Student: Judges, do not allow yourself to be dissuaded. Allow me to use a metaphor. Do you think the best, and stay with me here, do you think the best wines contain only the best fruit?

Mary Dibinga: I got asked by a colleague if I would help out because they were just starting a brand-new debate team at the school. And so I agreed to help out a little bit, and just immediately I was seeing how my students were really the ones directing what they were learning. Students who were struggling in English class could go after school and debate, and blow me away with their ability to really analyze complex topics. Debate just slowly went from this side thing that maybe I would help with to being what I saw as the most important professional experience that I was having.

Marisa Suescun: Debate requires critical thinking. It requires evidence. And it requires reasoning and seeing things from multiple perspectives. So all of those elements I think we wanted to bring into the classroom space—critical discourse, student collaboration—across literacy, history, math, science, the arts.

Kimberly Willingham: Debate is historically in white communities, in affluent communities, in suburbs. And so the Boston Debate League is one of 22 urban debate leagues across the country. And our goal is to really bring the debate space to students who are marginalized, who have been othered, who might not have had access to debate. And so we do that largely working in the public school system.

Willingham: The reality is teachers can’t do full-scale debates in the classroom every single day. And so we started thinking about what are some other things that we can do that help students to still practice the same skills that they would in a debate.

Dibinga: It’s not something that you have to use in a particular way. It’s a methodology that you can use with whatever it is that you’re already teaching. So I would say that the really important parts are making it your own and tailoring it the way that’s going to fit your classroom and your purposes. This is not a debate class. I’m not using these strategies to try to build better debaters. I’m using these strategies to try to build a better English class.

Willingham: They’re learning to think critically. They’re learning how to formulate and ask questions. They’re learning how to analyze evidence. Every debate-inspired activity requires our students’ collaborating. We think there’s certainly power in building on one another’s arguments. This type of classroom approach, it says you have something to say and something to contribute.

Connell Cloyd: You actually get a chance to say, “Mr. Cloyd, you are wrong.” And the way that you’re going to do it is you’re going to build a complete argument against what I have done. So your first job is to make a claim about what was wrong on the problem.

Cloyd: We were looking for a way for the kids to really have their voices heard in the math classroom. And we really wanted to have that claim, evidence, and reasoning. I truly feel like this model is more inclusive because this way actually gives so many entry points into the math.

Cloyd: OK. So what is your claim?

Student: That you may have multiplied…

Willingham: My hope is that students that learn these skills in debate-inspired classrooms will be able to use them for the rest of their lives. I want to see young people recognize, “I can use my voice in a powerful way,” particularly right now when things are so divisive in our nation politically. I think that students can engage in discourse with people who agree with them or disagree with them and be able to do it in a way that does not dehumanize anyone else. But it merely says, “I have another way of thinking about that,” and hopefully convince people to be open to other perspectives because of their debate skills.