Good afternoon everyone on behalf of the American Federation of Teachers, I want to welcome you to today's conference, our Virtual Conference, our final day of a virtual conference. My name is Kelly Booze and I'm the proud director of our American Federation of Teachers. Share my lesson and I will be your moderator today. Before we begin, I'd like to thank today's virtual conference sponsor, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie. Museum of Natural History offers educational support through resource materials, virtual and in person programs, and teacher loyalty passes. You can learn more about Carnegie Carnegie Museum of Natural History by clicking on their logo on the right side of your screen. We truly appreciate your support. And now I'm going to show a quick video that lets you know how our webinars work. Hello everyone, welcome to our 2020. Hello everyone, welcome to our 2022 share my lesson virtual conference. My name is Kelly Booze, director of the American Federation of Teachers. Share my lesson before we begin. We'll go over a few housekeeping items. For those of you who have joined us many times before, you know that we make our webinars as engaging as we possibly can. So to get us started, please open up that group chat box and tell us where you are from and why you are joining us today and what interests you about this particular topic. In addition to the group chat, if you're joining us live, you will be able to provide some different reactions throughout the webinar today, so let us know what you're thinking and throughout the webinar, whatever reaction you want to give, share it with us and share it with your fellow participants. At the end of this webinar, we will be facilitating a question and answer session. Use that Q&A widget to submit any questions that you want us to ask the presenter. If you have any technical issues, please also use a Q&A widget and one of our share. My lesson team members is there and ready to respond to you. If you would like a copy of the slide deck or any of the related materials, you can find those in the resource widget. For those of you who want professional development credit, you will be able to download a PDF certificate at the conclusion of this webinar verifying your participation today, you do need to answer the poll questions that you will see throughout the webinar. To access that certificate now, let's turn it back over to your moderator who will put up a sample poll question for you to try. The poll question is located directly in the slides. You can answer your question. And then hit submit. From all of us at share my lesson. Thank you for joining us today. Enjoy your webinar. OK so I'm gonna put up that poll question. I had to change it up a little bit today. I know some of you guys have been joining us for the other conferences. So your first question is do you wordle? Do you use that wordell? Yes no? Or what is Wardell? And if your answer yes in the chat box, let us know what's your. What's your best record? I will tell you that shortly after using Wordle I started. I do get addicted to it. I usually do it at night time before I go to bed. And when I one time I was up until midnight when it switches over to the new wordell of the day and I got it on the second try and I felt like I hit the jackpot. So that was pretty amazing. So share in the chat box your your if you use wordle, what's your? What's your record? Or if you don't know what it is, I will put a link into Wardell and I'm sorry you'll enjoy it. I do. I will say that I when I forget sometimes I will do it in the morning and if I do it in the morning and forget that I've done it and come at night time. I'm very disappointed that I'm gonna have to wait for the next day to use it. Alright, it looks like we've got the majority of you have responded to this all right? We've got a mix of the word lesnoe wordles or what is Wardell? Make sure I put that into attendee chat. Alright, so we always start off with like a little bit of a fun poll question just so you know where to find those poll questions or which are located directly within your slides. There will be more poll questions coming up alright. Susan, don't be sad. About 3/3 is awesome, that's great. I mean, I've only gotten two. I've gotten 2 twice. Seriously, I applaud you. Alright, so I for a lot of reasons I'm super excited to be moderating this session. I mean, I say that for all of them, but I will say that I used to work at the close up foundation. Many years ago, and it is an incredible incredible powerful civic education group. Nonpartisan Civic education group that really it inspires students to be civically engaged and civic and understand their rights and responsibilities of citizens. So what I want to do is, you know, welcome Sunday Mastrianna who is the curriculum design and professional development specialist for close-up? Who's going to be talking about a really important topic to deliberation versus debate? And the case for a consensus driven approach to teaching controversial issues, and I know. You know so much right now is you know conversations about divisive topics? Or how do we tackle this? And you know, some challenges are happening more in the political sphere right now, and I can tell you, you know, this nonpartisan approach that close up does to tackling these issues is really, really valuable. So thrilled to have you here someday. Thank you so much for being with us today. Alright, thank you and thank you for that wonderful introduction. So today we really are going to be talking about sort of. What exactly is deliberation first of all, but specifically, in contrast to debate, debate has sort of traditionally been the approach that people use when wanting their students to engage with something controversial or even just. Anything that students might have differing opinions on, regardless of its level of national controversy. But there's a problem with that in that there are certain aspects to how debate functions, typically that while they're reinforced in a lot of curriculum because of a lot of emphasis on things like argumentative language, it may in fact inherently lead to situations where if you're gonna actually amplify that controversy, whereas deliberation because of the way that structured can offer a formal approach to discourse. That unlike debate, doesn't kind of inherently tap into that animosity or that adverse aerial quality. So that's really what we're talking about here. Today I'll be sharing with you some of the research that we've done to reinforce this, as well as some of our anecdotal experience from working with our own students. But really, the goal here is hopefully you'll be feeling more equipped to conduct a deliberation in your own classroom, and through that end there are some materials and resources that are provided for you, including a Lesson plan and a sample resource that we use for our own deliberations. That you could take from and model. So let's get into things here. I'm gonna begin with my own poll just to sort of warm us up. So what is the strangest thing you've done during a virtual meeting in the past two years? It's hard to believe it's been that long, but at some point I'm sure all of you have done something a little off kilter. So take a second. What is the strangest thing you've done during a virtual meeting in the past two years? I know I certainly have. I I have to say I love this question. Yes, I feel like I've probably done. Just about all of these. And in for a worn clothes only from the worn formal clothes only from the waist up. I will say I may or may not be doing that right now. We call that the word. I call that the work mullet I coined that term a couple of years ago that business business up top and you know, yoga pants on the bottom. Not to out myself, but it is not unlikely that I have done all of these things that you see listed here, so I'll be curious to see what people say. I love it. Sorry, I had to come back on to at least share share that story. In fact, I I early on in the pandemic, I wrote a blog about the work mullet and the new reality of our the world that we were funding ourselves in. So. Alright, I promise I'll get away from you something. Give everybody a few more seconds to submit their responses. Just as we get used to polling. Since it's part of not just this presentation, but for those of you looking for certification credit, gotta make sure that we get those Poles answered answered. Alright, so let's take a look what we had to say. Alright, so pretty widespread here. Looks like the majority of us have cooked a meal without not the majority. A plurality of us have cooked a meal with formal clothes on. I mean, I feel like if you're putting on full formal clothes at this point, get with it. We got don't bother yourself with that, but I'm glad to see that it's getting around. And those of you who your lips are sealed. Don't worry, we'll keep that on the hush hush, but alright, so we're going to get into the swing of things here. The polls from this point off out will be more reflective of the actual content and substance, so. Please make sure you answer those as they come up there. Also be a few opportunities for you to respond on some paddle. It's that I've set up so that we can get a sense of what everybody is talking about. And then of course, if you want to ask a direct question to me, you can submit those in the chat and they will kewene rather, and they'll make their way to me in time for the session. We're going to try and set aside some time at the end to make sure that we have space for that, but here we go. No bite. So just to tell you a little bit more about close up beyond that wonderful introduction provided. So we are strictly nonprofit and nonpartisan organization. We though like to think of ourselves as being multi partisan. What I mean by that is we try to present the students that we work with and in the resources that we provide to classrooms as many. Legitimate viewpoints held by disparate groups on a particular controversy or a particular public policy. So we often try to shape things and get away from labels like conservative or progressive. Certainly, try not to put too much into the idea of Democrat versus Republican, but instead trying to prevent present issues to students based on is this a view that has legitimacy in terms of the types of people who advocated how actual conventional that viewpoint is. And based in something real and can we present that to students and let them draw their own conclusions before we get started to talk about who this comes from specifically and whether or not it's more conventionally aligned with one party or another? And what have you? We just try not to perpetuate any idea. So, for example, you'll never find something in close-up materials talking about the legitimate arguments for why the earth is flat. That's not going to happen, but anything short of kind of conspiracy we are willing to present to students because we believe that students are smart enough. Engaged enough and interested enough to be able to draw their own conclusions and the more that we can get away from these sort of labels that contribute to this tribalism that we'll explore a little bit in this session, the better, so our real goal is to empower young people to feel engaged in our democracy, to know that there's so much more that they can do to get involved beyond just voting. Even though voting is incredibly important, we want students understand that even if you don't even have the right to vote yet because of your age, there's so much that you can do and be involved in that still be trying to do to that end. Just to kind of give you sort of the foundation of our pedagogical approach. So really important to us is this idea of issued Senate education. In essence, that's what I was just talking about. We wanna D emphasize personality we wanna D emphasize party and partisanship and really focus more on what do I think is a good idea to solving this issue and what are those ideas that are out there right now? Do I have my own that I might augment with? But either way I want to draw my own conclusions and that's how we want to try and work with students. So all of our materials. Everything that I'm trying to provide today will reflect that mindset. We also believe in experiential education, which is why we're doing things like conducting formal deliberations and formal debates. We really think that students work best in application of these ideas. It's particularly true of something like civics and government, which for a lot of it's at least historic presentation to students has always seemed somewhat abstract and more like a box that you have to check rather than something that actually impacts their lives. So as often as possible, we want to give students the opportunity to engage. And so in our in person programming in DC, we obviously do a lot of that by bringing them into the capital and interacting with peers from all across the country. But even if we turn key to schools around the country we try to. Give you as many tools to to actually conduct these sorts of activities in your classroom in a way that takes out the logistical side and has that already for you so you can focus more on the substance of those interactions. Constructivism, I've already spoken to our constructive approach, but the idea being that we want students to expose themselves to as many perspectives as possible, not just the ones they're hearing at home, or the ones that they're getting hearing a lot in their own communities. But as diverse of a perspective as possible, and then draw their own conclusions as to what they support and why. And finally, cooperative learning, that kind of goes hand in hand with the experiential aspect we want students to take a look at issues together to engage with each other, and to draw from each others perspectives and experiences, as well as just. Knowledge so they can develop a clearer picture of what these sometimes very complicated issues are, and certainly a lot of these issues that we're dealing with in the country today, unfortunately, are very divisive and can lead to problems and terms of interpersonal interaction, and so we want to try and create spaces where students can interact with each other despite disagreements and still proceed in developing that knowledge and developing that civic efficacy. So these four qualities are things you're going to see reinforced throughout everything that I present today. I just want to give you an idea of close up and. How it approaches these issues? So Speaking of division, here is a sample from Gallup that took a look at a longitudinal study of America's perception of citizens as being united or divided. Taking a look here so that light green is people feeling overall united and the dark green is people feeling overall divided and as you can see with one very very conspicuous exception, the trajectory has been slowly increasing more and more to division. And then there is a bit of an. Uptick around 2012, 2013. I'm not sure if I can see the chat here, but does anybody wanna take a stab at where? Why? There's that one blip there where it flips all the sudden and then it goes back. I don't know if I can see the chat. Here we go. Ah, perfect, thank you. There we go. Andy, correct so 911 occurs right around then and then the war in Iraq comes around to kind of set things back to their previous levels of division. So that's where you see that instantaneous flop. Very rare. Do you see that kind of a statistical bloop? But that's what that really is. But the overall trend has certainly been to increasing division. You might also note that this poll ends right after 2016. I would be inclined to imagine that if it was to continue into 2020 and up to 2022, that split has only gotten greater since then, so this is a real problem. This is something that we're all immersed in all of the time, and students are immersed in it as well. The real problem, of course, being that students, unlike many of us. Don't really have an active memory of a time where Americans weren't feeling this way. It's not to say that everything in the past was peace, love, and harmony, but there have definitely been times in which there was less public animosity, and certainly that the divisions were it's so rigid in the idea that you are either on the A-Team or the B team, and in some cases and increasingly the mindset is you're on the good team or the bad team. So we have to remind ourselves that students now are strictly students of the 21st century. They have not really experienced the time. That's not featured on this poll, and therefore we have to be clear on the idea that they don't necessarily know what it is to have political opinions that are not strictly at odds with an entire other segment of the United States population. And then adding to that. Is the recent movement within school systems by state legislatures to pass these new policies that are nominally aimed at critical race theory? So whether or not you agree with the interpretation that critical race theory is something actively being taught in schools, or whether things that are being taught in schools are just simply informed by scholars who have dabbled in critical race theory? Regardless, there is legislation being passed to challenge it, but when we actually look at this legislation? A lot of teachers and many of you probably have encountered this. Take a look at the wording and it all feels very scary. It all feels very kind of general like it's difficult to even conceive of how you might talk about certain issues. The teachers I've worked with certainly have talked about. They've found teaching things like slavery and the Holocaust have caused a lot of anxiety for them because so much of the language. If you take a look at these laws is couched in terms like. Students should never be taught that they have inherent guilt because of their race or cultural background. Students should never be taught. That one particular group is responsible for the historical legacy of its origins and things like that. When I look at those laws though, it kind of makes me take a step back because I don't think any educator is really doing that or has ever done that. I think educators want students to learn, they want them to experience as much information as possible and be able to get an accurate portrayal of history or even science. I mean, we're talking about all kinds of content areas now. I don't really think. There were many teachers out there. Certainly they would be a very very small number who were ever teaching students that they are personally inherently responsible for the past, or that they need to feel guilt because of the person that they are. It's not really an accurate portrayal of what goes on in classrooms, certainly not with teachers that I've worked with. That being said, when you read language like that. It's kind of in between the lines, making some suggestions here that might cause some people to have some pause about how are we going to approach issues which are inherently tide to things like ancestry, race, culture, ethnicity. I question how anyone could talk about the Holocaust without talking about. Anti-Semitism, I mean it's it's. It is the manifestation of anti-Semitism, so to be so nervous about these qualities, you might just try to avoid talking with these topics, but then that just exacerbates the problem and we can't really have that. But this just gives you a sense of sort of where we are. As of October 2021, so these darker colored states have already signed some of these policies into law that lighter red. In Montana, Utah and Florida is just a reflection of some other state changes that are not strictly specifically geared. They don't make mention necessarily at the term critical race theory, and then there are several states that have introduced these policies into their legislature and we'll be deciding on them in this cycle. This issue will no doubt inform the upcoming congressional election as well, so I don't really expect this is going to go away anytime soon. And certainly I live in the state of Virginia where this was the focus. Of our governor Tauriel election and as a result, the Republican candidate who was arguing that this is a problem in our schools that needs to be confronted and was supporting legislation aimed at critical race theory and preventing its instruction. Unexpectedly somewhat one our governorship. After many, many years of democratic control. So it is definitely a real issue going on both inside of schools and in broader communities. Many of you have no doubt run into manifestations of it and are concerned about how to proceed. Forward so one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is because deliberation can be a way. Of addressing these issues, where at least you don't feel that you have the onus that it is really about representing a students perspective. It is not about putting the thumb on the scale in any particular way, and that's not really something that teachers probably do, but it is a perception that parents can have, because if you're presenting a particular set of information and having students draw their conclusions and then have to identify with am I on this side of the argument, or that side of the argument, it doesn't really enable a level of plurality. But if we can pluralise these discussions and just have students represent their own perspective rather than having to identify with, say, perspectives that are conventional for Democrats, convention perspectives that are conventional for Republicans, this can be a way to sort of diffuse the idea that you are portraying. Divide is one way or another, and that students have to therefore pick a right side and a wrong side so we wanna get away from as many. Two polled arguments as possible and deliberation isn't inherently about having as many voices in the room as possible. So first content poll here. In the wake of efforts to change approaches to curricula across the country, how comfortable do you feel having students engage with controversial issues in your classroom? Or just take a second to respond to that. Getting some responses now. Try to get a few more before I turn these results over. I've got about 1/3 of you now about half. Just a reminder, if you're looking to get that credit, make sure you're answering these polls. They give you 10 more seconds to get those answers in, and then we'll take a look at what everybody had to say. Alright, let's take a look. OK, so the majority of you said that you are somewhat comfortable. So you've successfully engaged with these issues in the past, though you are acknowledging that some issues could present more challenges than others. And then some of you said you're very comfortable. That's great to hear. Even if you are very comfortable, I highly encourage you to try out deliberation if you hadn't, it probably means that your deliberation will go really well if you feel comfortable with these issues and then some of you are saying somewhat uncomfortable, you only have some experience, or that you can anticipate a lot of issues being significant challenges. Sometimes this is just a reflection of the demographics some of us teaching more homogeneous student groups, some of us more heterogeneous, some of us are. At odds George sort of with the general culture in the area that we're teaching, whatever it may be, I am happy to see that no one feels very uncomfortable, and this is the kind of thing that they can't even really conceive of doing. So that's encouraging, so hopefully to all of you what we're going to go through to your today will clarify a different approach. And like I said, there are specific resources there for you in the form of a Lesson plan and an issue article that you could implement to get yourself going on this new strategy. Alright. So why talk about controversial issues to begin with? What are common arguments you hear for why talking about controversial issues in the classroom should be avoided? And what are arguments that support discussing controversial issues? For this I have a link to a padlet, so if you can click on that link and I believe the next slide will have it. Yes, so if you can click on that link you can answer the questions on the padlet there so I can get a sense of what people's responses are. But then also everybody can see what each other is saying. Give everybody a minute or so to put in their responses on the padlet. All. Alternatively, if you're having trouble with the path, let you can feel free. To put your responses in the chat. There should be a link in there as well. I sitting here. Like yeah, there's no responses yet. I realized I have two pad. Let's announce clicked on the wrong one. There we go. Now there are responses. House all. Read out a few of what you had to say. So some arguments that you typically hear against going through controversial issues in the classroom. Obviously parental and administrative pushback is definitely a very salient issue throughout the country. Particularly, I hear a lot about anxieties about parental pushback and or realities of parental parental pushback. One specifically talking about that in Florida. Parents actually have a legal right to complain and the system is set up that it can lead to a teacher losing their license. Sort of like in a civil manner. The idea that you might wind up making students and parents feel uncomfortable or attacked, whereas if you just didn't do this, that wouldn't be a factor. There are also direct risks to your possible employment. I know certainly a lot of public school teachers you know you can't share your own political opinions or your particular views, and therefore if someone can attribute bias to you, you could run a serious professional risk. The idea of controversy for controversy Seixo talking about an issue and injecting controversy into the classroom with the idea being that that is the quality that is inherently good, that it gets students talking about their views. But at the same time, if you're just creating a controversy in the room, is that really something worth doing? A few more here. Students lack of knowledge on an issue can make it challenging. That's definitely a huge factor, and it's something you have to consider before doing something. A lot of well meaning teachers out there have tried to address some very important issues, but their students just were not there yet and it has led to more confusion and more animosity 'cause they just didn't have the background knowledge to really have a concise and clear argument and said so. Instead, students tend to default to parroting things that they've heard that may or may not actually be well grounded. By contrast, for controversial issues, we have things like it is helpful as a means for getting students to understand different sides, particularly if you live in a community where everyone tends to have a similar the same opinion. This is a way of getting them to be exposed to other perspectives, encourages critical thinking. Obviously they're taking a look at some real world applications of what our otherwise concepts they just learn in school, and seeing how that manifests. A lot of people talking about the value to critical thinking and self awareness. Also as a way interesting of undoing misinformation. So. And that goes for all sides of the aisle. Here people are getting a lot of bubble kind of reinforcing their view that may or may not be genuine, particularly in our more democratized media. What we have now. So anybody can report on things and get an audience. They are not always well vetted, and sometimes they're being deliberately miss informative. So good. So these are all. Very, very common sort of arguments in favor in an opposition of doing this. My particular view is that the classroom is precisely where these sorts of conversations should be happening, because you can exercise a lot of control over these conversations that doesn't exist in the real world, and it's important for students to understand that their immediate peers may not share their opinions, but because they are their peers, that's a lot easier to disagree with someone that you know than it is to disagree with someone that you don't know in terms of actually having a positive experience. So I really think the classroom as much as possible is a great place for these things to happen, but there are certain precautions and procedures that you want to keep in mind as you go through. But deliberation might be a different approach that might lend itself to this going a bit more smoothly for you and for students having a better overall experience. If nothing else, alright, so let's keep going. So just to give you a sense of where our methodology is coming from when we're talking about you know, yeah, we're recommending these ideas and and we're saying they're really good, but I just wanted to point out that this is coming from actual work that we've done directly with students. This isn't even just monitoring other teachers. This is our own instructors dealing with students is where we're pulling a lot of this, so we've been facilitating discourse is one of the main focuses of close-up, and that's been going on since 1971, so we just had our 50th year anniversary, and. The students that we work with come from every state and territory, so that includes places you know from Maine to Guam, essentially anywhere that that that American citizens are. We are getting students to participate in our programs and coming together to talk to people who they would otherwise never encounter in their daily life. We're also bringing in about 20,000 students per year, so this is not a small sample size that we're working with to get these conclusions and test out these lesson plans that we're turning over to you. And then we have to conduct this discourse. Both in person and virtually obviously, particularly since 2020, we've engaged in a lot of virtual programming, so we were able to reach that many more students as a result. So I just wanted to have a sense of where this is all coming from. So in our own approaches, we use three types of discourse that will be more or less familiar to you depending on your own experience. So the first, of course, is discussion. This is something you've probably all engaged in with your students about something at some point, and this is highly informal and the real goal here. That discussion is that you're trying to build their content knowledge and get a broader sense of the issue and the arguments around it. It's also just discussion is really great entry point to topics because it helps you as an educator, develop a sense of what your students know. And what they need to know before they can engage in something more in depth. So the goal of a discussion. Is really just to familiarize students with an issue. Debate is something that all of you have probably participated in in your life as a student yourself. Not all of you may have done debates in your classroom, but presumably. Many of you have because it is sort of the default. As I was saying at the top of how do you deal with talking about something for which there are a lot of mainstream opinions that are at odds debate? It's a great way to explore it. Debate also offers the appeal to people of the idea that you can sometimes assign students to debate against what they actually believe, or at the very least, in order to be an effective debater, you have to develop an understanding of what your opposition is going to be saying so it builds your analytical skills. It teaches students how to defend their own views and how to respond to. Others I'd also has the utility of being very structured, which is part of the appeal as well. You're not just having sort of a discussion that can go anywhere necessarily. People know when they're speaking off and for how long they're supposed to speak, and it's more regimented, so it has some appeal there. So the goal of a debate. Keep clicking the thing there is to increase students understanding of those competing views and then to strengthen their capacity to formulate arguments. Now comes deliberation, so deliberation is also formal, but it's more loosely structured than a debate. It involves you as an educator, acting as a facilitator of an ongoing conversation between students, but it draws from a lot of the same skills as debate does, so they still have to develop analytical skills because they're evaluating conventional arguments surrounding an issue. But the difference between debate and deliberation is that deliberations goal is to come to some form of consensus, or at least a more widespread level of agreement. So inherently, students have to compromise. They're not trying to win, they're trying to reach an agreement with all the different views in the in the classroom as much as possible. So this is not about saying I'm right. Here's why it's about. Here's my view. Here's why I think this is a good idea. What do you think is really the difference between a debate and deliberation? So the goal here is really to build empathy for opposing perspectives and that reach conclusions which prioritize inclusivity, because without it, you can't actually reach the goal of forming any kind of consensus. We'll take a deeper dive on the merits and demerits of debate and deliberation based on the research that was conducted with our own students. So this research was conducted by Paula McEvoy. She is a social studies education professor at North Carolina State University and her essential thesis. Here was. How useful is debate and deliberation in reducing partisan divisions with her general thrust, believing that deliberation would probably prove to be the more useful one in terms of reducing those divisions. So the particular cohort that she studied with our own students was about 165 students on close up programs in 2019 and in 2020. This was done just before the pandemic we got in just under the wire, but her conclusions were published last year. She conducted pre and post debate and deliberation surveys with the same students to get a sense of where they were before and where they were after in terms of their levels of partisanship and their overall level of agreement. And we'll take a look at the results. So first we're looking at debates, since this is the more traditional approach to dealing with controversial issues. But first, with this question here, how would you describe your experience conducting classroom debates? Getting some answers now. Pretty good spread of answers as well. Let me get a few more responses before I turn those results over. I've got about half of you at the moment. Right, but every 10 more seconds to put their answer in before we look at the results. Alright, let's take a look. So the majority of you said that you conduct them occasionally, but they've been successful. It's good, and though, tellingly, the very next largest result was that you conduct them rarely and the results have been inconsistent. So really, our medium here is that it's not something that's going on a lot, and people have had. Better results, but some people have had some mixed results. Some of you said that you never conducted them. There could be very good reasons for that, but it doesn't surprise me that some of you just might not do that in your classrooms. So if you haven't conducted a debate before, then all of this information might be a little bit more new to you in terms of what the challenges and various aspects of that. But if it's a beta, is something that you have tried and it hasn't gone well, or if it's something that you have tried and it goes great, I still think that deliberation is worth trying as an alternative. 'cause it might have some different results for you, or at least maybe some more consistent results. But let's take a look. So one of the problems with debate is that good examples of it are very, very rare, and this one was really bad. The most recent presidential debate, which there was one I was watching it in 2020 and throughout the debate one candidate would not obey the prearranged rules and eventually the other candidate told that candidate to shut up was. At that moment, I decided that presidential debates were not something I was ever really going to dwell on with my students ever again. At least not until the nature of discourse in this country. Changes, but that is a problem. There are very few good examples of debate that you can point to, particularly in the mainstream, unless students are in a debate club, they're not going to see a good debate. Debates are more about getting sound points or winning over your particular opponent. We see debates on things like CNN and mainstream media all the time, but it's really just people trying to yell at each other and get people to like them on Twitter. So not really great examples. One of the challenges of debate is just having a good reference point. But in the chat, if you just answer what are the features you would expect or want to see in a substantive debate between students centering on a controversial issue? So just in the chat, if you could describe what you would most want to see and say that was a good debate, how would you know that was going on? Let's see some responses. I'll come back to those in just a moment. Please feel free to put those chat responses in there. So what is debate? In a nutshell. We talked about that this is essentially students representing or defending their opinions while making persuasive arguments. Debates typically feature at least two sides, and they centered on some kind of closed question. Essentially a yes or no question. So should the United States pursue a Medicare for all health care system? Should states abolish the death penalty? It's within those yeses and noes that the real substance of the debate emerges, but in essence you're trying to set up at least two arguments to be made, and then students choose a side or you assign them aside. And usually we try to use time limits on responses and debates. That's not always true. Certainly in formal settings they do use them. It's something that you might use, so there's some benefits, and there's some drawbacks to it. Debate debate is a really great way to apply those analytical and argumentative skills, particularly since this is so prevalent in most curriculums. We're always talking about argumentative writing and persuasive language, but often the only real way that we apply it is in writing, so debate can be a great way of applying it in a different mode. However, debate has the potential to reinforce or even make ideological divisions worse, since the debate is inherently. Adversarial in nature. If an issue is controversial, something like, say, reproductive rights, gun control. Drug legalization, immigration. These issues that really can get people fired up putting them into a formal situation wherein they are supposed to be at odds might actually have the opposite results from trying to reach some kind of mutual understanding, because, as I said earlier, debate, the goal is to win. The goal is to have the better argument, so as much as we talk about debate being a great way to expose students to another perspective, which it is, they do have to research it and understand it. They're not researching it. Go to empathize with that perspective. They're researching it to undermine that perspective, and so if the issue is already controversial, putting students in a situation where someone is now crafting arguments to take down what they view as being correct or right isn't always going to turn out well and can really lead to some problems there because the goal is ultimately to say this side of the debate one well, if you make that sort of judgment, then you might have students leave your classroom with the impression that, oh, that particular view on this issue. Is the correct one, and so you can wind up with students saying that to their parents getting that up to administration, whatever it may be, and that can put you into some hot water in addition to the interpersonal problems that it can potentially cause with students. So debate is a really great exercise. However, it's probably something that you wanna do when your students have shown a really, really high level of knowledge and engagement with a particular topic, or at least have demonstrated a maturity that they don't take things personally. Simply because one side made a stronger argument. That is something to just default to. It's not always the best choice for every issue. And here's some data to show exactly where that conclusion is coming from. So this is the data that Paul McEvoy study with our students yielded. So if you take a look here. She measured before and after on two issues. We have mandatory minimums so minimum sentencing and concealed carry reciprocity throughout the country and so the darker line is the post test. So after they went through a debate and the lighter line is the pretest, so before they went into debate so prior to the debate, students actually exhibited less polarization, which is indicated by having fewer peaks. So fewer hills and more alignment. So the higher the hill is, the more students fell into that category. So before the debate, they actually were less polarized and more aligned. After the debate they were more polarized and they had less alignment. Now this does not mean that students always have to agree about everything and only that means that a discourse has been successful. However, it does indicate that if you had an issue that was really controversial in your classroom or in your Community, a debate might wind up reinforcing those divisions. So you have to be careful about when you apply it. By contrast, we'll take a look at deliberation. So first of all, there are many examples of deliberation that you can point to that students probably have been exposed to, or at least have some knowledge of. Juries are the thing most formal that the average person could be expected to participate in. Obviously, your students will not have participated on a jury, but they have a concept of what that is, because in a jury, in most instances you have to come to a unanimous decision before you can recommend some kind of sentence. So that's a good example, Congress asterisk. Is an example of a deliberative body. The problem is that in reality they are not. They are a factionalized body that doesn't really accomplish much because no one is willing to compromise on anything. So Congress is supposed to do this, but they don't. One of the best examples that you can point though is reality. Show judges I know that might seem kind of trite, but reality show judges do participate in deliberation. They OfferUp their opinion as well as the objective merits and demerits that they feel exist for whoever it is that they are advocating for, and they that discussion is actually filmed. And mind you, it's edited, but it is filmed and it can prove as a useful example of what we mean when we want students to understand how a deliberation differs from a debate, everyone has to come to some kind of. Agreement or consensus, but no one is representing a particular side that exists before them. They are authentically trying to represent their view, and that's really where debate differs somewhat from. I'm sorry where deliberation differs somewhat from debate. So what exactly is a deliberation? How do we know what is happening? So really again, I want to emphasize the goal of a deliberation is to reach some form of consensus and or generalized greater understanding. So there can be multiple sides of perspectives. Like I said, there is no fixed position. You are not assuming the position of the DNC, you're not assuming the position of the GOP. You were assuming your own perspective. They also sent her an open ended questions, so we're not just doing a simple this or that we're saying how should the United States reform the immigration system? What should be done to address gun violence? We're not baking in a preconceived this or that we're allowing students to approach it from any angle that they would like to while still ******* the deliberation to a specific issue. And then actively the facilitator in this case. This would be you, as the educator is presenting questions throughout the process, they're making connections, so they're recalling you know Tom said this, which resonates with what Ashley said. Do you remember Tom saying that? And how would you build on it? Ashley, so you're kind of consciously pulling in what students have said. You're taking notes as you're going through, and you're prompting contributions, so if you know that you have a student who probably has a really good opinion that you heard them discussing, stay in the preparation group you would, you can invite them. Actively into the conversation because it's all informal. No one speaks at a certain time. No one only has a certain amount of time to speak. It's this more kind of inner locative back and forth. But you're not telling them what to believe. You're not saying that's a really good idea versus that's really bad idea. You are facilitating the discussion, so while you are actively engaged in it, you are not assuming a side representing a perspective. Calling into special attention in a particular view, you are there to clarify and to keep them talking to each other. So the benefits here is that since it's cooperative in nature, a successful deliberation can help students better understand and empathize in a way that a debate does not. It promotes that mutual understanding it promotes a pluralistic view. That being said, a successful deliberation requires a lot of active engagement on Potter. Of all the students. And it requires a lot of practice for them to get used to it, in part because it's not as structured as something like a debate. So they have to have a better sense of how do I contribute to something that's kind of informal? How do I make my voice heard? Are there systems that you want to have in place for getting a student to contribute and then having them take a step back so you do have to be more engaged and probably run through it a few times with students before you do a more meaningful deliberation on a really serious issue? So you might start with something relatively simple, like for example have a deliberation about what the schools uniform policy should be, something that doesn't actually get into the heart of what's dividing America, but something that nevertheless students would probably have an opinion on so you can sort of graduate the. Depth of the content and really focus on the structure for awhile until students are ready. But it does necessitate a lot of practice for students to become comfortable with it. But let's look at the data. So from the same study we took a look at deliberation so prior to the deliberation it showed the exact opposite results. So prior students were more polarized, so that's when you see more of those bumps on the line and there was less alignment, which means those bumps aren't as high. Then after the deliberation, they were less polarized. You can see that there's that one big bump there, and it's much higher than it was in the pretest, and so that indicates a higher level of alignment. And this is because students are representing their own view. They're not arguing for one position or another, and they're working towards. How do we get on board to at least be able to agree to something, even if it's only a tiny little point of agreement? That's the goal that we have. We're not trying to win. We're not trying to prove that the other side is wrong. There is no other side. This is everybody in the room taking part in voicing their opinion and trying to come together to agree. So we see the exact opposite results when Prudents predicted a deliberation compared to a debate less division. And then. Less partisanship. So one final poll question here. Based on what you've learned relative to a more traditional classroom debate, how would you rate the task of conducting a deliberation in your classroom? My response is coming in now. You know 30 seconds or so. It's like 10 more seconds to get those last responses. OK, let's take a look. OK, well that's very positive so. Everybody was kind of on the if I had to say the plus side of the of the pole versus the negative side. So some people said it seems easier and more beneficial. That's cool. Some said that does seem more challenging but more beneficial. And then the rest of you said it's about as challenging but could be more beneficial. So that's encouraging to me. I hope that you all do genuinely feel like this might be something that your students could really benefit from, and it's something you're willing to give a try. I have one final question that's going to be on another one of those. Tablets that you can put your responses to. Before I do, I just wanted to make sure I called special attention to in your resource folder for this session. There is a Lesson plan for a 60 minutes of deliberation that will walk you through the blow by blow of how to set that up, and there's a sample resource from closeups digital library. That is designed specifically for deliberation, so it already comes with multi partisan arguments for various policies that students might favor. So encourage you to take a look at that. That particular issue focuses on criminal justice reform. If that resource does appeal to you, you can always visit our website to get access to more of those, but I just wanted to make sure everyone sort of had not just the lesson, but something that would immediately lend itself to students conducting a deliberation. So please be sure to check those out. OK, so final question. What benefits is just sort of elaborating on your poll answers here. What benefits could you see for your own classes in using a deliberative model, and then what potential challenges could you anticipate planning or conducting a deliberation? In your classroom, so everyone wants to click on that link. I'm sure it'll be popped into the chat as well. Some padlet responses on there and then that'll basically conclude things and I'll be happy to take anybody's questions. Popped over to my padlet here. And as folks are putting in some of those responses, I'll read those in just a moments. The resources I mentioned. Looking awful lot like this. You should be sure to take those out. And if you have any questions about what I said during this session that don't spring to mind right now, or if you are using these resources and would like some advice or clarification, you can reach out directly to me at smastriannaandcloseup.org. Sure, everybody gets that down. In case you have any questions, but if you would like to ask me any questions right now and open the floor for those. Great Sante, thank you so much for this overview. If you do have questions, please go ahead and open up that Q&A widget which is on your platform to submit any questions that you have so we can ask them. I love this overview and the difference in the data between deliberation and debate. I'm wondering, even in in both situations and in deliberation debate, you know what's what's close. Strategy or recommendations for kind of setting some ground rules or norms for you. Know those conversations, especially if you're gonna have some conversations on some you know, divisive issues. Yeah, so that's something that's actually brought up in that Lesson plan, but there is going to be. It's really recommended that you do set up a series of specific norms for discourse, because those can be slightly different than what you might conventionally use in your classroom. One example I can think of is that we often want students to be able to cite facts or statistics to reinforce their opinions, but if you're talking about something controversial, like, say, police reform, the impact that policing can have on people's lives can be wildly different. Whether it's somebody in their family is a police officer or they've had somebody in their family have a bad interaction. But saying to either of those people you can't bring in a personal anecdote or personal story to inform how you feel doesn't really apply. So we wanna make sure we broaden more. The idea that we want perspectives to be their perspectives or something valid that people draw from. But that's just one example of you probably want to sit down with your students and establish ideas about how they demonstrate respect to each other, how they can show that they're engaging actively in the deliberation, and any particular things that you want to have permitted versus any things that you want to explicitly. Omit from being allowed into deliberation. You really want to establish that ahead of time, and that's that's how we do it with our own students on programming is we make sure that we devote some session time to just developing those norms. Yeah yeah, no thank you and I. I definitely remember that from some of my my close up days working with the students to, you know, do you and I know I did this and I don't know it. It's sometimes and you know with those lesson plans, do you recommend? You know, doing some of the deliberations and kind of doing a practice round on a not a controversial issue, so you can kind of get students to understand the the process and set it up before you start diving into something. That may be a tougher topic to discuss. Yeah, I mean it's definitely like focus on structure initially and then as the structure becomes more routinized. That's when you can turn up the content. So I kind of gave that example earlier of like you might do something like school uniform code. If you wanna do something more real world. For example, one of the issues that we sometimes have deliberations with students on is whether or not DC should be made of state. People can take that very personally. People have very strong arguments for one or the other, but it's not the sort of issue that's going to bring people. Inject as much animosity as say, if you were in September and we're like, OK, let's do our first deliberation on abortion. Probably not the wisest choice of a starting issue, and you really wanna make sure there's groundwork for that, so anything that for students is something they already know about. That you can reasonably expect them to know about pretty well. That's where I would start things off with and then something that has a lot of complexity to it. I would do much later once the process had gone well a few times. Yeah, yeah and I know, you know I. I recall doing you know, several different fishbowl debates back in the day. In fact, I actually got to go to a career day at my kids school and I ended up doing a fishbowl debate with a bunch of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders and I always like to. You know, sometimes take some of the most outspoken opinionated child and have them have to go on to have to take a position that is not necessarily where they strongly believe. Yeah, and then deliberation doesn't preclude that either. It's just that in deliberation it's not as important what side you're on necessarily, it's just how well can you articulate your view. Yeah, and that's that's a good distinction there, great. Well, I think we are almost at time and we've got several more webinars. For those of you who are with us right now, live, thank you. And for those of us on demand on all of our webinars from the last few days are on demand in these webinars will be on demand soon, so Santa I'll let you say you know final closing words and then I will close out our webinar for today. Thank you so much for for bringing this up to our attention on the deliberation versus debate. Great, well thank you all for your attention and your attendance I. I just wanted to say those of you who are still teaching in the classroom. I have absolutely nothing, but just unabashed respects. I used to be a classroom teacher back when it was already a hard job. I cannot imagine what you've all gone through in the past two years between the politics and then the actual logistical challenges of COVID. So just thank you all so much for. Will it be willing to engage with your students in the 1st place on these issues? It really is super important, but just to have the tenaciousness to hang in there, you all deserve. All of the praise in the world, and I feel so excited for you that your summer break is coming up soon. But I really hope that this material that I presented here could be helpful to you. And please do at any time. Do reach out to me if you want some tips, some advice, or even if there's materials we could potentially create for you. We don't really care about fees or things like that. We're willing to make new products for you so long as you're willing to test them out and tell us how it works with your students. So if there's an issue like us to have some resources for, just send me an email sometime. Well, that's awesome. What a what a great offer. So everybody here take advantage of that. You know, reach out to him. The email still on the screen and I also wanna call out. It looks like I see an old friend of mine in the audience and the civics world. Andy Evans that has posted a great resource that was made on the Socratic Socratic dialogue in the chat box. Maybe I can re up that as everybody saying thank you. So hi Andy, good to see you virtually all right. Well thank you so much. Again everybody we've got. In addition to this webinar. We have a keynote tonight that is really still on this. Related to this important topic, for today, we've got our webinar on teaching honestly and teaching honest history, so hopefully you can join us at is at the 5:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern Time Hour today and that will be live with our Vice President of the AF T&US representative Jahana Hayes, who's a afti member and former teacher herself, social studies teacher herself, so I'm hoping you can join us for that keynote tonight and I thank everyone for joining us and I'm gonna. Closeout with our closing video and we will hopefully see you on one of the next webinars. Thanks again Sunday. Thank you. Hi everyone, Kelly booze rejoining you again. I hope you enjoyed today's webinar as much as I did. I want to go over a couple reminders and I have one big favor to ask of you. First, you should now be able to download that PDF certificate for your participation. Today you can access that PDF certificate using one of the widgets, the one with the checkbox. 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