The I is for Intensive!
By Jackson Lallas
Many students wonder why our camps—previously, the San Jose Debate Intensive, and now The Debate Intensive—have the name “intensive.” The name choice is meant to highlight the rigorous, in-depth nature of our curriculum, essential for anyone looking to get better at Lincoln Douglas Debate. Our goal is to provide a holistic, thorough debate education so that even beginners can leave camp as competitive debaters and skilled debaters can gain an edge on their competition. This article will provide an overview of our core curriculum and the guiding principles behind it. Specifically, I’ll be discussing lab, practice debates, and the Focus Session.
We have created a standardized lab curriculum that provides an A-Z walkthrough of the core concepts in debate, tailored to students’ skill levels. For instance, the first week of lab last summer spent 3 days on Policy arguments, then the next 3 on the Kritik. We call these units “intensives” and have found that they help provide a deep dive into the material in an organized fashion. Our primary goal in lab is to provide students with the experience and tools they need to excel in competitive debate, so that even a beginner can work towards mastery of essential debate concepts and achieve competitive success on the circuit in one summer. To that end, each intensive is designed alongside a set of drills on the camp topic so that students can immediately implement their new knowledge. Students spend as much time on drills as they do listening to a lecture, as we want to emphasize practicing new techniques. Each lab also has 3-4 lab leaders with a variety of expertise to ensure high-quality instruction across each unit. By the end of camp, students see dramatic improvement to their debating and leave camp ready to tackle any new argument or strategy they may encounter in their debates during the season.
Keeping with our focus on execution, there are 19 practice debates during TDI’s core session, with 6 being part of the camp tournament. Each pre-tournament debate lasts for an hour and a half so that students can do a rebuttal redo of one of their speeches, incorporating feedback from the judge. Redoing speeches after the debate with the judge of that debates is a highly effective way for debaters to correct their mistakes and improve rapidly. The practice debates are also constrained to a camp evidence packet. The packet contains cases, responses, and frontlines that students can use in their debates, and new content gets added every few days as the intensive units progress. We’ve found that this saves students the stress of having to scramble together a case in the first few days of camp, and creates high-quality debates that force clash and nuanced argumentation. Later in camp, students also practice collecting evidence and writing cases through guided research in lab. They have a choice of several positions to contribute to the final camp packet within groups in their lab. The camp tournament includes all research compiled by students in addition to the original packet materials.
TDI’s focus session was designed in tandem with the core, which makes it one of the only opportunities in LD to have a cohesive 5-week curriculum. The experience from the core session is used as a platform for more challenging material and drills, giving students concrete results to chart their progress. New instructors also join the Focus Session, which enriches the ideological diversity students are exposed to and expands opportunities to work with top coaches.
Jackson coaches LD at the Brentwood School. His students have won several tournaments this year, and two of his students cleared at the Tournament of Champions this year. He has also previously coached a freshman debater to qualify for the TOC. As a student, he debated at the Brentwood School from 2011-2015, earning 17 career bids, and reached quarterfinals of TOC, won Golden Desert, was runner-up at the Glenbrooks Invitational, and was 6th place at NSDA nationals. Jackson is a senior at Stanford University studying Economics and Computer Science.