A Lesson on Audience Adaptation

In the summer of 2022 I arrived in Taipei as the only policy debate coach in the country. Every previous coach had left, COVID had made the program's future uncertain, and the other coaches I was expecting were stuck waiting on visas. My predecessor was a former national champion. I had months alone to make a first impression on students and parents who had every reason to wonder whether the program would survive.

So I built a research team. I drafted a quota system, defined the contract and expectations, pitched it to my boss, ran the interviews, and communicated the whole thing to families. My own job on that team was to write the team affirmative — the case every student on the squad would read all semester. The topic that year was security cooperation with NATO, with an artificial-intelligence component. I wanted to write something they would remember.

The idea underneath the idea

On the surface, the case was a conventional national-security proposal: a Cognitive Warfare Early Alert System to detect and deter AI-powered information attacks. Underneath the topical requirements, it was my thesis on AI literacy. I wanted to teach two things:

AI only works if we trust each other.
AI, like humans, needs to learn to love.

I titled the file 1AC — AI Love. I still believe both claims. But wanting students to learn something is not the same as building something they can learn from, and the gap between those two is the whole subject of this page.

What went wrong

The evidence, in the files themselves

Both artifacts below are founding curricular materials — the first scripted speech plus supporting scripts for the second. They are roughly the same length. What changed is everything about how they teach. These figures come from the documents themselves:

In debate, highlighting marks the words a student actually says out loud. The 2022 file was 62,000 words with almost none of it marked. A student opening that document could not tell what to read — which means the burden of figuring that out fell on a fifteen-year-old working in their second language. The 2025 file has thirteen times more highlighting and a documentation layer that did not exist before.

What I changed, and why it worked

I prototyped before committing. I built a short arguments file for the Arctic topic and ran it past younger students, letting them pick what interested them. They chose fisheries. The prototype is deliberately plain — taglines like “Melting ice unleashes deadly Arctic diseases, but scientific monitoring can help us quarantine them” instead of anything about affordance or deterrence.

I used an AI agent to source material so I could spend my own hours on the part only I could do: calibrating difficulty and adapting to cultural norms. The research was the cheap part. The teaching was the expensive part.

I wrote the documentation first. The 2025 file opens with a section called Notes, and the first thing in it is a fairy tale. Two ice kingdoms share a frozen sea they cannot divide; the ice melts; an Angry King closes his borders; two fish wizards make a bargain. It is a complete allegory of the policy — the Beaufort Sea boundary dispute, the collapse of scientific cooperation, the role of institutions that answer to evidence rather than to kings. A student who reads the fairy tale understands the case before reading a single piece of evidence.

After the story, the Notes answer the questions students were actually going to ask, in the order they were going to ask them: What does the plan do? What advantages do I read? Why is the plan text so vague? Is this topical? And then timing, in plain numbers: it takes me four minutes to read the Canada advantage — you're probably faster, with a ranked list of what to cut if you run long.

What I understand now about how people learn

A curriculum does not belong to me. It is not for me, and it is not for any one student. It has to be universal, simple, and consistent enough to pick up conveniently.

That is the biggest thing I took from the three years between these two files. Learning and communication come in many shapes and sizes, and there is plenty of empirical literature on that — but the practical version is architectural. A good curriculum is a foundation, not a finished building. Other teachers have to be able to build on it, students have to be able to add to it, it has to survive a change in topic or staff, and the same idea has to be deliverable through video, story, practice, and debate. The 2022 file was a finished building. Only I had the keys.

That is also why I wanted an empirical curriculum with broad goals rather than a narrow one built around my own thesis. Modeling and prompting are among the few teaching tools validated across nearly every audience — they show up in the evidence-based practice literature for autistic learners, for language learners, and for skill acquisition generally. If the practices that work for the widest range of students are modeling and prompting, then the file itself has to contain the models and the prompts. The topic had to be accessible enough that students would engage with it, and the file had to carry the demonstrations and cues they needed to reach the bigger concepts underneath. That is what the pre-highlighting, the scripts, the fairy tale, and the timing notes actually are: models to imitate and prompts to follow.

On modeling and prompting as evidence-based practices, see the site's EBPs for Academics and EBPs for Social Outcomes pages.

Everything else follows from that:

Motivation is a prerequisite, not a bonus. Explaining that fish are moving north is easier than explaining that we should merge with AI to reduce misinformation risk. Same depth of argument underneath; radically different cost of entry.

Scaffolding is not condescension. I thought pre-highlighting robbed students of the work. It doesn't — it changes which work they do. Freed from deciding what to read, they argued about whether it was true.

Documentation is a teaching act. Every question I answered in the Notes is a question a student would otherwise have had to ask in front of their peers, in a second language. Writing it down removed the social cost of not knowing. It also made the file legible to the next coach, which is the part I had not thought about at all in 2022.

Redundancy across modes is a feature. The fairy tale, the Q&A, the highlighting, and the timing notes all teach the same case. A student who does not get it from one gets it from another, and none of them cost anything to include.

The hard idea can still be in there. The fisheries case is, underneath, an argument about democratic engagement, the authority of scientific institutions, the limits of philosophical skepticism, the proper use of irony, and the place of spirituality in debate. The Great Wizard Council in the fairy tale refuses a king and says its ally is truth and reality itself. I hid nothing; I just built a staircase to it.

I was less confident students would absorb everything underneath. I was much more confident they would stand up and give the speech. That trade is one I would make again.

The artifacts

Each is the founding curricular material for its topic: the first scripted speech, the documentation, and samples of scripts for the second speech. Neither includes the materials for the six other speeches in a debate — what you see is the first quarter.

If you have not read a debate file before, How to Read Debate Files explains the anatomy — what the highlighting and underlining mean, and why they are the whole point of this page.