes, “Critical thinking skills are learned best and are most likely to transfer to novel situations when they are taught using a variety of different examples” (2003, p. 13). In other words, students are more likely to be able to achieve transfer if they can reason from a variety of examples and perspectives. If students can be exposed to content from multiple disciplines, this exposure could be coupled with a conscious focus on improving thinking skills to increase the development of thinking skills and the likelihood of transfer of those skills between, among, and even within disciplines.

All of this is a rather long way of saying that topic switching, accompanied by integrated instruction in the classroom, is designed to maximize optimal challenge while overcoming what cognitive psychologists call the "belief bias" effect (This is what happens when prior beliefs color the way phenomena are perceived - often in ways that interfere with accurate reasoning). In the MSPDP, students are challenged to debate based on preparation that happens in and after school, about a wide variety of issues, many of which are complex and unfamiliar. Over time, they develop the ability to generate arguments and ideas based on cross-referencing topic areas to draw more general conclusions about larger principles that they might apply in varied  cases.

I'm happy to share a much more thorough bibliography on this issue with any interested readers. Please email me for more information.

Cited Here

Chambers, A., Angus, K. B., Carter-Wells, J., Bagwell, J., et al. (2000). Creative and active strategies to promote critical thinking. Yearbook (Claremont Reading Conference).

Halpern, Diane F. (2001). Assessing the effectiveness of critical thinking instruction. The Journal of General Education, 50(4).

Halpern, Diane F. (2003). Thought & Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking. 4th Ed. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ.

Klaczynski, P.A., Gelfand, H., & Reese, Hayne W. (1989). Transfer of conditional reasoning: Effects of explanations and initial problem types. Memory & Cognition, 17(2). 208-220.

Reed, S. K., Ernst, G. W., & Banerji, R. B. (1974). The role of analogy in transfer between similar problem states. Cognitive Psychology, 6. 436–450.