Levelling Up Workshop with Ashish Kumar

Once they have a modest amount of tournament experience, many debaters find that their improvement slows down radically as they reach a plateau that is frustratingly hard to escape. There are three reasons for this:

• Debaters have fundamental problems in their approach to debating which cannot be fixed with more knowledge or experience. In fact, debating more without fixing these hidden problems often makes things worse by ingraining bad habits. 

• Debaters lack knowledge about key issues in the world, which prevents them from debating at the level of precision, detail, and rigour that is required for success at a high level.

• Debaters lack practical hands-on experience in debates that helps them speak persuasively and manage the practical challenges which tournaments pose. 

This workshop is focused on addressing the first, and most fundamental, set of problems. These problems often remain undiagnosed even for high-intermediate debaters and are critical to address early. Accordingly, the workshop comprises three modules which are mechanistic and technique-focused, aimed at providing students with the correct attitudes and frameworks with which to manage a broad array of different debates. The one content module in this workshop focuses on political theory and philosophy, which is one of the most important and least rigorously understood fields in debating – almost half of all debates touch on political philosophy, yet very few of these are done well.