What is Critical Thinking? The Center for Critical offers a few diffferent definitions on their webpage. For me, I think it’s best summed up as the ability to think clearly and rationally. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking.

A critical thinker is one who, when confronted with a stressful situation, can think through their thoughts and pause before making rash decisions. In debate, it involves not necessarily answering the argument with the most knee-jerk reaction but pausing a moment to evaluate the different options one has in responding to the argument. A good critical thinker understands the interaction of many different arguments with each other. A critical thinker will see where contradictions might happen between different arguments made at different points in the debate.

Secondly, a critical thinker is one who can think rationally during the debate – a person who makes logical arguments that appeal to the audience and offer the most persuasive case for their side. Bill Sparks, former director at Cerritos College, argued that spread debate is the antithesis of critical thinking. That when confronted with a debater using spread (by which I mean, dumping as many arguments as possible in response to position) he immediately wondered if he or she had any critical thinking skills. Rather than employing spread he taught his students to use their critical thinking skills to present the best arguments rather than all the arguments. So rather than respond to a topicality position with 30 answers – some of which may or may not apply to a particular position, choose 5 arguments that directly refute and counter the position. Explain those 5 arguments more in depth and justify the importance of each argument both in refutation of the position being made and the entire debate. That would show the judge much higher order critical thinking than just spewing out every possible answer.

It’s easy to defend the debater using spread as simply being smarter. That rather than coming up with only 5 responses to a position the debater used their critical thinking to come up with 30 arguments. That the debater making more arguments necessarily used more critical thinking to come up with more responses. However, I don’t think that’s true at all. I don’t think it’s hard to come up with 30 answers to any position. It’s deciding which of those 30 answers, in this particular debate round, with this particular judge, are the best answers, that employs the greatest level of critical thinking skills. As a judge I would much rather hear five nuanced and well explained answers to a position than 30 blipped arguments that require me, as a judge, to draw connections between the original argument and the refutation.

One example of this is the lack of signposting when responding to arguments in a debate. As a judge I detest debaters who say “on topicality, here are my 30 answers” and proceed to make all different types of responses to different parts of the topicality position. Answers 1,3,5,19,20-22 all deal with the standards debate, answers 2,4,6,8-14 all deal with the violation, and the rest deal with the voter. Strategically, the debater is likely trying to obfuscate the debate and try to ensure that the affirmative debater misses one of those answers. In the 2AR then, the debater will make the connection between dropped argument 21 and the lack of a response to the 3rd standard. For me, this is bad debating and shows a lack of critical thinking skills. It’s playing the game of debate as we’ve discussed before.

I think the same line of thinking can be applied to running topicality every single round. Sure, there are enough competing definitions of transportation infrastructure that you could probably run it against any case. However, do you need to? Is it in your strategic interest? A critical thinker will examine the situation and choose to run topicality whereas someone who defaults to running it every round is likely just following the script rather than applying their critical thinking skills to the round. Are there alternative arguments that would be a better use of the debater’s time? In front of this particular judge is topicality a losing issue anyway?

Third, critical thinking requires reflective thinking. This is the area that debate trains the best in my opinion. Because we split debates into constructives and rebuttals, debaters are forced to evaluate what is happening within the debate itself in order to give themselves the best chance of winning. You need to be able to take a step back and evaluate the round – what positions am I winning – what positions is my opponent winning? How can my positions earn me the ballot? A big component of critical thinking is the idea that you can examine the different points of view on an issue. Most novice debaters are only able to see the debate through the prism of their own perspective – hence, why so many novice debaters do not understand why they lost the debate. Reflective thinking, on the other hand, enables a debater to see the round from the other debater’s point of view and – perhaps more importantly – from the point of view of the judge. One of the best activities that you can do as a college debater to understand the different points of view would be to judge at local high school debate tournaments. As a judge you will see that the two debate teams often are seeing the round very differently from each other – and from you!

Another way that debate requires reflective thinking is that you must evaluate what is and is not working in your debate rounds. Following a tournament analyze where and how you lost each debate round. Furthermore, analyze where and how you won each debate round. This will give you a good idea where the strengths and weaknesses of your case are to help you in future rounds. If you keep losing to topicality it’s time to write out some better answers – or maybe find a new case?

Finally, critical thinking requires independent thinking. Independent thinking in debate means that you do your own research – pure and simple. When you have research and developed your own case you will be much more successful in the activity. As we’ve discussed before I’m perfectly fine with brand new students using camp/outside evidence for the first few tournaments in order to get familar with the activity and what using evidence looks like in a debate. Beyond that I think students are losing out on one of the most important benefits of the activity – research and critical thinking skills. It does not take much critical thinking to run evidence/cases that someone else has written for you. It takes incredible amounts of critical thinking to find articles, cut them into position, use those in a debate, and win debate rounds. Beyond any trophy that you may win in a tournament that skill will last you a life time and be incredibly valuable.

In sum, critical thinking is one of the most important skills in the 21st century and one that debate can teach extremely well. However, debaters, judges, and coaches must make choices to promote their critical thinking skills in debate. It’s been almost 7 years since my last competitive debate round and I can attest that the critical thinking skills I learned in debate are still valuable today.

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all the preparation is wasted. opp strategy is always Topicality, procedurals, and counterplans. the debate doesn’t start until the 2nd speech.

at least thats what it seems like.

If true, I think this is a very damaging to both the future adoption of the event by schools and the entire rationale for having NFA-LD debate.

As a school considering adding NFA-LD to my program this vision of the activity is not very enticing. It seems to privilege experience of debate “games” over topic specific knowledge. If true, it wouldn’t matter how much research I did on any particular topic but instead how well I know how to answer a generic more-or-less made up for debate position. It also defeats the point of having a single resolution for the entire season if the research one conducts ahead of the tournament is of little use.

As coaches and judges I think we need to evaluate what paths we are encouraging our students to take when competing in NFA-LD. If the comment is true, by rewarding debaters who ignore the case debate we may be ultimately sowing the seeds for reversing the tremendous growth of NFA-LD in Southern California.

While I never like absolutes given that each round is unique and dynamic, I think debaters who make no pretense of debating case (even with analytics) are avoiding the core of the debate and should rarely, if ever, be given the win. Debate can and should be more than just a robotic answering of arguments and the “flow sheet.” If so, why even have a live competition? Just submit your arguments ahead of time and judges will evaluate what briefs should win.

I think we can also have a more-or-less sliding scale as the season develops – sure, at the start of the year students will have little specific neg evidence but by this time in the year negative debaters unprepared with specific case arguments should be penalized.

What are your thoughts and impressions? I’ve gotten much the same impression as the anonymous commenter on the state of NFA-LD and it’s really making me question my continued support for NFA-LD as a tournament event… I can do only so much as a judge – this is a question not about what individual judges or coaches can do but about the culture of the activity and what is rewarded.

I hope we can keep this discussion civil…

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This speech is given a time limit of 6 minutes to present the affirmative case in support of the resolution. Generally, this is going to be one of the easiest speeches to given since you will have it scripted before the tournament begins.

This is your bread and butter “debate case” speech that will probably end up taking up the bulk of you pre-tournament preparation. You’ll want to fully understand your case and know each card within you case. This will help when you are answering cross examination questions and you can quickly identify a piece of evidence which answers the negative’s question without having to look through your case which hurts your credibility.

My suggestion for a solid 1AC is to first start off with an introduction. You can see the difference in having an introduction from my STA case and Mike’s space case.

Here you establish the significance of the topic and pre-empt a topicality challenge. I would recommend no more than 30 seconds but it affords you multiple benefits. First, it gives you a chance to get out ahead on topicality. You can point to the evidence you cited in the introduction when answering topicality to give yourself additional arguments in the 1AR. Second, it gives you a chance to warm up your voice before jumping into the heart of your case. I’ve seen way to many rounds where the affirmative debater stumbles through the first couple of cards before warming up and delivering their solvency much better. Third, it gives the judge a chance to warm up to your presentation. If we truly view the debate round in a real world fashion many times as judges it’s hard to listen to the first 30 seconds to a minute simply because we have to adjust to your presentation style – ie, your pitch, rate, enunciation, etc… By having an introduction you let everyone ease into the debate case.

You then want to meet your stock issues. The rules clearly establish that the judging paradigm in NFA-LD is stock issues. As such, you will want to clearly identify which stock issue you are responding to and prove that you’ve met the prima facia burden. I would recommend a needs style case since that tells the best story.

You would start with establishing the inherency for your case – why the status quo is not solving. Then move onto your harms, plan and solvency. If you are trying to “run down the middle” of NFA-LD this will be your best route to success. If you run a comparative advantage case structure (plan-adv-adv) you should very clearly signpost each argument as an inherency, harm, or solvency to make sure the judge knows you did not miss anything.

In summation, the most important responsibility for your 1AC speech is to present a prima facia case proving to the judge that you have meet the stock issues burdens of proving inherency, harms, and solvency. Any other suggestions for the 1AC speech?

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A few of my students got very excited about the “fun” factor of a case like this, and have even run it at tournaments. Not surprisingly, they were not unbelievably successful. Since I don’t care much about winning but about the education (I think a fact that annoys some of you), I enjoy hearing about very intelligent debate students finding themselves unable to respond to a silly case, simply because they don’t have cards.

Another strategy that seems to have faded from use is the criticism of individual pieces of evidence. Most of the evidence in the below 1AC is critically flawed in one way or another.

In any case, enjoy. At least until an asteroid kills us all.

Space Tourism 1AC

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Losing can be a very valuable part of the debate tournament. It mirrors life really well. You will not always get the job – you will not always get the promotion or the contract. Learning to lose gracefully can be yet another benefit of NFA-LD debate.

I’ve noticed a definite curve with how debaters approach losing. Usually, when debaters are brand new they don’t mind losing so much since not much of the debate round makes sense anyway so the ballot decision seems more or less random. Then, debaters start understanding what’s going on and start to get mad when they lose. Finally, most debaters by the end of the career understand the process and in really close rounds understand a loss even if they disagree with the decision.

As outlined in this post here from the realm of computer science – it may well be impossible to succeed without first failing:

Failure is a wonderful teacher. But there’s no need to seek out failure. It will find you. Whatever project you’re working on, consider it an opportunity to learn and practice your craft. It’s worth doing because, well, it’s worth doing. The journey of the project should be its own reward, regardless of whatever happens to lie at the end of that journey.

I think the same message applies to debate. I know that for me as a competitor I learned much more from my losses than my wins. My losses forced me to realize I didn’t do enough to win the ballot. It showed me where my weakness was and what I needed to do differently next time. However, I did not always learn from every loss and one of the main reasons is the self serving bias:

A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The self-serving bias can be seen in the common human tendency to take credit for success but to deny responsibility for failure

So in debate, this would happen if your losses are the judge’s faults but the wins are because you’re an amazing debater. Every loss is an injustice and every win is a deserved victory. There may be an occasional ballot which is so random you can write it off – but if you find yourself writing off ballot after ballot after ballot perhaps it’s not the judge you should be focusing on.

I would contend that the above attitude is a substantial barrier to success in debate. If you are doing something wrong and losing ballots blaming the judge will not help you in the next round. The same behavior will likely replicate itself and cause another loss.

I was impressed with Nick’s recap of the APU tournament where he acknowledged that in one round he deserved to lose.

Tim voted for the negative team, a decision I agreed completely with. There was simply no conceivable place on the flow to pull the trigger any other way.

Acknowledging that one has legitimately lost a round is an important step towards improving your ability to win future rounds. Acknowledging that you will fail occasionally in debates allows you to identify those weaknesses, work on them, and avoid them happening again.

Acknowledging failure is not an easy thing to do. I think it takes specific skills and communication to frame the discussion after a loss. As I mentioned above, I think one must learn ways to deal with failure and losing in debate.

Any tips or ideas on how you handle failure?

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A game is something we engage in to have fun or win. I play monopoly all the time just to enjoy the game. I don’t seek to be educated about real estate while playing monopoly nor banking rules. I just play because it’s fun. I learn strategy about how to win each game – that is, winning at Monopoly requires different skills than winning at scrabble. And there may be some benefits outside of the game sometimes – I may learn new words playing Scrabble but that certainly is not the point. I do not play scrabble to learn new words since the game draws upon my existing knowledge. Games are self contained – when the game is over you’re done and the skills most likely do not apply outside of that game. My scrabble skills do not serve me well when writing this post since the strategy in scrabble is unique to that game.

Is NFA-LD the equivalent of monopoly? We go out weekends and play a game called debate? We just as easily could break out a monopoly board and be doing the same thing?

I answer in the negative. The debaters are not merely players who have picked a board piece and roll the dice. Instead, debaters are students who are practicing their critical thinking, public speaking, and argumentation skills. One of the reasons I really like debate is that it involves a competition between students which is the best driver I’ve ever seen to encourage hard work and improvement. The drive to win the competition does amazing things for motivating students to improve their skills to be successful.

But a competition is distinct from a game. Sure, both a competition and game have “winners.” But a competition captures the idea that two or more people are trying to win but the goal is more than just winning the game. If what we do is a game than any strategy to win the game is encouraged. In monopoly I may buy 1 property of each color not to benefit myself but to ensure my opponent can not form a monopoly. In scrabble I may not play a particular word if it opens up a way for my opponent to get the 3x word score box. If debate is a game than I can strategically place a turn randomly throughout my responses to try and confuse my opponent into dropping one so I win. If debate is a game I can strategically be confusing until my final speech.

Instead, if debate is a competition, distinct from a game, than how you play matters. What we reward is different. We, as both judges and the community, do not reward games playing or strategy that works just for winning the game, but instead practices which encourage critical thinking, public speaking, and argumentation. The competitor who seeks to improve clash, to improve understanding, to engage the other debater and the audience, is competing at the tournament and upholding academic goals.

I tell my debaters the same thing that Mat wrote in the comments: If you are here for the trophies we can go to the trophy store and buy you a huge one for $10. You can put it on your shelf and be proud you have a big trophy. But if you are here to improve your critical thinking, public speaking, and argumentation skills, then you should be doing those things in your rounds. Why did you join debate in the first place? For trophies?

This can be thought of in terms of the debate about speed/spread as well. Why would a debater engage in speed/spread debate? Most likely to improve their chances of winning based on the idea of dropped or conceded arguments. If I can make 15 arguments rather than 10 arguments than that is 5 more the other debater has to answer which increases the chances they may drop an argument I can pull through in my last speech to win the debate. That, to me, is seeing debate as a game. Each argument is a piece on the game board that you strategically line up in order to win that game.

Instead, if debate is a competition, than rather advancing 15 arguments you’d advance only your best arguments demonstrating your ability to engage in critical thinking. Which of those 15 arguments are the best? Win because you understand the issue better and win because your arguments were stronger. Win because you are a better public speaker and can engage the audience in your debate through eye contact, humor, and rhetoric. Win because you can demonstrate through sound argumentation your arguments are better than your opponents. If you can do those three things the trophies will come and will mean a lot more than you played a game better than your opponent.

In NFA-LD when the rules state “Competitors in NFA Lincoln-Douglas will be evaluated on their analysis, use of evidence, and ability to effectively and persuasively organize, deliver, and refute arguments.” Nowhere in that statement do I see the promotion of games playing or rewarding strategy just for strategy sake.

As a coach and judge I do not view debate as a game. I view it as a competition where students are working to improve their critical thinking, public speaking, and argumentation skills. As a competitor I often saw debate as a game and I think it decreased the value of the activity for me. As a debater I only cared about earning the “W” and lost a lot of the benefits of debate beyond winning rounds. I now see why that mindset minimized the benefit I gained from debate. Viewing debate as a game decreases the educational value of the activity and likely would decrease participation. I know I do not sell the activity to new students or school administrators as a game. I sell it as a place to improve critical thinking, public speaking and argumentation skills. We have competitions but we do not have games.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts.

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1) An affirmative must provide something under the plan text regarding funding. In the absence of this requirement, an affirmative could just say “Gov’t re-builds all roads in America in two years through normal means.” That seems to take away a huge chunk of negative ground that the Status Quo is not spending the money in the plan, and is therefore a better option.

2) It also seems to me that an affirmative does not have to provide a specific amount, or budgetary line-item for the plan, but should have to provide some sort of rough outline of funding. If nothing else, the affirmative should explain what the opportunity cost will be of doing the plan. For example, the affirmative should say something like, “This plan will cost roughly $100 million dollars, which will be recouped from the construction of public toll roads.” or “the money will be taken from the defense budget.”

3) If the funding is taken from some part of the U.S. budget, it doesn’t seem topical that the Aff. would be able to claim benefit or advantage from that budget cutting. So while I think it’s fine for an affirmative to take money from the defense budget, it would be extra topical for the affirmative to claim advantages from cutting the defense budget. Or farm subsidies, or a tax on cigarettes, or any number of any other funding source the aff. could create.

The fine line seems to be between making funding a should/would fiat argument (as explained in an earlier post on this site), and still forcing the affirmative to at least give a ballpark to how much money the plan costs and where the money comes from. Debates should not become bogged down in legislative financing arguments, but they should not become Utopian “magic wand” affirmatives either.

So, how far off am I?

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The split of coaches between conversational delivery advocates (based on the premise that more real-world delivery styles causes better education for students) and spread delivery advocates (based on the premise that more information in the round causes better education for students) has been around for quite a while. A worrisome trend I have seen in the last few years, and entrenched in my mind in the previously mentioned round, is the social pressure to claim that no argument is too difficult to follow or too quickly delivered to be effective. I have seen many judges collapse their reasons for decisions into gross mockeries of the actual issues raised in the round, and I suspect one of the reasons is that they are pressured not to say “clear” when arguments are blippy and/or slurred or “slow” when they have trouble flowing the tag lines. I have always had the opinion that a flowsheet is a not a scoreboard, but my personal note-taking device for a debate round. If a speaker makes eleven arguments, but only three of them are substantively different in claim or warrant, I write down three arguments on my flow sheet. Rarely have I ever heard a judge say something like, “I didn’t understand your arguments, they seemed confusing.” The first rule of judging is apparently to never admit when arguments are confusing, to avoid the appearance of weakness.

I had two novice speakers at their first tournament spread out of the rounds this weekend, and they each spent at least one of the only four prelim rounds reading a rules violation argument concerning speed and sitting down. They had no opportunity to debate, since they didn’t understand any of the arguments being presented. Both were admonished by judges to “learn how to flow faster”. They did not take the opportunity to ask their opponents to slow down, which may have helped the situation. I honestly wonder if the judges were also unable to flow the round, but in classic “Emperor Has No Clothes” style, simply pretended they could. For the judge to admit that the speakers were going too fast, would be admit they are not ontologically perfect argumentative critics, and worse, admit that they are not the gold-standard in a masculine-game of argumentative speed reading.

I understand that coaches trying to compete at NFA have to allow and teach spreading, because that’s what their opponents at Nationals will do. I also understand teams (mine among them) that will not spread in any case, because they feel that too much education is lost. I wonder if lost among the arguments however, is an issue of evidence debate judging become such a masculine and aggressive game, that we forget that admitting our weaknesses as critics can lead to more educational outcomes. What do you think?

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2010-SoCalLD-SeasonSweeps-Update1

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For anyone who is new to NFA-LD I wanted to point out a very valuable forensics resource available at the National Forensics Association website: the National Forensics Journal.

There are tons of articles specifically related to NFA-LD theory that an enterprising debater could cut to win theory arguments.

Any other sites you use to find good theory discussions?

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