Trainers’ Toolkit – Battle of the arguments

	Exercise nr 25: Battle of the arguments
Duration	30 min
Type of activity	Social / Body / Emotional / Cognitive
The goal of the exercise	It encourages people to discuss topics critically, listen to all points of view and formulate their own opinions.
Group size	6-15 participants
Hashtags	#debate #sharing  #arguments #perspectives
Apps	Zoom
Materials	Access to Zoom platform
Exercise agenda	Before the training,  prepare for participants a few sentences related to a topic of your workshop.  All have to be short and as clear as possible. Ex. for workshop about work related topics – entrepreneurship, burnout: 1. Showing emotions at work is unprofessional.  2. Working with friends is a bad idea. 3. Young people should not be heads of large teams. Divide the group into two smaller ones. Create two separate rooms e.g. using the breakrooms option. One team prepares some arguments to agree with the statements, the other group prepares the arguments to disagree with the statements. People have to convince the opponents that they are right. After 10 minutes, invite everyone back to one group. Now is the time to exchange arguments. Present each sentence in turn and ask both groups to engage in a battle of arguments. Each person speaks one at a time. Do not interrupt each other. After all the rounds, ask who indeed agrees with the theses presented and who is against them. This is a moment to reveal for participants what is their real opinion. Encourage the group to have a short discussion. You can ask the following questions: 1. Was there a moment when you were closer to the arguments of the opposite team?  2. Did you describe your position clearly? 3. Did all the participants join the discussion? 4. What new things did you learn about the discussed topics?
Possible modifications	This exercise has two different aspects: – one concerning the culture of discussion, the art of exchanging arguments. What is needed for each person to be able to express himself/herself freely? – the second is from the merit point of view of the issues discussed, in this case, you can use the exercise as an introduction to the substantive part of the workshop.
Credits	Compiled by Fundacja Culture Shock for TRENDSS – Transnational Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills (https://trendss.eu/)Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)Co-funded by the Erasmus+Programme of the European Union