For your first speech, you will work in groups on a topic based on your own expertise.  Everyone in the group will work on exactly the same topic, but each person will present a different kind of argument -- one a definitional argument, one a causal argument, one an evaluation argument, and one a proposal argument.  As a result, the arguments should be quite different from one another, even though everyone in the group is working on exactly the same topic.

I recommend that you coordinate with one another and share information and sources, but in theory, once you decide on a topic and decide which kind of argument each person in the group will present, you can work individually without further group contact.

You will be graded individually on your own speech (rather than on the group's presentation as a whole).  My criteria for evaluating speeches are available at http://www.tcnj.edu/~gsteinbe/syllabi/speechcriteria.htm.