The Atlanta Urban Debate League is committed to providing excellent debate education programs, services, and opportunities to diverse students, educators, and members of the community!
Getting Started - Middle School Coaches
If you’re new to debate and just started a program at your school, you may be wondering how to get started and how to effectively use the AUDL resources. Many AUDL coaches learn as they go, and there’s no one right way to run a program; this page is a loose outline of how you can approach building a program over the first couple of months.
Check out the resource breakdown to learn about the AUDL tools that can help you and your students as you learn debate together. Various AUDL resources will be referenced throughout this page.
Building A Team
Before doing any debating, you’ll need to just have a group of students who are willing to speak in front of each other. If you’ve started a program, you may already have a group of interested students, in which case you’re already halfway there!
The “Starting Your Team” section of the Coach Curriculum has some suggestions for initial club meetings when you’re working on getting a solid group of returning students
It includes tips for recruitment and retention
It also has ideas for community building activities to get students comfortable speaking in front of each other
Digging Into Debate
Introducing Debate Structure
Once students have gotten comfortable speaking in front of each other, you can begin to introduce them to some of the specifics of how policy debate differs from arguing in general or debates on TV.
The big concepts are that there is a set order of speeches that happen in every debate, with two-person teams arguing for or against a given topic.
You can incorporate more debate structure into fun spar debates by having students work in pairs and assigning pairs to agree or disagree with spar topics.
The “Introducing Policy Debate” section of the Coach Curriculum has lesson plans for teaching the basic structure of debate.
If you’d like to talk through any questions with the AUDL, come join us at the Digital Debate Center. If you’d like to have us come and work through things with your whole team, schedule a site visit!
The topic will be the same for the whole year, so you can have students watch the topic lecture on the AUDL YouTube channel for an introduction to what they’ll be debating.
Introducing the Packet
When students are ready to start learning about the specific arguments they’ll be debating, everyone can look at the Novice packet together. It won’t all make sense, but getting students exposed to the evidence is a huge step.
The argument overviews at the beginning of the packet summarize what the evidence in the packet is saying and the overall narrative for each side.
Being able to understand what the individual pieces of evidence are saying and explain it to students is huge, even if they don’t understand how exactly it works as a debate argument. A great goal for students is for them to be able to explain the evidence in their own words.
Understanding how to use the packet is often confusing and not at all intuitive. You’re more than welcome to visit the Digital Debate Center to talk through it with AUDL staff before introducing it to students or booking a site visit to have someone come and explain it to everyone.
The demonstration debate also has people reading from the packet. Having students follow along in their own packets while watching a speech from the demo debate can help them see how the packet is used in a round.
Getting Ready for Your First Tournament
Many aspects of debate will be difficult to grasp without actually debating, so we recommend participating in tournaments sooner rather than later. New students will never be 100% ready for their first tournament, which should be treated as a learning experience more than anything else. After students have had some time to digest the packet, have them practice using it at a tournament!
Picking Teams & Preparing Arguments
Students will need to be prepared to debate in pairs. Assign partnerships or let students pick their own partners.
Once students have been divided into teams, they will need to pick (or you will need to assign) speaker positions. Each student will be the first speaker for their team on one side and the second speaker on the other.
Whichever student prefers/is more comfortable explaining affirmative arguments should be the second affirmative speaker in affirmative rounds and the first negative speaker in negative rounds (2A/1N)
Whichever student prefers/is more comfortable explaining negative arguments should be the second negative speaker in negative rounds and the first affirmative speaker in affirmative rounds (2N/1A)
Students should use their evidence packets to prepare. You can either have students work on highlighting and filling out templates at home or highlight and write explanations out as a group. There are activities in the “Working Through the Packet” section of “Introducing Policy Debate” in the Coach Curriculum that can be repeated to help your students prepare as a group.
Students should highlight parts of their packet based on their speaker positions. 2N/1As should highlight the 1AC in their packet, while 2A/1Ns should highlight the 1NC in their packet.
Students can also start to prepare parts of their speeches by filling out the templates in the 2AC and 2NC sections of the packet. It’s okay if they don’t have everything prepared!
Using a site visit before your first tournament is a great way to get help preparing and answering any lingering questions. If students are struggling to understand how to use the packet, going over it at a site visit can also be helpful.
Feeling Ready
A lot of getting students ready for their first tournament is about anxiety management more than argument preparation. Here are some tips for helping ease students’ worries:
Everyone debating in the Novice division is in their first year of debate and learning, too!
It’s okay if you don’t have 100% of your packet highlighted or don’t have all of the templates filled out
It’s okay to not have cross-examination questions ready to go. You can always make up some questions during the round.
Everyone is using the same packet, so no one will start making up a bunch of arguments you’ve never heard before
You’ll keep using this packet and format throughout the year, so it’ll only get easier after this first tournament
If you have any logistic questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for help at atlantadebate@gmail.com!