What would you do if you had nine weeks to help ELA students imagine the real-world use of ELA skills? Inside the unique elective wheel program at Lisa Jones’ school, students explore each discipline for nine weeks before moving onto the next. To show them literacy in action, Lisa has crafted an elective with three real-world projects to help them imagine how they might use their ability to communicate across modern mediums. Listen (or read) on to dive into these three real-world projects with us. Whether you’d like to create a Literacy in Action elective of your own, or just add more real-world projects to one of your other courses, you’ll find plenty of ideas in the show today.
You can listen in to this episode below, click here to tune in on any podcast player, or read on for the full post.
The Big Picture: Literacy in Action
Setting up the course at her public middle school in Virginia, Lisa had the freedom to create the course in a way she felt would best impact her students. Her goal was to look at the ways that literacy shows up in the world, give her students creative freedom, and help them participate in assignments that felt authentic to real-world contexts.
She chose to root the course in three big projects, focusing on the skills that would help students complete each one as they moved through the nine weeks. Each project features freedom of expression and a strong real-world context so students could easily connect the dots between the skills they were learning and the reason why.
The course begins with students crafting a school newsletter together, moves on to creating “This I Believe” video essays, and wraps up with podcast creation. Let’s dig deeper into each one…
Creating a School Newsletter
Lisa begins her first project unit by warming her students up to journalism. Together they look at fake news, explore articles about journalism, and learn what makes something newsworthy and relevant to particular audiences.
The next step is for students to break into small groups to work on specific “beats.” Imagine what the beats might be at your school – sports? Fashion? Robotics? Theater?
Lisa’s students might interview teachers to create profiles, talk to school leaders about upcoming events in different arenas, etc. They get out of the classroom and become journalists in training, “playing the whole game at the junior level,” as Harvard Researcher Dave Perkins might say.
Crafting “This I Believe” Video Essays
As the newsletter unit wraps up, Lisa’s students move into working on“This I Believe” video essay, inspired by the NPR This I Believe project.
The goal of this project isn’t to first create a traditional essay and then add imagery. Instead, student watch and listen to examples, jot down notes and ideas, and start shaping their ideas about their core beliefs. Then they begin to explore how they can express those beliefs in a visual way.
With freedom to choose the structure and visual medium for their essay, some students choose to create an animation, some record talking head videos, and still others will create a series of images and overlay a voiceover. Every essay will express different beliefs in different ways, and along the way students get the chance to explore how to combine audio and visuals to communicate their ideas.
You can read more about using This I Believe essays in the classroom here.
Recording Individual Podcasts
Students finish the Literacy in Action elective by creating their own podcasts.
They begin by listening to different models and taking sketchnotes. They focus on the format and structure of the podcast, thinking like a podcaster instead of just as a media consumer. After examining a few different examples of real-world podcasts, students – in groups or on their own – come up with their own show concepts and titles, exploring whatever topics interest them most.
If you’re thinking about trying a podcast project with your students, you can learn more in my Beginner’s Guide to Using Podcasts in the Classroom. You might also like this Podcast Unit on TPT.
The Impact of Literacy in Action
We know that communication today comes to us through many mediums. While words on the page have enormous power, so does audio. So does video. Communication is often a combination of two or three of these mediums, and our students need a chance to develop their skills across all three.
This Literacy in Action give students a chance to do just that, in contexts that easily translate to real-world work beyond the classroom.
A Tip for Getting Started
If you’re interested to get started with a Literacy in Action unit or an elective course, Lisa suggests you use it as an opportunity to give students as much choice and agency as possible. This course (or unit) provides a great chance to give students some autonomy. You can use these real-world applications to be the vehicle to cover the ELA standards that may be required in your curriculum.
