WHAT IS THE 2016 GALLOWAY MOCK PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE?

In July of 2016, Sam Biglari and I met to discuss our partnering on a substantial collaborative Reacting to the Past project between AP Literature and AP Comparative Government.  Three hours later and RTTP idea forgotten, we left with the outline of a much bigger plan that would weave together instruction and objectives of my Senior Seminars and AP Lit classes with his AP Comparative class: the 2016 Galloway Mock Presidential Debate project.

12th-Grade English Involvement, at a glance:
  • 3 out of my 5 classes participated in significant ways, including 52 of my 76 students
  • ___ direct teaching + learning hours (and ____ teacher meeting + planning hours)
  • Deliverables:
    • One student-developed and -delivered lesson for third graders on the rhetorical triangle + on persuasion
    • One student-developed and -delivered lesson for third graders on storyboarding
    • One student-developed and -delivered lesson for seniors on the rhetorical triangle
    • One student-developed and -delivered lesson for seniors on macro-level peer review
    • One student-developed and -delivered lesson for seniors on micro-level peer review
    • Four student-developed, -produced, and -delivered  political ads 
    • A student-developed rubric to assess the AP Comparative students' position papers

The Mock Debate Project in Numbers, as a whole:
  • 125  students participated (there were multiple students who overlapped between classes, but this is the number without duplication)
  • 11 different classes
    • AP English Literature and Composition (two sections)
    • AP Comparative Government
    • Policy Debate: China Policy
    • Senior English Seminar: Politics of Theater/Theater of Politics
    • Filmmaking
    • 3rd Grade (2 classes of this)
    • Economics (3 sections of this)
  • 65 instructional hours
​

OBJECTIVES

This project gives students an opportunity to research and prepare policy positions for debates and speeches, present that information in a way that is rhetorically sound and persuasive, produce commercials, and broadcasting a live event.  Additionally, it required that students in English classes learn rhetoric and communication concepts specifically for teaching and transfer rather than just replication.

This project provided opportunities for students to develop 
  • analytically: in completing this project, students should establish a deeper, more deliberate level of interaction with and understanding of the rhetorical moves available to them as they create political ads and teach the third grade classes about persuasion and storyboarding and as they teach the rhetorical triangle and macro- and micro-level peer review and revision to the AP Comparative class;
  • rhetorically: the project requires students to compose with a more nuanced awareness of audience and deploy the rhetorical moves sophisticated communicators use to interact with their audiences; it also requires students to transfer their own knowledge as they develop it into age- and level-appropriate lessons and classroom activities;
  • multimodally: this project invites students to practice their skills in multimodal communication, whether linguistically, visually, orally/aurally, gesturally, or digitally, including creating and publishing digital artifacts;
  • individually: because the work and objectives of the project were established by student-driven decision-making, individual students demonstrated greater investment in the process and their work product and a greater sense of expertise and empowerment; and
  • communally: to successfully complete this project, students worked together to determine their assessment criteria and goals and how they might achieve them, resulting in a more self-consciously team-oriented learning environment and increased mutual respect for and interdependence upon one another.
Learn more about the 2016 Galloway School Mock Presidential Debate 
​by exploring the links and buttons above.