Mock Trial Program October Newsletter

Welcome to our Discovering Justice Mock Trial Newsletter! Even in this challenging and uncertain time of COVID19, our Fall 2020 semester kicked off to a great virtual start! Discovering Justice has been thrilled with the level of enthusiasm, ingenuity, and adaptability of our legal mentors, students, and teachers this semester. 

Moving forward, these newsletters are designed to bring our Discovering Justice Mock Trial community together by highlighting participants, showcasing bright spots, impactful work, and serving as a central location for important news, tips, and strategies for our teams to excel!

Program Highlight

The Mock Trial Program aims to bring these four values to life through an engaging curriculum delivered by our wonderful legal mentors. We will highlight the four values throughout the Fall. 

One transferable skill we hope our students gain from our program is the ability to see multiple perspectives and develop and make an argument for any side.

Our organization holds perspective taking in high regard for our students in our Mock Trial Program and for everyone in our community as we try to democratically solve our collective problems together. Perspective taking is a necessary skill for us all as community members as we work towards justice.

This week students practiced perspective taking in our “Face Off” activity. Students had 60 seconds to argue their side then switched sides and argue for the opposite side.

One BLS student delivered a skillful and passionate argument about how cats are clearly better than dogs. You wouldn’t know she thought “that was hard because I don’t really like cats at all!”

After participating in this activity, sixth graders from the Tobin School brought up how difficult it must be for lawyers to argue for something that they may not personally believe in order to have a fair trial. The activity was a huge success and a lot of fun!

Tips / Strategies for Teams:

• Assign a timekeeper: The Mintz legal team did an excellent job with pacing the session by assigning one member the role of timekeeper to ensure they were able to cover everything in the session!
  
• The Chat: Interacting with students over the chat is an easy way to keep the class engaged and help shyer student voices to be heard. One group implemented a community standard of typing an exclamation mark in the chat when students hear something they agree with, or typing a smiley face to show understanding of a topic before moving on. The McDevitt Team has students type an exclamation point when they want to share something out loud, and has found it helpful to assign one legal mentor the role of monitoring and responding to students in the chat.
  
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  Tips / Strategies for Teams: Assign a timekeeper: The Mintz legal team did an excellent job with pacing the session by assigning one member the role of timekeeper to ensure they were able to cover everything in the session! The Chat: Interacting with students over the chat is an easy way to keep the class engaged and help shyer student voices to be heard. One group implemented a community standard of typing an exclamation mark in the chat when students hear something they agree with, or typing a smiley face to show understanding of a topic before moving on. The McDevitt Team has students type an exclamation point when they want to share something out loud, and has found it helpful to assign one legal mentor the role of monitoring and responding to students in the chat. Team communication: A consistent theme of a successful team of legal mentors and the school’s teacher has been communication. It is vital to share all instructions among your group of legal mentors so that all activities and breakout rooms are carried out effectively and timely.

  Message from the Mock Trial Program Manager:  Hello everyone and welcome to the Mock Trial Program Newsletter!  I am extremely proud of the work being done by our partners – the law firms and schools that make this program possible, and the individual legal mentors and teacher leaders who show up every week for their students! We are grateful to have many returning legal mentors and schools this semester. I also want to welcome our new legal mentors and new students teams to our program. Our new legal mentors include Boston University Law School and Committee for Public Counsel Services (Lowell). I am also happy to welcome three new schools to our program: McDevitt Middle School, Butler Middle School, and James Sullivan Middle School.  DJ’s program team has done a wonderful amount of work this summer to make sure our Mock Trial Program could be accessible to teams across the Commonwealth during COVID-19 by moving our curriculum online with engaging activities and lessons. We are proud of our updated virtual materials and are impressed with the legal mentors for jumping in feet first! We are excited about the new cases we are offering this fall. Built around the First Amendment, these cases have students investigate the intersection of free speech and cyberbullying, the tension of a school newspaper’s desire to uncover a groundbreaking scandal and a school administration’s desire to protect the privacy of their students, and what messages can and cannot be worn during a school day. I want to give a huge shout-out to our friends at Liberty Mutual and WilmerHale for helping us create these new cases. Last, but certainly not least, welcome Discovering Justice’s Mock Trial fellow, Alzeta Wilson to our team! She will be supporting our teams week to week and revising and updating our material as we prepare for the Spring! She is a great educator and we are lucky to have her on our team! Hope to see you in a virtual Mock Trial Session soon! Luke Matys Discovering Justice Senior Education Associate Mock Trial Program Manager