Formal Debate: Confidence and Public Speaking - Life, Study, & Social Skills

Our mission is to give students the tools they need to become Global Citizens of the 21st Century. We help shape resilient, confident individuals, who will be equipped with practical life skills integrated with academics, to ensure success in the real world, beyond their school careers. We use mainly inquiry-based methodologies to encourage our learners to develop sharp, critical, and sensitive minds. 

In this one-time group class, your learner will begin by engaging in some friendly discussion about everyday topics. For example: Are dogs better than cats? Is fiction better than nonfiction? They will then move on to more controversial topics, such as whether social media actually makes people more sociable, the pros and cons of vegetarianism, and the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence for humanity. They will then read about how to structure a formal debate using an opening statement, an argument, a rebuttal, and concluding remarks. They will also watch a video of some teenage students engaging in a debate and identify how the speakers communicate their ideas in a concise and engaging manner. For their main task, they will be assigned the topic of animals for entertainment, and asked to construct arguments for and against. In between these activities, your learner will also get to participate in some fun and interactive games that will put what they have learned to the test! 

Our general class structure is as follows: Each of our lessons is separated into distinct sections. After being welcomed to the class, learners will be introduced to the topic through a game or warm up activity (5-10 minutes). They will then have their existing knowledge on the topic tested with various inquiry-based questioning techniques. After, our facilitators will present them with pertinent information on the topic and the main class task (10-15 minutes). The facilitator will then present the main task, which will predominantly be student-led. During this time, students will be creating, innovating, or solving a problem while the facilitator guides them (20-25 minutes). Learners will then have the opportunity to present their class work. They will give and receive feedback from each other as well as from the facilitator (10 minutes). Before finishing the class, learners will complete a short Exit Ticket to solidify their takeaways from the class experience (5 minutes).

The facilitator will share all of our content built on Canvas LMS. We use this for display purposes only and learners are not required to create an account. To make our content engaging, we diversify our delivery methods as much as possible. Our content includes static slides with text and images built on Microsoft Powerpoint, educational videos from YouTube, online games built on platforms such as Wordwall and Baamboozle, and interactive builds developed on Articulate Storyline. Our content is well-researched and referenced in every lesson, as it is all strictly factual, objective, and secular. We only use images and YouTube videos that fall under the Creative Commons license. Each of our lessons is also matched with a selection of Common Core and CPalms standards and is inspired by a variety of UNESCO key topics.