Case+Study+-+Poverty+Debate

We heard that Ms Kirtane used some interesting teaching techniques and decided to head along to her US history class. In this class Ms Kirtane likes to use //debate// as a central teaching method. She gave us some information on how she usually carries out such classes and we went away to design a lesson based on this. We decided to use the topic //Poverty// and came up with the following questions:
 * Description: Debate Class **

The class consisted of 21 students, in their junior year. We gave each student in the class the questions on a piece of paper and we gave them 10 minutes to start to think about the questions before we started to open a discussion//. This gave everyone the opportunity to think about their own views before being influenced by others.//

We started the discussion with the question: “what is poverty?”. We let everyone in the classroom state their own opinion on the matter, counter-clockwise. //This meant that all students were able to contribute to the discussion, and made it more comfortable for them to do so.// We then opened the question for any extra comment.

When the first question was done, we gave them a debate question. In the debate question there were two or more different alternatives and the students got to divide in groups depending on what alternative they stood for. So for example for the question “Should the US reduce overseas aid spending?” you could stand in the “yes” corner or the “no” corner. When they had divided themselves into groups the students in the groups got to explain their choices, one person at a time and one group at a time. After a while the debate really got going, when they started to try to convince each other that their alternative was the right one.

After 10 minutes, we continued with the second debate question, which involved five different groups. We wrapped things up with a very open final discussion question “Why does poverty persist?” We left that question as an open question for anyone to answer. //We figured that everybody would be confident enough now to answer by this time and that they would have an insight in the subject so that we did not have to pull out an answer.//

We gave each person in the class a slip of paper where they could rate the lesson on a scale of 1 – 10 where 1 means the lesson is rubbish and 10 that it’s brilliant. 57% of the class rated the class as a 9 or 10 out of ten. The remaining 43% voted it as a 7 or 8 out of ten.

 Why was the lesson interesting to us?

One of our goals at the schools that we’re visiting is to find innovative and interesting classes and projects. We saw this History/Debate class and found it interesting since we haven’t heard of a debate class at any school so far. We also heard that the teacher of the class, Medha Kirtane, is a very talented teacher. Another factor is that the subject is very easy to do a rich task in, since a debate could be about almost anything. This was also a very good opportunity to interact with the students.

Below is a video of the lesson: media type="custom" key="9658812"

This is a table with more info about the Rich Task: [|Table.docx]



