Debate Assignment
The culminating assignment for The Handmaid’s Tale was an oral debate. I distributed the following assignment to the students:
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In this assignment, the students divided into groups of three (they chose the groups) and were assigned specific positions (either Agree or Disagree) on each of the topics. By design, they were provided with the stances that they would be arguing. This assignment was meant to focus on the acquisition of text-based evidence and the formulation of sophisticated, three part thesis statements. While the central part of the assignment was an interactive debate (during the rebuttal sections of the debate, students were put on the spot to find passages that supported their argument and undermined their opponents’, forcing them to anticipate and respond to opposing positions), they also wrote thesis statements that they read and the whole assignment was structured to mimic the progression that might be found in a thesis paper. In this way I both modeled and hoped to support future transfer of knowledge gained to written thesis papers.