The health and safety of your child and of our community as a whole remain our highest priority. VDA has decided that all the in-person classes are going back to ONLINE until further notice. Please check our latest 2022 Term 2 COVID update. We look forward to seeing you all soon!
Term 2 Class Schedule
2021 Winter Camp Schedule
Term 1 Class Schedule
Debate Class Description
____
This course is designed to give students a very solid and strong start to debate.
Without going through the Foundation course, students easily get lost, which hinders their improvement and affects their interest in debate. We believe that no one can succeed at a high level without learning the basic, fundamental skills.
This is why we ask all our students to complete a term of Foundations before moving into the Intermediate class.
Target Debate Skills
- Basic debate format rules
- Speech and argument structure
- Rebuttal techniques
- Public speaking skill
- Basic note-taking
- Generating arguments
- Explaining impacts
- Beginner topic analysis
- Modeling a debate
- Weighing arguments
Knowledge Sessions
- Basic criminal justice
- Basic international relations
- Role of education
- Human rights and animal rights
- Basic philosophy
This course is designed to develop intermediate debate skills through use of challenging debate topics in domestic formats of debate (Canadian National Debate Format or British Parliamentary).
In class, students focus on specific debate skills to help them progress more quickly to the next level while expanding their knowledge.
Target Debate Skills
- Strategic argument choice
- Using multiple lines of analysis and rebuttal
- Drills on improving quality of argumentation
- Use of framing and weighing devices
- Intermediate-level burden analysis,
- Drills on earlier skills (intros, presentation, note-taking)
- Economics
- Gender and society
- Journalism
- International relations
- Human rights and animal rights
This course is a special class offered to those students who are higher-level intermediate: not quite ready for the Advanced class, but higher level than most of their peers in Intermediate.
In this course, coaches will focus on targeting student areas of weakness and cementing high-level skills to prepare students to move up into the Advanced program.
This course is for strong debaters who are passionate about debate and are considering pursuing debate competitively. The lessons of this course are chosen by the coach to target specific areas of student weakness and will be decided based on the needs and goals of the debaters.
Lessons will be aimed at specifically improving student style and content while introducing higher-level strategic tools in debate.
Target Debate Skills
- Principled argumentation
- Meta-debating
- Use of presentation style for framing and weighing issues
- Pushing burdens
- Frameworks
- Use of personas
- Use of style for strategy
- Effective use of examples
Knowledge Sessions
- At the discretion of the coach
- Will be on more challenging and nuanced debate topic areas
This course is for the academy’s most competitive debaters who will compete on behalf of the academy at major Canadian and American, as well as world tournaments. All sessions are at the discretion of the top coaches of the academy, with a large portion of classes focused on training for specific tournaments, including tournaments that use the most popular American format of debate – Public Forum.
Prerequisites for entry into this class include both a coach recommendation as well as a try-out session. Students at this level frequently win top awards and have excellent skills that are easily transferable to other areas of their lives.