SPAR Debate: A Format for Rigorous, Real, Ready-to-Go Debating in Class
Overview
SPAR Debate is an excellent way to introduce students to debating in the classroom. It’s an activity for getting students initially exposed to debating, but also for isolating and introducing the key elements of academic argumentation.
SPAR is short for Spontaneous Argumentation debates. The term connotes, too, some of the jousting and practicing that we think of as “sparring.” SPAR Debate can be used with minimal research, and is therefore a very good format for getting students up and arguing. SPAR Debate can be used with academic issues, as a way to begin to immerse students in curricular content, or with non-academic (“fun”) issues, as a way to focus on debating format and individual argumentation skills.
Review of PBS Learning Media Election Central Resources
PBS Learning Media just posted its 2016 Presidential Debates curricular resources.
Its collaboration with We the Voters (an advocacy group formed by persons in the media concerned with civic and voter engagement, especially among teens and young adults) emphasizes rhetorical techniques — e.g., ad hominem attacks, sowing doubt, false equivalency — debaters use to evade rigorous argumentation.
Not All at Once: Academic Argument Skills Building Sequences for HS and MS
Teachers and administrators from Argument-Centered Education partner schools have made an important request over the past couple of years: since we cannot expect students to learn the difficult skills of academic argumentation all at once, how can these skills be taught and built in sequence?
Document-Based Argument Writing: Immigration from the Middle East
This is an argument-centered writing assessment designed to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills, in an in-class and on-demand setting. Both because of the college-directed rigor of the preparatory work that students will be immersed in, and because of the conditions under which students will be writing, this assessment is also highly aligned with the new SAT exam, so it is an authentic, properly embedded and seamless part of an instructional strategy that has raising students’ college exam scores as one of its objectives. And finally it is document-based, so it parallels the kind of AP Exam writing that many students will be striving to master.
Issue: The United States should significantly restrict immigration from the Middle Eastern due to the possibility of terrorism.
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Fact Checking Evidence in the 2016 Presidential Debates
The Republican presidential nominee has produced more falsehoods than the major fact-checking sites have identified from a major presidential candidate since they came into existence. The Democratic nominee hasn’t come anywhere close to that. But she’s not exactly dwelling in Honest Abe territory, either.
— New York Times, September 26, 2016, p.B1