The 52 Progressive Skills of CX - A List for Coaches

 
52 Progressive CX Skills
 
 

The 52 Progressive Skills of CX - A List for Coaches

Last week I coached 12 sessions at NIHD in the mountains of California in just two days. (It was AWESOME, thanks for asking!)

I surprised myself with something I said in the session I had with about 40 coaches and parents. I said one of the reasons it’s hard to make a “curriculum” for coaching, which is far different than teaching, is that the skill progression will always vary from audience to audience how far you can get.

What matters is to know A) How to coach skills in a progressive fashion (hint: I can’t stand the word “lecture” in debate training), and B) To know the sub-skills of any skill so you know where to take the students in front of you in the time you have.

Then I said this: “I mean, cross-examination has at least 26 skills.”

Sometimes my brain gives me concrete estimates for stuff I know intuitively. I’ve learned to trust these instincts.

So I’ve got to Name All 26 Skills of CX

Here goes.

I came up with 52.

Presence

  1. Starting your CX sincerely but in character (avoid complementing last speech, how are you, etc. My go-to is “good day”)

  2. Engaging the audience

  3. Letting questions simmer/sink in

  4. Processing answers with the audience

  5. Owning the platform

  6. Moving/Roaming

  7. Going no-notes

  8. Ending on a rhetorical question

  9. Asking/Answering the audience, not the debater

  10. Spinning the novice (haha don’t do this, but it is a funny skill)

  11. Standing back to demonstrate absolute unreasonability

Dropping Guard / Disarmament

  1. Demonstrating yourself non-manipulative

  2. Establishing a rhythm with harmless questions

  3. Exposing a hostile witness / demonstrating unreasonableness

  4. Avoiding escalation / always making peace

  5. Valuing “likability” over “results”

  6. Freeing self from even needing CX at all to provide this degree of freedom: ability to experience CX through the audience’s eyes

  7. Having no fear/anxiety as the answerer (believing you and your partner can repair anything reasonable)

  8. Learning to say “I don’t know” with the confidence of “I don’t believe I needed to know that”

  9. Handling “Are you aware that…?” questions

  10. Reorienting your goal to gaining agreement, not managing disagreement

  11. The confidence to end a CX early if it’s going to go downhill

Questioning Technique

  1. Using leading questions all the time, every time (cornerstone technique)

  2. Keeping the claims of leading questions to single-warrant claims

  3. Recasting a confusing question

  4. Taking ownership for any and all confusion

  5. Learning the exceptions to leading questions

  6. How and when to ask them to hand you things (e.g. cases, quotations)

  7. Asking questions to which you already know the answer, versus when to go ahead and explore

Generating Material

  1. Setting up your next speech

  2. Cross-examination from empty space (nobody has spoken yet)

  3. Bullet-pointing your claims so you know where you’re driving

  4. Sub-bulleting pointing claims so they’re easier to prove

  5. Identifying the crux or likely cruxes

  6. Using sticky notes on your flow to keep CX organized when you’re CXing their points (note: CXing their points is a secondary objective; our primary source of material is our own next speech)

  7. Building “lines” of questioning

  8. Setting your sights on 1-3 lines of questioning for a successful CX that the audience will really process

Thinking On Your Feet / Critical Listening

  1. Visualizing “sub-bullets” to break down any question

  2. Agreeing in part, disagreeing in part without rambling

  3. Answering with an image (concrete), not a concept (abstraction)

  4. Mirroring what you see in the audience’s eyes

  5. Following clues, not a script

  6. How and when to ask a question as the answerer (a rare exception)

  7. Using the mysterious “no” instead of inserting more than the questioner really asked

  8. Forming a “so it all comes down to X” crux statement

Support/Quotations/Evidence

  1. Answering “did you have evidence for that?” with Classical Rhetoric’s 7 types of evidence

  2. Inserting “evidence” as questioner, then asking about it

  3. Making statements or creating word pictures before asking questions around them (“imagine if…,” “let’s suppose…,” “in the first speech…,” “CNN reported in 2019 that…”)

  4. Getting opponents to set a standard before admitting that they violate it (e.g. secondary sources, real life statistics, or other criteria)

Leveraging CX In-Round

  1. How to open a speech based on CX

  2. How to recover from a rough CX moment

  3. Responding to a beautiful CX point that nobody turned into a speech point, because it stuck in the judge’s brain

As you can see, you could coach this for days, all year, or—as I’m usually asked—take students from wherever they are to as far as they can get in just an hour or two!

Resources

  1. This sample debate with myself and one of my former debate students, Mikayla Simpson, we had some lit CX’s that I love to show off at trainings.

  2. The old black and white movie, Witness for the Prosecution.

  3. “The Art of Cross-Examination,” first written in the early 1900s, is still the undisputed classic: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Cross-Examination-Francis-L-Wellman/dp/0684843048

Take Action, Please!

First off, what am I missing from the CX skills list? Email me so I can add! isaiah@isaiahmcpeak.com

Secondly, I’d love to know if you liked this format and would want to see it for more of debate’s skills (rebuttals, constructives, refutation, etc). Same as before: isaiah@isaiahmcpeak.com. What I’m toying with is maybe some videos unpacking some of the items I’ve listed above, but I find myself constantly guessing at how many people would really watch such a thing.

Finally, if you ever want to learn some of the skills on here that aren’t familiar—or how to coach them—now you know what I do as a coach.

 
 
Cross ExaminationIsaiah McPeakCross Examination, CoachesComment