CCWA MUN

Advisor Conference Preparation Guide

Faculty Advisors:
Thank you for your interest in attending the 61st annual Cleveland Council on World Affairs Model UN Conference. Model United National is a fun and exciting way for students to practice a wide variety of skills and learn current and highly relevant information. As a faculty advisor, your primary goal is to ensure that your delegates' experiences at the Model UN conference are as enjoyable, educational, and stress-free as possibly. Your responsibilities to obtain this goal include registration, transportation, and all other logical requirements. Please refer to the following guide as a way to reduce stress for both yourself and your students.

Preparation for the Conference

Step One: Create a team
The first step is to create a Model United Nations team. Your school might already have a pre-existing team or club. If not, you should begin recruiting students at once. You can put out a school-wide announcement or publicize the opportunity to groups with a common interest, such as international affairs clubs, law or government clubs, and debate teams. Please note, the more students involved, the better the experience will be for everyone involved.

Step Two: Register the team
Once you have a team that is committed to attending the conference, you must register with the Cleveland Council on World Affairs (CCWA) and pay the registration fees before countries are assigned. Since countries and topics go quickly, please have this step competed as soon as possible. Once you have registered and CCWA has received your fees, you can choose your countries. Please note that your choices should be made in accordance to the size of your delegation , the committees that you wish to participate, and your geographic and political preferences. In selecting countries, keep in mind the advantages and disadvantages of debating from a certain country's perspective. For example, the United States of America is a powerful and well-known country but is subject to much more scrutiny and opposition from other countries. Lesser-known countries are slightly harder to find information but are usually much more interesting in their information and point of view.

Step Three: Make all logistical arrangements for the team
Regardless of experience or ability, how much your team enjoys the conference depends on logistical organization. This responsibility entails arranging for transportation, orchestrating permission from schools and teachers to miss classes, arranging for food and any other supplies and funds necessary for your students to attend Model UN. As advisor, organizing the logistical requirements is one of your most important roles. This part of the planning process should be completed as far in advance as possible; making arrangements at the last minute is always difficult and might result in diminished performance of your team.

Step Four: Introduce MUN to the team
Most likely your team will contain at least some students who have never participated in MUN prior to this conference and will need clarification about the entire process. Before the conference each team member should understand what is MUN and what is the specific task of their committee. All this information is available on CCWA's website at www.ccwamun.org.

Step Five: Prepare the team
In order for your team to be successful at MUN, each student most excel in the following areas:

* Research: Each student is required to a write a position paper for each of their topics, which will include a profile on the student's country, background of the topic, and their country's current policy on the topic. Delegates will be scored on their knowledge of the topic and their country and on their portrayal of their country's view. CCWA's website contains short topic papers for each subject that the committees will be covering. Delegates are welcome to use the topic papers as a reference but are strongly encouraged to do their own research, especially on their country's policy towards an issue. While CCWA's information on the topic should provide a beneficial introduction to each topic, they should not take the place of more the detailed information and statistics delegates will need to speak with authority on the topic. To ensure your school?s delegates are well prepared, please supervise their research and refer them to the appropriate research material. A list of useful links is available under the research section of CCWA's website.
* Public Speaking: Delegates should be comfortable speaking in front of people; they will need to do so during the conference in order to make proposals and voice their country's opinion. Often delegates will have little to no time to prepare their speeches and should be able to respond spontaneously to remarks made. New delegates should be taught about the format of debate that the United Nations uses. Familiarity with this technique can make the conference flow much smoother and focus more on achieving solutions whether than on procedural matters. The students should also practice giving both prepared and impromptu speeches before attending the conference. Students need to become comfortable making spontaneous or near-spontaneous speeches in front of large groups; therefore, the practice sessions do not have to be formal or MUN-related. One possibility is to have impromptu speaking contests with all your school's delegates. Have a student go in front of the classroom, give him or her a topic (preferably an amusing one that will be difficult to think and talk coherently about), give the student one minute to consider, then have him or her give a speech on the topic for around a minute and a half. Later, you can increase the amount of speaking time and decrease the amount of preparation time as students improve.
* Negotiation Skills: Each country has its own policy that is most likely going to conflict with other countries' policies on the same issue. A major challenge for each delegate is to find a way to either join or form a bloc of countries with similar policies and support a resolution that best correlates with your country's policy. Delegates will have to strike a balance between their attempts to pass a resolution and their attempts to not make compromises that would go against the wishes of their government. On one hand, delegates want any resolution passed to benefit their country as much as possible but will most likely need to make certain concessions in order to ensure that their resolution passes.

Step Six: Ensure the team's conference experience is positive:
Above all, the advisor's responsibly is to ensure the team has the most enjoyable experience possible at the conference. As the famous MUN saying goes, M-U-N is F-U-N!

Useful Information