Teachers Institute
TDC 2024 will take place July 21st-August 3rd in San Marcos, TX.
Running concurrently with the student camp, TDC’s teacher camp is designed to be the premiere intensive professional development for debate teachers. In line with TDC’s mission, the camp is free for teachers of low-income students. Want to better understand the philosophies your students hear in debate rounds? Struggling to come up with a way to help your debater fix that one subtle problem that keeps them from excelling at tournaments? Hungry for the chance to “talk shop” with some of the most competitively accomplished coaches in debate? TDC’s teacher institute is for you!
Camp Curriculum
The institute offers the opportunity to experience debate camp from a student’s perspective while collaborating with fellow professionals about the best ways to teach critical debate skills. The program will aim to comprehensively cover and drill the skills most used in debate. There will be lectures on these skills followed by practice with actually doing relevant drills. Such practice will be followed by learning how to implement these drills with students, including work on developing targeted and comprehensive lesson plans for building debate skills. While our Teachers Institute staff specialize in Lincoln-Douglas debate, they also have substantive experience coaching and judging other formats including policy and World Schools Debate.
Teacher Institute Faculty
All of TDC’s staff members are well versed in philosophy and debate strategies from their years of successfully coaching debate. Many of TDC’s staff members have also formally studied philosophy and political science at the undergraduate and graduate level at the nation’s leading universities. Therefore, participating teachers will have an invaluable opportunity to analyze articles on philosophy and political science in an intellectually rigorous and collegial environment.
Cost and Scholarships
The cost for the TDC 2023 Teacher Institute is $900, or free for teachers of low-income students. We believe that one of the biggest impacts TDC can make is by helping the teachers that teach them refine their understanding and teaching of debate. Therefore, if approximately 40% of your school’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch, apply for a scholarship! We’d be happy to answer any questions you might have via email: texasdebatecollective.info@gmail.com