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Kora Moore & Wikipedia Warts
40 Plays1 year ago
Kora Moore teaches 6th, 7th, and 8th grade ELA at Lighthouse Middle School in Coos Bay, Oregon. This is her second year leading a journalistic learning project across the three grades she teaches. Last year, three of her students won an award for their published journalism piece.
In this episode, Kore shares how she heard about journalistic learning and a fun little experience she had teaching her kids about Wikipedia!
Note: As this is our first episode, we do take a little time to explain journalistic learning and the Journalistic Learning Initiative's (JLI) Effective Communicators Program.
Link to JLI's website: journalisticlearning.org
Link to JLI's Effective Communicators Program: journalisticlearning.org/effective-communicators/
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Transcript
Introduction to Journalistic Learning
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Journalistic Learning Podcast, where we talk with teachers who are leading journalistic learning projects in their classrooms.
00:00:20
Speaker
What is journalistic learning?
00:00:22
Speaker
Journalistic learning is a systemic approach that infuses journalistic strategies into required English language arts courses.
00:00:29
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.
00:00:40
Speaker
Hey
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:41
Speaker
there.
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm your host Beau Brusco, a former high school English language arts teacher and multimedia journalist.
00:00:47
Speaker
Today, we get to hear from Cora Moore.
00:00:49
Speaker
Cora is from Oregon and has about a decade's worth of experience in education from elementary to high school.
00:00:55
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.
00:01:03
Speaker
She teaches sixth, seventh, and eighth grade English language arts to about 50 students.
00:01:11
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, Cora.
00:01:13
Speaker
How's it going?
00:01:15
Speaker
Oh, it's going well.
00:01:16
Speaker
I've actually just started teaching the Effective Communicators course for the second year.
Media Literacy and Effective Communication
00:01:21
Speaker
So that's really exciting.
00:01:24
Speaker
And it's off to, I think, a good start.
00:01:26
Speaker
Oh, excellent.
00:01:27
Speaker
Which part of the project phase are you in right now?
00:01:30
Speaker
Right now, we're right about lesson nine and 10 talking about SIFT and how to determine if a source is reliable.
00:01:38
Speaker
And I feel like that has so much real world application.
00:01:41
Speaker
So the students were really excited about it last year and they're really interested in it this year as well.
00:01:47
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.
00:01:54
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.
00:02:17
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.
00:02:27
Speaker
So if you want to learn more about the Effective Communicators program, please visit journalisticlearning.org forward slash effective dash communicators forward
Incorporating Media Literacy in Education
00:02:37
Speaker
slash.
00:02:37
Speaker
All right, let's jump back into it.
00:02:40
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?
00:02:56
Speaker
Sure.
00:02:56
Speaker
So I came into my current position and it is a Waldorf-inspired school.
00:03:03
Speaker
And one thing we do really, really well is literature and teaching of literature.
00:03:08
Speaker
And my closet is full of amazing literature.
00:03:13
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.
00:03:25
Speaker
that the students are really going to need in the real world and going into high school.
00:03:30
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And as we're kind of having that conversation, my admin sent me, forwarded me a link to apply for the fellowship.
00:03:39
Speaker
And it just seemed like a really good fit because, again, as a Waldorf school, doing things
00:03:45
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.
00:03:54
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.
00:04:00
Speaker
Cora, you said, well, I guess I read it in your bio, so I know you're teaching three different grades.
00:04:06
Speaker
Are you implementing effective communicators across three grades simultaneously?
00:04:11
Speaker
I am.
00:04:12
Speaker
So...
00:04:13
Speaker
Last year, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to plan three different grades at one time.
00:04:18
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.
00:04:25
Speaker
And I do have smaller class sizes.
00:04:28
Speaker
So we only have about 50 students across the three grades.
00:04:32
Speaker
So it did work out and it was a lot of fun.
00:04:35
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And it was really fun to see how each different grade level kind of handled the curriculum.
00:04:43
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Each group of students is clearly very different.
00:04:48
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But in the end, I feel like we had a pretty cohesive set of articles about a variety of topics.
00:04:55
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.
00:05:02
Speaker
And instead, we had like 10 or 12.
00:05:06
Speaker
And it just kind of, I think, made it into something that the students were a little more excited, I think, to share.
Student Engagement and Project Adaptation
00:05:13
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?
00:05:27
Speaker
But you are in the unique position where your students get to do it.
00:05:31
Speaker
A lot of them get to do it again the next year.
00:05:34
Speaker
Do you find that there is any lack of enthusiasm to do the project again?
00:05:40
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.
00:05:47
Speaker
We're going to do this again.
00:05:49
Speaker
And my seventh grade students, they did it as sixth graders last year.
00:05:52
Speaker
They're like, okay, all right.
00:05:55
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That was pretty cool.
00:05:56
Speaker
The eighth graders were like, no, this is more, we are not doing this again.
00:06:01
Speaker
And I was like, I hear you, you know, but let's just kind of wait and see how it goes.
00:06:08
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:09
Speaker
Um,
00:06:11
Speaker
If you want to talk to me about it, come see me.
00:06:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:14
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.
00:06:23
Speaker
Or do you think I could do?
00:06:25
Speaker
So like the kind of initial response was no way are we doing this again?
00:06:31
Speaker
But as time kind of passed, I,
00:06:35
Speaker
I started to sense that their mind was changing, that it was something that was impactful to them last year.
00:06:41
Speaker
And they did kind of start to get excited about doing it again.
00:06:45
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.
00:06:56
Speaker
And I kind of compressed myself.
00:07:00
Speaker
the first few lessons.
00:07:03
Speaker
And I think it was like lessons one through five.
00:07:07
Speaker
And we just sat down together and it's a small group.
00:07:10
Speaker
We sat down together and we had just this really lovely conversation about what is communication.
00:07:15
Speaker
And we kind of reviewed the ethics of journalism.
00:07:19
Speaker
And then we just had a really nice like brainstorming session for our topics.
00:07:24
Speaker
And so I think kind of trusting them that they did remember something from last year.
00:07:30
Speaker
And we're going to kind of jump straight into getting with a group and researching.
00:07:35
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.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:46
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.
00:07:54
Speaker
those, you know, what they had already learned and then build upon that.
00:07:58
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.
00:08:07
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?
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I think that that was a really good way just to introduce it.
00:08:19
Speaker
And again, trust that they already knew some of the material.
00:08:24
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.
00:08:32
Speaker
And so at that point now I'm kind of slowing back down and going kind of at that same pace.
00:08:38
Speaker
And sometimes they're like, you know, we did this last year, Mrs. Moore.
00:08:41
Speaker
I'm like,
00:08:42
Speaker
yeah, what have you learned about it since
Real-world Application and Discussion
00:08:45
Speaker
then?
00:08:45
Speaker
Or have you used it since then?
00:08:48
Speaker
And, you know, there's been a couple of examples, like today's lesson had Wikipedia involved.
00:08:54
Speaker
And one of my students says, this is more, I edited a Wikipedia article.
00:08:59
Speaker
Oh, and it's still there.
00:09:02
Speaker
And I was like, well,
00:09:04
Speaker
Well, prove it.
00:09:05
Speaker
Right.
00:09:05
Speaker
So we look it up and sure enough, there is an unsighted sentence in a Wikipedia article.
00:09:13
Speaker
Oh, about what?
00:09:16
Speaker
It's about warts, types of warts.
00:09:21
Speaker
That's hilarious.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:25
Speaker
What a great and spontaneous learning opportunity.
00:09:29
Speaker
I mean, really, truly.
00:09:31
Speaker
Like, you know, okay, so all this information is there.
00:09:34
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.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:45
Speaker
I feel like they teach themselves sometimes.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:49
Speaker
And that will be it for today's episode.
00:09:51
Speaker
We want to keep these episodes nice and short for our teachers because we know how busy you are.
00:09:56
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.
00:10:05
Speaker
If you want to learn more about Journalistic Learning Initiative or our approach, visit journalisticlearning.org.
00:10:11
Speaker
I'm Beau Brusco.
00:10:12
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in.