How to Plan the Best Classroom Debate Ever!

Debates are a great learning tool to use in your social studies classroom because they hit so many target skills at once, plus, they can be so much fun! I’ve always loved doing debates, however, in my first years of teaching, I have to admit, they were not always the most fun or fulfilling for everyone, students, and myself included.

I have found that in order to have a classroom debate that is both educationally enriching and engaging for students, you need to have a clearly defined task, expectations, and a debate question, scaffolds and graphic organizers for students to organize their research and arguments, and a structure for organizing the student debates.

I have done student debates across all grades of high school from senior government and economics to freshmen global history. However, this year, in my sophomore global history class, I changed up the format of my debates, from a traditional debate, where two teams of students are in front of the room debating a question, with an audience of students observing and peer assessing, to two-on-two speed debates.

One of the aspects of debates that I always struggled was getting all of my students feeling confident and comfortable debating in front of the class. I had a component in my assessment rubric that all students spoke at least once during the debate, so while I never had many issues getting students to comply with speaking in front of the class, there were definitely a lot of student debates that felt, well kinda awkward. If you’ve ever done a traditional classroom debate, I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about. While there are some kids that love getting up there are arguing, you have those moments where minutes seem to stretch into hours as you have students quietly reciting their pre-written arguments and the other side slowly defending their side by reading from their notes, but no real back in forth. No fire. No excitement. It feels like watching the intellectual version of a really bad tennis game.

This was my problem and I solved it by scrapping the idea of traditional debates and having speed debates instead. Rather than having teams, I had students in pairs debating another pair. Instead of one debate happening at once, I had multiple debates happening at the same time. The students had more accountability because there is no group to fade into, but did not feel as nervous because there was no audience watching them. Additionally, since each debate was 5 minutes long, students got to debate three times, with three different partners so they had a chance to warm up and perfect their debating skills with each new debate.

After doing speed debates, I’m never going back to traditional debates. Not only did I have higher engagement and level of rigor, but I saw students who normally don’t speak in class start to shine in their small debate groups! With no audience, ample support and time for research, my students felt way more comfortable expressing themselves and speaking up. I promise, if you do speed debates, you and your students will have a blast! You can take a look at my Instagram posts about my first speed debate here and here!

In this post, I’m going to walk you through how I set up speed debates in my global history class, and how you can too! Let’s look at all the aspects you need for a successful debate:

Clearly Defined Task & Expectations

As with any great activity, backwards planning here is key. When planning a debate, the first thing you need to tackle is what you want your students to do and learn, how do you want them to do it, and of course, what is your debate question going to be!

A good topic for debate is something controversial, interesting, and have a connection to their lives or society today (culturally relevant pedagogy is key to engagement). It can even be an awesome idea to have your students come up with the question!

Some examples of great debate topics I’ve done for my classes:

• Should we legalize marijuana? (Government & Economics)

• Was the United States justified in dropping the atomic bomb? (U.S. History or World History)

• Should we celebrate Christopher Columbus Day? (World/Global History)

In creating a task for your debate, after creating the debate question, you want to have a clearly defined task that your students will complete. I usually have a 2 part task in which students are graded as a pair or group for their performance and preparation in the debate and an individual grade for a writing task. Depending on how much time you want to devote to the debate and the level of your students, your writing task may be an argumentative paragraph or an essay.

Next, you want to create your rubric or checklist for how you’re going to assess your students. When presenting a project or activity like this, I like to distribute the assignment paper that breaks down the task and has the rubric on the same paper so that expectations are clearly defined from the beginning.

Scaffolds and Graphic Organizers

It is essential for a successful debate to give your students the tools they need to succeed, and this includes graphic organizers to guide students in their research and craft their debate arguments.

You should create a graphic organizer for students to guide their research and build their arguments. Additionally, this organizer can be used during the debate so students have notes and evidence for reference. Here are the graphic organizers I used for my debates.

You can get these editable graphic organizers if you click!

Depending on how independent you want the research to be and how much class time you are devoting to this debate determines the level of guidance you give your students in their research. For older students who are working on college readiness research skills, perhaps a list of websites or texts is sufficient.

For my sophomores, I printed articles for them to use (6 in total, with a variety of viewpoints) and gave them laptops as well for extended research. For younger students, students who struggle with independent research, or even if you only have a few days or don’t have accessible computers, printing the articles for your students is a great option. I used Newsela to do this because their website makes it very easy to search for articles and even lets you differentiate by printing articles in multiple Lexile levels.

Additionally, for the day of the debates, I created a rubric for students to fill out while debating. It asks students to jot down three arguments of their opponent and also includes a peer review section.

Create a Structure for Debate Day

After a few days of in-class preparation (I recommend at least two days), the exciting debate day will be here!

You want to have an action plan of how this fun day will go so that it does not turn into a hot mess! I recommend having the room pre-set up in tables of 4 (pairs of 2 will sit across from each other. Think: two couples having dinner) and I found that pre-planning the seating arrangements and placing name cards on each desk will not only make the start of your debate waaaaaay more organized but also ensure that students are evenly matched for a debate.

I actually had a LOT of fun decorating and everything I purchased was from the dollar store!

Since I like to be a little “extra”, I decorated my classroom like a restaurant with plastic tablecloths, cups of juice, and paper plates that served as name cards. I wanted to add an element of fun and whimsy to the day, and also to let my students know that I appreciated and wanted to celebrate their hard work. It definitely added to the fun for the day and my students were automatically more engaged when they saw their name on a plate and their desks decorated.

After you greet students and students take their place, take a few minutes to distribute your peer review graphic organizer and explain your expectations for the day. You should go over how they are being assessed, the instructions on how to fill out the graphic organizer, and some accountable talk stems to keep the debates respectful.

So here is the minute by minute breakdown of my class that day:

First 7 mins:

I welcomed students and helped them find their seats, distributed and explained peer review graphic organizer and expectations. I reviewed accountable talk stems via a Google Slides presentation I created for the day and also explained step-by-step how the debate was going to be structured.

Speed Debate Rounds!:

Each speed debate round is five minutes long with 1 minute for students to finish their graphic organizers and peer review.

For five minutes, the students debated their side with one person in the pair being a note-taker and the other a primary speaker. While both students were allowed to speak, the note-taker did not have to speak. Students were also allowed to switch roles after each round to take turns. I created these roles because I knew that sometimes, students really don’t want to speak out loud, but need to participate. The note-taker role allows students to actively participate by taking notes of their opponents arguments and peer assessing their opponents and gives you the student work you need to assess your students.

While students were debating, I walked around with my checklist, grading each student on their debate performance and participation.

After the timer went off after five minutes, I set a one minute timer to allow students time to finish their notes and peer review.

Then, students on ONE side (you can make it the inner circle or outer circle) of the tables moved one table to the left to sit with their new partners. I arranged the room so that the affirmative “pro” side was sitting on the outside, and the negative “con” side was sitting on the inside.

The debate rounds repeat two more times, for a total of three rounds. This should take about 20 minutes.

Closing Discussion and Feedback:

After my 3 rounds of debate were over, we had about 10 minutes left of class, and I had prepared some final questions and opened up to a mini whole-class discussion of their final ideas and opinions about the topic.

I also had created an online feedback and form (you can use Google Forms) where students answered some reflection questions:

What did you do well today and during our preparation days?

What could you have done better next time?

What did your classmates do well today and during our preparation days?

What could your classmates do better next time?

What did I do well today and during our preparation days?

What could I do better next time?

While I was a little nervous putting in those last two questions, I felt if I was asking students to review themselves and their classmates, it was only fair that they review me too. I’m happy that I went through with it because I got so much positive feedback from my students and they told me how much fun they had during the debates! I also got some very good feedback about how they thought we could improve the debate structure!

So there you have it! That was a complete breakdown of how I prepare for speed debates in my history classroom! I hope that you are able to have fun and engaging debates with your students!

Please let me know in the comments how your debates are structured and let me know how speed debates worked for you!