Teaching Debate: September 2006

In my last posting, I briefly sketched out some of the thinking skills justifications for topic switching. In this post, I talk about some other justifications for topic switching.

The MSPDP is designed to develop students' extemporaneous and impromptu reasoning and speaking abilities. Various aspects of the program amplify this goal, such as the inclusion of "preparation time" before debates to stop students from simply reading from scripts during debate (it's debate, after all, not declamation). But topic switching also amplifies this goal. As students are asked to debate on a variety of topics, they engage in thinking, reasoning, and research that mirrors the goals of liberal arts education. Each debate deals with a different topic, ensuring that students are always speaking extemporaneously, with little formal preparation time despite substantial scaffolding and support before the tournament actually occurs.

These extemporaneous and impromptu speaking situations are actually the kind of speaking situations that are required of students in professional and classroom situations. It is exceedingly rare that professionals and college students are asked to deliver a presentation for which they have had many weeks of preparation, and for which they can use extensive notes. Most public speaking and communication situations are impromptu. In a discussion, a professor might ask a student for their opinion on a section of text. The student must respond thoughtfully, with limited preparation. In a business, an employee may be stopped in the hallway and asked to speculate about a professional decision. The employee is unlikely to be able to whip out their pre-prepared note cards or script to deal with this issue.

And most people are not great in these kinds of speaking situations. Which is too bad, because employers and highly selective colleges strongly value students and employees who have exceptional communication skills. But students need training to be able to excel in these kinds of speaking situations. Which is where the support for extemporaneous and impromptu speaking comes into the equation.

Another way to think about topic switching is that it mirrors and amplifies the demands put on citizens in a democratic society. As voters, we are constantly being asked to render our opinions on a wide variety of issues, many of which are extremely complex and difficult (if you’ve got any lingering doubts about these issues, consider the 2006 Voter Information Guide for the General Election, available here.) But most of us don’t really know how to form opinions about these issues. We need practice. The National Council for the Social Studies recognizes this need, and has used it as a justification for social studies education. The NCSS defines social studies as "the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence." This is essentially what the MSPDP does. I sometimes describe what we do as "Building a better democracy, one 11-year-old at a time." There's something to that.

When we designed the MSPDP, we were very conscious of trying to maximize both rigor and accessibility. It's hard to do -- you want to have a program that is as rigorous as possible, which serving the maximum number of students possible. The MSPDP's topic switching feature is part of what makes our program so much more rigorous than any other comparable program for students in the middle grades. The results of our family survey from last year bear this out. Last year, family members reported that students work very hard to prepare to debate. On average, students devote 10-12 hours a week during the debate season preparing to debate. This is the equivalent of attending an extra day of school every week for an entire year. It's hard to get more rigorous than that, especially when you consider that students are using that time researching and practicing with teammates to debate issues that many adults are completely unfamiliar with. Students are pushed to do all of this work through the combination of many factors, but one of those is topic switching. There is always more research to be done, and always more practice to be had. Students can't just prepare on one topic and be done.

Next week, I'll talk about the current events classroom and integrating current events discussions into the middle school classroom. This is one way that teachers who aren't debate coaches can create a "debating classroom" while still adhering to standards and other kinds of pacing and content mandates.

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.