First meeting
The first meeting of a new society should be a general get-together with a short, light-hearted debate. A good first meeting debate should be an issue directly relevant to young people or a school-based topic. This is because it requires little preparation and students will be able to debate the issue without too much research.
It makes sense for the first session to be as light-hearted and fun as possible. If the session is an hour long it can be easily split into two halves. The first half can be spent explaining the basics of debating and playing some debating-related games. The second half can be spent actually debating. The beauty of formal debating is that the speech lengths can be altered to suit time constraints.
For the first society debate, the substantive speeches can be shortened to 3 minutes (first 30 seconds and last 30 seconds protected from points of information) and the summary speeches can be 2 minutes. The entire debate takes a little over 15 minutes, which leaves time for a floor debate or, alternatively, a discussion about the debate with the society as a whole.
Future meetings
As the weeks progress, the motions can become slightly more challenging. See Useful Motions for ideas, and remember that the society members themselves may come up with good ideas for motions.
One way to encourage pupil involvement is to ask them at the end of one debating society meeting what they would like to debate about the following week. You can also allocate who is speaking in the following week’s debate at this time. This can be done by rotation or by asking who wants to speak.
There is no prescribed number of times per week a society should meet. Many school debating societies meet twice a week, others meet once a week or once a fortnight - find the mix that you think is right for your school.
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