Written by: Ella Hirmasto
Edited by: Priyanka Krishna
Often, when we think about the THIMUN Singapore conference we think about how much the delegates are learning, how much the delegates are improving and what new skills the delegates are developing. You may wonder what your teachers all do whilst you’re busy at debate. Surely there’s nothing for them to learn? This might be exactly what you’d think before you walk into the Best Delegate Workshop, which was hosted by Kevin Felix Chan.
Chan is the co-founder of Best Delegate, a Model United Nations (MUN) organisation that helps students and schools effectively run MUN conferences. Chan has extensive MUN experience ranging from high school clubs, college clubs, to even serving as a secretary-general at a MUN conference at the United Nations headquarters. To Chan, the Best Delegate Workshops are extremely beneficial, as ”a lot of directors have no MUN experience themselves and they need to understand the fundamentals of MUN”. Chan hopes to explain a wide range of topics, including the flow of debate, research, resolution writing, and where to start researching. Once these many concepts are explained directors are able to “support their students more,” elaborated Chan.
To see the impact of these workshops on the directors, I decided to talk to Yin Meng (MUN Director, Harrow Int. School Hong Kong), who confirmed to have learnt quite a lot as a result of the workshop. Meng highlighted the importance of research before attending a conference and now knows how to “support students to complete thorough research”. One of the research techniques introduced was MUN speeches, programmes, events, agreements, and reports (SPEAR). This MUN SPEAR suggests appropriate starting points for researching a country’s stance on a chosen issue.
The implementation of simple strategies such as SPEAR will ensure that directors fully prepare delegates before they attend conferences, which will highly improve their MUN experience.