Mock Trial
The Gann Academy Mock Trial team is a statewide powerhouse.
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The team perennially runs deep into the playoffs and in 2023 we won the state championship. We returned, again, to the championship round in 2024.
But the success of the team is much deeper than its win-loss record. Students come away with life-long skills. They learn how to make complex and nuanced arguments extemporaneously. They learn how to craft, memorize, and persuasively deliver an evidence-based story that leaves the listener thinking that this narrative is the only way to see things. They learn how to see evidence from multiple perspectives and to explain it to others in a compelling way . They learn how to publicly speak and to feel comfortable in high pressured competitive situations. They learn how to debate in an adversarial setting, to be humble in winning and to graciously accept - and to learn - from losing.
Students spend many hours a week perfecting their parts (and helping teammates perfect theirs) and they tell me that they only wish there were more hours in the day to do more.
In 2023, the Gann Academy Mock Trial team won the state championship. The team would make it back to the finals again the next year. Click the image above to read he story about Gann’s state championship win.
As with any successful student learning experience, it is the kids who do the intellectual work. They make sense of the fact pattern, they determine our case theory, they argue the nuances of the applicable case law, and they learn the rules of evidence and craft the arguments about what should and what should not make it into trial. Click on the image above to see one example of that student-led work. It is an objections clinic they devised and run to teach each other the rules of evidence.