Writing good case feeback (what to look for, reading cases, reading ballots, and writing feedback)

Proteus Debate Academy is a project by Sasan Kasravi and Paul Villa to increase equity in academic debate by providing high quality coaching resources for free.



0:00 - Introduction
1:08 - Who Sasan is
2:20 - Someone reached out for feedback on their case
3:53 - I've been working on designing debater assessments
7:00 - The case evaluation tool we built (what to look for in a case)
10:40 - Why I don't recommend using our evaluation tool
13:13 - Weaknesses in debate stem from oversights/misprioritization
16:24 - The role of a coach
25:46 - 3 things that make an argument good (Relevance, Accuracy, Significance)
34:06 - PF focuses on comparisons of significance
35:36 - Let's take a look at Contention 1
38:25 - Advantage Structure (what arguments need to work well)
43:26 - These debaters should put more focus on the outcomes and impacts
44:00 - Checking for the same issue in Contention 2
46:56 - Contention 2 does have the same problem, causing it to have "no link"
49:10 - Denying the Antecedent: The most common logical error in debate
54:28 - Checking second case for issues
59:56 - Checking ballots (Tournament 1)
1:06:11 - Checking Ballots (Tournament 2)
1:09:42 - How the issues we noticed ealier are presenting themselves
1:10:23 - Counterplans/not defending Status Quo as neg in PF
1:12:00 - Power matching and lay judges
1:14:07 - The issues we noticed earlier present themselves again
1:18:06 - This judge might have made a mistake?
1:19:42 - Third example of the same issue
1:20:16 - Reminder: limit the amount of feedback
1:20:56 - Writing feedback (what's good, what to work on, framing)
1:26:36 - That's it for this awful video, what's coming next time?

[proteusdebateacademy]

Hey folks! Sasan here. If you watch the you'll very quickly notice that I worried there would be terrible tech issues, and then later notice that there were, in fact, terrible tech issues. If a video has a problem like this I normally wouldn't post it, but (1) I don't have the time to re-re-re-record this, (2) It feels like an important topic for us to have a video on, and (3) this is feedback for a viewer who asked for help, so I'd feel bad not letting them get the full feedback. Hope video issues in the second half aren't too annoying.

[davidkirker]

I’ve had to take BART for work pretty often these past few months, and I’ve been going back through these videos to listen to on the commute. Really kicking myself for not watching these more thoroughly as a competitor, this is truly great stuff. Most of it was taught in class or in the van, lol, but to go back home and not take advantage of the off-hours resource was really disadvantageous. I suppose hindsight is 20/20, and all I can do now is absorb this knowledge back up for the future. Once I get my teaching credential and get a “real” teaching job, it would be so fun to coach HS forensics and give back to this activity, because I really do miss it!

[jk]

Any tips of helping team with nerves? Some of our teammates thrive under pressure while some crumble- how can we alleviate this as a team?