Model UN Newsletter

See you in the Fall!

Congratulations to our Deal Delegates who participated in the first annual SSISMUN Conference on Saturday, May 30. Students discussed freedom of the press, the Greek Civil War in an historical crisis, Stranger Things, and global weapons trafficking. Congratulations to the following delegates who earned awards: Liam Sheives: Best Delegate, Lillian Bricken: Outstanding, Evie Siegel: Outstanding, and Evan Tonolli: Honorable. This was our last conference of the season! See you in the fall!

HAMUN 2026 will take place on Saturday, October 17, 2026. It will begin at 1:00 p.m. and will continue until approximately 5:30 p.m. There will be a $20 registration fee per student.

1. UNEP - Reducing Plastic Waste and Ocean Pollution

2. ECOFIN - Ensuring Equitable Access to Green Technology

3. SOCHUM - Gender Equality in Healthcare and Accessibility

4. DISEC 1 - Preventing the Weaponization of Outer Space

5. DISEC 2 - Addressing Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East

6. UNESCO - Protecting World Heritage Sites in Conflict Zones

7. UNHRC - Limiting the Exploitation of Vulnerable Communities in the International Drug Trade

8. WHO - Improving Global Cooperation During Disease Outbreaks

Congratulations on a successful MUN Season for the SY25-26! We held 43 meetings (including regular meetings, position paper writing workshops, planning/prep meetings), attended nine conferences, hosted/organized/ran one conference, ran six in-house mini sims, hosted seven guest speakers, had 47 students who chaired, wrote a background guide, earned an award at a conference or mini sim, and/or attended a MUN Event State Dept. field trip or SDG Workshop…and of course had immeasurable fun because MUN is FUN!!! See you in the Fall!

Thank you to all who attended our Parent/Community Potluck on Tuesday, 5/19! We enjoyed good food and great MUNning! While no resolutions were passed, we of course, did have much fun! :)

A special shout out to Deal MUN Alum, Eva and Andrew, for being our chairs!

Congratulations to the 13 students who participated in Cabin John MUNC this weekend. Students participated in committees about access to quality education (UNICEF), Preventing Maritime Drug Trafficking (UNODC), the Marvel Sokovia Accords, the Roman Senate (Historical Crisis), and Addressing the Humanitarian Crisis in Haiti (UNSC). This was our first time participating in this conference and we’ll be back!

Awards were earned by:

Lena Voss (Best Delegate), Liam Sheives (Outstanding), Jacob Sloane (Honorable), and the double delegation of Alma DiRuggiero and Hannah Lopez (Honorable).

Congratulations Delegates!

Shout out to Ms. Kouri for observing and posting!

Onto common feedback:

Speaking:

For a big room like this, most delegates will never speak more than once or twice, which means you only have 1-2 minutes’ worth of formal speaking time during the day to stand out and stick in the minds of the chairs. That means that you need to make every second of your speech count and to make it as memorable as possible. A good speech structures looks something like this:

Opening hook (10%): Grabs the audience’s attention and draw them in

Problem (10%): Why is this an issue? What do we need to fix? This can be combined with the opening hook, depending on how you structure your speech.

Substance (60-70%): The meat of what you want to say. This is where you talk about how you propose to solve the problem you’ve identified.

Call to action (10%): What do you want the audience to do about it? What action are you looking for them to take?

Most of you had an opening hook, which definitely helped you all stick in our heads, and most of you likewise had well-researched speeches, but they mostly focused on the problem statement. I would encourage all of you to be more explicit in your substantive portion and your call to action – no one in the room needs to be convinced that this is an important problem worth solving (after all, that’s why we’re here), so focus on what solutions you’d like the room to adopt. This is where you can and should leverage your own countries’ programs. Being able to say “My country has put in place XYZ policies to improve pandemic preparedness, and I urge the committee to adopt these common sense policies across the WHO” is a much more powerful statement to make. This also goes into branding, which I’ll talk about more below. Secondly, I’d encourage you all to work in an explicit call to action. Some of you had variations of “please send us a note if you agree with our policies”, but you can take that one step further. When I competed, I liked closing my speech with something like “I urge everyone in this committee to adopt these common sense policies, and if you’d like to work with us to make that happen, we’ll be standing in that corner during the unmod”. By pointing out where you’ll be, you’re encouraging other delegates to come to you, rather than you to them, which immediately sets the tone that you’re assuming leadership of whatever bloc forms around you. Of course, your speech has to be memorable enough that people will actually do that, and you then have to be good enough at bloc control to maintain leadership while still being someone they like working with, but that’s for later.

Division of labor is also important. Both delegates don’t always have to speak during a speech, but it’s important that we see both delegates speak throughout the conference. Most of you had notes, which is fine, but I’d encourage you to work on being able to speak without notes so that you can maintain eye contact with the audience (especially when your first speech can be more or less memorized ahead of time). Whether or not someone is reading from notes is the #1 thing I look for at the beginning to help me figure out who’s standing out, and I’ll suggest some speaking exercises below that can help with this.

One other thing you all should practice is to scan the room. Most of you looked straight ahead, and that’s the natural place to look. But when you’re speaking to a big room like this, you’re going to have people sitting to the side in your peripheral vision (not to mention Cata and I, who were both directly to your left). As you talk, slowly pivot your head so that you make eye with everyone, as well as the chair if possible. The people sitting to the side aren’t going to expect that you’re paying attention to them (and people who sit to the side are more likely to be less experienced dels and are more willing to collaborate without strings). I’d also encourage you all to work on your speech cadence and tone. Most people speak at a constant pace and don’t vary their tone much, which makes it easy to tune out, especially when there’s not a lot of difference between what everyone is saying. Intentionally slowing down and pausing before an impactful sentence forces people’s brains to go from subconsciously paying attention to fully paying attention, which helps you stand out. This takes practice though, because it can sound artificial if it’s not done well, but used properly (and infrequently), it makes you a much better public speaker. If you want some examples, look at how politicians who know how to talk do it – Obama is a great example of this in his campaign speeches.

Now onto substance. Your first speech can be prepped ahead of time, so we expect it to be more substantive. What we’re looking for is substance throughout the day, especially when the topic at hand requires some improvisation. As an example, one of Cuba’s afternoon speeches talked about the HEART plan, and while it was well done, you didn’t use the full amount of time and I found myself wishing you had more to say about your plan. One exercise we use to help practice that is “Would you rather”. Have a partner come up with a list of random would you rather’s (or use an online generator), give yourself 30 seconds of prep, and then start talking. This forces you to come up with coherent arguments on the spot, which can help when you only have 30 seconds worth of substantive content but need to fill an extra 15 seconds of time. As you get better at it, decrease the amount of prep time you have. If you can come up with a mostly coherent 45 second speech with only ~10 seconds of prep, you’re doing great! There’s nothing wrong with having notes with you, but the more fluent you seem without having to refer to notes, the more convincing you’ll be to the committee and to us. This is an important skill to master, because in moderated caucuses, you might only have 30 seconds to prep before you have to go up, and as we mentioned earlier, you need to maximize the use of every second you get to help stand out.

On that note, because you need to maximize the impact of all your speeches, timing is essential. One of the greatest skills you can learn in MUN is to have an intrinsic grasp of how much content you can fit into a speech that's 30 seconds vs 45 seconds vs 1 minute. As a rule of thumb, you should never yield time back to the chair – always use up the full time allotted. This skill comes with practice, but knowing in your head whether you have 45 seconds’ worth of things to say, and adjusting on the fly to add more content, is an incredibly useful skill. I would suggest choosing a topic you know a lot about (and it doesn’t have to be a topic like pandemic preparedness at all – the important part is to get a mental sense of how much you can say in a given timeframe, so you can choose something like your favorite artist or book series if you want) and then seeing how much you can say within 30 seconds, then repeating that with 45 seconds, and finally a minute. Do this a couple of times, and that'll give you a sense of how much time those speeches actually take and how much ground you can cover within those time intervals.

As with any exercise, the more often you do this, the better at it you’ll get. The important thing is that you consistently practice, even if that’s just once a week. You want to build the mental muscle memory of coming up with things to say and having a sense of how long a given speech is. Once you get to a point where you no longer have to think about how long you’re speaking, you can afford to focus on improving other things like how you sound and the different techniques that you’re using to persuade people.

Finally, always raise your placard. In a big room like this, you know that you’re probably not going to speak more than once or twice. But as chairs, we notice who is consistently participating, even if we can’t call on them again because there are others that haven’t spoken yet. It’s all part of helping you stand out to the chair. Plus, you never know – you might get called on! Even if you’ve already spoken during a mod, there’s nothing stopping you from raising your placard immediately again (Cuba, you were excellent at this. Well done). Obviously, you should have something useful and substantively relevant to say, but that's why I recommend those speaking exercises -- they help you get better at coming up with things to say when you might not have anything planned. Once you have a resolution, you can also use mods to explain the contents of your resolution and emphasize the branding of it. The more times that people hear the name of your resolution (and your resolutions should ALWAYS have a name), the more likely they are to vote for it. Likewise, the more times us chairs hear the name of your resolution, the more likely it is to stick in our minds when we consider awards.

Branding:

By far the best way to stand out is to get others to associate an idea or name to you. That can come in many forms – I tend to like associating myself with a substantive idea during the conference and making that my “thing”. But you could do this by having a consistent thing you do every speech for example, or any number of things. What tends to work well though are things that are funny and relevant.

One easy way is to name your resolution. Most of you guys did this, but I would have liked to see it being applied more consistently. After the first unmod, you should have a sense of what your resolution wants to accomplish, and you can then name it accordingly. The more time you spend saying the same things over and over again, the more likely it is to stick in other peoples’ heads. For example, it was pretty obvious to me early on what UK and Portugal’s Hella Money resolution was about. This is partially because the name was funny and self-explanatory, but also because they established that brand early and kept bringing it up. Once you come up with a brand, don’t just rely on yourself to talk about it – encourage as many delegates in your bloc as possible to talk about your resolution using the acronym. While I knew that you all individually had some really good ideas, I never really got a strong sense of what differentiated you from the other resolutions, whereas I could have easily answered that question for the UK/Portugal resolution, which was that they were focused on funding mechanisms. Now, you don’t want to do this too much and put yourself in too niche of a topic, so it’s a fine balance. One exercise we’ve done is to pick a topic (again, it can be any topic), and then come up with as many witty acronyms or names that you can attach to a resolution about that topic as you can within 5 minutes. Just like any other skill, being funny is a muscle you have to exercise!

Another thing you can do is to identify during your research an area you’d like to specialize in. For example, if you know you’re really knowledgeable on vaccine manufacturing, make that your thing and you’ll stand out as the subject matter expert in the room. Because others will inevitably defer to you on that topic, you pretty much can assume leadership just by knowing more than anyone else.

Bloc Control and Unmods:

Bloc control is the term we use to refer to the degree of leadership that a delegate exhibits within their bloc of countries (whether they're sponsors or signatories). This is where most of you could improve in – most delegates tend to stick together, there’s two of you, so you should split up and talk to different people. Also, I didn’t get a good sense of your unmod leadership; the way that we know who’s leading is we listen to what other dels say, and when other dels say “we’re working with XX and YY”…, that showed us that who’s exhibiting leadership. This partly goes back to branding, but you may remember that several speakers mentioned they were working with the UK and Portugal – they both did this quite well and I’d encourage you to learn from that. While you were all active participants during unmod, I didn’t get a clear sense of leadership. In practical terms, that might look like you taking charge and assigning different people in your group different topics to work on, or it might be you collecting feedback and inputs from others (but drafting the resolution yourself so you get to control what’s being written).

Likewise, I wished you all had a more robust presence during Q&A. One thing I’d encourage you to do is to reference your own resolution during Q&A. If you’re able to answer a question by saying that clause 3 notes that XXX…, that shows mastery of your own content, and even if you might not have been the person to write it, you get to own it during Q&A. This was something Thailand was very good about doing during her Q&A, and it stood out to us.

Also, you should use the Q&A portion of others’ resolutions to either poke holes in their resolution or to strengthen your own. While you all did ask questions during Q&A, the questions themselves didn’t really stand out to me. The way to change that is to ask questions that put your own resolution in a favorable light. For example, asking about something that your resolution focuses on allows you to spin your question in a way that advertises your own resolution. Alternatively, you can ask questions that demonstrate your substantive knowledge; if you hear something that doesn’t sound right, ask them to elaborate on it. Haiti’s question about restorative justice was excellent here – it simultaneously poked holes at another resolution and drew attention to your own country and your own policies. For maximum effectiveness, that could have been broadened to encompass more than just Haiti, but it was nonetheless well done.

I also wanted to compliment you all on giving everyone the chance to talk during Q&A. It’s tempting to answer every question yourself, but it’s equally important to show that you trust your fellow delegates and give them a chance to speak up as well. Cambodia 2 did this especially well, so props to you. It’s worth noting that for almost every question, multiple people answered, and that didn’t always need to be the case. There were some follow-up answers that felt more like fluff, so I’d encourage you to make sure that if you’re answering a question, you’re adding something of substantive value more often than not.

Moving into Open Space:

I talked about this during committee, but the basic concept is to identify something that’s not being discussed and to own it and move the committee towards that topic. To Cuba’s credit, they tried this and proposed several excellent moderated caucus topics, but unfortunately those didn’t get voted in. I want to applaud you doing that – that’s exactly what I’m talking about. However, rather than just proposing the topic, take it one step further and make that your brand throughout committee. For example, the Philippines proposed a mod at one point to talk about vaccine hesitancy and Ethiopia proposed one on vaccine manufacturing. Neither of those topics were voted in, and they ultimately weren’t really discussed during resolutions. The result is that everyone’s resolutions seemed very similar, which made it difficult for any single resolution to stand out. If one of you had picked up on that and included it in your own resolution, you then could have marketed your resolution as helping to plug a gap that other resolutions don’t address. That immediately helps you stand out, and because it’s a complementary topic, it doesn’t put you into conflict with other resolutions, and if others disagree with your resolution, they are then put in a position where they have to address that topic themselves or work with you.

I have tshirts for sale in sizes Adult S, Adult M, and Adult L. Super soft cotton material. $20 each, cash. Students can just bring cash, look at the sizes, and take their tshirt!

Please consider signing up for a spot to share with our students! Information and sign up can be found here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F0444A8AE22A6FA7-58638523-munspeakers

1. Speak out loud every day.
Even for 5-10 minutes. Talk about a global issue, your opinion on a topic, or practice a speech.
This builds confidence fast - so you're not panicking during unmoderated caucus.

2. Stay updated on world news.
Just 5 minutes a day with a news app or newsletter makes a difference.
You'll sound smarter in committee, ask better questions, and actually know what's going on.

3. Write one mini position paper a week.
Pick any country and issue, and write a short paragraph.
This builds your research and writing skills - and helps you prep faster before real conferences.

4. Join MUN practice sessions or simulations.
You don't need a full conference to get better.
Even one practice a month will sharpen your skills and help you feel more prepared.

5. Reflect after every conference or session.
Ask yourself:
• What went well?
• What confused me?
• What do I want to work on next time?
That's how you improve - on purpose.

6. Work on your soft skills.
MUN isn't just about facts - it's about:
• Listening to others
• Leading respectfully
• Being a strong team player
These make you unforgettable in committee and in real life.

7. Hang out with other MUN kids.
Find your people.
Surrounding yourself with motivated students who get it will inspire you to grow and keep showing up.

Try these for 6 months, and you'll show up to your next conference as a delegate who knows exactly what they're doing. Let's go!

Photos/videos taken by Ms. Trenkle during MUN events are here! :)It will be added to all year!

Ready for the next steps? Get your binder! Download the contents here---table of contents provided and all handouts (in order). Print, punch holes, assemble, and be ready to MUN! :)

HIGHLY recommended---and a great start for our in-club mini sim!

Steps from Sign up to Conference:

1. Choose country and committee
2. Download and read background guide—it is suggested that you print it and have it with you for committee
3. Do country research
4. Complete position paper draft
5. Type position paper final
6. Put in list of citations at end of position paper—at a very minimum list the URL for each site—if you can put in MLA format, that is great.
7. Get binder for MUN
8. Get final conference updates—this will go out the week of the conference.

Attire:

Attire for all MUN Conferences is business casual. This means that one should wear khakis or dress pants, a button down shirt, a tie, and you may wear a jacket. Or one could wear a skirt or dress pants and a button down shirt and nice shoes. In MUN students do NOT dress in clothing from the country they are representing.

Research:

Site: CIA Factbook at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/profileguide.html --please recognize this is from the US perspective

Site: un.org + topic (for instance migration) –this helps you learn what past actions have been taken on this topic

Site: gov.qa + topic (for instance migration) –this helps you learn what your country’s perspective is on the topic. The search allows you to find documents that your country has published on the topic from their perspective.

**Instead of qa (which is the country code for Qatar) use the two letter web country code for the country you are researching. You can find the country code at the link below. https://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/text/web_country_codes.html

Other Information:

· Answer the questions that are usually in a background guide—the answers should be incorporated into your position paper.

· Print your position paper and bring two copies with you to a conference—one for you and one to turn in to your chairs. Sometimes they ask you to turn in your position paper electronically (via email) before the conference—this will be in the background guide. It is always standard practice to have two copies with you.

· Your phone and a computer aren’t allowed in committee for research. Anything you print (your binder), handouts, research you may bring and use in committee.

Resources at the bottom of the newsletter that can be downloaded:

· Country Research PDF

· Position Paper Outline with Example PDF and Position Paper Outline (worksheet)

Attire for all MUN Conferences is business casual. This means that one should wear khakis or dress pants, a button down shirt, a tie, and you may wear a jacket. Or one could wear a skirt or dress pants and a button down shirt and nice shoes. In MUN students do NOT dress in clothing from the country they are representing.

Model UN is a simulation of the UN General Assembly and its other multilateral bodies where students perform an ambassador role while debating topics such as gender equality, climate action, global health, and more. Through public speaking, critical thinking, and in-depth research, the Model UN experience allows students to cultivate skills and enrich their global affairs knowledge.

Model UN at Deal has had a rich and successful history. Students have been active in the club locally and nationally. Some students want to learn about global topics and countries while others like to hone their conference skills of speaking, writing, collaborating, and researching. In 2017 middle school students at Deal planned and executed their first run-by and for middle schoolers conference. This was not only the first in the area, but one of the first in the country! When the pandemic hit, the secretariat took their planning virtual and for both of our 2020 and 2021 conferences, hosted an online conference. We will host our conference again this November and hope you will be a part of it!

All students, 6th-8th grades, novice or veteran, curious or expert, academically or socially motivated, are invited to participate in Model UN. We meet on Tuesdays from 3:30-4:20 pm in W104, unless otherwise noted.

Ms. Trenkle, Advisor: amy.trenkle@k12.dc.gov