How do you teach what’s really important?

Yesterday I walked through the familiar maroon doors of Stephen F. Austin High School, a building that I knew all too well for a four-year period.  Since graduating from high school, however, I have avoided stepping onto the campus, appreciating my education and memories from a distance.  But yesterday I returned to Room 302, my old debate classroom, with all the same posters on the walls and only a few minor changes in the arrangement of the desks.

In hindsight, my return to this classroom makes sense.  Of all the activities I participated in during high school, I most obviously see the benefits of debate.  The skills that I gained in this activity transferred to my writing in literature classes, my analysis of statistics and my ability to argue with my parents at the dinner table.  Learning how to debate has immediate impacts and ferments the desire to think critically about the realities of our world and then go on to solve some of these problems.  In theory, it is an incredible activity.

Yet even now I have the exact same complaints with debate that I did in high school.  Why do we have to learn the terminology?  Why do we have to follow so many rules?  Why does one person have to be declared a winner when the issues are so vast?  Why don’t we get so angry at the government or corporations or failed programs that we actually walk out of the classrooms and do something about it?  Why does improving at this activity bring one into an even more isolated world of hypothetical conversations instead of promoting activism?

Teaching debate in Providence, rather than participating in the activity as a student, is now becoming its own form of activism.  Yes, I am still spending my afternoons in high school classrooms instead of at the State House, but now I enter these schools with more of a mission.  Our goal is not just to teach students how to research, read tough authors or speak articulately.  Even more, we want to show these students that this ability to think about complex issues will enable them to affect future micro and macro policy decisions.  Many of our lawmakers are former debaters; many people in power grew up with this activity.  We at the RIUDL want bright, motivated Rhode Island public high school students to have the passion and credentials to be the next agents of change.

This socially conscious goal was never explicitly expressed in my high school debate program.  We talked about tournaments and the specific topics and which intellectual could be most helpful to a certain position.  Yet the spirit of social change must have somehow seeped into us, because most of my peers and I went on to care about something broader than the internal world of debate.  We looked back and got what it was really about.

Now I sit here comparing my experience of high school to the mission of the Swearer Center, which expressly communicates its desire to address inequalities, share knowledge of the public good and “prepare students for lives of effective action.”  Debate taught me to do all of these things, but even today I have no idea if that was the intention of my coaches or by chance.  If it was by chance, should I just trust that debate imparts these same goals and desires on all participants?  If it was a focus of my high school coaches, must I too make these goals so subtle?

These questions are perhaps what any teacher or parent asks: If I have a clear goal, do I make it known or just hope that all turns out well?  Or do I let these desires develop organically, and avoid steering people in any one direction?  This is perhaps an issue of trust – in a program, in another person, in the culmination of many experiences and observations.

Going back to Austin High felt good; I no longer felt the anxieties of being a high school student.  I could view my education with a distance, even in the building that housed much of it.  But returning did not answer my questions of intentions or expectations of my debate coaches.  And perhaps this is one of the great secrets of debate: under the mask of concern over competition or trophies, everyone in this world understands the gravity and power of this activity on the lives of these students and the future of our society.

Sophie Elsner
Rhode Island Urban Debate League

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.

Rewriting a Curriculum & Redefining my Relationship to the RIUDL

If designing a comprehensive and engaging debate curriculum for Rhode Island high school students were easy, someone likely would have done it in the past ten years.  In the RIUDL’s history, various Brown students and Providence teachers have worked to modify how we teach debate.  Some would argue that our curriculum has succeeded: many students, frequently coming from underserved schools, can discuss complex concepts and policies.  Others would say that despite our best intentions, the students entering the RIUDL with the strongest reading and writing backgrounds are almost always the ones who win; we know how to teach debate, but perhaps only in a way that benefits most privileged students.  My partner Matt Grimes and I hold a view that falls somewhere in the middle. We have a lot of faith in debate, and we know that something is working.  Yet even after ten years, the RIUDL has not completely learned how to overcome the challenges of working with students who lack reading skills, free time after school, or access to the Internet and good libraries.  Our task is not to create the dream curriculum for debate but rather to design one that is exciting, challenging and manageable for our participants.

One question that we face concerning curriculum is: are we revising or revolutionizing?  As Matt and I began to question the outcomes of the RIUDL – Were we engaging enough students? Were we serving participants as well as possible? Were we teaching debate in a way that truly gave every student a chance at winning? – we never thought about changing the model of the RIUDL.  We believe that the RIUDL’s partnership with the Swearer Center and the Providence Public School District is valuable for everyone involved.  We trust that through debate we can accomplish our goals of education and commitment to national and global issues.  We always thought that the RIUDL had enough strength to be remodeled from within.

Can the same be said for our curriculum specifically?  Is what we have now strong enough to provide a foundation for further development, or do we need to completely revamp the way we teach debate?  What intimidates me most about the latter possibility is not the task itself, but that perhaps by taking on this difficult goal, we are lacking a sense of humility that two college students should have.  In the RIUDL triangle of teachers, Brown volunteers and high school students, Matt and I find ourselves in a strange place.  We help to run this organization, but we also recognize that we work with professionals who have dedicated their careers to teaching students.  Yes, we have the debate background; but are we qualified to tell others how to effectively transmit knowledge?

I’m sure many of my peers are facing these same questions as we all try to find a balance between offering support, a fresh perspective and valid criticism while respecting the efforts of community partners who have long been in the field that we entered relatively recently.  Throughout my two years with the RIUDL, I have tried to find my place as both a student and a leader.  Taking on more obligations this summer and in the coming year will only force more introspection in how to humbly, responsibly and thoughtfully participate in an organization that has a strong foundation yet also needs some extensive repairs.

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.