Sophomore year of high school, my world history teacher, Mr. Lansman, ended the year with what he called the World Leader Debate. In pairs, we drafted one leader from world history. We researched that leader to justify that he or she was the best leader in the history of the world. After about a week of research, we would square off with other groups in the class to debate why our leader was better than theirs. We’d give an opening statement explaining why our leader was great, a rebuttal statement explaining why our competitor wasn’t, do a Q/A in which we attempted to point out the weaknesses of our opponent’s leadership while defending our own shortcomings, finishing with a brief closing statement to summarize our arguments. At the end, Mr. Lansman would score us on a 25 point rubric based on each section, the class would vote, and we’d determine a winner. After two opening round, round robin style matches to determine seeding, the groups with the two highest averages / records would advance to the class period championship. Winners then debated other class period champions. The final debate was held in front of the entire sophomore class in the high school library. It was incredible. It taught reading and writing, research, public speaking, critical thinking, …. everything. It became such a tradition that teachers from different grade levels and classes would bring in their students to watch. I loved it, so like any good teacher, I stole it.
I’ve done a different version of the World Leader Debate every year since I became a teacher. It’s almost a 15 year old project, and yet every year it continues to expose deeper layers of just how good it is for kids. As I reflected on it this year, I came up with 8 reasons why.
1. It’s social. Kids get to work with partners of their choosing, but they’re also competing against their classmates. You can see this reality slowly dawn on students every year. Kids start off their research on day one just like they would research for any other project: Quiet, a little bored, just sort of going through the motions. Eventually, usually about day two or three, there comes a moment where a group starts to research their opening round opponent. They find a good piece of dirt somewhere online and, inevitably shout out something like ”We found something on you!” to the group they will debate. You can almost see the light bulb flip on in the classroom: This look of “oh s*%$…..we actually have to debate each other….and they have something we don’t!” flips on….and we’re off to the races. Research and writing days, days that would otherwise be the “boring part” for most kids, become competition fueled dirt digging days of trash talk and laughter. That environment, social at its core, motivates kids more than anything I could dream up.
This is just the research phase! Once we get to the actual debate, we spend four to five straight days of class in which the only people in the room talking are students. The students are, essentially, in charge. They become the teachers, and they love it. This is a reward, in and of itself, for the hard work they put into their research and writing requirements. This leads to the last connection to the social nature of the project: Its rewards are social. If students make the semifinals, they get to debate in front of TWO whole classes. If they make the finals of the tournament, they get to debate in front of the whole grade level (and, if admin are as cool as they were this year, the whole school). Even though they say otherwise and get nervous about the public speaking, getting that level of social recognition is one of the greatest rewards for a high schooler. Again, it motivates them more than anything I could come up with.
2. It pushes kids to go deep (i.e. they don’t just check boxes off a rubric). If I were to assign a kid a research essay in which kids argued for why their selected person was a great leader, most would go about surface level with their research. They’d find the required support for their claim and call it good once they’d hit the rubric-required amount of info. But when they have to argue why their leader is greater than a classmate’s leader? All the sudden, they’re diving way beyond the surface to get an edge. Instead of “Abraham Lincoln is a great leader because he ended slavery,” and leaving it there, they’re diving in to how the Emancipation Proclamation altered the meaning of the Civil War, how the Homestead Act opened up the west, how the Morril Land Grant Act led to the creation of our modern university system. On the opposite side, the group against Lincoln isn’t just criticizing him for his suspension of habeas corpus, they’re explaining habeas corpus, how it’s a bedrock of American government, and how Lincoln’s violation of it was a dangerous precedent. This was high level stuff….and it was coming from 8th graders when I was at Milford. It had nothing to do with me, it had to do with the inherent motivation kids felt in their desire to one-up their classmates. This leads to the next point.
3. It causes “head fake” learning. “Head fake learning” is an expression I stole from Randy Pauseh in his book The Last Lecture. In his words, “the best way to teach someone something is to make them think they are learning something else.” I had a group this year that was doing opposition research against WEB Du Bois. They found a site that criticized Du Bois for joining the communist party late in life. They wanted to use it, but they also knew they had to understand communism if they were going to use it, because their competition would surely push back...in front of the whole class. So all the sudden, KaTory and I are having a detailed discussion about what communism is, leading to how it differs from capitalism, leading to a comparison and detailed discussion of “American values” and “private property”. One supporting detail against WEB Du Bois became a 15 minute discussion on economic systems and their influence on culture. Few other projects I do lead to that level of deep questioning and “head fake” learning.
4. It’s easy to learn, hard to master. The debate structure isn’t complicated. It doesn’t follow any formal debate style of rules or citation formatting/sourcing. I’ve thought about being more rigorous about this in the past, but have decided against it because I think kids would find it frustrating. So the project becomes easy: Write an opening, rebuttal, and closing statement based on a rubric. Use bibme and footnotes to cite sources MLA style. The Q/A is essentially a free for all where the only rules are that each team gets 3 questions max and only the person at the podium can speak. The simplicity makes it just as accessible to a 7th grader as it is to a Senior AP student. The difficulty is in thinking on one’s feet and in being well versed in the research enough to be able to think on the fly. But because most materials are prepared in advance and the structure is simple, the entry level is set where any group can feel like they were competitive. I have seen this be an incredible confidence boost for students who otherwise lack confidence in the classroom. When they get up and debate the “smart kids”....and stick with them, you can feel their joy and sense of accomplishment. Even if they lose, they held their own (in front of the whole class) with someone they previously perceived to be smarter than them. That has been very empowering for many of my students.
5. It makes kids feel like they did something awesome. This is mostly because it is genuinely difficult ... and somebody loses. We want kids to feel like they did something awesome, and in order to do that, there has to be a genuine sense of difficulty. So winners feel a strong sense of accomplishment when they experience success. When kids earn a 25/25 on a paper, they may feel some sense of accomplishment, but mostly they look at the grade, nod, and put it in their folder. But when they work hard and overcome a classmate? They smile, high five, yell out. They feel accomplished. This leads to the next point.
6. It teaches kids how to fail. Nobody likes to lose because it feels bad. It challenges our sense of ability and self worth….but it’s also a part of life. Losing is just as important as winning in the debate tournament. I’ve seen it happen that, when kids lose their first debate, they completely revamp their opening statements and go deeper in their rebuttal. They learn from their failures, and they’re better for it.
Unfortunately, someone has to lose and get knocked out for it to feel like there are real consequences. But really, and I tell the kids this, the only way to truly fail is to give up….and it still happens every year. Kids lose their first debate of the opening/seeding round and completely shut down, call the project stupid, call me biased, and give no effort in their second round debate. But those are the kids that need to fail because they clearly don’t know how to do it….yet. I tell them this after they cool off, and about 50% of the time, the kids nod their heads in agreement. Those moments are just as important as the joy & accomplishment felt by the winners. The failure is hard for kids, but most end up better for it.
Sometimes, though, the failure is hard for me too. I still think about a student named Emily who made the finals in my first year as a teacher at Louisville. She and her partner lost in the tournament championship, by one teacher vote...to her twin sister. She was in tears. She had to leave the room. She didn’t want to talk to me. Unfortunately, I never really got a chance to talk to her about the failure because we announced the winner on an awards night at the end of school. I still regret it. But in my failure to coach her through her loss, I learned how to have the tough conversations mentioned above. I learned from my failure, too.
7. It teaches kids the difference between an opinion and a fact. This is an important skill these days. The project is entirely opinion based. To be honest, there’s no objective way to prove that, say, Franklin Roosevelt was a better leader than Alexander the Great. But, at least initially, the kids don’t get that. To them, it’s a fact that one leader was better than another, they just have to explain that fact. It takes time for them to realize that, instead, it all has to do with how you define “greatness” and how you’re able to back up an opinion with supporting evidence. Kids find out quickly that arguments and opinions without facts to back them up are of little value. Hopefully that’s a life lesson they can carry with them to reshape flaws in our current political culture of “alternative facts” and emotion over reason.
8. It teaches reading and writing skills. This is the most obvious benefit of the project, but it’s a valuable one as we increasingly try to pull reading and language growth out of social studies classrooms. It’s telling that I have done this project both as a history teacher in Nebraska AND as an English teacher in Chicago. The research involved requires deep reading skills, the writing involved teaches writing organization, how to support a claim, and how to cite sources effectively. The public speaking portions are also a great supplement to public speaking units within English classes.
These are just the first 8 things that came to mind, there are more. The project was epic again this year because my assistant principal was so supportive of the project. She let us have our finals in front of the whole school! We had seniors in the front row oohing and awwwing our Sophomore’s when they burned each other in the rebuttal statements! The kids felt like gods, it was incredible! I hope I’ve gotten to the bottom of a least a few of the reasons for that. It’s one of the few projects that I make almost no changes from year to year. If you’re interested in using it, check out the sheet here. Send me an email or a tweet or something if you want rubrics / student examples, etc. Oh, and lastly, thank you to Mr. Lansman for passing this tradition on.