In this blog, I’m super excited to unpack a very creative way and a very fun way for  students to debate something in a really healthy productive and educational way and it is called The Candy Bar Method. It was adapted actually by my mother-in-law, Anne, who I will introduce to you in  a moment after the intro. I’ll be sharing The Candy Bar Method and then I’ll be sharing a 1 paradigm shift or mind shift that I would strongly recommend inviting students into to have a really  productive debate and not, you know, conflict in a debate is great, right. You’re actually  manufacturing disagreement if it’s not already inherently there. The debates get unproductive when that conflict becomes combat this candy bar method is really powerful at diffusing  some of that unproductive combat that can happen rather than that healthy conflict and tension that  debates are really useful for.

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There’s a little bit of a bonus, I couldn’t help myself. Will and I wrote a book about creating conversations that matter and asking powerful questions, and in the very back in the advanced skills chapter, there is a section on debate versus dialogue. I think that if you’re watching this video, you’ll really love that model, toward the end I’m going  to hold it up. You can take a screenshot of it. 

The Candy Bar Method

We’re not going to do a super deep dive into it  but it will definitely be a little bit of a mind thought expansion for you. I don’t like fluff, by  the end of this video what is in my brain is going to be in your brain.

I said it was going to be in my brain is going to be in your brain, but I have to give credit to Anne, my mother-in-law Anne and introducing Anne, how wonderful is Anne. She is a… she’s probably gonna be peeved at the fact that she’s in one of my video, maybe not, I don’t know. But, she is a speech professor at Penn State University. She’s been teaching speech and debate and has been involved in debate for longer than I have been alive. She shared… we were chatting at one point over the holidays and she shared this really cool method that she tried  she learned it from a conference. And I’m sure whoever shared at that conference learned it  from somebody else so I don’t know who the origin of this is, thank you humanity for the idea of The Candy Bar Method. I don’t want to get it wrong. I was, you know, just had a quick chat  with Anne about this over the holidays. I want to actually read you her exact description because I thought it was a pretty nice concise flow of how it goes so that you can pick it up  and run it right away. So, technically the activity is called “Our Candy Bar Is Better Than Yours.” Now, it could be “My Candy Bar Is Better Than Yours” but she had people get into groups for this  to debate on teams rather than just individuals. 

“Our Candy Bar Is Better Than Yours.” They worked  in a team and each team had a different candy bar. 1 minute speeches were given by each speaker.  The 1st speakers of each team worked tO persuade us that their bar was superior to the other bar.  The 2nd speakers of each team worked to refute the other team’s claims and reinforce their own  claims. Then she said, “Does this sound familiar?” I said, “Yes! I’m gonna make a video about it.” The 2nd speakers of each team work to refute the other team’s claims and  reinforce their claims. You get the idea. 

That’s enough to unpack and roll with this. Really relevant. As soon as you involve sugar, students are like…  All right, there’s something there. But even though people might feel passionately about a candy bar, and to be honest, I ran down to CVS to get these. These are 2 of  my favorites. If you ever want to get on my good side, send me a Reese’s take five. The reason it is the best candy bar is it’s actually 1 candy bars blended together. Why would you not?

Anyway, and I got this one because I thought it was kind of cool because I realized as I looked at it KitKat sounded like chit chat to me. Okay, we are totally going off on a segway. You actually have these candy bars in class, you might give them out, you could either  have them bring their own or hand them out if you were feeling like spending money on your students. Having this debate is really useful because it gets them to practice the mechanics of debate and taking both sides and refuting and the flow of debate without all the emotional charge  of talking about abortion, the death penalty, republican versus democrat, right. Without getting all of those personal and cultural and structural beliefs intermingled. And the reason that’s useful  is because the human brain is wired with a very deep need and desire and a fight, flight or need to be right response. And in a debate ,this can start to become unproductive in the classroom. Whereas in, you know, we’re teaching at somebody. If you’re debating abortion in a high school classroom, you are not going to change policy on abortion necessarily there. And so, no one needs to lose sleep over that debate. The point is to teach students how to productively communicate.

Shifting from this mindset of like, “I need to be right” to a level of openness,  where you know I think really great debates are you have to study both sides because you  don’t know which one you’re going to get assigned to on the day of. You have to be willing and ready to argue for both. Now, that’s really charged to argue for both pro-life and pro-abortion. Reese’s take five, KitKat, a little bit less charge. Just a really powerful simple strategy to create a fun debate in class. At some point you can upgrade to what, you know, what is an  idea you strongly believe in and another fun way to do debate in the classroom is actually  ask this question to students, “What is an idea that you strongly believe in?” Then ask them to debate that and what their opponents would say. Going from enemy to empathy is  a really powerful transition and I think debates in the classroom have the potential to take people  from that enemy to empathy state. Now, if you’re curious about debate versus dialogue, you can  pick up a free excerpt of the book and this chart in 1 of the links below. You can just take a screenshot of this if you’re somebody who likes to think deeply and you want to think about creating dialogue as opposed to just debate which I would argue in some ways depending on  what you’re talking about is way more productive. If you talk about really contentious issues,  a dialogue where you’re listening to understand rather than listening to win can be a much more productive way to actually learn and connect and build bridges rather than  walls between people. If you liked this video, you will love this video on how to make learning fun.