Teaching Debate

A-R-E: Tracking the Presidential Debates

I know we tend to forget what we learned over the summer. So, a brief review. An argument has three parts: Assertion, Reasoning, and Evidence. We abbreviate these as A-R-E.

Now, as someone who is interested in debate, I have of course been watching the presidential candidate "debates." Why the quotes? Well, those of us who participate in middle school debating have higher expectations for what counts as a debate. For example, we expect that participants will make arguments (including reasoning and evidence). Is that what's going on in the presidential debates?

To find out, I've enlisted a few of the most gifted debaters I know. First up is Crystal, who is my lead research assistant on this project. Crystal will be a ninth grader next year in Southern California. She is a graduate of our Middle School Public Debate Program - a national champion as a seventh grader, she was the very best middle school debater in the United States in her eighth grade year.

Taking the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate as a starting point, Crystal went through every question, diagramming the candidates' responses, and keeping score. Just like diagramming sentences! They got one point if they made an assertion, two points if they had reasoning, and three points if they had evidence. Then, she gave them an overall score - how many points they received out of a possible number. Here's how they did, in alphabetical order:

• Biden: 12 responses, 100% assertions, 91.6% reasoning, 41.6% evidence, 2.583 average, SCORE: 86.1%
• Clinton: 15 responses, 100% assertions, 80% reasoning, 46.6%  evidence, 2.6 average, SCORE: 86.6%
• Dodd: 12 responses, 100% assertions, 83.3% reasoning, 25% evidence, 2.416 average, SCORE:  80.5%
• Edwards: 15 responses, 100% assertions, 73.3% reasoning, 46.6% evidence, 2.8 average, SCORE:  93.3%
• Gravel: 10 responses, 100% assertions, 90% reasoning, 40% evidence, 2.6 average, SCORE: 86.6%
• Kucinich: 10 responses, 100% assertions, 90% reasoning, 50% evidence, 2.8 average, SCORE: 93.3%
• Obama: 20 responses, 100% assertions, 90% reasoning, 60% evidence, 2.7 average, SCORE: 90%
• Richardson: 13 responses, 100% assertions, 84.6% reasoning, 53.8% evidence, 2.461 average, SCORE: 82.05%

Interesting, isn't it? Now, there are some subjective elements here, but we're not trying to assign a "winner" to the debate; indeed, it's hard to see how you could assign a winner, since any attempt to do so would be even more wildly subjective than, say, your average attempt to judge a regular competitive debate. We are not, for example, rating the reasoning or evidence - just trying to see if there is any (talk about a revolution of lowered expectations!) Plus, the playing field isn't exactly level - you can see that Kucinich did very well, with an average score of 2.8 per response. But he only had 10 responses. Edwards also had 2.8, with a total of 15 responses.

Does that mean he "did better" in the debate than Kucinich? It depends. You'll notice that we haven't accounted here for whether the candidate could be fairly judged to actually answer the question they were asked (we're working on a rubric for this, and I'll post about this soon). 

What really strikes me about this chart is the overall lack of evidence. It's not a pretty picture...Perhaps we should grade on a curve?

Sample Debate: Is Television A Bad Influence?

   

   

As part of our new effort to put video resources online, we're pleased to present a new sample debate in the MSPDP format on the topic "Television is a Bad Influence." The debate was filmed during our summer enrichment programs here at Claremont McKenna College, and features student debaters from public and private middle schools from Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. We've also filmed an actual judge's decision of the debate, available here on Google Video. As with all of our sample debates (there are currently three available online, plus the championship debate from 2006), teachers can order DVD copies from us to use in the classroom. If you're interested in ordering DVDs, please email me at kate[dot]shuster[at]cmc.edu.

Distributed Learning

Education is, let's face it, a pretty buzz-word heavy place. When I started working in this field, as the program director for a non-profit in Seattle, I felt like a total outsider at meetings where it was just understood that we would all know what the various acronyms stood for. Not knowing an IEP from an LEP from a GED (okay, I knew what that last one meant) made me seem, I think, vaguely incompetent in the eyes of the district personnel I was forever meeting with and working with. That's the nature of the shibboleth, though. You've got to have something, preferably arcane, to distinguish your in-group from everyone else.

But jargon's not all bad. After all, you can just make up your own.

So, today's class is about distributed learning. You may have heard this term used in different contexts. For example, many people use it to refer to what used to be called distance learning (you can read about this use of the term here, here, and here - used by the Army, no less, the undisputed world champion of jargon). But I think there may be a more interesting understanding of the terms that we can divine from, of all places, the world of computing.

I'm sure someone will correct me about this, but as I understand it, distributed computing is a kind of parallel computing, where different parts of a program run at the same time on different bits of the same (or different) computers, breaking up a larger problem into smaller bits to solve the problem more quickly. But in distributed computing, the assumption is made that different elements will have different environments with different capabilities. Like the differentiated students in a debate class or club.

This is, depending on your perspective, either a benefit or obstacle to tournament preparation.

To recap: if you're a MSPDP coach, about a month before the upcoming tournament, you get a list of four or five topics from your league president. Students who go to the tournament will debate all of the topics. And they won't know what side they'll be on. So, really, students have to be prepared to debate 8-10 positions (4-5 topics * 2 sides). This is a lot of work for the average student, let alone the struggling or unmotivated student. One common approach that teachers use is an "every student for themselves" type scenario, or an "every team for themselves" scenario. But I want to suggest that there's another, more efficient way to organize for research- a way that incorporates peer instruction and oral communication.

It requires sharing, which is sometimes tough. The idea is that you organize students into small groups with facilitators to research and prepare "issue briefs" (more on issue briefs and what debate notes should look like next week) that they will share with other groups. If you've got a 20 of students, you could have groups of 4 working on each topic, including preparing arguments for both sides. One senior student functions as an "anchor" for each group, making sure that younger or more inexperienced students stay on task. It's important to split up teams in this process, to avoid clubbiness and to prevent tunnel vision on the part of any given team.

Students have some period of time (1-2 weeks depending on your aggregate instructional time & other factors) to produce their issue briefs. Then those are swapped with another group, which is charged with poking holes in the arguments given and offering feedback. Then the briefs go back to the authors for revision (Peer editing - it's got uses far beyond torturing students in an English 101 class!), before final presentation to the class and swapping with everyone.

If students are keeping a debate notebook - which they should, see my post about that here - you can photocopy the final briefs in time for insertion, review, and perhaps even a practice debate or two before the tournament. Much more efficient, plus it gives your senior debaters a chance to take the lead in instruction. I've seen this in action in a classroom or two, and it's neat to watch students present their arguments to their  larger squad while getting grilled by fellow teammates who want to make sure that all their bases are covered ("But what if they say ..."?).

Running a Middle School Debate League: What's it like?

 

   

So, we've been pretty busy this summer at the MSPDP. We've run several residential student programs (with more than 100 participants in conferences), gotten some grant money for an upcoming program expansion in Los Angeles, and filmed a number of videos. Here's one of them. Three league presidents in the Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP) discuss what it's like to manage a middle school debate league. Featuring Lee Harris, from St. Mark's School of Upland, Greg Paulk, from Desert Springs Middle School, and Katie Ward, from Pasadena Polytechnic. Moderated by me, MSPDP Director Kate Shuster.

Oh, and I've also moved the blog to Typepad. Please update your bookmark, if you've got one, to reflect my new address: http://teachingdebate.typepad.com/.