Teaching Debate

Debating immigration policy

So, I'm probably a little late on the uptake here, but I ran across this site last week. It's a great selection of materials put together by some AVID coordinators out here in California - very useful for anyone thinking about discussing immigration policy and reform options in the classroom. Proving, once again, why AVID is my hero (brilliant organization, exceptional results, I could go on and on...).

The standout here is the booklet done by the Constitutional Rights Foundation. It's good. Very good. The readings are well done and easy to follow for many students (could be better scaled to middle level students and ELL students, however). I'd like to see more explicit vocabulary instruction, but for many students this will serve as a good primer.

I've worked with a number of teachers this year who have wanted to teach immigration policy in their classroom and use it as an issue for debate and discussion. It's such a great issue, as it intersects with a number of topics in the social science curriculum as well as the language arts curriculum. It's nice to see the good people at the CRF doing work to assist teachers in this area.

Costs, Benefits, and CHOICES

I highly recommend that teachers interested in teaching current events investigate some of the resources available on the CHOICES Program's Teaching With the News page. Although the units are aligned for grades 9-12, many of them could easily be used in a grade 7 or 8. I haven't seen any of the non-free materials offered by CHOICES (the history booklets seem interesting, but mostly for high school history teachers), but I like the idea of the program. I especially like their focus on deliberative education as a necessary precursor to debating. Students should be confronted with multiple options to respond to controversial topics or events, and should be encouraged to explore costs and benefits of different approaches, as well as related issues of complex causality.

I was at a school in Long Beach yesterday working with a group of teachers, and one of them brought up the importance of teaching costs and benefits as part of a thinking skills curriculum. It's true that one of the skills students need is the ability to make explicit the costs and benefits of an approach, which really is just another way of teaching causality. In addition, students need to be able to compare costs with benefits to reach a decision on their own. This is higher order thinking, and not easy for students to do. In debates, students get a lot of practical experience making these kinds of comparisons explicit by evaluating competing positions in the debate to favor thier side. Hopefully, with practice, this can translate into the classroom and vice-versa.

One way to teach comparison is, of course, by beginning with graphic organizers. I use Inspiration for most of my graphic organizing design needs, and prepared this simple cost-benefit organizer (it's a PDF file- if you click this link, it will download) based on the conversations we had yesterday in our working group. So, teachers can help to organize students for deliberation and assessment of options using materials like those provided by CHOICES, and they can also have debates to further the comparison of different positions.