Debate

This course gives students an opportunity to explore what makes someone an effective speaker by creating and delivering humorous, performative, persuasive, and informative speeches. The course allows students to consider audience, intention, and style in their delivery and to build the public speaking skills to participate in discussions, presentations, and to deliver their own senior speeches in their senior year. Students will read and watch speeches delivered by various speakers in front of a variety of audiences. Students will have the opportunity to deliver speeches of various lengths in front of the class. To prepare for speeches, students will work in structured small groups to discuss their ideas and develop their presentations before returning to the class as a whole and delivering their final product.

Students learn and practice the basics of debate from the beginning of the school year through the semester. Classes practice argumentation, research, writing, reasoning, evidence, persuasion, and public speaking. Because debate is an interscholastic activity during semester 1, we expect students in this course to participate in at least one tournament per marking period. Semester 2 Beginning Debate will teach principles of Debate competition without the benefit of attending tournaments.

The goal of this class is to strengthen the skills learned in Beginning Debate with an emphasis on interscholastic competition. Students in this course will be members of St. Paul Academy and Summit School's competitive debate squad and should be willing to devote time to evening and weekend tournaments. This course may be repeated as many semesters as will fit a student's academic goals.