Hi,

I'm a junior that's going to be the congress captain at my school next year.

While me former captain and I have found success competing at nationals and on our state circuit, with me finaling at nats and states, our school has never had any sort of formal training or lessons to help our new debaters. It has always been more of a "figure it out" approach.

I'm expecting 5+ new people to join our team next year (we currently only have 2), and I am completely lost on how to help them. I don't want to overload them with everything I know about Congress when they're just competing on local circuits, but I also want to ensure they feel confident and ready to do their best.

Does anyone have any ideas or experience with what lessons or drills work good for training novice congressors? I don't have any materials to teach them with any only one other returning team member (who has only competed a few times).

p.s - especially parliamentary procedure cause that's a whole thing

~Thanks

Hello everyone! Kankee Briefs has been in collaboration with Circuit Debater in order to revamp the site before the start of the upcoming 2026-2027 debate season. We added concept mapping in order to visually represent the connections between concepts and to more thoroughly showcase all that there is to know about debate. We have also substantially updated the site to encourage further assistance from debaters like you.

https://ld.circuitdebater.org/w/index.php/Main_Page

If you are interested in helping give back to the debate community, please see the details below

1. If you are knowledgeable about debate concepts, please make an account on Circuit Debater and update unfinished pages and further flesh out the website. If you are interested in giving back to the debate community, Circuit Debater seeks to consolidate as much debate knowledge as possible for a long-term resource, so your assistance could help future novices for possibly decades.

2. If you are in connection with major debate programs, camp coordinators, urban debate league directors, brief writers, and/or people who manage sites with debate resources, please let them know about Circuit Debater. Whenever anyone posts a lecture, explanatory video, or article, our goal is to establish a new norm that that knowledge ought to be also cross-posted to Circuit Debater. Kankee Briefs as an organization has already made the pledge to do so and hope that other organizations within the debate community will do so as well.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

I'm struggling a lot to find the best possible topic for myself, as I have so many ideas but not sure if they are even strong enough in the first place. I have a lot of bad performances in the past due to me procrasinating and being stuck with a bad topic, so I want to spend a lot of time figuring something out and then outlining it.

My goal this year is to qualify for NSDA's & NCFL's, and do pretty well invitationals like Harvard or Yale.

Can I have some advice on finding a strong thesis?

basically im new to prog/kritikal debate (ld) but i really like it and i wanna read into it more. do you guys have lit recs for:

cap k

queerness (queer futurism and pessimism)

academy k

i wanna have a good understanding of the lit base of all of those before the season. im a quick reader with a ton of time on my hands so i think i can get through bare minimum at least 20 books in a month rn and i wanna have a good lit base both for the summer and throughout the season. so yeah, any recs for kritikal lit for the above Ks + where/how you guys find kritikal lit? thxx :)

Hi! We’re a team of three high school girls looking for an experienced debate mentor to help us prepare for our tournament on August 15–16.

We’re hoping for 3–4 online sessions (UTC+5) where you could:

• give feedback on our speeches,
• run practice rounds,
• help improve our argumentation and strategy.

Unfortunately, we don’t have access to a coach, so we’re looking for someone willing to mentor us for free.

If you’re interested or know someone who might be, please send me a DM. We’d really appreciate it!

Hey, I’m really interested in the WGLF from college policy in the early 2000s and i was wondering if you guys had any information i could find on them online to learn more about them. or please feel free to share stories you’ve heard about them and cool stuff you heard them do. please interact with this post and let me know! i think they’re really cool and want to learn more.

i have already seen them on the Debate Team documentary and read the article All Hail West Georgia. thanks!