CLASSROOM
ESCAPE FROM LECTURE: Using Escape Room Strategies to Flip Your Debate Team’s Season Prep by Dan Hansen and Becky Hansen
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very debate season begins with an uphill climb. There’s so much background knowledge to activate, so many new skills to learn, and that doesn’t even include all the new topic material. The consensus of research on retention proves that students learn far more by doing than by lecture. Yet, as coaches, we often lecture on a skill and immediately ask students to use it in a debate round. Even if we employ practice rounds, the theory of gradual release suggests we ought to provide an opportunity for collaborative learning before skills are assessed (Fisher & Frey, 41-42). A great way to address this gap is with a Debate Escape Room! An interconnected series of puzzles, games, and problems to solve, escape rooms are studentcentered, active learning experiences that energize
your students and get them working together while they learn what they need for the season. In addition to building skills, escape rooms build teams. Around the country, escape room businesses market themselves as corporate team-building experiences. Debate teams can benefit in the same way. An escape room presents students with a layered set of obstacles that must be “solved” to move on to the next set of challenges. The ultimate goal is to “escape the room” of puzzles and challenges. In real escape rooms the escape is literal— you try to get the code to the exit door before time runs out. For our team, we ask our students to see how fast they can solve all the puzzles related to some scenario we craft, such as: “A rival team has locked your evidence in the broom closet. You need to find the code before you forfeit your next round.”
They then must solve puzzles, such as construct a kritik from the given cards, put together the topicality standards, match the tags to the cards, or even access our tournament sign up system and put the round in order to gain the codes that will give them access to the next puzzle—all leading to rescuing their pilfered evidence. Learning through problem-solving gets students engaging through a greater variety of learning styles and lets them take center stage while also building a team mentality. Students have to help each other and rely on each other to do well. They learn—and sometimes we as coaches do, too—what skills their teammates have that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Quiet students may thrive in the small-group environment and demonstrate their mastery in a way they won’t during a whole-team
meeting. As coaches, we can also tell who is ready to lead and who just wants to be in charge.
Creating an Escape Room Challenge Escape rooms can be as simple as a small, linear chain of a few puzzles or a crazy, whole-room experience of numerous interdependent puzzles with false leads and hidden components. Regardless of your comfort level, they all rest on a few basic principles.
You’ll need some materials, but you DON’T have to spend much money. • You’ll need some containers to hide puzzles in until the students get to them. Useful containers include luggage, briefcases, toolboxes, backpacks, password-locked computers, cash boxes, etc.
Visit www.speechanddebate.org/escape-room-strategies for editable materials to help you get started! 32
ROSTRUM | FEBRUARY/MARCH 2020