NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 26
Lessons Learned
geographic area. It is important to give them time,
either during the session or afterward, to talk with
one another — to brainstorm ideas for lessons and
activities that teach core news literacy concepts,
and devise and share strategies for integrating news
literacy into their classrooms.
We have delivered professional development
training to middle school and high school educators
across a variety of subject areas and in a variety
of settings, including at educator conferences and
through online videoconferences. Our most recent
professional development product is NewsLitCamp®
— an all-day training held in a local newsroom that
connects teachers and journalists in conversational
workshops. (As an example, here is the agenda of
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our first such event, held at the Chicago Sun-Times
newspaper. Our subsequent NewsLitCamps have
used a similar format.)
We found that the following approaches to news
literacy professional development greatly enhanced
our outcomes with educators:
Teacher-centered. Too often, professional
development is not created to serve teachers’ needs.
We strive to expose teachers to new ideas in our
sessions, but we always look for ways to focus
on activities and concepts that they actually want
and need. Asking for feedback from participants
is important — perhaps a simple questionnaire or
an open chat at the end. Equally important is just
observing: Track common questions. Notice which
topics and slides or activities generate the most
excitement or interest from audiences. Pay attention
to what sorts of resources get teachers engaged
on social media. Simply ask at the beginning of
a session: What do you hope to get out of this
workshop/day?
Example-driven. Of particular use to educators
are examples of news and other information that
they can use to teach specific concepts or skills.
Teachers regularly ask us for copies of slides that
contain examples of viral rumors, or depictions of
the ways misinformation is created and is spread, or
insightful (and often shocking) illustrations of new
artificial intelligence and computer-generated-image
technologies.
Educators and journalists come together to learn from each other
at the Houston Chronicle NewsLitCamp in November 2018.
They also highly value off-the-shelf tools and other
resources for verifying information and teaching
news literacy. While formal training sessions do
help teachers develop skills that will enable them
to create their own new materials, educators are
also consistently hungry for accessible, high-quality
resources that will work in the classroom. The
teachers we work with ask for — and respond to —
graphic organizers, concrete ideas for activities and
student projects, lesson plans, creative approaches
to student engagement, and access to collections of
digital tools and third-party resources that they can
incorporate into their teaching.