NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 34
Lessons Learned
34
Communications
Spreading the word about your work is a huge part
of spreading the healthy habits of news literacy.
We began by word of mouth, getting into a small
number of diverse and dynamic schools through
introductions to principals or teachers. Subsequently,
school and school district administrators and
journalists helped us begin to expand our reach
as our reputation in our initial cities grew and we
developed more assessment data and anecdotal
evidence to demonstrate the impact of our work.
Here are key lessons we learned:
the adoption of state teaching standards that include
the critical-thinking skills reflected in news literacy.
Share your successes. Students and teachers
will be your best advocates. Identify those who are
benefiting from your programs and are willing to
share their impact. Over the years, students and
teachers have vouched for the quality of our work
through quotes and appearances in promotional
videos and other materials, participation in public
events and interviews with journalists.
Frame the mission. Frame your mission as
broadly as possible. We say that we are focused on
helping to educate the next generation and sustain
quality journalism by creating an appreciation and
demand for it — but the overriding goal is to create
informed and engaged participants in a democracy
(or it could be “participants in our country’s civic
life”). Though our name is “The News Literacy
Project,” we are quick to add that we seek to teach
students how to evaluate the credibility of news
and other information. The field of media literacy
may be more familiar to many people, so aligning
news literacy within this field can be effective —
however, it is important to distinguish the narrower
focus on identifying the credibility of information
from the broader focus of media literacy, which
includes evaluating popular culture, such as films
and television, for its depiction of women and ethnic
groups.
Set aspirational goals. Examine your own
community of learners and base your goals on
that. We say that we would like to see news literacy
embedded in the American education experience.
In our four-year strategic framework, we aspire to
build a network of 20,000 educators in the U.S. who
are using our resources to teach news literacy to 3
million middle school and high school students a
year (about 10% of the total number of students in
those grades in the U.S.). We also want to turn these
educators into a community of practice that, by 2022,
is advocating for systemic change in the way news
literacy is regarded and taught in schools, including
Spreading the word about news literacy: Three high school
students describe how news literacy lessons changed the way
they view the world (top); a look at Checkology in use at a Virginia
high school (center); NLP’s “Easiest Quiz of All Time” encourages
people to always “double-check your facts” (bottom).