Teaching Debate

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.

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.

“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