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Student EngagementDuring a DAC lesson every student is expected to take an active role in speaking, note-taking, and thinking through the clashes occurring in the debate. Teachers typically assign students groups and roles within those groups. Each group advocates for a different position, and with the group, students are assigned to do: opening statements, attack, defense, cross-examination, and closing statements. In Committee Debates, there is an added role of committee member. Because DAC lessons provide opportunities for critical thinking, clashing, working collaboratively with peers, and making connections to the real world, student engagement is typically very high during DAC lessons.

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Text-based EvidenceDAC lessons incorporate text as primary evidence used to support the arguments within each debate. Teachers draw on their textbooks as well as other texts—articles from magazines, newspapers, websites, and/or class notes—to scaffold each debate. Students are expected to draw evidence from these texts to strengthen and support the claims they make during debates.

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Note-takingTeachers can use the existing formats and routines within their classrooms for note-taking or the DAC templates, but during any debate, all students need to take notes (or flow) in order to keep up with all the arguments and clashes.

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AdvocacyThe teacher identifies a debate resolution (topic) for a DAC lesson. Often the resolution is an essential question or re-written content standard for the course. The idea is to develop a resolution that requires students to advocate for one position. Resolutions usually include one of the following words: should, best, worst, coolest, weirdest, most, biggest, guilty, innocent. Examples: Worded as a question: Which organic compound is the most important?Worded as a statement: A person should take a dollar now instead of two dollars next year.

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Structured ArgumentDAC lessons center on teaching students how to argue and use evidence in a structured format. For smaller groups of students, teachers may find it useful to use a traditional two-perspective debate model to engage a small group of students whereas larger classes of students will find multiple-perspective debates and committee debates to be a better fit. Types of debates that include structured argument: traditional two-perspective debates, multiple-perspective debates, Socratic Seminars, Committee Debates, Press Conference Debates. Regardless of the type of debate, there are also key structures to the debates: opening statements, attack, defense, cross-examination, and closing statements. These structures help students to build knowledge together within the structures of a DAC lesson.

DAC SKILLS AND CORE ELEMENTS