I cannot believe this is week 13 of the course. Time flies by so far!
The past 12 weeks has been a tremendous learning experience for me. In the month of September and October, I was not able to keep up with the reading due to constantly working overtime eight to ten hours a week. By the time I sat down to do something for my study, it was usually after 11pm. I was eventually burnout in the week of November 9th. I am stilling in the state of recovery. During that week, I identified my working overtime as an issue and applied what I had learned from the debate process to deal with this issue! Examining the pro side and con side of the issue, I listed the main causes of the issue and came up with some strategies to deal with it. In the past three week, I left the office between 4:30pm to 5pm! I can now start to do something for this course between 8pm and 9pm. It was a breakthrough for me. I had been working consistently overtime since May 2008, the time I took over the district as a district case manager at a local home care program.
I learned how to identify issues and how to apply the principles of the debate process in real life! In clinical practice, I utilize the case management framework, a situation-specific theory, i.e. applying theory to practice. After the completion of the debate assignment, I realized that I have been able to identify clinical issues more efficiently and to apply the principles of debate process mindfully.
The above is the outcome from my learning of the debate. The following is my reflective thoughts of how I have gone through the debate process from week one to week ten, the week I completed the self-evaluation assignment.
From Week One to Week Four
In the first two weeks, I kept asking myself five questions. Why did I have to learn about debate? What were the implications to learn about debate? How did it relate it to my clinical practice? How could it demonstrate the advanced level of nursing practice? How did this assignment support the title of this nursing course? I came up with some rationales to convince me continuing this course.
In the first two weeks, my thinking process made some turns. I got my answers to the first three questions above. It made sense for me to continue this learning journey.
In the third week, a new challenge confirmed my direction to keep going with this course. Reading all the articles related to debate, I was very confused during my first attempt to understand the terminology of debate. I had to read the required readings a few times. I realized that the challenges were to apply the abstract concept of debate into actual practice of debate, and to demonstrate the logical reasoning process of an individual’s internal thinking process to the audience. Yes, indeed debate was at the advanced level of nursing practice and the debate assignment answered the last two questions above.
From Week Five to Week Eight: The Fours Weeks Before My Debate Week
There were four debates presented before my turn. Each time I read the class’ power point (ppt) presentations; I thought to myself that they articulated so well that I could not do a better job than theirs. English is my second language. I have to struggle with it from time to time. Just the thought of posting the ppt presentations, I had been losing my confidence slowly in those four weeks. I was not only losing my mental strength but also struggling to learn how to research online, and how to use the ppt presentation program for the first time! All these factors made my learning of the debate assignment a challenging and rewarding journey. 
Reviewing the four debates, I recognized two findings. Firstly, pro side and con side could find many references to support their position statement. This finding generated my conclusion that references might not be the most important information during the debate process. The two significant learning objectives of debate were the flow of logical reasoning that demonstrated the individual’s internal thinking, and the ability to articulate the flow of logical reasoning into powerful and vivid messages to convince the audience supporting the individual’s position statement. Based on these two learning objectives, I provided feedbacks to classmates’ debates on how to present the position statement, premises, and arguments by thematic approach, and grouping ideas into three main themes rather than a list of six to seven points. The thematic rebuttal and the strategy of “attacking` the tree truck, not the branches and twigs” (Greenwell, Driscoll, Byrne, & Moss, 2001) were the two main strategies in debate. I had tried to apply these strategies to my own debate and that made me feel a sense of accomplishment and encouraging in my learning of the debate process in week nine. 
Week Nine: My Debate Week
The peak time of learning the debate was the five to six hours that I spent on organizing classmates’ comments and wrote up the eight pages to respond to the class. Completing the opening presentation and the rebuttal, the information of the debate topic, program management, was like puzzle pieces of references in my mind. Answering all the classmates’ questions and responding to their comments, I had to mentally re-organize the information and those puzzle pieces of references, and created them into the “big picture” of program management. This mental exercise facilitated my learning as the professor had described in one of the online posting dated September 18, 2009 at 4:09pm, “One of the reasons is that to engage successfully in a debate, student must become immersed in the entire range of facts surrounding an issue – the facts from both sides of the issue.” After completing the eight pages, I experienced the sense of “immersed in the entire range of facts surrounding an issue”! 
Week Ten: My Reflective Thinking Process
When I was preparing the annotated bibliography for the trend paper in week ten, I read an article described the participants of the first international symposium debated on many issues of places of death (Mpinga, Pennec, Gomes, Cohen, Higginson, Wilson, & Rapin, 2006). I inferred that debate might be a format of knowledge inquiry in conferences. It was another interesting discovery in my learning journey of the debate process. 
Conclusion
In the past ten weeks, I learned that debate was the advanced level of clinical practice to deal with issues. I had to examine an issue from pro side and con side, different perspectives, to understand the complexity of an issue. Using thematic approach to zero into the central theme(s) of the issue, I could look into options of dealing with an issue more effectively. Despites my high anxiety level, and the demands from work and family, I managed to complete the debate assignment and learned how debate related to clinical practice.