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.shuster@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.

Tennis Debates

When I was in Japan about 10 years ago, I visited an English class where the students were learning English using debating. The teacher had broken up the students into small groups of seven, and everyone was talking at once. The teacher explained to me that the students were engaged in "tennis debates." I've used this exercise on a number of occasions in middle school, high school, and college classes. It works well - the competition element creates interest for students, and you can even "seed" a bracket where students who win their table get to participate in another round against another team. Students that are eliminated from competition seem to really enjoy watching and refereeing subsequent games. I've uploaded an instruction sheet for students here. It is a guide for students participating in the debates, and includes the rules and instructions for referees. Basically, the teacher uses tennis debates either:

• As a review and practice opportunity for work students have been doing already on a given topic, in which case topics are chosen from the students' previous and preparatory work and notes on the issue; or
• As an opportunity to practice impromptu argument, choosing easy and fun topics like "Sega is better than Shakespeare," or "Superman is better than Batman."

Students are sorted into teams (either assigned or chosen; whatever you prefer), and each team is given a number. Teams go to the table, already set up, where their number is. Here's a graphic showing the layout and starting procedure. As you can see, each team of three sits on one side of the table. A student designated as "referee" sits on the end of the table. Before the topic is announced, the referee flips a coin to decide which team will be pro and which will be con. (ADVICE: Write simple topics for this, otherwise students will get too confused. That holds for all classroom debating exercises. To see more about how to write a topic, read this article on our website.) When that's decided, announce the topic and write it on the board. Teams have 10 (or more, if you like) minutes to work together with their notes to come up with arguments for their side and answers to arguments the other side might make. After the preparation period is over, the Pro side "serves" with an argument for their side. Con "returns" by refuting the argument. Pro "returns" by refuting that argument. And so on. Until someone drops the ball. (ADVICE: Often it helps to actually have a "ball" for each table so it's easier to keep track of who's talking) A team is said to drop the ball when any of the following rules have been violated:

• Players must respond within 15 seconds.
• Players must not repeat a point that has already been made without adding anything new.
• Players must use A-R-E to construct their arguments.
• Players must use 4-Step Refutation when answering arguments from the other side.

More information on ARE and 4-Step Refutation is available here, here, and here (that last one refers to our Teacher's Guide, which is about 11 MB). You don't have to include these rules, but it helps to give everyone a way to practice making complete arguments and following refutation procedures. Other rules include the following:

• A team can only score a point when they have “served” the ball and the other side drops the ball.
• If the team that serves drops the ball, the serve goes to the other side.
• The serve rotates between players. Once you’ve served, the next serve for your team goes to the player on your left.

It's a fun exercise. Students really like it, and it's a great way to do whole class debating without having to manage dozens of participants in a single debate.

In my country...

This week, we've had a group of 20 students and 6 teachers on campus. The students and teachers are from Jordan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. They're here with a program sponsored by Relief International, and they've already been in the United States for some time (previously, they were in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento). We've been working with the students to teach them the skills associated with discussion and public argument. They've learned argumentation and refutation (using the methods discussed elsewhere on this blog) and applied those skills to come up with ideas for effectively thinking about the topics they have prepared to discuss. The topics are:

• The government should more strictly regulate the media during national emergencies.
• Internet companies should not cooperate with government censorship.

The students spent today preparing to participate in panel discussions that will be filmed in the studio tomorrow. Interestingly, after practicing in discussions on both topics for an hour, each panel (they're in 5 groups of 4, each with a high school moderator from an outstanding group of students at the local high school) chose the first topic for their final discussion tomorrow. I think this was because they spent a bunch of time talking about the Internet and free speech earlier in the trip, and wanted to talk about something a bit different. To see the list of discussion questions we generated for each topic, you can download this Word document. In any case, we chose discussion as the format for this part of the exchange, rather than debate, because it allows for a more free-form activity that is still oral-intensive and requires all of the basic debate skills (except for the sophisticated note-taking part; although students should take notes during discussions, few do so - my theory about this is that they don't have as many incentives built into the format for note-taking; also, they're just not used to it. So, today while my co-worker John Meany was assisting with the trial discussions, I spent a few enjoyable hours meeting with the teachers. They are a diverse group- as I said, they're from 3 different countries. All were English teachers except for one, who is a computer teacher from Jordan. We had a wide-ranging discussion, a good bit of which was consumed by me teaching them about how to write and use different kinds of debate topics/writing prompts. I'm always fascinated to talk to teachers in other countries, not because teachers are so different from place to place, but because the assumptions that are made about how teaching and learning are best accomplished vary so widely among different cultures. Of course, this is certainly true in the United States, especially over time- witness the periodic swings between the "new math" and the "old math" and, lest we forget, the phonics wars. A few years ago, I spent some time with a group of teachers from formerly Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. These particular teachers were really struggling with the tradition of (very and exclusively) direct instruction they had inherited from their own teachers, and a culture of teaching that looked askance at classroom discussions or other instructional situations that might be unpredictable or not teacher-centered. It was so interesting, especially since (though I'm certainly a fan of direct instruction in any number of circumstances), most of the tools in my teaching kit are decidedly discussion oriented and even a bit chaos-provoking; not the kind of stuff that many of them would be prepared (or even allowed) to do in their own classroom. Today's group seemed less constrained and more interested in adopting inquiry and discussion based learning in their own classrooms. I'm not saying there's a trend (not a comparative education specialist myself ), but it was interesting when the teachers from Jordan mentioned, during the break, that they're increasingly being asked to function more as classroom facilitators. Interesting- the pendulum's swinging both ways at once, all over the world.

The five-finger rule

Not directly related to debate, but... I recently read Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, by Michael Smith & Jeffrey Wilhelm. I liked a lot of things about the book, as I'm a fan of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (that's pronounced "chick-sent-me-high," according to someone I know who knows him), and I appreciate the ways that Smith & Wilhelm link their work to the ideas of "flow" and "optimal challenge." Something that stuck with me from the book was the idea of the "five finger rule." Basically, this is a way for students to identify texts that may be a bit above their reading level- they open a text to a page, and raise a finger every time they encounter a word on that page that they don't know and can't figure out from the context. If they raise five fingers on that page, then the book (or article, or whatever) may be too far above their reading level. This was used in elementary school classes, according to the authors, but could be of some use in the middle grades, as well. When students are doing independent or guided research on current events for debating, they will often encounter texts that are pretty far above their reading level. Of course, we want them to challenge themselves, but we also don't want them to get frustrated and stop reading. Optimal challenge (pretty hard, but not too hard- think of it as a Goldilocks principle) is best. So, the "five finger rule" struck me as a guideline we could give to students to choose texts that are not too challenging. There should be a companion rule to help them select texts that are a little challenging- perhaps a "two finger rule?"

Good book, bad book

I spent some time in a charter school in Los Angeles last week. While I was there, I observed a talented young teacher struggling to engage a class of 10th graders who weren't excited about the novel they were reading. The book was Bless Me, Ultima - a great book, to be sure, but one that about half of the students plainly did not like or find particularly engaging. After class, I met with the teacher to talk about strategies for engaging the students. We talked about some different tactics, but one that we decided to try was an exercise called "Good Book, Bad Book." The idea is to have students make an argument about the book using the ARE method (discussed here last week, encouraging them to reflect on their impressions of the book so far from a "bigger picture" perspective. It's a simple exercise, but one works to engage students in discussion and debate about the merit of a particular text. I've uploaded the instructions and worksheet here as a Word document. Now, this may seem like a dangerous strategy- but it's not as if you're putting the book up for a vote; rather, you're trying to get students to reflect on the characteristics of a good or bad book, and to have an informed opinion (For example, if a student thinks the book is boring, they have to produce evidence from the text to support their opinion). I like this little exercise- it can be repeated periodically through a novel, and is a way to scaffold a book review assignment or other critical reading exercise where students use these worksheets as a way to develop criteria for analysis of texts. It's also an example of how you can integrate argumentation into the reading of literature, if only in a small way.

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: They say that we can't teach debate because there's no time to have debates in class. But you 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.

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

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.

Student Research and the Internet

I've long been concerned about how teachers can teach students to use the Internet in a constructive way - students encounter so much information online, and often they seem to believe that it's all equally valid or credible. There are good resources for teachers who want to teach Internet literacy, but even these are hard to manage for the average teacher, who is unlikely to have access to computers for all students in a given class. Even exercises and teaching methods that claim to work in the one-computer classroom, such as the outstanding WebQuest, get mixed reviews from teachers I work with, and may not fit into the demands of pacing guides. Of course, the issue of how to constructively integrate technology into the classroom is a much bigger issue than can be addressed here. There are a few outstanding sites that contain resources for teachers to teach Internet and information literacy. I've summarized and linked to those sites here. We've given a lot of thought to how teachers can facilitate student research, especially as the MSPDP is an extremely research-intensive program. While there is no substitute for the kind of media literacy lessons that should be associated with learning to use the Internet, there are some work-arounds that teachers can use, especially with beginning students. For example, it is best to begin with new students by giving them articles that you've pre-selected for content and readability, having students summarize the articles and work with them to extract elements for ARE-type charts. With most MSPDP topics, we try to do a "pre-think" and "pre-search" of the Internet to find good, readable articles to link to from our site. You can see examples of this kind of research here -- when topics are no longer current, we move them to our "Topic Research Guide" page, so links can still be used by classroom teachers and others browsing our site. People sometimes ask me how we choose what articles to link to. Basically, we look for articles that are attributable (there is a posted author for the article), articles that seem credible (we don't link to blogs like this one), articles that have age-appropriate content (no inappropriate ads or adult-themed links, and the reading level should be accessible for a motivated middle school student), and articles that do not require registration to read (this last one is a biggie- we don't feel like it's appropriate to ask young students to reveal their email addresses, even to credible news agencies. Most students will continue to believe, despite our best efforts, that Google is the best way to get information. And there's no disputing that Google works very well. But it must be supplemented by lessons and group work to teach students about the importance of credible and attributable information. Over the summer, I read this article about something called "Search 2.0," and I decided to experiment with a new service called Rollyo. Rollyo allows users to create "Search Rolls" within specified sites. It's no substitute for teaching information and Internet literacy, but it is a good stopgap measure, and has a lot of uses in the classroom. I've created a sample MSPDP Search Roll for use in debate research, using some of our cross-posting guidelines. You can see it here. I'm interested in feedback on the guided search concept.