Photo: Teachers who put on a sample debate pose with Snider and Bojana Skrt

 

Posted by: Alfred Snider

 

Increasingly debating is being used to liven up classroom environments as well as improve learning by directly involving the students in the material they are studying. The technique is to adapt many debate forms to as many classroom situations and needs as possible so that teachers can select from a wide range of different activities and approaches. The idea is to introduce a little or a lot of debating, depending on the teacher and the other parts of the curriculum, to adapt to the teacher, class and school culture.

 

This is a one-week intensive workshop primarily aimed at teachers who would like to add debate as a method to their classes. The workshop can either be taken non-credit or can be a three credit graduate course.

 

The class is being taught by three instructors.  Bojana Skrt of Slovenia has taught over twenty-five such teacher workshops in the last few years. She is working with the Ministry of Education and a group of teachers to produce specific debate methods and formats for use in language arts, history, philosophy and environmental sciences. This is her second time doing this workshop here at WDI. John Meany will also be teaching sections of this workshop, and John has considerable teacher training experience. I will also be involved, and I “wrote the book” on debate across the curriculum and have been involved in pioneering a lot of these techniques.