Teaching Debate

Tournament Direction and Hosting - New Resources

At long last, we're happy to announce the publication of new resources for tournament direction and hosting as part of a site-wide update of materials this school year. Many teachers, as part of the Middle School Public Debate Program, decide to get together with other schools to have tournaments through leagues. Here at at Claremont, we provide support and training to make these competitions meaningful and well-organized events for students, teachers, and parents.

If you're familiar with the competitive side of our programming, you already know that we are the only debating program in the United States to require training and certification for judges in competition. But you may not know that we are also the only program in the US to require that the people who administer tournaments be trained and certified by us.

For the last two years, the Tournament Director training program has been in a trial process. We have trained only a handful of Tournament Directors - most notably Desert Valleys Debate League (DVDL) Tournament Director Kelley Bieringer and Big Apple Debate League (BADL) Tournament Director Alberto Duarte. But this year, everything is changing - we are dramatically expanding to add and solidify new leagues, and with that will come a whole new group of willing and capable volunteers.

New online at our Tournament Administration Resources page, are a number of resources to support this effort, including the first edition of our Tournament Director's Manual, a document about how to host a tournament, and a variety of resources for tournament administration. Anyone interested in what a tournament is like, even if they aren't interested in directing tournaments themselves, should look these resources over.

We look forward to the new season and the new additions to our network of volunteers!

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/.

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.

Common Vocabulary

Good teachers work to build a common vocabulary for instruction. But it's not always obvious how to do this. On Wednesday, I learned a great technique for teaching one element of common vocabulary for writing instruction. When students are developing writing skills, they often make the mistake of taking a writer-based perspective rather than a reading-based perspective. In other words, they're writing for themselves (no surprise, as many of our students have not yet had their own Copernican Revolution)- in shorthand, or with unclear connections between thoughts. The text makes perfect sense to the writer, but the reader struggles to make heads or tails of it. This is a problem for effective writing, so students need to understand the difference between reader-based writing and writer-based writing.

But it doesn't really work to just teach those concepts. We've got to have a good example. So here's one, courtesy of DeLacy Ganley, the Director of Curriculum and Advancement at Claremont Graduate University's Teacher Education Program.

DeLacy begins by asking one of the teachers in the audience if she'd be willing to do some grocery shopping for DeLacy, because she's just not feeling that well. The teacher agrees. DeLacy puts this list up on the board:

The following conversation ensues between DeLacy and the group of teachers (who are from Jordan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan - part 2 of our exchange program this year):

DeLacy: "So, the first thing on my list is fruit. What are you going to buy for me?"
Teachers: "Bananas?"
DeLacy: "Ugh! I hate bananas!"
Teachers: "Apples!"
DeLacy: "Red or green?"
Teachers: "Red."
DeLacy: "But I wanted green! Okay, how about the milk? Are you going to get regular or low-fat?"
Teachers: "Regular."
DeLacy: "How big?"
Teachers: "A liter."
DeLacy: "But I wanted a gallon! How about T.P.? What's that?"
Teachers: "Toilet paper?"
DeLacy: "No! I wanted toothpaste!"

The lesson here, of course, is that this list is writer-centered. If DeLacy had taken the list to the store, she would have known to buy green apples, a gallon of regular milk, toothpaste, etc. But the reader doesn't have the same information, and so is left to guess at the author's intention. Or fill in the blanks. A reader-center list would be different. It might have more details. It might also be better organized - fruit and vegetables might be next to each other on the list (as they are in the store), to make the trip to the store more convenient for the shopper.

What I like about this example is that it illustrates the concepts of writer-centered and reader-centered writing without simply teaching the terms a-contextually. Nicely done!

Sequencing for a debate unit or class

It's very rare that teachers get the opportunity to teach a debating class, at least in most middle schools. Most teachers who integrate debating will have a debate assignment or unit, varying in length from a week or so to a few weeks. There's a smattering of good commentary on this practice online -- check out Aquiram's reflections on The Great Debate and The Reflective Teacher's discussion on using debate in class, which you can read here.

A longer unit is possible for some teachers (depending on what subject you teach, of course, and how good you are at all the basic stuff like incorporating vocabulary and reading instruction into content learning (come on, is there really any other kind?) and process-based instruction that activities like debate require.

Over the last year or so, I've worked with a small number of teachers to develop ideas on sequencing for a twelve-week unit. I wanted to share it on the website for comment and revision. These things tend to work best if more people try them out and tinker - a kind of open-source unit plan, if you will. You can download it here. Comments, suggestions, and reports from the field are encouraged, either on this blog or via backchannel to me (kate[dot]shuster[at]claremontmckenna.edu).

The unit is designed for 60 days, with three debates for all students. It's annotated with relevant California English-Language Arts content standards in one column. If you're not in California, you can ignore these or match them up with your own content standards. Depending on the kind of class you're in and the topics you choose, you can add more standards met if you're choosing topics from the curriculum. (NOTE: to decode the standards abbreviations, CA's ELA standards are online here.)

The unit would probably be most easily accomplished using Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP) materials, including readings from our textbook Speak Out! Debate and Public Speaking in the Middle Grades, or the Teachers' Guide on our website, but could certainly be adapted for whatever format you wanted to use. I'm partial to the six-person debate format, as it involves a lot of students without getting too out of hand. It's also short enough for a class period, at 26 minutes, and dynamic enough for an audience to enjoy and pay attention to (though this is probably stretching it for most of the students we serve...).

I suggest that the unit be taught with a portfolio assessment system, which I discussed a few months ago here. You could use one topic, repeated three times, or several topics (I prefer this approach). The first topic should be easier. For ideas for debate topics for middle school students, we've got a giant list of topics we've used in competition here, and a list of topics synced with California's Social Science Content Standards here. Vocabulary can be taught as part of topic instruction and context-building for reading and research. I've included a persuasive essay as a final assignment - this probably won't work if you haven't done persuasive essays before, but the idea is for students to take a position on one of the topics and write a short essay in support of their opinion on that issue.

As for what the other students do while debates are happening, I suggest that some students be assigned to adjudicate each debate. They should be required to submit ballots and flowsheets as part of reporting for the adjudication part of the unit.

I suspect there will be much more discussion about the unit as people explore it, so I'll resist the temptation to go on and on about it. One teacher who used this last spring felt like it was too short. Another used it this fall and felt like it was impossibly long for the time allotted. So, as always, actual results may vary...

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.

They like us!

Though normally this blog is devoted to classroom practices that use debating, rather than to competitive interscholastic debating, I thought I'd take a moment to note that the Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP), which I administer, has been recognized  by the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, as a Civic Learning Example. See our program summarized here. So far, we're the only debating program they've recognized, and I'm delighted.

As I've mentioned previously here and elsewhere, I do think that civic education is essential. Not that we need more things to integrate into our already overstuffed and overmanaged curricula, but civic learning is a Big Idea in education that, used properly, can help us organize any number of things better - from inquiry projects to direct instruction to service learning. And the core ideas of civic education are, really, the core ideas of universal education -- the idea that we should have a society of informed, active, vocal citizens who will make a difference in national and transnational communities.

And debating is one of many ways that teachers can accomplish these goals. So, I'm happy to have the endorsement of the  folks at the CCMS.