Teaching Debate

Sequencing for a debate unit or class

It's very rare that teachers get the opportunity to teach a debating class, at least in most middle schools. Most teachers who integrate debating will have a debate assignment or unit, varying in length from a week or so to a few weeks. There's a smattering of good commentary on this practice online -- check out Aquiram's reflections on The Great Debate and The Reflective Teacher's discussion on using debate in class, which you can read here.

A longer unit is possible for some teachers (depending on what subject you teach, of course, and how good you are at all the basic stuff like incorporating vocabulary and reading instruction into content learning (come on, is there really any other kind?) and process-based instruction that activities like debate require.

Over the last year or so, I've worked with a small number of teachers to develop ideas on sequencing for a twelve-week unit. I wanted to share it on the website for comment and revision. These things tend to work best if more people try them out and tinker - a kind of open-source unit plan, if you will. You can download it here. Comments, suggestions, and reports from the field are encouraged, either on this blog or via backchannel to me (kate[dot]shuster[at]claremontmckenna.edu).

The unit is designed for 60 days, with three debates for all students. It's annotated with relevant California English-Language Arts content standards in one column. If you're not in California, you can ignore these or match them up with your own content standards. Depending on the kind of class you're in and the topics you choose, you can add more standards met if you're choosing topics from the curriculum. (NOTE: to decode the standards abbreviations, CA's ELA standards are online here.)

The unit would probably be most easily accomplished using Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP) materials, including readings from our textbook Speak Out! Debate and Public Speaking in the Middle Grades, or the Teachers' Guide on our website, but could certainly be adapted for whatever format you wanted to use. I'm partial to the six-person debate format, as it involves a lot of students without getting too out of hand. It's also short enough for a class period, at 26 minutes, and dynamic enough for an audience to enjoy and pay attention to (though this is probably stretching it for most of the students we serve...).

I suggest that the unit be taught with a portfolio assessment system, which I discussed a few months ago here. You could use one topic, repeated three times, or several topics (I prefer this approach). The first topic should be easier. For ideas for debate topics for middle school students, we've got a giant list of topics we've used in competition here, and a list of topics synced with California's Social Science Content Standards here. Vocabulary can be taught as part of topic instruction and context-building for reading and research. I've included a persuasive essay as a final assignment - this probably won't work if you haven't done persuasive essays before, but the idea is for students to take a position on one of the topics and write a short essay in support of their opinion on that issue.

As for what the other students do while debates are happening, I suggest that some students be assigned to adjudicate each debate. They should be required to submit ballots and flowsheets as part of reporting for the adjudication part of the unit.

I suspect there will be much more discussion about the unit as people explore it, so I'll resist the temptation to go on and on about it. One teacher who used this last spring felt like it was too short. Another used it this fall and felt like it was impossibly long for the time allotted. So, as always, actual results may vary...

Debate - It's misunderstood

Many teachers believe that debating is something you do once, or a few times, and then it's done. Or, alternately, they never have debates in class at all - thinking that there's no time (thank you, pacing guide!), or that they don't have the necessary expertise.

I'd like to suggest that there's nothing intrinsically valuable about debate. Now, this may come as somewhat of a surprise given that I administer a debating website, direct a gigantic debating program, and have written a bunch of books about debating. When I say that there's nothing intrinsically good about debate, it's just like saying that there's nothing intrinsically good about writing a research paper.

What's good about writing a research paper is the way that the project exercises a complementary set of component skills, such as researching, summarizing, outlining, constructing a thesis statement, making subjects and verbs agree, and so forth -- it's a convenient (if difficult) way to have students work on all of those different skills at the same time - the mental equivalent of cross training.

Debate works in the same way. Done correctly, it builds research competence, media literacy, reading comprehension, argument literacy (more on that one in just a second), evidence evaluation, summarization and outlining, public speaking, conflict resolution, civil discussion skills, critical thinking, and note taking. I've even made a handy chart that details these skills in relation to our program. You can download it by clicking here.

Done poorly, debate provides a mixed bag- people yelling at each other, students reading from scripts that they didn't write, and so forth. Students need the skills associated with debate first. And if they learn those, even if you don't have time to have a series of classroom debates, you'll still have taught the basics.

I think there are three essential, basic debate skills:

1. Argumentation
2. Refutation
3. Note taking

Note that public speaking and listening don't appear in this list. That's because listening is part of refutation and note taking, so I don't list it separately. I prefer to list the way it's operationalized. As for public speaking, I've found that students master speaking more effectively if they have the tools and content for their speeches- like most of us, they're more comfortable speaking if they know what to do, and speaking ability builds over time with debating. I think teaching content first is the best way to teach speaking, especially with students who are nervous about speaking (like most normal adults) or who don't speak English as their home language.

So, a few notes about each of these skills:

1. Argumentation. The easy way to teach this is to reinforce it across all lessons by teaching the ARE method. Students learn that an argument is an assertion, reasoning, and evidence. An assertion is a statement that something is so. Reasoning is the "because" part of an argument, and evidence is the "for example" part, that supports the reasoning. It's used to validate or support the reasoning.

2. Refutation. We teach a 4-step refutation model. Step one is "They say..." That's the part where you refer to the argument you're about to answer. Step two is "But..." That's where you make your counter. You can make a counter-assertion ("They say the Backstreet Boys are a good band, but they're not.") or attack the reasoning or evidence that's been offered ("They say that the Backstreet Boys are a good band because they're popular, but just because you're popular, that doesn't mean you're good."). Step three is "Because..." This is the part where you offer reasoning (and evidence, if possible!) to support your counter-argument. Step four is "Therefore..." This is where you make your conclusion - essential summarization. Let's look at an example:
Butyou don't need to actually have debates in class to teach debating.
Because you can teach the skills associated with debate, like argumentation, in any unit.
Therefore there's plenty of time to teach debate in class.

So easy!

3. Note-taking. This bit is essential to debating as well as to success in school. But students aren't (let face it) very good at taking notes. As my colleague Anthony Gibson has noted, teachers are always saying that students need to take notes, but there are very few situations in school where students actually need to use the notes for something- even when the teacher says the notes will help on the test, they often don't. One of the many nice things about debate as a teaching strategy is that it creates an incentive system for students to take notes. The better their notes, the more they'll win. As you can see with the refutation method above, students are expected to refer specifically to the argument they're about to answer. They need to have it written down to answer it. As debates get more complex, with multiple students in the discussion, students need better skills to track arguments as they develop (or don't) in discussions and debates. So, they learn to be better note-takers.

The problem is that conventional ways we take notes (and even Cornell Notes) are ineffective for debating and the give and take of ideas in a dynamic discussion. That's why graphic organizers with multiple columns are essential for taking notes in a situation where ideas are being exchanged, developed, and refuted. In the MSPDP, we have students (and judges) learn to use a "flowsheet," which is a multi-column organizer. You can download an example here. Notice that speeches are given their own columns. To see some that are filled out, you'll have to download our Teachers' Guide (free but gigantic, at 11 MB) here. That link takes you to the page it's on, not the document itself, by the way.

In my next post, I'll talk about some formats for whole-class debate and apply these ideas to them. But even if you never "have a debate" in your class, you can still add some value to your classroom by taking different parts of debating and integrating them into everyday instruction.

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.