NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 23
Lessons Learned
23
Overview
We began on a small scale, creating a series of
engaging lessons to give students in grades 6-12
a foundation in news literacy concepts and skills
and introducing these lessons in just a few schools
(two schools and an after-school program in our
initial pilot). This allowed us to test and evaluate
our curriculum (which grew to include hands-on
e-learning resources and, as our program developed,
digital media) and student project ideas as we
created them, improved them and established their
viability and effectiveness.
We also tapped into the passion journalists feel
for their work by bringing both active and retired
journalists into schools to encourage students
to seek verified information on any medium or
platform. Working in concert with teachers and
our staff, these volunteer journalists (we called
them “journalist fellows”) extended what students
were learning in our core curriculum by tying in their
own compelling stories. Individually or in teams,
journalists visited classrooms or connected with
students in videoconferences. They helped to teach
students how journalism works, how journalists
verify information, why news matters to young people
and what a free press and the First Amendment (the
constitutional guarantee of, among other things, free
speech and a free press) mean in U.S. democracy.
“Misinformation” and “Practicing Quality Journalism”)
are updated or adapted versions of lessons from our
classroom program (“The Information Neighborhood,”
“Democracy’s Watchdog,” “The Power of Deception”
and the “Be a Reporter Game”).
One key to getting into schools was the high degree
of flexibility that we offered teachers. We created
drop-in units that could fit into social studies, history,
government, English, humanities or journalism
classes. They were not designed as a full course or
elective that would displace educators’ existing
lesson plans.
These drop-in units also helped in terms of
bureaucracy; teachers did not need to get approval
from a school district or school board when they
In classes during school hours
We introduced our classroom program in February
2009, one year after NLP was founded. It became
our laboratory and our showcase as we developed,
tested and refined our curriculum and model.
Even though our curriculum is now completely online,
we still continue, with ongoing refinements, to use
the formula from our in-person classroom program: a
modular approach that provides smaller curriculum
elements that teachers can use as stand-alone
lessons, as thematic modules or in their entirety as a
comprehensive news literacy unit, depending on what
makes sense for them and their students. In fact, the
four foundational lessons in our Checkology virtual
classroom (“InfoZones,” “Democracy’s Watchdog,”
Sorting information then and now: A handout from our classroom
program (top) and the start of our “InfoZones” lesson in the
Checkology virtual classroom (bottom).