Debate Activity

When I perfected this debate activity, the English Learners in my classes begged me to do more debates! More speaking and listening about complex topics? Yes, please! This process took me years to perfect, and I am so happy that I didn’t quit.

Classroom Debate Guidelines

There are many pitfalls on the road to a successful classroom debate. Here are some guidelines that I’ve perfected over the years.

1. Choose a topic that has both depth and passion. More on this below.
2. Randomly assign students to a side. Your class will not evenly split naturally. This prevents students from only thinking from their preferred perspective or aligning with their friends. I explain that this is how it is for lawyers. They have to argue their case whether or not they personally support it.
3. Give ample preparation time, including time to develop thinking in writing, before the debate. This ensures everyone has thought enough about the topic to have something to say.
4. Have clearly defined roles for every member of the debate team. If your class is larger than 20, host two debates. You can do one group and then the other, and assign students to take notes when it is not their round (they can even vote for the winning side, if you want to have winners). You can run the debates concurrently if you are less concerned about assessment. For example, if the debate is to introduce a topic, you may not be as concerned with hearing what everyone says.
5. Let students preview the other team’s opening argument. In a competitive debate, it would be up to students to listen, but in a general classroom, I’ve found that I get better debates if the students know what the other team is going to say. Because they are amateurs, they just don’t have anticipation built yet. If you do multiple debates in the school year, you could challenge students by removing this scaffold.

Debate Topics: ESL

While this is what I did for my language arts ESL-only classes, it could apply to general education too. I used to introduce debate with simple topics like cats vs. dogs, but the students struggled to come up with much to say, so then I would end up giving them articles to back up their points and now I am teaching cats vs. dogs and that is not my content 🙃

Instead, I find the intersection between depth and passion. For example, after reading The Giver, we read about censorship. Students quickly leapt to the real-world applications of this topic. Some of them had immigrated from censorship-heavy countries. Some of them drew connections between censorship and protecting ICE officers who had assaulted immigrants from legal consequences. This was a topic we had studied in-depth and also they felt personally connected to studying.

Debate topics can spring from fiction by focusing on the real-world elements behind the story, as above. They can also emerge from current events or global issues. SIRS Issues Researcher is my favorite source for debates. It provides solid topics and some starter resources for research. If your school does not have a subscription, be prepared to find a few student-friendly articles for and against your selected topic.

Be sure your topic isn’t too lop-sided. It should not be a topic that has a clear answer. In the censorship topic, it may seem easy to say that censorship is bad, but the students on the other side were able to argue that all governments have some censorship to protect matters of national security and to protect people from some forms of discriminatory and hateful language.

Classroom Debate Example

I follow something close to NSDA’S public forum debate. Normally, this is done by teams of two, with each student doing more than one job. I use bigger teams for the following jobs:

I have one person for each of speaker 1-4 plus at least one questioner, but I usually have extra questioners on each team. That way, if someone is sick, they can sub in to a speaker role and use that person’s notes.

Here is the order. I let the team I think will have the easier time of it go first (so the team with the harder burden get to have the final word). You could also flip a coin. I will refer to the teams as A or B.

Speaker 1A

Speaker 1B

Questions

Speaker 2A

Speaker 2B

Questions

Speaker 3A

Speaker 3B

Questions

Speaker 4A

Speaker 4B

While the students debate, I keep notes of who said what and try to track what’s been refuted. I also keep track of who asked questions to make sure one side doesn’t sneak in more questions than the other.

When to use a debate activity?

The determining factor for timing is the amount of background knowledge students have and the purpose behind the debate.

High background knowledge = use debate to introduce a unit while activating the background knowledge.

Medium background knowledge = use debate after text to prepare to write an argumentative essay. This was the follow-up to the censorship unit. Because they had read and debated, they were more prepared to write. They were also able to choose the side they wanted to write for support. Either way, they were able to develop counterclaims because they had spent time thinking about both.

Low background knowledge = use debate to review after writing essays. Ecotourism was a topic that my students didn’t know a lot about (but should, since it affected many of their home countries). We read a lot of articles together and then wrote about our personal perspectives before debating as a capstone experience.

Debate Activity | Step-by-Step Prep Lessons & Outline

These step-by-step prep lessons and outline is the perfect way to introduce a course topic or prepare students before writing an argumentative essay. Can be used whole-class or small-group. It includes

•2 days of slides and prep activities for 5 different debate roles

•slides to keep the debate on track during the round and a note tracker for the teacher to evaluate the debate