Civil Discourse and Teaching Faculty Lunch with Professor Jill Lepore: Leading Effective In-Class Debates

November 03, 2026

Jill Lepore speaking with colleagues at faculty lunch

Professor Jill Lepore kicked off our 2026-27 Civil Discourse and Teaching faculty lunch series with a talk and conversation about leading effective in-class debates. These lunches bring together FAS faculty to discuss, and learn from, how colleagues are addressing key teaching challenges related to open dialogue in the classroom. Lepore shared her decades-long experience using in-class debates, beginning with her 2004 First Year Seminar, “Jefferson vs. Adams,” and, starting in 2014, with her General Education course titled “The Democracy Project.” Lepore used debates in these classes as a means to encourage students to develop, defend, and discuss viewpoints with which they may or may not personally agree. Lepore also noted how generative these courses on debates have been for her as a scholar and intellectual: We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution emerged out of the 2004 class on the Jefferson vs. Adams debate.

In her class, Professor Lepore emphasized structure and rules and discussed how she gave students lots of models to emulate. Her students would practice debates in the first week of section, with low-stakes topics like whether El Jefe’s or Felipe's has the best tacos in Harvard Square. Making things a little silly enabled Lepore’s students to practice the formality of the debate process while discussing a topic that likely did not hold existential stakes for them. Lepore built on this scaffolding by giving students talking points, positions, and guidance - and by couching formal-sounding things with silly propositions. She used debate cards where students are given the basic structure of a statement or argument but then have to add something of their own, often in a light-hearted way.

In her class, Professor Lepore emphasized structure and rules and discussed how she gave students lots of models to emulate.

Lepore devoted the final part of her discussion to the problems she has encountered in running in-class debates. The desire to win rather than explore was challenging for some students. Debates were time-consuming and difficult for TFs to grade. Instructors, she argued, have to untrain students from wanting to score points at each others’ expense - or, conversely, to simply agree about everything. These challenges became especially acute between 2014 and 2020, when students began objecting to the readings, with some objecting to reading the Dred-Scott decision because it was triggering and racist. She concluded with a call for faculty to embrace debate again, as the abandonment of this tradition has had real consequences for academia and public life.

Below is some practical advice for faculty on how to effectively run in-class debates, drawn from Jill Lepore’s talk and the ensuing discussion:

Ensure students understand that their goal is to develop an interpretive stance, based on evidence and rational argument, not an opinion. The debate is like a lab experiment to help students develop and question multiple interpretive stances, not to win.
Scaffold and structure: start with low-stakes topics before moving to weightier ones, and then give students structure, both through individual lines (e.g. by using debate cards) and by setting, communicating, and enforcing clear rules
Give students time to discuss the proposition at hand, assign students specific tasks to complete in preparation, and allow time to debrief at the end.
Assign positions to students - nobody should assume that their personal identity is what they’re having to defend. In doing so, acknowledge that it might be hard for some students to argue for a certain idea and explain why the question is important to grapple with, e.g. to understand a moment / movement / figure in history.
Connect the debate to the course content / methods: debate is a central skill for scholars, especially in the social sciences and humanities, since they engage in debates in journals, conferences, through books, etc.
Debates are not role plays. Lepore suggested that she doesn’t see role playing, which can be infantilizing or juvenilizing, as part of collegiate education. Also, she would never want students to be forced to inhabit a position that is atrocious. Grappling with such a position in a debate is fundamentally different than forcing to act or embody it. This scholarly distance is helpful in addressing student concerns about ideas they find offensive.

The Bok Center offers advice for all FAS instructors on a wide variety of teaching-related questions. Please reach out to us if you’d like to discuss how to develop an in-class debate for your class, or are interested in other methods to foster open dialogue in the classroom. We’ll be hosting more Civil Discourse and Teaching lunches over the course of the academic year - explore our upcoming events.