Bringing the Power of Debate to Math Class

Published in Cult of Pedagogy.

“Why aren’t students talking?” was my constant gripe my first years of teaching. I was young, energetic, and passionate about math, but my students didn’t seem to be engaged in talking about math…at all.

Add to that the fact that I wanted my students to think deeply and critically about some of the rich questions I posed, but students wanted to take the path of least resistance. They just wanted to quickly get to an answer; they were not as engaged as I would have liked. They were doing math, but they weren’t discussing math.

Yet, at speech and debate team practice, I saw an entirely different side of these same students. Students were digging into heavy research articles. They were talking to each other, verbally brainstorming ideas. They were thinking critically about their arguments, and they were challenging each others’ thinking. They were alive with discourse.

So that brings me to the question that has been my exploration for the past decade or more: How do I bring these two worlds together?