Sociology course: debate on racial profiling

The debate seems like a good way to create a scenario where students are learning from each other, and in which the information to be gleaned from the assigned readings is not presented directly to the students. Instead, they need to think it through and apply the central questions to the reading.

One thing that could be changed about the debate assignment, is presenting the idea of debates as a valuable approach before the assignment itself. That way, explicit skill instruction is built into the assignment, and students go into it already having a sense of what the value of this activity is. This would also make the reflection afterwards more valuable.

Using the format of a debate is clearly a nice fit with the topic which could be controversial. I wonder if there could be a way to instruct debating skills in a more purposeful or sophisticated way, beyond the exercise of taking each other's point of view. In other words, it seems this format could be very useful to deepen students understanding of the content the debate was about but maybe something could be added in terms of communication skills?