A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF DEBATE ON DIVERGENT THINKING AMONG STUDENT TEACHERS OF COLLEGES OF EDUCATION.

Active teaching strategies like Debates can teach students to research a topic thoroughly, analyze the informationcritically and construct knowledge from it.It also enables them to examine different perspectives to an issue,take a standand find ways of defending it.While presenting their arguments before an audience,they do it logically with clarity andconfidence and improve their communication skills. With these multi fold benefits if debate is used as a strategy ofteaching it transforms their roles as learners, so instead of passively receiving they construct their own knowledge.Divergent thinking is essential for creativity and imagination and helps individuals address situations and problemsthrough innovative perspectives and possibilities. A question arose in the researcher's mind, will the acceleratedthinking ignited by an active strategy like academic debate in classroom teaching, impact Divergent Thinking ofstudents? An experimental study was carried out where a module of debate was used to teach topics of the courseEducational Management in the one-year B.Ed. course and the researcher made tool on Divergent Thinking wasadministered to the students. The pre-test and post test scores were compared to see if the debates had an impact onDivergent Thinking of the students' teachers.The post test of the experimental group showed an increase in the scores ofDivergent Thinking.The researcher desires to motivate through the finding of this study faculty of B.Ed.and other highereducation courses to use debate as a strategy and focus on increasing the Divergent Thinking,as in a dynamic world withever new challenges coming up it will enable the young generation to improve the quality of their decision making.