Debating Methods
Document | Beginner Resource
Public Speaking and Debating Games
Games and activities are a fun way to engage students in learning the core skills of evaluative thinking and speaking. The best games balance a focus between three areas; critical thinking, general knowledge and persuasive skill (in the best case scenario, a game will touch on all three!)
There are a few things to note here:
Critical Thinking on its own can be fun, and can definitely introduce new ideas and patterns of thought to children, but games that exclusively focus on logic can become intellectually draining very quickly.
Games with an exclusive focus on persuasive and presentation skills can have great benefit as introductory activities/icebreakers but are less beneficial activities for the development of thinking.
Finally, training focused around teaching methods or structures tends to be dry and fairly ‘rote’ in terms of its implementation in the classroom. We would always prefer that lessons like this get discarded in favour of teaching methodological skills directly through practice debates.
Here are some games that overall balance this range of core skills:
Fortunately, Unfortunately
Manic Mouth-off
If we ruled the world
Fortunately, Unfortunately
Aim
Teaching imaginative thinking, responsiveness, listening and persuasive skills.
Overview
This is a dynamic and fun game particularly appropriate for young debaters. It focuses on developing listening skills and creative thought, by having students work together to create and further an imaginative narrative.
Description
Students are asked to sit in a circle and then take turns adding pieces to an emerging story. To start, the basis of the story (stimulus) is provided by the teacher, and these few sentences serve to establish context (or the setting for the narrative). Proceeding clockwise around the circle, students start their contribution with the words ‘fortunately’ or ‘unfortunately’ to create complications and resolutions in the story, often with hilarious results!
Example
Teacher: Once upon a time, there was a dog named Rufus who lived with his family of oyster farmers on Mars. Rufus was a happy dog, and well-loved, except for his voracious habit of eating oysters.
Student 1: Fortunately, it was oyster season, and there was an abundance of oysters that Rufus could eat!
Student 2: Unfortunately, Mars oysters were particularly rich in helium, which meant that Rufus started floating away.
The story can continue until every student has had a certain amount of turns to add to the story, or until the teacher decides to complete the narrative.
Teacher: And Rufus lived happily ever after in space.
The way you set up the elements of the narrative can have a valuable effect on the focus of its development and therefore can organically introduce students to debating concepts, such as specific interactions and characterisation. Experiment with the game by including a combination of fantasy worlds, real life scenarios, heroes and villains or even contemporary references to include a focus on logic or current affairs. If you take a turn in the circle it can be useful for redircting the narrative or introducing important concepts.
Manic Mouth-off
Aim
Teaching speaking, persuasive and critical thinking skills.
Overview
This is a speaking game valuable as an icebreaker and for getting students used to speaking in front of their classmates. Students in the audience can also have a role acting as ‘judges’.
Description
A student is asked to stand up and speak on a topic for as long as they can. They must avoid obvious repetition, filler words (like, you know, um), long hesitation, lists of similar things, and clearly irrelevant material. The audience is asked to listen carefully, raising a finger for each mistake. When the teacher sees a new finger is raised, they ask the audience member to define the kind of error that has been made, thus reinforcing class involvement. After three ‘strikes’ the speaker must stop. They are timed, with the longest-lasting speaker the ‘winner’.
Manic Mouth-off can be developed in three stages:
For beginners, the speaker gets to choose their topic and is asked to provide a description of it. This could include their thoughts, feelings and opinions about the topic. This provides a gentle start, particularly for younger students.
The next stage involves either the audience or the teacher naming the topic for each speaker—audience participation means a topic the student doesn’t ‘like’ may be nominated, stretching their thinking and broadening their perspective.
The teacher or the audience chooses a topic and the speaker is asked to describe the topic, then go on to justify in detail why it is good or bad. (If the audience is involved here, they often pick a friend’s favourite thing and have them argue why it’s bad, or their least favourite thing and why it is good!) For this stage, it’s important to remind the speaker they need to offer proof and explain why that proof is true.
It is valuable for the teacher to offer comments on the inventiveness, persuasiveness and logical explanation of each ‘mouth-off’. This is particularly true for the more advanced stage, where the value of proof should be the focus.
If We Ruled the World
Aim
Teaching critical thinking with a focus on general knowledge and policy.
Overview
Students are asked to engage with a real policy change and defend it both in principle and practice. It runs in a similar way to an interview panel, and focuses on developing effective questions and responses—very useful for practicing impromptu speaking as well as logical thought.
Description
Students are asked to form small groups of 2 to 3 students and work together to think of one policy that currently exists in society that they would like to change. They present their policy change with a list of three positive outcomes that they believe they would garner from the change, after which the rest of the class takes it in turns to question them about their policy.
Example
Students: We believe that we should make ice cream free for all primary school students. We think this will improve student happiness, classroom behaviour, and have overall benefits to the ice cream industry.
Question 1: How does ice cream improve classroom behaviour?
Response: We think that free ice cream means that students would be so happy during break time that they would be ready to learn in their next session at school. This happiness will then mean that they are more attentive in class.
Follow up to question 1: Doesn’t it also mean that students could just be disruptive as they are waiting for their next ice cream?
Response: No, because teachers would be able to ban them from collecting ice cream if they have misbehaved in class.
It is important to make clear during this exercise that questions should avoid two things:
Wouldn’t this be expensive/hard to do?
Any question that starts with the phrase ‘What if...’
These rules help students to discuss the policy in its most meritorious way, rather than creating a focus on implementation issues.
You can add to this game by assigning policies to particular groups (potentially policies that are relevant to the next topic area that you are debating, for example) as well as by using a stopwatch to time the questioners. Setting an overall amount of time that is dedicated to questions can ensure that students focus on asking their questions in the most succinct way possible (5 minutes of question time shared amongst the entire class can disappear very quickly!)
Summary
Debating games are a great way to involve and engage your debaters and occasionally provide some respite from an intense training session! Remember that almost all games that you currently use for the teaching of Talking and Listening can be easily adapted to suit the different areas of debating development, which means that you can turn almost any classroom activity into something that promotes the core skills that we
are focusing on in debating. Even better, the reverse is also true—debating games are a great addition to your current Talking and Listening resources— they can easily entertain a whole class of non-debaters!
Feel free to adapt our games and, of course, invent ones of your own!