TEACHING
For an idea of what it is like to be in my classroom, this is an essay I wrote on using in-class debates. This essay was selected to be part of a departmental teaching manual at New York University.
In-Class Debates for Deeper Learning
By taking on the role of historical actors for an in-class debate, students engage in a dynamic conversation with ideas from their readings and those raised by their classmates. Students must understand and scrutinize the material more deeply than they would by simply reading or writing. Further, students gain a concrete understanding of how historical decisions and debates are fraught and indeterminate. In my summer course entitled ‘“Aiding’ the Sick, Poor, and Hungry: African Development in Debate,” students debated the issue of development aid to Africa.
There are three key steps to having a productive debate: preparation, facilitation, and reflection.
Preparation
In the classes preceding the debate, students work towards understanding the players, concepts, and terms to be raised in the debate. As a whole class or in small groups, have students clarify terms or references and identify key points from their readings, lectures, and in-class discussions. This preparatory work could be shared online via a collective Google Doc or discussion board on NYU Classes. Students are not yet assigned to teams and therefore have an incentive to understand all readings thoroughly.
As a class, create a guiding question that your debate will seek to answer. Our question was purposefully kept broad, and was something like: Based on past experience, what should the future of development aid in Africa consist of, and why? Also, decide on a debate format. I created a simple format with time limits for opening remarks, rebuttals, and conclusions. However, there are many different formats to choose from, and you may wish to consult this website for more options as well as general debating resources.
Next, work together as a class to determine criteria for assessment and norms for the debate. Criteria can vary, but should include some sort of rubric for making sure that each member of the team participates during the debate, and that people speak to one another in a respectful tone. Students should also be encouraged to cite specific examples from the texts they have read in the course of their argument. This is particularly useful if students are presenting controversial arguments, since presenting the actual words of someone else is more palatable than making broad, unsubstantiated statements.
Last, divide the students into teams, seeking a balance based on factors such as gender, ability, and ethnicity. Our four teams represented the viewpoints of Jeffry Sachs, Dambisa Moyo, William Easterly, and Paul Collier. Have each team read more materials to help formulate their ideas. It can be helpful to prepare a bibliography and make readings available online via NYU Classes. Give the students time in class to work in their teams. Float around asking and answering questions of each team. Have students decide who within their team will speak at which point in the debate structure. Students must prepare to apply the scholar’s viewpoint to arguments their classmates raise. To practice this, you could have two members of the Collier team come up with some of the arguments Easterly may lodge against him, and have the other two members practice responding to them. Easterly has, in broad terms, asserted that aid has had a mostly negative impact on development in Africa. Collier’s rebuttal to this is that the negative impact of aid has been exaggerated, and if aid were to be more focused on the bottom billion, and there were greater G8 involvement, aid could be more effective.
Facilitation
Before beginning the debate, quickly review the assessment criteria, debating norms, and debate structure established last class, and make sure all of this information is visible to all during the debate. The debate works best when the students are in control as much as possible. If you are concerned about some students dominating the debate, you can give each student a fixed number of chips or tokens that they have to turn in each time they speak.
I was also prepared with a few questions to jumpstart the debate if it stalled at any point. Generally, the students pushed the debate forward and I merely took notes for future reference. I made signs with each debate team’s name. Depending upon the debate theme and your teaching style you can encourage your students to get into character through costumes or props.
Reflection
Individual and group reflection helps students process the debate proceedings. Each student should write a few pages between the debate and the next class. This is a graded exercise that is noted on the syllabus. Some general questions for students to answer are: how has your thinking about the issues changed based on the debate, what conclusions can you draw, what questions were not answered, what were the most clarifying and confusing moments of the debate? These questions will be discussed as an entire class after they have written their individual reflection pieces. The quieter students are more likely to talk if they have something prepared, and this individual reflection work helps everyone to have a more focused discussion.
When to use in-class debates
Your class could debate a well-known meeting or decision: Japan’s decision to open to the West during the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Oslo accords in the Middle East, or the Constitutional Convention in the United States. Or, the debate could be an amalgam of a series of debates or a set of related historical questions. In either case, try to have the class frame the guiding question in a broad enough way that it does not over-determine the direction of the debate. For one of the lessons learned from the act of debating is to see the historical decision making process as fraught and contingent, and to emphasize the idea of the process itself as opposed to a conception of history as a set of neatly defined outcomes.
Do not be too literal in debating a particular historical conjuncture. It is not a historical reenactment. For example, you could include a recently freed slave at the Constitutional Convention. This addition would be to encourage students to think about how freed slaves might have felt about the issues at stake, and about the significance of excluding certain groups from crucial historical decision-making moments.
Students greatly enjoyed our in-class debate. The benefits went beyond the debate itself, as students raised points from the debate in subsequent class sessions. It also helped set the tone for future class discussions, making students more comfortable contributing and interacting with each others’ ideas.
For an idea of what it is like to be in my classroom, this is an essay I wrote on using in-class debates. This essay was selected to be part of a departmental teaching manual at New York University.
In-Class Debates for Deeper Learning
By taking on the role of historical actors for an in-class debate, students engage in a dynamic conversation with ideas from their readings and those raised by their classmates. Students must understand and scrutinize the material more deeply than they would by simply reading or writing. Further, students gain a concrete understanding of how historical decisions and debates are fraught and indeterminate. In my summer course entitled ‘“Aiding’ the Sick, Poor, and Hungry: African Development in Debate,” students debated the issue of development aid to Africa.
There are three key steps to having a productive debate: preparation, facilitation, and reflection.
Preparation
In the classes preceding the debate, students work towards understanding the players, concepts, and terms to be raised in the debate. As a whole class or in small groups, have students clarify terms or references and identify key points from their readings, lectures, and in-class discussions. This preparatory work could be shared online via a collective Google Doc or discussion board on NYU Classes. Students are not yet assigned to teams and therefore have an incentive to understand all readings thoroughly.
As a class, create a guiding question that your debate will seek to answer. Our question was purposefully kept broad, and was something like: Based on past experience, what should the future of development aid in Africa consist of, and why? Also, decide on a debate format. I created a simple format with time limits for opening remarks, rebuttals, and conclusions. However, there are many different formats to choose from, and you may wish to consult this website for more options as well as general debating resources.
Next, work together as a class to determine criteria for assessment and norms for the debate. Criteria can vary, but should include some sort of rubric for making sure that each member of the team participates during the debate, and that people speak to one another in a respectful tone. Students should also be encouraged to cite specific examples from the texts they have read in the course of their argument. This is particularly useful if students are presenting controversial arguments, since presenting the actual words of someone else is more palatable than making broad, unsubstantiated statements.
Last, divide the students into teams, seeking a balance based on factors such as gender, ability, and ethnicity. Our four teams represented the viewpoints of Jeffry Sachs, Dambisa Moyo, William Easterly, and Paul Collier. Have each team read more materials to help formulate their ideas. It can be helpful to prepare a bibliography and make readings available online via NYU Classes. Give the students time in class to work in their teams. Float around asking and answering questions of each team. Have students decide who within their team will speak at which point in the debate structure. Students must prepare to apply the scholar’s viewpoint to arguments their classmates raise. To practice this, you could have two members of the Collier team come up with some of the arguments Easterly may lodge against him, and have the other two members practice responding to them. Easterly has, in broad terms, asserted that aid has had a mostly negative impact on development in Africa. Collier’s rebuttal to this is that the negative impact of aid has been exaggerated, and if aid were to be more focused on the bottom billion, and there were greater G8 involvement, aid could be more effective.
Facilitation
Before beginning the debate, quickly review the assessment criteria, debating norms, and debate structure established last class, and make sure all of this information is visible to all during the debate. The debate works best when the students are in control as much as possible. If you are concerned about some students dominating the debate, you can give each student a fixed number of chips or tokens that they have to turn in each time they speak.
I was also prepared with a few questions to jumpstart the debate if it stalled at any point. Generally, the students pushed the debate forward and I merely took notes for future reference. I made signs with each debate team’s name. Depending upon the debate theme and your teaching style you can encourage your students to get into character through costumes or props.
Reflection
Individual and group reflection helps students process the debate proceedings. Each student should write a few pages between the debate and the next class. This is a graded exercise that is noted on the syllabus. Some general questions for students to answer are: how has your thinking about the issues changed based on the debate, what conclusions can you draw, what questions were not answered, what were the most clarifying and confusing moments of the debate? These questions will be discussed as an entire class after they have written their individual reflection pieces. The quieter students are more likely to talk if they have something prepared, and this individual reflection work helps everyone to have a more focused discussion.
When to use in-class debates
Your class could debate a well-known meeting or decision: Japan’s decision to open to the West during the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Oslo accords in the Middle East, or the Constitutional Convention in the United States. Or, the debate could be an amalgam of a series of debates or a set of related historical questions. In either case, try to have the class frame the guiding question in a broad enough way that it does not over-determine the direction of the debate. For one of the lessons learned from the act of debating is to see the historical decision making process as fraught and contingent, and to emphasize the idea of the process itself as opposed to a conception of history as a set of neatly defined outcomes.
Do not be too literal in debating a particular historical conjuncture. It is not a historical reenactment. For example, you could include a recently freed slave at the Constitutional Convention. This addition would be to encourage students to think about how freed slaves might have felt about the issues at stake, and about the significance of excluding certain groups from crucial historical decision-making moments.
Students greatly enjoyed our in-class debate. The benefits went beyond the debate itself, as students raised points from the debate in subsequent class sessions. It also helped set the tone for future class discussions, making students more comfortable contributing and interacting with each others’ ideas.
