Guilty or Not Guilty?

Pupils will be familiar with court room dramas and the conventions of prosecution and defence each putting forward their case. This framework makes an excellent basis for constructing logical arguments with evidence to support them – skills needed not just in English, but in many other subject areas.

Persuasive or discursive writing does not have to be based on adult preoccupations such as school democracy, the environment or other serious issues. Pupils can come to understand the techniques of argument and evidence through more light-hearted topics.

In this activity, pupils are asked to make the case for and against fictional characters. To make the task accessible for all, we have chosen the well-known children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  If your class includes students from cultures where the story is not known, this provides an opportunity for other pupils to retell it.

Briefly discuss what Goldilocks has done wrong and what defence could be made, without going into too much detail. Divide the class into groups. Half the groups should be constructing the case for the prosecution, half for the defence. They are aiming to argue that Goldilocks is guilty, or not guilty.

PowerPoint slides can be a useful aid in doing this as each slide encourages a main point followed by a number of bullet points. You can download the PowerPoint here..

The first slide should sum up the case and subsequent ones break it down into smaller sections. For example,

Slide 2 would develop the point about damage; Slide 3 might look like this:

The use of bullet points encourages succinctness. Each point can be elaborated when pupils make the case verbally.  Those making the defence case can point out that selfishness is not a crime, that the damage done is very small, the house was open and inviting – and so on.

Once the convention has been established, other cases of guilty or not guilty can be considered such as the Pied Piper of Hamlyn or Beauty’s father in Beauty and the Beast before more adult topics or characters are dealt with.

The accompanying worksheet offers a guide to help pupils with the case against Jack of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.  It will be relatively easy to then draw up the case for the defence and to stage the trial.

 

By Trevor Millum for Smart Learning