Teaching Debate

An heuristic a day...

In the January 29 issue of the New Yorker, there's an article that should interest anyone trying to teach critical thinking and argumentation. The article is about physician Pat Croskerry's  efforts to make sense of why doctors make errors in diagnosis. It's an interesting read, in part because the errors doctors make are so similar to the errors in reasoning that the rest of us, without medical degrees, make all the time. Croskerry believes that many errors in diagnosis happen as the result of errors in thinking that are easily identified and often preventable.

It turns out that looking at doctors can tell us a lot about how we make decisions. Doctors are called on to make diagnoses all the time, and often under very stressful conditions. While they carefully examine their patients, they are basically searching through their mental files of medical problems, trying to find a "match" between a problem and the symptoms they see. To accomplish this efficiently, doctors often rely on different kinds of shortcuts or rules - called "heuristics." Heuristics are, basically, mini-theories generated by experience. We use them in problem-solving all the time, and they function like assumptions. Teachers are storehouses of heuristics. Johnny squinting at the board and having trouble paying attention? Maybe he needs glasses. Students bored and listless in class on a Friday? Time for a fun activity.

And so on. Doctors use a lot of heuristics. As the author of this article points out, doctors are trained to assume that patients with high fever and sharp pain in the lower right side of the abdomen could be suffering from appendicitis. Better send for an X-ray right away! These shortcuts for effective and efficient diagnosis save lots of lives. But they can also cause problems.

Here are three of the common heuristics that Croskerry's identified:

1. Representativeness. This happens when your thinking is overly influenced by what is usually true. Doctors will sometimes look at a set of symptoms and say that they're usually typical of condition X, because when they see those symptoms, patients usually have condition X. This is useful, because it allows doctors (and teachers) to shortcut a whole in-depth examination of each individual patient. But it can cause them (and us) to overlook rare or unusual conditions that don't fit expectations.

2. Availability. We use the availability heuristic when we make a decision about something based on what other examples readily come to mind. Things that are familiar to you are more likely to influence your decisions than things that may be less familiar. Doctors who have recently seen a lot of cases of infection Y are more likely to diagnose infection Y, even if a patient has condition Z. What's immediately available to you in your mind and memory are just more present, tangible, and influential than more distant experiences.

3. Affective Errors. This is the tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true, rather than on what is actually true. Doctors may relate to a particular patient so much that they fail to perform a crucial examination (as in the example in this article), or they may believe that a positive outcome is inevitable, so they fail to forestall the negative.

The point of this article is that doctors, even though they are highly trained (or perhaps because they are highly trained - an argument for another post), are prone to make errors in thinking just like the rest of us. What teacher can say that she hasn't used all three of these heuristics, often within minutes of each other? Who among us isn't guilty of wishful thinking, hasty generalization, and cherry-picking the evidence?

The idea that physicians have the same reasoning problems as the 6th graders we work with does give me hope, in a strange kind of way - it makes me think that there's nothing particularly wrong with the way our students think, that they're just humans, and what humans do is make mistakes while trying not to. If critical thinking instruction is important in middle school, it's just as important in medical school.

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.

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

Topic Switching, Part II

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.

Topic Switching, Part I

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.