Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Journalistic Learning Podcast, where we talk with teachers who are leading journalistic learning projects in their classrooms.
Speaker: What is journalistic learning?
Speaker: Journalistic learning is a systemic approach that infuses journalistic strategies into required English language arts courses.
Speaker: The idea here being that if you want students to acquire journalistic skills like critical thinking, media literacy, effective communication skills, you have them do as journalists do.
Speaker: Hey there.
Speaker: I'm your host Beau Brusco, a former high school English language arts teacher and multimedia journalist.
Speaker: Today, we get to hear from Cora Moore.
Speaker: Cora is from Oregon and has about a decade's worth of experience in education from elementary to high school.
Speaker: Right now, she's in her second year teaching at the Lighthouse School in Coos Bay, a Waldorf-inspired charter school on the Oregon coast.
Speaker: She teaches sixth, seventh, and eighth grade English language arts to about 50 students.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast, Cora.
Speaker: How's it going?
Speaker: Oh, it's going well.
Speaker: I've actually just started teaching the Effective Communicators course for the second year.
Speaker: So that's really exciting.
Speaker: And it's off to, I think, a good start.
Speaker: Oh, excellent.
Speaker: Which part of the project phase are you in right now?
Speaker: Right now, we're right about lesson nine and 10 talking about SIFT and how to determine if a source is reliable.
Speaker: And I feel like that has so much real world application.
Speaker: So the students were really excited about it last year and they're really interested in it this year as well.
Speaker: Hey there, it's Beau again interjecting here real quick because I realized that some listeners might not know what the Effective Communicators course is.
Speaker: So real briefly, the Journalistic Learning Initiatives Effective Communicators course is a 10-week long instructional plan that guides students start to finish through a journalistic learning project where students get to choose a local issue that they're passionate about, investigate the topic by conducting research, interviewing community experts, and eventually writing and publishing a piece on the matter.
Speaker: It teaches students critical thinking, media literacy, and effective communication skills, as well as meets over 90% of college and career readiness anchor standards.
Speaker: So if you want to learn more about the Effective Communicators program, please visit journalisticlearning.org forward slash effective dash communicators forward slash.
Speaker: All right, let's jump back into it.
Speaker: Well, before we jump in, because I'm sure we can talk at length about the value of SIFT and media literacy in general, but I'm curious to know, just right out the gate, what sort of drew you to leading a journalistic learning project like Effective Communicators course in your classroom?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So I came into my current position and it is a Waldorf-inspired school.
Speaker: And one thing we do really, really well is literature and teaching of literature.
Speaker: And my closet is full of amazing literature.
Speaker: And a conversation I had with my admin and some of the parents and the board was we really wanted to bring in more nonfiction texts and more media literacy and some skills.
Speaker: that the students are really going to need in the real world and going into high school.
Speaker: And as we're kind of having that conversation, my admin sent me, forwarded me a link to apply for the fellowship.
Speaker: And it just seemed like a really good fit because, again, as a Waldorf school, doing things
Speaker: project-based is a really big aspect of that and letting the kids really explore and kind of come to the learning on their own terms.
Speaker: And so it ended up being a really good fit for our school as well as some of those needs that we were seeing.
Speaker: Cora, you said, well, I guess I read it in your bio, so I know you're teaching three different grades.
Speaker: Are you implementing effective communicators across three grades simultaneously?
Speaker: I am.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Last year, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to plan three different grades at one time.
Speaker: And I just thought, you know what, we're just going to give it a go and try it in three different grades at one time and see what happens.
Speaker: And I do have smaller class sizes.
Speaker: So we only have about 50 students across the three grades.
Speaker: So it did work out and it was a lot of fun.
Speaker: And it was really fun to see how each different grade level kind of handled the curriculum.
Speaker: Each group of students is clearly very different.
Speaker: But in the end, I feel like we had a pretty cohesive set of articles about a variety of topics.
Speaker: And it really took it out of if I had done it with just one class, it would have been like four or five articles.
Speaker: And instead, we had like 10 or 12.
Speaker: And it just kind of, I think, made it into something that the students were a little more excited, I think, to share.
Speaker: Usually from the experiences I've heard with teachers implementing effective communicators, they have it one year and then the next year, their former students might love it so much that they'll come back and ask like, hey, can we help your students with the journalistic project this year?
Speaker: But you are in the unique position where your students get to do it.
Speaker: A lot of them get to do it again the next year.
Speaker: Do you find that there is any lack of enthusiasm to do the project again?
Speaker: I was very worried about that, especially when I went over the syllabus at the beginning of the year and was like, this is what we're going to do.
Speaker: We're going to do this again.
Speaker: And my seventh grade students, they did it as sixth graders last year.
Speaker: They're like, okay, all right.
Speaker: That was pretty cool.
Speaker: The eighth graders were like, no, this is more, we are not doing this again.
Speaker: And I was like, I hear you, you know, but let's just kind of wait and see how it goes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: If you want to talk to me about it, come see me.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And then as the weeks went by, people, kids started coming up to me and telling me, you know, I've got an idea for their story.
Speaker: Or do you think I could do?
Speaker: So like the kind of initial response was no way are we doing this again?
Speaker: But as time kind of passed, I,
Speaker: I started to sense that their mind was changing, that it was something that was impactful to them last year.
Speaker: And they did kind of start to get excited about doing it again.
Speaker: And my carrot for my eighth graders was I did try something a little bit different because I knew they were very apprehensive about doing it again and feeling like I'm babying them.
Speaker: And I kind of compressed myself.
Speaker: the first few lessons.
Speaker: And I think it was like lessons one through five.
Speaker: And we just sat down together and it's a small group.
Speaker: We sat down together and we had just this really lovely conversation about what is communication.
Speaker: And we kind of reviewed the ethics of journalism.
Speaker: And then we just had a really nice like brainstorming session for our topics.
Speaker: And so I think kind of trusting them that they did remember something from last year.
Speaker: And we're going to kind of jump straight into getting with a group and researching.
Speaker: I think that that really helped them feel like they were able to approach this project again without feeling like I'm bossing them around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I really love that idea because you're not making them jump through the same hoops again, but you just want them to help each other remember that.
Speaker: those, you know, what they had already learned and then build upon that.
Speaker: Because I was going to ask, you know, how do you sort of scaffold it, the difficulty a little, well, maybe that's not the right question.
Speaker: I was going to ask though, how do you make it more challenging for those older grades who are doing it again for the second time?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that that was a really good way just to introduce it.
Speaker: And again, trust that they already knew some of the material.
Speaker: Then we're kind of, now we're getting into like the sift and then we're going to be doing some more research and some more, we're going to be preparing for interviews.
Speaker: And so at that point now I'm kind of slowing back down and going kind of at that same pace.
Speaker: And sometimes they're like, you know, we did this last year, Mrs. Moore.
Speaker: I'm like,
Speaker: yeah, what have you learned about it since then?
Speaker: Or have you used it since then?
Speaker: And, you know, there's been a couple of examples, like today's lesson had Wikipedia involved.
Speaker: And one of my students says, this is more, I edited a Wikipedia article.
Speaker: Oh, and it's still there.
Speaker: And I was like, well,
Speaker: Well, prove it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we look it up and sure enough, there is an unsighted sentence in a Wikipedia article.
Speaker: Oh, about what?
Speaker: It's about warts, types of warts.
Speaker: That's hilarious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What a great and spontaneous learning opportunity.
Speaker: I mean, really, truly.
Speaker: Like, you know, okay, so all this information is there.
Speaker: So we kind of, we can't take it at face value, but we can look at some of the sources that have been used to create this and they can be a really valuable jumping off point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I feel like they teach themselves sometimes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that will be it for today's episode.
Speaker: We want to keep these episodes nice and short for our teachers because we know how busy you are.
Speaker: But stay tuned for our next episode where Cora shares how she helped her students take a big issue like gas prices and narrowed it down to something more specific to their community.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about Journalistic Learning Initiative or our approach, visit journalisticlearning.org.
Speaker: I'm Beau Brusco.
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in.
