Determining success in a sea of challenges

By: Matt Grimes

The Rhode Island Urban Debate League will be entering its 12th year in September, and in many respects, it seems like we’re just starting out.  Sophie and I have surely benefitted from the efforts of student leaders and League directors who have come before us, but the same set of challenges seems to persist every season.  We have several teachers involved in the League who don’t seem to be very interested in teaching debate, preferring to take a back seat to Brown student volunteers–not exactly a sustainable model as students rarely maintain the same free afternoons over the course of a school year much less over four-year Brown tenures.  We have to call students at home to encourage them to come to camp, show up at lunch time to inform the student body of our existence in their school, and repeatedly remind team members of upcoming tournaments.  Teams dwindle over the school year, League administrators and coaches come and go, and the accumulated knowledge of how to teach debate or run  a league seems to graduate every couple years with the student coordinators.  While we spend a lot of time convincing our community partners of the benefits of debate, sometimes my pitches feel hollow in light of these facts.  How do we end this cycle of needing to re-establish our presence in schools every year, of needing to dedicate hours and hours to re-learning the best approaches to League operations, of needing to convince certain potential recruits of the importance of debate instead of having teams flourish on their own? 

These are not easy questions to answer, especially in one summer, so I think it’s important to have realistic expectations of how our project addressing one particular aspect of the League.  Curriculum development has the capacity to address a number of the factors limiting our ability to reach as many students as possible, but can’t tackle them all.  With a revised curriculum, we will hopefully be able to maintain student interest throughout the year, progressing from mastered skill to mastered skill instead of throwing an overwhelming quantity of information from the start.  This would (also? possibly?) improve teacher engagement , giving a better sense of ownership over the activity as a whole that would ideally translate into increased efforts for recruitment and establishing a strong presence in the schools.  For everyone involved (including Brown volunteers), best practices would be documented and new teaching innovations could flourish as basic lessons are already put together.  All of this is great, and if everything goes to plan, we should see some positive signs over the coming school year.  But it won’t be enough to make the program self-sustaining.  Not even close.  

It would be easy to end this summer with a new curriculum packet, call it a day on big RIUDL reforms,  and judge its success or failure based on participation levels, quality of debate, and teacher feedback.  In this scenario, I think we’re bound to judge our project harshly.  We can only make a significant impact when this reform is accompanied by many others, large and small, and clearly improving the League should be our ultimate goal.  The tradeoff is that we won’t be able to tell if the curriculum work is directly, causally  responsible for positive (or even negative) changes in the League.  While it would be great to know this, particularly as it could serve as a model for others, I think we’ll have to be wiling to make this sacrifice.  I’d much rather be confident that the League is in a good place overall and not be able to attribute it to the particular project Sophie and I are working on than know we put out a great curriculum  but see the League stagnate.  Implementing the Starr lessons on program evaluation, however, will be made a little more challenging.

RI Urban Debate League – Elevator Pitch

A New Curriculum for Providence Debaters

by Matt Grimes

In the wake of our second RIUDL tournament of the 2008-9 school year, I was a little discouraged.  Despite two months of intense preparation, many students seemed to lack a strong handle on the most basic debate skills.  As the student coordinator in charge of curriculum, I took this failure personally—how should I have reorganized the progression of the lesson plans?  What activities could have made the material more engaging for students, enhancing their mastery of the subject?  Did I hold unreasonably high expectations of our debaters?  In our subsequent weekly meeting, our volunteer coaching assistants and the other student coordinators expressed similar concerns.
I was fortunate enough to eat dinner with Sophie that evening where we shared hypotheses about the problems facing our league.  Granted, our students seemed to enjoy debating political issues and working with their peers, but our personal experiences with debate suggested the activity had far more to offer young people than an outlet for competition.  We eventually decided that we were trying too hard to reproduce our own high school debate careers rather than targeting our efforts toward the specific needs of Rhode Island students.  Expecting hours of work every week rewriting debate arguments and giving practice speeches may be legitimate in an upper middle class setting, but applying that model of debate to a group of students who work dozens of hours in draining jobs every week was clearly not realistic.  Unfortunately, our curricular resources seemed to push our teaching in this direction, leading us to resolve to completely redesign the RIUDL’s approach to the activity.
While I firmly stand behind this decision to change our teaching style and am looking forward to the possibility of spending my summer working on this project, I fear we could be asking too much of ourselves.  Reform has been a widely discussed issue in the debate community for at least the past decade.  Our combined experience as debaters and coaches will surely serve us well in this endeavor, but how can we expect to succeed where other attempts have failed or produced serious backlash?  Do we risk making our students worse-off as we abandon a mildly effective approach for a fairly unprecedented one?
Ultimately, I think the RIUDL provides an excellent laboratory for testing new approaches to debate in an urban school setting.  We have a small enough community that we can rapidly assess the efficacy of our new techniques through conversations with various local stakeholders and adapt them accordingly.  Our relative isolation from broader trends in policy debate suggests our project will not face intense criticism from outsiders, hopefully giving our new methods time to take hold.  While our students may spend some time at the beginning of the school year adjusting to the new curriculum, I hope they will still enjoy their encounters with other politically engaged Rhode Islanders and see the value in challenging themselves beyond the classroom setting.  Though I am uncertain we will completely change the nature of debate, I am certainly excited for the challenge.