From First Principles

A brief introduction to myself, this curriculum, and what I hope you get from this workshop-style course.

a brief introduction

I am Tejas Prabhune – I debated parliamentary debate for ~7 full years (I graduated in May 2026). Over the course of these years, I noted that a centralized resource for technical parliamentary debate was lacking. Most of my learning came from my great coaches at Evergreen Valley High School (James Gooler-Rogers, Will White, Trevor Greenan and lila lavender), and at Cal Parli (Amanda Miskell, June Dense, and Brenna Seiersen).

In high school, I grew so much as a debater just watching college NPDA (National Parliamentary Debate Association) nationals in 2021. And so I created NPDA Videos as a replacement for the late Zach Schneider’s debatevid.io website to be a centralized resource for all recordings that Cal Parli had access to and for the future. To my understanding, this website has served our squad and others well.

After my recent graduation (and retirement from debate), I felt compelled to put much of what I’ve learned alongside my partner (Timothy Zhu) and with my incredible team at Berkeley. As a disclaimer, I’m partial – my brother currently competes in the high school NPDL circuit, so I’ll likely be involved in debate as long as he is competing.

my curriculum

There exist great blogs and camps out there for debate already. Why a new curriculum? A few reasons:

  • I have my own thoughts and opinions on debate that I hope others can learn from.
  • Many technical blogs are built for LD and CX. While useful, parliamentary debate has unique qualities that deserve its own curriculum.
  • I hope to provide a centralized resource to improve the quality of high school and college parliamentary debate from a first-principles approach.

That being said, I encourage everyone to also read/watch external material! I’ve been in debate a very short amount of time. There are many folks out there who have thought about debate a lot more than me at schools like Michigan and Emory—you’ll learn an amazing amount from them. Hopefully, you’ll be well-prepped to quickly understand and apply their material after this.

What does first principles mean? I’ll assume a near-zero background on debate and motivate/build advanced strategy, content, and execution from the ground up throughout this curriculum. Admittedly I don’t know the full history behind every argument, nor will this be completely comprehensive, but I’ll attempt to maximize the value in each article.

goals

You should hope to gain the following from this course:

  • a coherent internal model of debate that you can apply in-round
  • a structure and motivation for each speech in parli
  • an understanding of how to prepare the affirmative and negative
  • the theory behind counterplans and competition
  • the strategy and execution of topicality and other theory
  • an understanding of the criticism and how to deploy it and answer it
  • a plan on how to execute each speech effectively in round
  • methods of practicing effectively and preparation before tournaments

and hopefully more. We’ll take our time and try to keep things straightforward. Please email me at prabhune[at]berkeley.edu or tejas.prabhune[at]gmail.com if you have any questions or want to request an article on anything in specific.