March 20, 2024

In today’s visit to Greentown Primary, we created a lesson with a balance of fun activities and productive learning, to provide an enjoyable yet informative session for the kids. We started the session off with a fun game called, “If I ruled the world”. Each student had some time to brainstorm ideas, and they each took turns putting on a paper crown, then sharing their idea to the class. This little game was incredibly effective in getting students excited for the lesson and entering a “creative thinking” mindset. As for the main part of our lesson, we focused on some debate vocabulary and sentence structure learning. For the past few sessions, we’ve mainly focused on structure and the basics on how to give an argumentative speech. Thus, taking the advice of Ms. Uttam (who very briefly watched the end of our previous session), we chose to incorporate some more technical, english-based learning. In this way, students would be able to get an all-rounded understanding of debate—in skill, structure and language. To make the information easier to retain, we also created a handout with a summary of all the vocabulary or sentence structures they can use in speeches. After the main lesson, we split off into smaller groups and conducted a few debates. To encourage students to put their newly learned knowledge into practice, we told them that they would receive a piece of candy if they utilised those vocabularies in their speeches. Overall, it was a very effective tactic (as expected), and I had lots of fun this session! In terms of the plan for the next visit, we will devise fun and challenging activities to provide the students with an extremely memorable last lesson!

March 13, 2024

Today marks the second last session of Links Group A. In order to maximise engagement, we bought candies as a reward incentive system, which effectively brought everyone together. Utilising a hand crafted golden paper crown, we played a highly interactive game called “If I ruled the world…”. This game likely encouraged participants to think creatively and express their ideas about changes they would make if they had the power to rule the world. The crown added an element of fun and excitement to the activity. Another highlight of this visit was an activity which involved students having to pick and run towards one out of the four corners of the classroom, depending on their answer. The active nature of this game made for an immensely enjoyable experience, for both us and the students! Furthermore, students fortunately recalled significant amounts of the PEEL structure and vocabulary from previous sessions. Ultimately, this built up to a relatively competitive debate after we split up into two rooms. For the majority of this session, I was filming on my camera in order to achieve a final introductory film for Debate Links, so the other students in my group took charge. They did a phenomenal job in maintaining high energy and spirit, which we will definitely aim for in our last session!

March 6, 2024

This week, our lesson was centred around how to create an argument. While brainstorming ways to teach this in a simple, engaging way, we decided to go with the acronym PEL (Point, Example, Link). In our lesson, we started off by reviewing what we learned previously (prop/opp), and taught the kids how to build an argument through PEL. We then split into smaller groups and did an activity where the teacher would provide a “point” (argument), and the students would have to come up with the “E” and “L”. In this process, we made sure that every student could understand this structure. Furthermore, this small group activity allowed every student to easily contribute to the discussion. After this activity, we explained the structure of a debate (speaker orders, speech structure) and we then split off into two rooms to conduct debates. We had 6 students per debate/3 students per side and gave them some time to each write a “PEL” regarding the motion that we decided on. After they were done preparing, they each got up to the front of the classroom to give their speech, and we allowed for open discussion of the topic between prop/opp teams after each student had delivered their PEL speech. Overall, I would say that it was a very successful session. The students were incredibly engaged throughout, they all successfully gave PEL speeches and had argumentative discussions with each other. For next time, rather than simply focusing on debate/argument skills, we could incorporate a vocabulary/sentence-structure learning segment as well. As evidence of our impact, our CP actually sent us a photo of one of his students utilising the PEL structure we had taught in her classwork. I am more than ecstatic that our hard work is bearing fruit, and we can’t wait to return!

January 17, 2024

Today was my first day teaching at the Greentown Debate links location, and I would say that it was definitely a huge success. The moment the kids walked into the classroom, I could already feel their energy, curiosity and enthusiasm. They were all smiling as they took their seats, and immediately, with an excited mindset, the four of us started the lesson. In today’s class, we started off with some self-introductions, then moved on to ice-breakers. We had all the students make their own card-paper name tags, including drawings of different things that they liked. Right after I showed them an example name tag, they quickly got to work drawing, laughing and conversing with each other. After they finished creating their name tags, we had everyone introduce themself and share 1 thing about themself. Just in this little sharing activity, I could sense how eager they all were to participate in group discussions. Then, we moved onto the next activity. We had prepared different motions (statements) to display on the slideshow (e.g. cats are better than dogs/there should be no school uniforms), and Miya stood on the left side of the classroom with a sign saying “No”, while Lindsay stood on the other side with a sign that read “Yes”. We then asked the students to stand next to the side that they agreed with. We repeated this process with 5 different relatable opinion statements, and I noticed that many of the students were already starting to debate with each other during the exercise. After going through all the motions, we went back to the first one (cats vs. dogs) as we noticed it seemed to be the one the students found most interesting and were already starting to argue about. Now that the students had chosen their sides (“Yes” or “No”), we introduced the debate terms of Proposition and Opposition to them. Thereafter, we split off into the two teams in two separate classrooms; with two teachers on Proposition and two teams with side Opposition. We then took around 10 minutes to have the students discuss their points. We prepared large papers and had them create a mind map that included their reasons as to why they think their side is better. During this discussion, every student had something to contribute to the mind map, and they all had such creative ideas! They were all able to clearly articulate their points, but also weren’t afraid to ask questions when they were confused. In this brainstorming exercise, I found myself barely having to direct the discussion at all; other than the occasional vague guiding question, the students were completely on task, coming up with all kinds of clever reasons and even sharing their own personal experiences. As the brainstorming came to a close, we had everyone go back to the main room and begin a mini “debate”. Essentially, students would sit with their respective teams and would take turns sharing some of the points they had come up with as to why their side of the argument was better. Once again, they were highly engaged and energetic - students were getting up onto their feet to shout out their points, furiously rebutting arguments coming from their opponents in a heated debate, and there really wasn’t a single moment of silence. Every student was laughing the whole time, and I could tell that they were genuinely having fun. Later on, we repeated this same activity but with another motion. To end the class, we had everyone write an exit ticket, including 1 thing they learned and 1 topic they would like to discuss in a next class. In conclusion, I think we did a great job with creating fun, engaging activities to capture the interest of the students. We made sure to talk slowly, make instructions clear, and be patient with all their questions. Throughout group discussions, we made a big effort to try and include every student, so that they all had a chance to share and make a contribution. For next time, we could definitely work on having more structure in the activities, and incorporate more hands-on, debate-specific “learning” exercises into the lesson. Overall, I am really grateful that I was given the opportunity to share debate with a group of such welcoming, talented students.

March 30, 2022

In this week’s class, we hoped to organize a more official debate and take our students through the entire experience, from prepping to speaking and then feedback. In previous classes, we realized that students’ thoughts are often disorganized, and their points tend to be repetitive due to the lack of clear communication. Thus, we felt the need to introduce our students to the concept of a prep structure, from individual brainstorming to the sharing and ranking of argument points as a team. The outcome was just fabulous. Each group developed more insightful arguments thanks to the individual brainstorming sessions. Because of their effective communication beforehand, students didn’t repeat any already mentioned points and elaborated on arguments that weren’t touched upon. The structure of the debate was just so much more organized and higher-leveled.

Furthermore, we also used this lesson to introduce our students to the idea of rebuttals. We have seen them subtly do rebuttals in the previous debates already, so we felt like today was the right time to make it official so that they could incorporate rebuttals into the beginning of their speech in a more structured and deliberate manner. Our students embraced this new concept incredibly well and utilized this new knowledge immediately at the end of the class debate! Since we had a lot of content to go over today, we paid special attention to keeping our students engaged by asking them questions and just walking around the classroom to let them feel our physical proximity. This method worked like magic, and we realized that a zoning out student would “wake up” immediately when we walked behind them! We are super glad that we were able to learn from last time and make this class more engaging for our students!