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

View more documents from lherzl.

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.