Summer 2011 Coach Training Courses

The Chicago Debate League will be offering three Coach Training Courses this summer. All three will be located at the CDSI site — Westinghouse College Prep, 3223 W. Franklin Ave., Chicago, IL.

All three are free to CDL teachers/coaches. All three are Monday-Friday, 9am – 3pm. All three provide teachers with materials (including Core Files) and lunch daily. All three will provide participants with 5 hours of CDL Professional Development credit, and 20 hours of CPDUs. Coaches can take one, two, or all three courses, so it’s possible to come out of the summer with 15 hours of CDL PD credit. Allstate will once again be sponsoring the Allstate Professional Development Incentives, so this would earn participants $100 for the first 10 hours and position teachers to be within 5 hours of the second $100 (for 20 hours of PD for the year).

Register by sending an email to Forrest — forrestsumlar@resources.chicagodebates.org — by July 22, 2011.

All three of these courses are equally geared toward and valuable for HS and MS teachers — the synchronization of the formats between the two levels ensures that both grade levels will have an equivalent experience.

Here are the three courses.

Introduction to Debate Coaching — July 25 – 27 — Instructor: Les Lynn

This course is very highly recommended for all new and relatively new coaches in the Chicago Debate League. The course will cover all of the essentials on three key levels: (i) organizing and running a CDL debate program, (ii) policy debate fundamentals, and (iii) the key arguments on the 2011/12 debate topic (space exploration). If you’re new, or relatively new, to the CDL, you will be much, much better equipped to be successful in the upcoming season if you take this course.

Coaching Varsity Debate — August 1 – 3 — Instructors: series of panels and presentations from experienced CDSI instructors

This course will develop the capacities of our coaches who have 2-5 years of experience in the CDL. It will draw on the vast coaching expertise of those who are teaching at the 2011 CDSI. It will enable coaches to feel confident that they know what they need to know to be effective in coaching Varsity debaters in the CDL — both theoretically and on this upcoming debate topic (space exploration). There will not be a teacher who takes this course who doesn’t feel vastly better prepared to coach intermediate and more advanced debaters this upcoming season than they did before taking the course.

Curricular Debate: Infusing Debate into Your Regular Classroom Teaching — August 8 – 10 — Instructor: Les Lynn (with guest presentations by Professor Gerald Graff and Professor Cathy Birkenstein-Graff)

The next generation of impact in the field of urban debate may be in the regular classroom, in addition to at debate tournaments. This course will explore how you as a regular classroom teacher can make your regular classroom teaching much more highly engaging for your students, and more academically rigorous, by infusing debating into how you teach your courses — regardless of subject area. Curricular Debate is a movement that is distilling the key academic elements that make competitive debating so intensive and valuable, and bringing them into the teaching of the daily curriculum. Teachers will leave this course with a solid core introduction to Curricular Debate and with classroom-ready and adaptable teaching units, classroom debate formats, and assessment rubrics that will enable them to “debatify” just about anything they teach.