Transcript
Speaker: Hello everyone and welcome to the Journalistic Learning Podcast, where we talk with educators who are leading journalistic learning projects in their classrooms.
Speaker: Hey there, I'm your host Beau Brusco, a former English language arts teacher and multimedia journalist.
Speaker: You know, group work can be hard work, whether you're in the third grade or in your 30s.
Speaker: And that's exactly what we're talking about today in our ongoing conversation with Coos Bay, Oregon Middle School teacher, Cora Moore.
Speaker: So this is your second year teaching effective communicators.
Speaker: Are you trying something new this year that you haven't or that you didn't try last year?
Speaker: So I think, like I mentioned a little bit earlier, I had tried to kind of put a few lessons together for my group of students that had done this previously.
Speaker: And I felt like that went really well and was successful at helping kind of motivate those students to get started and to really show them that they had some agency over the project as a whole.
Speaker: So I think that that was really successful and something that I might consider doing again, depending on the group of students.
Speaker: I also, as the project kind of wrapped up last year, a challenge I noticed was teamwork is hard and getting teams to work together is really challenging.
Speaker: You have students at all different levels academically and nothing shows, you know, just,
Speaker: desperate, uh, disparate levels like group work.
Speaker: Um, and so that was something that was really challenging last year.
Speaker: And I think, I mean, I navigated it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I want to be a little more intentional about it this year.
Speaker: Um, but just making it very clear that I'm not going to sit down and grade the final article and that's everybody in the group's grade.
Speaker: Um, cause that would not be fair.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: It's going to be based on so much more, you know, a final grade for this project is going to be based on so much more than that.
Speaker: And I think that that was something that they were really worried about last year.
Speaker: And I wasn't quite sure how I was going to grade it yet.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: So I do want to be a little more intentional about that.
Speaker: Can you tell us how, how you do plan on grading it this year?
Speaker: I'm just curious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think that this year, um, I, the, the curriculum has a really great, like kind of self-reflection guide and like a group reflection guide.
Speaker: So, um, I think I'm going to try to emphasize that a little bit more, um, as well as just my own observations, um, about participation and, um,
Speaker: each individual's contribution to the final story.
Speaker: So I did divide it up.
Speaker: So each student kind of did take a beginning, middle and end of the story.
Speaker: And something that I think worked really well, because again, we had so many different levels of students writing these parts of the story.
Speaker: Some of them kind of saw the end product.
Speaker: They put their three parts together and they're like, oh, yeah.
Speaker: We don't want to turn this in.
Speaker: They didn't do their work.
Speaker: And this person writes way better than me.
Speaker: And it's not fair.
Speaker: And so what thing we did do is kind of towards the end as groups were starting to finish,
Speaker: we just pulled up some chairs and we put the finished story on the screen.
Speaker: And we were able to look through each person's section and acknowledge kind of what that section contributed to the story.
Speaker: And then to start talking about how can we kind of
Speaker: Add to or take away or mold or reshape or only a period here or capital letter here.
Speaker: So we edited together as a group with me to guide that.
Speaker: And I think that that was really an important part of making the stories kind of come together at the very end, because as especially younger students, editing is really hard.
Speaker: It's really hard work.
Speaker: And so I feel like they really needed some guidance there.
Speaker: And it was a good opportunity for me to
Speaker: acknowledge every person's contribution, even if, you know, they're a struggling writer or a struggling reader.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and I think that's a good question too, is for students who you, who you just noticed do tend to struggle in, in, you know, various ways, I suppose.
Speaker: How have they reacted to this, to this project?
Speaker: I think, yeah,
Speaker: It was at times overwhelming, feeling like they can't contribute much.
Speaker: Trying to kind of be mindful of those students and scaffold for them.
Speaker: So talking, you know, hey, tell me about your topic, you know.
Speaker: that was really good.
Speaker: Now let's write it down.
Speaker: Or here's a sentence starter or some of those kinds of things that we do to help students who are struggling with writing.
Speaker: We're still just as useful here in this journalism unit.
Speaker: And we're really effective at having them have at least something to contribute to, to the story.
Speaker: Of course, I had a lot of
Speaker: group members that didn't work well together, but I also had some groups that were really, really lovely and helping their students, their classmates to grow and giving suggestions.
Speaker: And so I think that they all kind of found their place.
Speaker: And again, as we kind of did that final editing, acknowledging each person's work and contribution to that story was really meaningful.
Speaker: And then getting to see the final product and have their name on it.
Speaker: I think it was really uplifting in the end, even though it was such a struggle for so many.
Speaker: to see that final product was really an important moment.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: That's good to hear.
Speaker: Well, and for you as a, as the teacher, where do you find, I guess right now, and maybe you've changed it from last year, but where are you sort of fitting this unit in during the school year?
Speaker: And are you purposely trying to put it before or after a different unit that you're kind of tying in?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I honestly just kind of stuck it after our first unit of the year, getting to know the kids.
Speaker: We read through a novel together in each grade and we kind of just, I was able to get a feel for where everybody's at and get to know everybody.
Speaker: We had a few new students.
Speaker: And then I planned it pretty well to where we can get our interviews scheduled and then come back and kind of start that second half of the project after the winter break, which worked really well last year.
Speaker: So I tried to hit, tried to do that again this year.
Speaker: When students, you know, obviously it's a wonderful experience, I think, as a teacher, because you get to see what your kids care about, right?
Speaker: The sort of issues that resonate with them.
Speaker: Does that inform maybe some of the literary texts that you choose to bring into class later in the school year?
Speaker: I haven't thought much about that, but I think that's a really thoughtful idea.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: Like I said, we have a lot of literature in our school, which is so wonderful.
Speaker: But the standards have a lot of nonfiction skills emphasized as well.
Speaker: And so I.
Speaker: Trying to find really good sources of that has been a bit challenging, but I think maybe looking at some of the topics that they're interested in would be a great way to start bringing some of that into the classroom.
Speaker: And that's where we're going to end things today with Cora.
Speaker: We want to keep these episodes nice and short for you educators with your full schedules.
Speaker: Be sure to join us next time when Cora and I talk about the power of a story.
Speaker: Thanks again for tuning in.
Speaker: We have a new episode coming out Monday.
Speaker: Be on the lookout for that.
Speaker: I'm Bo Brusco.
Speaker: We'll see you next time.
