L1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth:

I choose to be a co-leader of the school’s debate club because communication is one of the most important skill one needs throughout life and when it comes to impromptu speaking, I am a little poor in it so I decided to improve my communication skills as well as gain and share knowledge about current affairs taking place throughout the globe. Because I am not much of a newspaper reader, one of my aim was also to get to know about the current affairs going on so that it widens my knowledge and helps me in my college interviews. Communication skills was my weakness before I joined this club, while I was in the club I discovered my another weakness which was lack of knowledge about global affairs. Now after being a part of this club for more than 6 months I feel that communication in no more my weakness but I still need to widen my knowledge about global issues. 

L2 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken in developing new skills:

The challenge that I faced initially was that the club had a rule that each co-leader had to organize a debate with a partner at least once. And because I had poor communication skills I got super nervous when it was my chance to lead the debate but sometimes you have to get out of you comfort zone in order to learn new things. Initially I stammered a lot but then my partner somehow convinced myself to imagine talking to a friend because all the club members were of my age. Just after this thought confidence automatically came in me and the debate was successfully concluded. I incorporated leadership skills in me during this phase of me in the club.

L3 – Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience:

Because I was one of the co-leader, we were responsible for starting and managing everything about the club which includes club constitution and guidelines, topics for every debate, format of debates and managing the club’s service part. As mentioned above, each co-leader had to host a formal debate at least once. To do all of these things, we had to initiate and do planning. 

L4 – Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences:

Sometimes I felt of leaving the club because there were a ot of school assignments because of which I did not have enough time to research on the debate topic. Because a lot of club members were feeling the same, we started to have informal discussions which did not require any background knowledge, eg. discussion on any changes in school’s policy. This made commitment and perseverance easy. 

L5 – Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively:

Working with others is generally difficult for me because I am an introvert. Here, initially I did not speak a lot in the conversations but then I became friends with all the club members and so conversing with them became a lot more easy.

L6 – Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance:

Most of our debate topics were global political/ socio-economical issues so by debates I got to know about different view points on the same issue. 

L7 – Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions:

While discussing about different global issues we also discussed about the solutions government took to solve those issues and to how much extent were those choices ethical (were there any ethical dilemmas that the government had to consider while making those choices)

Evidences: (Google meet recordings of our sessions)

Constitution of Debate and Current Affairs Club: