The game should then proceed around the circle until all the students have had a turn. This is one of the best debating games for beginners. 2) Cross the Circle if… Have four to six student volunteers come to the front of the class. Each one should choose a person that they will play during this game. You may want to restrict them using a theme, e.g. ‘famous people from history’ or ‘characters from Harry Potter. Each student will give a 30-second explanation of why their character should be allowed to stay in the balloon, using a point and an explanation. After these arguments, the rest of the students should vote on who should be thrown out of the balloon. This can be repeated until only one person remains in the balloon. Have students form small groups. Give each student an object (e.g. a pen, a pair of sunglasses, a phone charger). Within the small groups, students should convince others that they should ‘buy’ their object.

Become part of a 5,000+ community which believes that speaking and listening skills are central to personal fulfilment and cultural understandingYou can immediately decide a winner by a vote after Round 2. If you prefer, you can select the top two proposals and have a final round where they must argue directly against each other in a final pair of speeches. 7) Sales Game Give students a statement and ask them to give all the reasons why they disagree with it. Make sure that the statements are absolute but difficult to disagree with. In this round, the advocacy groups will need to argue that their policy should be selected by the government. They will have to argue not only that they are better than the others at something, but also explain why that means that overall, they are best choice for spending. For example, someone defending ‘more nurses’ might suggest that ‘saving more lives’ is more important than ‘boosting the economy most’. From our public speaking competitions to our in-school workshops like Discover Your Voice , we know the importance of oracy in the classroom. If you’re teaching students debating, you probably need to find ways to engage them before diving in. Here’s a list of tried-and-tested debating games that our facilitators and mentors use in primary and secondary school classrooms to get students thinking. All the best debating games for students 1) If I Ruled the World Set the scene: The government has announced that there is a million pounds of extra money available to be spent in the local region. Students will represent different advocacy groups with proposals on how to spend this money.

One-off or regular donations are vital to our work, helping us ensure that young people everywhere have the oracy skills they need to thriveWhen a student agrees with the statement, they should stand up and ‘cross the circle’, finding a new seat from one which has been vacated. The facilitator should also take a seat and the student left standing then begins the next round with a statement of their own. Set the scene: all these people are in a balloon, but it is leaking. To save themselves, they will have to throw someone overboard!