Debate / Argument Organiser

Five boxes, in the order an argument is built

Claim. Evidence. Reasoning. Counter-argument. Rebuttal. The motion goes across the top and each step gets its own labelled space underneath.

Those five steps are the structure of a persuasive essay, a debate speech and a decent letter of complaint. None of it is obvious to anybody who has not been shown it once.

Reasoning is the box everyone skips

Most students go straight from evidence to conclusion, as though the evidence spoke for itself. It never does.

"Phones should be banned. A study found 40% of pupils are distracted by them." Those are two true sentences and there is no argument between them. The reasoning box is where you say why the second supports the first — and being made to write it is where students discover that quite often it does not, or that it supports something weaker than they claimed.

Insist on it. A completed sheet with an empty reasoning box is a sheet that has not done anything.

The counter-argument is not a concession

Students resist this box because naming the other side feels like losing ground. It is the opposite.

An argument that never acknowledges an objection is easy to knock over, because the first person who raises it wins. An argument that raises the objection first and answers it has already dealt with the best thing the other side had. Which is why the rebuttal box comes last rather than the claim — you finish on your answer to their strongest point, not on a restatement of your own.

The useful instruction: write the counter-argument you would find hardest to answer, not the easiest.

Writing a claim worth arguing

It has to be something a reasonable person could disagree with. "Bullying is bad" is not a claim, it is a shared assumption, and a sheet built on it will be empty by the third box.

"Phones should be banned in lessons but allowed at break" is a claim. It is specific, it is contestable, and the counter-argument writes itself — which is exactly what you want.

What is adjustable

A title and the motion. A4 or US Letter.

The default motion is about phones in school, which is there because everyone has an opinion on it. Replace it with whatever the class is actually arguing.

Running a debate with it

Give both sides the same sheet and the same motion. Ten minutes to fill it in, then swap sheets and have each side read the other's counter-argument box.

Worth the lesson on its own, that step. A student who reads how the other side predicted their argument tends to argue better afterwards, and rather more politely.

Print at 100% on A4 or US Letter.