Introducing Victory Briefs Classroom

Welcome to our first installment of this year’s Curriculum Corner series. I realize we are already a good way into the semester, however, I’ve had a pretty busy last few months. The plan is from here on out, though is to update the Curriculum Corner approximately once per week.

In this first post, I am pleased to be able to reveal a new project that the Victory Briefs Team has started working on, and which we will be working on throughout this year to finish by the start of next fall.

That project is Victory Briefs Classroom.

We have been planning this project since early in the summer, and we are pleased to finally be able to go public with a short demo to give an idea of what the final product should look like.

What is Classroom

Classroom is intended to be a comprehensive novice Lincoln-Douglas debate curriculum that can be used by schools to start debate teams.

The Classroom Curriculum is designed to be sufficiently clear and comprehensive so that a teacher or volunteer would be able to effectively teach novice debate without any prior forensic experience. We accomplish this goal by using techniques of blended learning to enable at-home content delivery to complement in-class activities and lessons.

The curriculum is split between teacher facing resources (which include lesson plans and teaching materials) and student facing resources (which include online videos, quizzes and additional resources) both ordered to integrate into comprehensive units.

Click here for a fuller explanation of the curriculum structure.

Why Classroom

All of us reading an article on Vbriefly strongly believe in the value of debate. And we also all believe that it is important to make debate accessible to people who face obstacles to participation. And while there are a lot of awesome and free resources available online to help debaters learn about debate, there still seems to be a large resource lacuna.

Much of the online content that debate camps put up, from recorded lectures to online strategy posts, are primarily useful as a tool to supplement an individual’s debate education. However, these resources would not be particularly helpful in starting a team nor in teaching novice debate to someone who lacks any prior forensic exposure.

Thus, we wanted to try and use Victory Brief’s resources to create a team focused novice debate curriculum. Creating a debate team is, perhaps, the best way to create long-term access to debate, and the goal of Classroom is to make starting debate teams significantly easier.

Please Send Us Your Feedback

We want to make this resource as helpful as we can possibly can. To that end, we would love your feedback or advice! Please do reach out either on our online feedback form, the comments of this article, or in an email to classroom@victorybriefs.com.