Classroom Activities
Journal Prompts
Daily journaling is an important part of self-expression and developing an opinion on a variety of issues. Freewriting for three minutes at the beginning of each class allows students to express ideas and feelings about a topic and develops a comfort level with committing their thoughts to words on paper. Pairing the question to the content for the day may also serve to activate prior knowledge. Some potentially useful prompts include:
- What is the purpose of prison?
- What are some of the effects of poverty on our community?
- Brainstorm a list of influences that might cause a youth to become delinquent.
- What do you know about racism? The causes, the effects, the types?
- How do you feel about the PBIS process for students who misbehave?
- Does serving prison time serve as a deterrent to prevent criminal conduct?
- Try to write out the Miranda rights statement read to you when you are detained as a suspect by the police.
- Do you think wealth or race has an impact upon your sentence for a crime?
- Does having SROs on campus make you feel safer? How would you feel if we had metal detectors?
- What do you know about social class? To what social class do you belong? How difficult is it to improve your social class?
- How would your life differ if every group you tried to be a part of rejected you and made you feel like an outsider? What would you do?
- What is justice?
- Brainstorm a list of factors in our school and community that might deter a youth from becoming delinquent.
- Are zero tolerance policies necessary to protect us or are there times where they are enforced too rigidly?
- What are your thoughts about the death penalty?
- Why is there a separate juvenile justice system for individuals under the age of 18?
- Should incarcerated individuals be given the opportunity to get at education?
- Why is 18 the age of a juvenile in our legal system? Is this arbitrary? Why not 21, especially if you consider brain development?
- Should juveniles have different language in the reading of their Miranda rights to make sure they understand?
- Once a felon has served their sentence, should they be allowed to vote?
Week One
Students will be encouraged to consider the big picture of incarceration in America and practice their skills at accurately interpreting graphs and charts. Links to a variety of visual representations will be provided for students along with a worksheet that will familiarize them with both statistics for the United States and specifically juveniles.63
Conversations about the nature of justice and why we incarcerate individuals will be conducted to allow students to consider the topic. In addition, students will read the reflection on incarceration by Peter M. included in Maryam Ahranjani’s Youth Justice in America to develop empathy.
Students will simultaneously use Chrome books to take the Project Implicit survey on Social Attitudes towards race created by psychologists at Harvard. By having the class take it at the same time, we will be able to immediately debrief and have a class discussion about racial biases in our country. Students will be placed into different group and each will read a different article that offers strategies to help overcome implicit bias and create visual/verbal representations of the content. Ailsa Chang’s, “A Lesson in How to Overcome Implicit Bias” offers kairos as it addresses the recent closure of Starbucks locations across the nation to address this issue, while Linda R. Tropp and Rachel D. Godsil’s Psychology Today article, “Overcoming Implicit Bias and Racial Anxiety” offers more concrete strategies.
Students will read and complete a descriptive outline of either, “Many Kids Called Unfit for Adult Trial” or Gail Garinger’s, “Juveniles Don’t Deserve Life Sentences” and the following day they will write a rhetorical précis of that article.
Week Two
I will model focusing on word choice and style to demonstrate bias in an article using Bob Redell’s seemingly factual presentation of recent data in, “Youth Crime on the Rise in Santa Clara County: Report.” Students will read a recent opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News about juveniles that is clearly biased and after analyzing the ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, tone, and style, they will write a reaction to the arrest of a youth who committed armed robbery in the personae of the author of the article. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/24/opinion-juvenile-justice-reform-is-working-despite-san-jose-crime-spike/
Students will then randomly receive a peer’s reaction and write a response to that in their own voice in the form of a letter to the judge recommending sentencing or begging for leniency. Once they have done a partner-pair-share to discuss the reasons for their choices I will reveal that the scenario they reacted to was the real-life circumstances of Frances “Frankie” Guzman’s 1995 arrest at age 15 for armed robbery and vehicle theft and how he is now an attorney in California advocating for reform of the juvenile justice system. The article “From Prison to Juvenile Justice Lawyer” in the Feb 17, 2013 edition of the SF Chronicle is a powerful testament to the ability of a determined individual to turn his life around despite challenging circumstances.
Week Three
Students will read two articles about adolescent brain development. The first being a more scholarly approach to brain development and the effects of marijuana on teen brains in Time Magazine “Why Teenage Brains are so Hard to Understand” and the second being “Startling Finds on Teenage Brains” by Paul Thompson which will undergo a thorough rhetorical analysis. Students will also watch a brief WPTV interview with Nathaniel Brazill who was charged as an adult at age 13 for murder and is now a 24 year-old serving a 28-year sentence. Reinforcing the information about adolescent brain development will occur when we read Malcolm Heid’s “Here’s What We Know About What Weed Does to Teens” 2017.
I will provide my students with the scenario Ahranjani poses wherein three brothers, aged 26, 16 and 6 are caught shoplifting to discuss the current justification for separate categories of the justice system. They will work in groups to devise appropriate punitive measures and rehabilitation for each of the brothers and explain their reasoning.
Lastly, we will spend a day conducting a poetic analysis of Common’s “Letter to the Free” with a focus on the allusions in that text. This will serve to illustrate the role that art can play in shaping our social conscience and remind students that even lyrics from a contemporary artist can be deconstructed as one would a poem. Furthermore, Common’s role in the California political landscape was notable during the 2017 “Imagine Justice” campaign to reform the criminal justice system in Sacramento and highlights the importance of educated voters participating in our democracy.
Week Four
Students will spend three days completing detailed pre, during, and post reading activities as they read Marjie Lundrom’s 2001 article, “Kids are Kids—Until They Commit Crimes.” These activities include a complete annotation, summary, and SOAPSTONE.
Given our school mascot is an eagle, the scenario posed by Ahranjani “The Screaming Eagle” is too perfect to pass up. With a copy of the Bill of Rights in front of them, I will provide students with a copy of the scenario involving a plot to steal the school mascot’s costume and the subsequent investigation. They will choose to tell the truth, lie, or choose to remain silent intention is that they journal their reason for choosing or discounting each of the three options to respond to the police officer. They will then all indicate which option they chose and the class survey will be noted. Then, in small groups, individuals will use the art of persuasion to try to convince peers to alter their stance.
On the final day we will explore some poems such as Jimmy Santiago Bacca’s “Who Understands Me, But Me” and Daniel Beaty’s “Knock Knock.” Both of these are designed to develop empathy in my students and to allow them to experience a genre they may have thought was not representative of their experiences or point of view.
Week Five
Students will take on roles for a Restorative Justice exercise so that they develop a familiarity with an alternative means of repairing the harm caused by criminal behavior. As all of my students are concurrently enrolled in a government course with a community service component, we will also spend time considering which options might provide delinquent youth with alternatives and explore some less frequently considered options for community service. This civic engagement will serve to both connect the students to the community as well as to hopefully bolster programs that serve at risk youth in San Jose.
A final text, Alan Blinder’s "After a Massacre, a Question of One More Death: The Gunman's," will be annotated and analyzed using a SOAPSTONE strategy. Students will engage in the writing process to draft, write, revise, and submit an argumentative essay that addresses the topic of juvenile justice. The essay prompt will be to make a recommendation for how juvenile justice should be approached using evidence from multiple texts as well as life experience. Students will also be required to anticipate and address a counterargument.
Week Six
In the final week, students will work in groups to create and present programs designed to keep students in school and construct programs that would deliberately reduce the number of youth who enter the system. The Fresh Lifelines for Youth will be utilized as a model although thinking outside of the box will be encouraged. Students will design a program at the school/community level to benefit at-risk youth with specific components to address specific needs in the community.
Given that the potential power of the youth vote (over 50 million potential voters aged 18-29) largely goes unfulfilled, especially among Latinos, I would like to focus on creating voting behaviors in my students. Hence I plan to encourage my students to have informal conversations and policy debates as discussion has been proven to be a factor in making youth more likely to vote. In addition, as my students are about to turn 18, we will develop a charter for a club on campus that encourages voting by promoting registration (even 16 and 17 year olds can pre-register in California) and focuses on policy debates to develop familiarity with the electoral process, issues on the ballot, and engaging in political discourse.64
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