The D.E.B.A.T.E Learning Framework for an AI World

While a lot of ink continues to be spilled over how to modify (often in as few ways as possible) education for an AI world, tends of thousands of students spent the weekend debating hundreds of topics that will define their future.

For years, I’ve seen schools overlook debate—not because they don’t care, but because they often don’t see what debate really teaches. Many treat it like a small club while investing heavily in athletics and consultant-designed initiatives wrapped in polished acronyms. So I decided to borrow that language and structure—not to reduce the richness of debate, but to make its value visible. By turning DEBATE into a clear acronym and framework, schools can immediately recognize what the program develops: voice, reasoning, confidence, collaboration, and leadership.

With the help of ChatGPT, I already (took me 15 minutes) came up with three acronyms that can be used as frameworks.

If you are like me and you’ve spent a lot of time discussing curriculum reform for an AI world, you will know that many of the terms/concepts on the left are important ideas now (they actually have been for thousands of years but we instead chose to spend all our students time and energy training them to be stochastic parrots who can spit back content often using patterns). The ideas are often discussed in AI-related curriculum reform presentations, though the presentations often lack concrete steps as to how to achieve any of them.

The D.E.B.A.T.E framework actualizes these many ideas and has already been tested by millions of students over the last 100+ years. There is a variety evidence (testimonials, gold-standard empirical studies, common sense) from sources that have not been financially incentivized to provide results that support the framework that attest to DEBATE’s value as a learning mechanism for both content and skill.

With the help of ChatGPT I was also able to generate a slide deck that I can use for a Keynote on this framework.

There is also a model for curriculum design.

There is also a curriculum design model

And I created a professional development package

More detail —

Costs

In order to increase the credibility of the package, I decided to charge competitive rates —

$10,000 USD — one main facilitator for the day
$2,5000 USD for each additional adult facilitator
$5,000 USD for each additional high school student facilitator who actually knows how to debate and learned in the above framework.

$25,000 — Basic materials on classroom debate that I will co-generate with AI that classroom teachers can use. Note: This is $25,000/100 teachers.

$15,000 — Future tweaks to these materials with a slightly tweaked framework

Multiyear packages that will provide ongoing support for the evolving DEBATE framework are available.
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I already asked ChatGPT for some quick theoretical grounding that I’m providing for free..

For an additional $10,000 (fully inclusive price), I’m willing to ask ChatGPT to generate any of the following.

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Subscribers to my blog can access this additional content I generated with ChatGPT.

Teaser: “Debate is an intellectual gymnasium.”