Nadeen School Debate Club by Ms Stephanie and Ms Karlien
Clubs are a great way to help develop students’ character and provide critical skills such as commitment, leadership, collaboration and communication. It unifies students so that they can all work towards a common goal.
The Debating club has started at NadeenSchool and Miss Karlien and Miss Stephanie are delighted to be able to build students’ debating skills over the term, ensuring that students are contributing constructively and positively to each session. In the first week, the first task students collaborated on was to come up with some key guidelines for all students to follow. These were important to ensure that all students understood the rules to not only make the most of this time each week, but to also foster a safe and harmonious environment to work together. Once these rules were agreed upon, Yasmina and Rayyan created some lovely posters for the club to display each week as seen below.
Afterwards, students were then encouraged to start to form their opinions based on the ‘arguments’ presented from each team. They debated some interesting topics such as ‘Should pets be brought into school’, ‘Should teachers be replaced by computers?’ and ‘Are aliens real?’.
These were just used as an introduction to debating in the first session, and soon students will continue to acquire further formal skills in order to understand the details and finer points of what debating is all about. This will then lead up to further more structured and exciting debates in future.
Being able to constructively debate can really open up opportunities for students as they are required to critically think and are exposed to various viewpoints. Other opportunities can result in participating in wider competitions such as Model United Nations and World Scholars Cup! This all leads to many very exciting opportunities as the school continues to expand and we welcome the older year levels at Nadeen School.
Yasmina has submitted her thoughts about Debate Club after the first week:
“We were very excited to join the Debate Club, but neither I nor my friends realised how much fun it would be. In our first session, we got to pick sides and a speaker for our team to try and convince the opponents to listen to us and, subsequently, join us. I remember how much fun it was, even if we were losing the debate we would be laughing along, listening to whatever our opponent had to say. We covered topics from ‘Should school trips be allowed?’ as our opening debate, as well as, ‘Are aliens real?’ as the finale. It was interesting to see which side our classmates decided to support, but the best part was, when we left the club, we were all talking about our favourite debate and how fun the club had been.”
Yasmina, Year 7
