Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson: PLC Notes, Friday, 10/30/2020

 Led by Deannah Bahl and Amy White

 What truly is 9th grade? What do we want our 9th graders to walk away with at the end of

the year? What skills are essential and how do we deliver those tools to them?

 Just Mercy is composed of multiple stories of injustices people of color have faced. It
centralizes on police brutality and the wrongful imprisonment of BIPOC at alarmingly
higher rates than those of white people.
o Multiple plot lines are a sophisticated writer’s move, but may get a little cloudy
and murky for students.
o Do we raise the bar and allow them to attempt to read this intricate work or pick
the main story line of Walter to allow them to study?
 Deannah is planning to teach Just Mercy in conjunction with To Kill a Mockingbird
o She plans to extract Walter’s story, the main focus of Just Mercy, to pair with
TKAM
 The marriage of these two texts opens up the floor for conversations surrounding racism
in America in the past, as well as, what’s happening in our world today.
o Students will be able to take the texts and examine how we have changed as a
society and how we haven’t.
 Just Mercy was also made into a movie which allows for analyzing multiple forms of
media and employ critical thinking skills. It also opens up the discussion of how books
differ from movies and why. This, in turn, leads to asking ourselves about personal bias
and asking ourselves about the director’s intent. What did they leave out? What did they
include? Why?