Scaling Debate Centered Instruction

It's Really Beginning to Happen

Readers of this newsletter will be aware that I have been a long time promoter of using debate techniques in the classroom as an exciting pedagogical tool. I laid out the case for this in my 2020 book Resolved, and the people featured in the book were the subjects of a major PBS documentary released in the fall, Beyond Debate, available on Amazon Prime, and also here: https://www.pbs.org/show/beyond-debate-a-revolution-in-education/.

Through one of the teachers I worked with in the intervening years, Steve Fitzpatrick, an innovative educator and former lawyer, who teaches at the Hackley School in New York and who has his own new substack (example here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-158326212), I learned of another powerful new substack that advances debate centered instruction (DCI) to a whole new level, using AI in a constructive way. Here’s a link, and you probably to have to subscribe to get the full flavor. It’s remarkable: https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/how-to-use-debate-in-your-classroom.

Look, I am all too aware these are dark days. But when I see a bit of shining light I want to call it out, hence this post. If our democracy can survive these next four years, the efforts of innovative educational entrepreneurs like Steve and Stefan and others, such as those featured in the Beyond Debate documentary (including Les Lynn in Chicago, and whole Boston Debate League team, led by Kim Willingham), are going to teach a new generation of students the skills to succeed in the workplace and what a democracy really means and how it depends on fact-based debate. But like all innovations, they won’t succeed without being scaled. The above substacks are the innovations I had hoped would come along to scale DCI. I hope our country has enough time for them to work. Spread the word if you can.