Scott Wunn, Executive Director of the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), joined The Richmond Forum and local educators for our launch of the Richmond Region Speech & Debate Initiative (RRSDI) in May. As part of his visit, we met with administration staff of Chesterfield, Henrico, and Richmond school districts. In addition to their unwavering support for RRSDI, they requested support in the form of curriculum development.
We are proud to have been able to leverage the expertise of the NSDA’s staff for English Language Arts Specialists from Chesterfield, Henrico and Richmond City Public Schools to embed speech and debate components into high school English Language Arts curriculum.
We are thrilled to be working with The Richmond Forum and the National Speech & Debate Association to embed components of speech and debate into the 2019 English Language Arts high school curriculum. This partnership will provide engaging opportunities for teachers to organically and authentically introduce and align speech and debate resources from teacher leaders across the nation with the new Communications and Multimodal Literacies standards.
Emily Stains
Instructional Specialist, Secondary Literacy
2018–2019 Central Office Instructional Leader of the Year
Chesterfield County Public Schools
We are thankful for the National Speech & Debate Association’s eagerness to partner with us, and to share national best practices from the nation’s best coaches and teachers. This partnership also makes it possible for the Richmond region to be at the forefront of bringing argumentative writing, research methods, and other debate skills back into the English Language Arts classrooms.
Our next steps are to bring Hanover County Public Schools into the conversation and begin to develop speech and debate elective courses for all regional public high schools.
National Speech & Debate Association Executive Director Scott Wunn shares a vision of Richmond becoming a model of regional speech and debate initiatives for other regions around the country to follow on May 15, 2019.