NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 27
Lessons Learned
27
We have found that members of the general public
— of all ages — are interested in using our tools and
resources. When we overhauled our website in the
spring of 2018, we created shareable graphics,
quizzes and blog posts that appeal to a broad
audience for use in and out of the classroom. We
feature these both on our site and in social media
posts that send visitors to our site.
Self-starting. Ultimately, we strive to help teachers
notice the news literacy “teachable moments” that
occur dozens of times a day, in the memes and
headlines and rumors all around them online. A
successful professional development event will give
teachers not just resources and ideas that they can
begin using right away, but also an increased ability
to create their own resources — to structure their
own student discussions, invent their own concise
warm-up activities (sometimes called “bell-ringers”
by educators) to jump-start learning, and design their
own lesson plans and projects. This is what teachers
naturally do when they are given the training and
resources they need.
News organizations
News organizations and educators have a similar
reason for being: creating an informed citizenry that
knows the difference between news and propaganda
(not to mention rumors and outright falsehoods) and
supports an unfettered press.
In approaching news outlets to be our partners,
we asked for three things: an endorsement of our
mission by a senior editor, producer or executive; an
agreement to make their journalists aware of the
opportunity to volunteer with us; and the prospect
of working with us in a variety of ways, such as
hosting a “VIP” breakfast or lunch for supporters and
potential supporters or an event honoring a journalist
at that outlet who has been particularly active with us.
We have generally not asked these partners for
financial support — in part to avoid this being an
impediment to their participation (given the difficult
financial state of many U.S. news organizations
these days) and in part to avoid the appearance
that we included an outlet as a partner because
At an NLP-sponsored public event in November 2013, (from left)
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, Andrea Mitchell of
NBC and Gwen Ifill of PBS discuss press coverage of U.S. foreign
policy before an audience of more than 1,100 in Washington, D.C.
we received a contribution from it. A few have
subsequently provided financial support or have
foundations or other philanthropic arms associated
with them that have become donors.
Individual journalists
Tap into your community’s local journalists, and
request that they visit classrooms or facilitate a field
trip to tour their newsroom. Journalists have a unique
ability to bring news literacy concepts to a life in an
engaging way. If journalists visit a classroom, it is
important to prepare them by tying their visit to a
core news literacy concept — such as strategies for
sorting news from opinion and advertising, or factchecking, or the importance of a free press.
For our classroom and after-school programs, we
recruited active and retired journalists — reporters,
editors and producers who had worked at well-known
news outlets — to supplement our lessons by going
into classrooms, either in person or online (via Skype,
for example), to help students learn to think like
journalists.
We arranged orientation and training sessions with
journalists at our participating news organizations
to encourage them to volunteer and let them
know what would be expected. We emphasized
that they should not lecture; instead, they should