A very positive session today with some excellent points from the group and great levels of engagement all round.
We began the session with a discussion on ‘speaking with conviction’, why it is important and how to do it effectively. As well a review of key tips and tricks for the students to practice. We spent some time discussing famous historical and political figures who spoke with conviction and the impact they had.
We then moved into our debate of the day, this week we looked at whether or not western countries should be sending military armaments such as tanks and jets to the Ukraine. There were strong arguments on both sides ranging from a fear of nuclear war to the importance of defending democracies and nation states from aggressors.
Following a period of open discussion we began a formal debate on the motion ‘this house believes we should send tanks to the Ukraine to support in their conflict with Russia’. In the first, pre-debate poll the group was fairly even split with 6 in favour and 4 against with a similar result recorded in our post-debate vote.
At the end of the session we encouraged the students to give constructive feedback to each other on their performance during the debate and as always we were very impressed by the level of maturity and the quality of the points raised during this exercise.
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