Is there a way to determine a winner of a political debate? Use a helpful rubric to evaluate the issues, specificity, evidence, reasoning, and delivery of candidates in a debate. After assessing each person's performance, high schoolers reflect on the debate with six additional short-answer questions.

Concepts

american politics, political campaigns, political parties, political systems, politics, elections, debate, presidential campaigns

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Additional Tags

social studies

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Instructional Ideas

• Assign a mock debate project in which groups of learners work together to simulate various campaigns (real or fictional), culminating in a final debate for the rest of the class to evaluate
• Host a viewing party for a recently televised debate, or find clips from historical debates online for class members to assess
• Prompt individuals to use one of their short answer responses as the basis for a larger argumentative essay

Classroom Considerations

• Does not include a lesson plan, but would fit well in an existing unit about debate
• Includes spaces for five candidates, which may be too many or too few depending on the debate

Pros

• Applicable to any political campaign that involves a debate, whether it's a national or local election, or even a school election

Cons

• Some questions aren't punctuated correctly

Common Core

SL.9-10.3 SL.11-12.3