Respondents and Moderators

Application and Support

General information and application to attend

Secondary school students are not eligible to serve as respondents or moderators.

There is no conference fee for respondents/moderators.

Applications are due by February 1, 2016.

To apply, please email Lauren Phillips, lauren.phillips@cmc.edu, with  your name, college and grade, mailing address, and email address. Please include a brief description (75-125 word) of relevant experience to participate at an academic conference and public affairs discussion event. Experience may include previous academic conference participation, coursework, internship and work activity, extracurricular programming, debate and speech training, etc. Experience related to the conference topic should be noted but it is not required to serve as a respondent or moderator.

Guidelines for respondents and moderators

Papers are presented in panels. Panels may have 3-5 participating members. Panels are organized in 90-minute sessions. A respondent and/or moderator is assigned to each panel.

The respondent will introduce the panel and each of the student presenters, manage the time of the events, respond to a series of student presentations (critical and productive commentary on the papers and presentations), moderate a discussion, and coordinate audience question and comment periods. There are guidelines for each type of presentation, noted in the format guide for each presentation.

Moderators of panel discussions will prompt and maintain a balanced discussion, ensuring full and fair participation for the panelists, ask questions and offer commentary, and manage time. The moderator will facilitate any audience question and comment periods.

The respondent, moderator, and outside evaluator will assess each of the student presentations based on a conference rubric. The rubric will be emailed to all approved respondents, moderators, and outside evaluators within a few days of the February 17 application deadline.