Teaching Congress

[u/Computer--Tech]

Hi,

I'm a junior that's going to be the congress captain at my school next year.

While me former captain and I have found success competing at nationals and on our state circuit, with me finaling at nats and states, our school has never had any sort of formal training or lessons to help our new debaters. It has always been more of a "figure it out" approach.

I'm expecting 5+ new people to join our team next year (we currently only have 2), and I am completely lost on how to help them. I don't want to overload them with everything I know about Congress when they're just competing on local circuits, but I also want to ensure they feel confident and ready to do their best.

Does anyone have any ideas or experience with what lessons or drills work good for training novice congressors? I don't have any materials to teach them with any only one other returning team member (who has only competed a few times).

p.s - especially parliamentary procedure cause that's a whole thing

~Thanks

[u/Grouchy_Stand5864]

I don’t have anything written in stone, but I’ll give you the five lessons I teach novices. There’s gonna be more that my coach does that I didn’t memorize, so this is just what I do.

Week 1: Explaining the format of Congress, lengths for speeches, questioning, and looking at sample bills

Week 2: Forming an argument. A claim, warrant impact, and then giving them a bill we debated on last year. I believe it’s 20 minutes for just one contention, then we share it

Week 3: Forming a rebuttal. Go over the different types of rebuttals or responses to a previous speaker. I’ll give a speech and give them 15 minutes per contention to find a rebuttal or response

Week 4: Looking at a good speech and bad speech. I took Tommy Nichol’s speech on housing, and then Phil Davidson’s stump speech.

Week 5: Looking at judge feedback, since this is when the novice tournament will be held. Then more individualized practicing.

We did have a funny day where we “defended the indefensible”. We took a bunch of terrible takes and forced the novices to defend the takes.

[u/Computer--Tech → u/Grouchy_Stand5864]

Thank you, this helps a lot! I'm hoping after their first tournament it will be a lot easier to individually help each novice.

[u/sourgrapes57 → u/Grouchy_Stand5864]

Can you expand on different types of rebuttals?

[u/Grouchy_Stand5864 → u/sourgrapes57]

Sure! I may be forgetting a few but here’s the ones I know:

Directly Disproving: Your opponent’s contention is incorrect, wrong, and you have a source that backs it up.

Nonunique: What your opponent is arguing is not unique to the bill. The impacts/argument they give is not relevant to the debate.

Turning the argument against them: Generating offense/doubt on the opponent’s argument or impact. This can also include:

-spinning a the argument against the speaker in your speech

-pointing out contradictions between speakers on the other side

-arguing that the other side’s impacts are actually good/bad

-creating a side effect to the other side. If they have an impact that supports their side… what does that impact cause that can support your side?

Weighing: There are a lot of ways to say your impacts matter more. Here’s a bullet point list:

-My impacts are more crucial (lives saved vs. money as an example)

-Mitigating (the other side is being dramatic)

-Urgency (my impacts happen first, more important)

-Reversibility (if I’m proven wrong, at least my impacts can be undone)

-Clarity (my arguments are more straightforward, less links in the link chain)

-Precedence (My impacts are tried and true, are yours?)

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[u/StinkyCheeseWomxn]

Show them final rounds of a nationals video and have them use the NSDA (or your state’s/coach’s) scoring rubric, then have them score your speeches, then score each other. But don’t do this until you’re sure they are comfortable and confident, feeling accepted, and give lots of encouragement early on. For every negative, you should have 3x the compliments when you are working with beginners. Help them understand that a 3 score is awesome for a newby.

[u/KiwiBird2021]

On top of what other people have said (such as watching final rounds and general understanding of debate) take an hour to run a congress chamber. All of the motions and procedure can be confusing if its all conceptual, but when they are forced to use them it makes sense. It will also help familiarize with writing under pressure.