Cover Story
High Five
By Dinah Eng
Teachers involved in a pilot project to promote learning and literacy through use of the newspaper give High Five a solid “A” for absolutely making a difference in their students’ interest in the world around them.
High Five, an NAA Foundation program supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, went through a field test in spring 2006. Sixth-grade students in 16 classrooms across the country used local newspapers instead of textbooks to help improve their standardized test scores.
The language arts curriculum for sixth-grade students featured 90 lessons that covered media literacy, journalism and newspaper production. Students put together their own classroom newspapers, and teachers worked with local Newspaper In Education professionals on activities involving their area newspapers.
“Two things made the project a success – the quality of the instructional materials we had, put together by Use the News, and the teachers involved, who were energetic and willing to try new things,” says Jim Abbott, NAA Foundation vice president. “We’re now looking at the teachers’ evaluations and what we need in terms of curriculum redesign. Then we’ll look at how we can launch this on a national scale.”
Living textbook
The teachers, who represented school districts in Texas, North Carolina, New Jersey and Arizona, were enthusiastic about their High Five experience, and several have continued to use the material.
Melba Garza of Pearson Elementary School in Mission, Texas, was so pleased with High Five that she persuaded her principal to let her teach it again this year, expanding it to the school’s entire sixth grade.
“I was thrilled that the principal agreed to pay for a newspaper for every sixth-grader all year long,” Garza says. “The students are so eager to read it every day. Last year, the first month of the project was rough because the kids didn’t know how to look through the paper, but once they got the hang of the vocabulary and principles, they took off.”
Garza says her High Five class was the lowest-performing group in its grade level, but test scores improved measurably after going through the pilot program.
“When the students had trouble connecting what I was teaching them to passing the standardized tests, I said there’s life outside the tests, and you’re learning everything you need to know for life,” Garza recalls. “The more you read, the more you know.
“The light even turned on for me, watching them. Prior to the High Five training, I’d use the newspaper if I found something relevant for a lesson. But the newspaper has become my living textbook, rather than just a tool.”
Jeff Koenig, educational services director for The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, says his newspaper is working with Garza and teachers in two other schools in the Mission Consolidated Independent School District who are using the High Five curriculum this year.
“I think it does a fantastic job of covering all the objectives of the language arts curriculum at the sixth-grade level,” Koenig says. “The only real negative I heard from the teachers was that there was some repetition in the curriculum, and that it all had to be taught in the spring semester, rather than over the course of the year.”
Koenig says teachers raved about the effect that reading newspapers had on their students. One teacher noted that his kids began to realize that it was acceptable to have different opinions about things in discussions.
“He said it was great to see kids thinking and responding to the articles, rather than memorizing and regurgitating things back because there’s so much emphasis on the testing, and because it’s what they think the teacher wants to hear,” Koenig says.
He said The Monitor published stories written by each of the four classes in the pilot program in its education section. The process of writing the stories, submitting photos to illustrate them and working with the paper’s editors on rewrites engaged all the students, and the newspaper is looking at doing a similar project with the three schools using High Five this year as well.
“One of the reasons our paper was chosen for the pilot was because about 85 to 90 percent of our students are Hispanic, and 85 percent come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,” Koenig says. “In each of the classes, no more than 30 percent had access to a newspaper at home on a daily basis. So this program, which allowed the kids to take the paper home each day, opened up avenues for the kids and their families.”
A new view
Deborah Williams, a teacher at Kennedy Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., says her students looked forward to reading The Charlotte Observer every day. They also enjoyed a field trip to the newspaper, where they interviewed employees for a class newspaper project.
“I continue to use some things from the curriculum, like principles I’ve learned about freedom of the press and plagiarism,” Williams says. “I gained an entirely new view of reporters after going through the program. It definitely won’t leave me, or the students, who learned to express themselves in a different way.”
Reading the newspaper gave Amanda Konecny’s students the opportunity to become, as she puts it, “a little more worldly and cultured because they don’t always have the opportunity to read the paper at home.”
Konecny, who was the sixth-grade literacy teacher at Paterson School No. 18 in New Jersey last year, is now supervisor of literacy, kindergarten through eighth grade, for Paterson Public Schools. She says her experience with High Five was positive overall, though she thought some of the activities were too advanced for her students.
“I think it increased their vocabulary, and they learned a lot about propaganda and the media,” Konecny says. “We got the [North Jersey] Herald News and The Record, and they were always excited about whatever the cover story was on the front page and the front of the local sections.”
Konecny says she’s in the process of developing new curriculum for the schools, and has spoken to Cynthia Forster, educational services manager at The Record, about using the newspaper and integrating media more into the literacy curriculum.
Activities related to creating an advertising campaign also resonated with students in the pilot program. Michelle Wood, a teacher at Utterback Magnet Middle School in Tucson, says her students worked in groups to create a newspaper ad, a television commercial and an ad in a third medium of their choice for products that they invented.
“One group made up a deodorant called Stink-Away,” recalls Wood, laughing. “Another did a Bling Bling Phone, and one invented Nerd Be Gone, a spray for instant coolness. They loved being creative, which made the activities fun.”
The Tucson pilot schools all received the Arizona Daily Star, says Janet Wood, NIE manager for Tucson’s Newspapers, and some also got The Tucson Citizen.
“My teachers have said they’d like to continue using a lot of the High Five activities, incorporating them and newspapers into their lesson plans several times a week,” Wood says. “I’d like to expose student teachers to something like this in a special workshop, and let them know this is available because it’s so comprehensive, and they would get a lot of support from the two newspapers here.”
Guest speakers from the newspapers really impressed the sixth-graders at Wakefield Middle School in Tucson, says Andres Burrola, who teaches language arts and reading.
“The kids could see themselves doing the kinds of things our guest speakers did, and really enjoyed working on the classroom newspaper,” Burrola says. “I thought the program was a wonderful experience and worked well with sixth-graders, who are naïve enough to think the world is their oyster, yet are sophisticated enough to understand and ask appropriate questions.”
He says when High Five first began, students who weren’t successful at reading resisted looking at the newspaper.
“But once they found out there were exciting and useful things in the paper, they became motivated to get additional help to read better,” Burrola says. “The paper is a living history of what people are about, and it helped the kids understand that what’s happening in the world affects them. Even though we live in a technological age, that connection to a printed product really makes a difference.”
Dinah Eng is a freelance writer and columnist for Gannett News Service based in Los Angeles. She can be reached at dinaheng@earthlink.net.
