Napoleon Triad Debate Reflection

Over the past two days I have been doing triad debates with my honors classes.  In my past two years of teaching freshmen I've discovered they seem to universally have the following weaknesses: organization, formulating a thesis (opinion backed by fact), and debating in an orderly fashion.

As a teacher, especially one of history, I feel that it is my duty to help the students improve in these areas.  How can they be effective as historians if they can't formulate and argument and factually defend it?  My first year I tried to do whole class debates, which were a complete and total disaster.  Several students would dominate the discussion, often times it would generate into insult slinging.  Last year I didn't even attempt debates, I did some whole class discussions, and lots of small group discussions, but nothing that could truly be defined as a debate.

This year I am determined to make debates a priority, and hopefully a strength of my students.  This is a skill that could be generalized to all facets of life, and will make them better writers, thinkers, and people.  When I set this goal for myself I really wasn't entirely sure of how I was going to go about doing it.  I knew I couldn't just start at the level of a whole class debate.  I wanted to support my students on their journey to become effective debaters/speakers but I didn't want to coddle them either.

Then one of my colleagues introduced me to the triad debate format.  In this format the students are in groups of three.  There are three roles: affirmative, negative, and judge.  Each student must participate in order for the debate to work.  They follow a very specific format:

• Affirmative Speaker, opening - 2 minutes
• Judge's Questions to Affirmative
• Negative Speaker, opening - 2 minutes
• Judge's Questions to Negative
• Affirmative Speaker, closing - 2 minutes
• Negative Speaker, closing - 2 minutes
• Judge's Decision

I thought this format would be a nice way to scaffold into my eventual goal of a whole class debate.  In this format all students have to come up with a point of view (except for the judge), argue effectively for that point of view.  They never have to directly argue the opposing party, so this avoids a lot of the juvenile banter that can evolve out of a debate.

So here's what I gave the students as a graphic organizer (I also gave them documents from a DBQ on Napoleon to use as supporting evidence) :

Napoleon triad debates

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I let the students determine what the ideals of the French Revolution were in their groups.  Then the affirmative had to prove that he did not meet the ideals of the French Revolution, and the negative had to prove that he did meet the ideals of the French Revolution.  I told them outline and prepare for homework. 

The next day in class I gave the students ten minutes in their groups to prepare and then I had them begin debating.  Here are my thoughts:

Good:

• Students were all engaged
• There were some really great factually based arguments
• Everyone participated

Needs Improvement:

• Students seemed confused about directions/weren't always following directions.
• Students weren't utilizing the documents as much as I would've liked them to.
• The ideals students set weren't always conducive to debate/prove able.
• Students weren't always staying within their roles - in some cases the Judges were arguing a side or the Affirmative and Negative were arguing directly with each other.

Next Time:

• Clearer wording, directions, and explanations of the debate format.  I think this would clear up some of the confusion I was seeing.
• Set the ideals of the French Revolution, or whatever fact is the pivotal point of the argument, as a class so all students are on the same page.
• Give students time in class to prepare, that way I can check in and make sure their arguments are effective and factually based.

I also still need to find a more effective way to get around to all the groups.  I visited every group at least once during the debate, but wasn't with any group long enough to feel like I could adequately assess them on their debates.  Everyone is writing a reflection on what they did, and that's how I will grade them, but for the future I'd like to try and come up with a way to grade them on what they've done in their groups.  Maybe a rubric of some sort?  That will be something I can come up with later.  For now I want to focus in on making the students participate in the triad debate more effectively, and then I'll figure out how to best assess what they've done.

Thoughts on grading papers.

I've dedicated several hours of my Sunday to grading papers my students wrote this week and I've managed to get through 30.  That's right, 30 of the 110 papers I have to grade.  While on some level I find that thoroughly depressing I also think it's a reflection of how much time I spend on their papers.

My first year I found grading papers to be somewhat overwhelming.  What makes an A paper?  I wasn't entirely sure.  I experimented with various rubrics until I came across this one that I thought encompassed all the aspects that I wanted to include in my grading of papers.

Modified Mcas Rubric

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I thought this rubric was the answer to all my paper grading woes. Going into my second year I graded the first paper using this rubric.  Of course I still did my traditional notes in purple pen in the margins and the bottom of the paper, but I really felt that this rubric would help guide the students on what was strong/weak about their papers.  Unfortunately I noticed their second papers had the same mistakes as their first, so clearly this rubric and my comments weren't getting through.  I tried to conference with students, but would often run out of time, and it was like nailing jello to a tree to get them to come before or after school to conference.

Then towards the end of last year I read Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, most of which I didn't find applicable to my students or the kind of classroom I wanted to run, but I did find one gem in there.  Finkel expressed some of the same frustrations over student papers that I did above.  He started writing his students letters about their papers.  He found their responsiveness to the information in the letters to be much greater than when he left the same information in comments in the margins or at the end of the paper.

I decided to give it a try last year when only my honors students were writing papers.  All the students were thrilled to receive a letter specifically addressed to them with my thoughts on their papers.  At least half of the students came on their own initiative to see me about their papers and ask about what I wrote in the letters.  Their writing also improved because they actually took my advice and comments under consideration.

This year I am writing ever single one of my students a letter about their first paper.  Since this is the first time I'm seeing their writing (and this is the first time they're experiencing my grading) I've found that I have a lot to say.  Is writing each student a letter, and filling out a rubric for them excessive?  Probably.  Does it get results?  Yes.  So it will take me a while to get through these papers, but I'm hoping that my efforts will pay off and the students will think it was worth the wait to get them back.

Exciting Developments

Entering my third year of teaching it's pretty exciting to look back on all the progress I've made, especially in terms of using technology in my classroom.  My first year my classroom had a television (with no VCR, DVD, or remote) and an overhead projector.  However, during this year I was introduced to SmartBoards.  I applied for (and received!) funding to get a SmartBoard for my classroom.

The SmartBoard was just the beginning.  Over the summer I took a class where I learned a lot about blogs and wikis.  I decided to go the wiki route and set-up a wiki for my classes.  My honors classes created their own usernames and began to post and have discussions on the wiki.  It wasn't perfect (I think I've worked out a lot of the flaws for this year) but it was pretty encouraging.

This year my mentor teacher Dan (who has always been very technologically inclined) showed me some pretty cool stuff he was having his students do with blogging.  I was extremely impressed, and insanely jealous!  His blogs had a lot of the outcomes I was hoping to achieve from using the wiki.  I was tempted to jump on the student blogging bandwagon right away, but after some discussion and thinking it through decided to hold off until second semester. 

My students will register on the wiki and begin posting soon.  This will at least get them acclimated to using the computer, logging into a site and posting.  Then second semester we will up the ante by having each student blogging independently (very different from a communal site like the wiki).

Although I already have a personal blog of my own (where I often talk about teaching) I'm starting this one specifically to document my trials and tribulations of using technology with my freshmen honors world history classes.  I figure this one can also be used as a reference/resource/model to my students when they begin blogging.

We'll see how it goes . . . but I'm pretty psyched, I'm really looking forward to second semester now!