Teaching Current Events

Last week my group and I presented a current events lesson to my fellow colleagues. We decided with the help of our teacher to do a debate as our lesson. A debate is an example of interactive instruction which involves two-way communication and rely heavily on discussion and sharing among participants allowing for a range of groupings. According to the New York State K-12 Social Studies Field Guide "As students discuss their findings and debate potential responses to compelling questions, they have the opportunity to speak and listen in the context of the social sciences," this enhances students' conceptual knowledge within social studies. Debates also encourage students to think critically and build presentation skills.  

First we had to decide what current event we wanted to class to debate. Finding the perfect article took a lot of time. With the help of Dr. Smirnova, we chose the article "PRO/CON: The world's getting warmer, can nuclear power help us?." This article is good because it is only 2 months old and is a hot topic in politics. We had our classmates read the article before coming to class so that they were already familiar with the topic. We also designated our colleagues to either side of the argument, that way they could take notes on which side they would be defending. Once we had our topic it was time to create a presentation for our class. The presentation can be viewed here. We included questions to access prior knowledge and see what they already knew about debates. Then we included rules so that they knew what behaviors we were expecting from them. Adding a slide for the parts of a debate helped because the groups were able to organize their ideas accordingly. On this same slide we gave an example of a debate so that they were able to see an actual debate modeled for them. At the end of the presentation we attached a link to our evaluation sheet which we created with google forms. We wanted to know what our classmates took away from our lesson and if they would use this method in their own classroom one day. 

We gave the teams a brief 2 minutes to collect all of their thoughts and put them into order. Each team chose a candidate to present the statements. Once we realized this we encouraged other colleagues to take a turn as well. This gave everyone the opportunity to participate which we believe is very important when working with elementary students. Our class went back and fourth battling to prove their argument. After the debate, we had the class vote as if they were viewing this debate on television. The results can be seen here.  One thing that I would do differently if I was teaching a debate lesson to younger students is to have more then one argument with smaller group sizes that way you can guarantee everyone's participation. Also, as two groups are debating I would have the rest of the students evaluating them on their performance. Overall, I think our lesson was very effective and my colleagues enjoyed it.