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What is Structured Student Debate?
A structured student debate is a designed opportunity for students to discuss and organize points of view regarding a specific topic. Integrating textual primary and secondary sources helps to focus the student discourse more on citing evidence from the text to support claims.
Why is Structured Student Debate important?
Having students organize and discuss a perspective of an argument creates opportunities for students to discover new knowledge as they listen to and consider various points of view on a topic. Additionally, students develop interpersonal and communication skills. Structuring the debate by providing claims and using sentence frames supports all learners develop academic language and helps to focus the discussion on the intended academic topic.
How to use Structured Student Debate?
Provide informative text at a level appropriate for the age group of students in the class, and consider modeling a structured procedure for analyzing the source, so that students can then identify examples supporting a statement regarding the text, as well as identify counterexamples that would disprove the statement.
Provide different claims (some in support of a statement as well as some against the same statement) for small groups to discuss.
Allow sufficient time for students to find and discuss evidence from their source that support a claim or support a counter argument
Consider using rotations so that all students have access to all claims.
Use structured reading response like Cloze reading or Choral Reading to introduce sentence frames for the structured debate
Facilitate a mini-debate. A possible strategy for the mini-debate is utilizing two lines of students facing each other and having one student step forward to begin the conversation, providing a statement, then stepping back in line while a student from the opposite line could step forward to state a rebuttal
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