Lesson In My Placement: Newspaper Articles

Newspaper Model


I've had plenty of practice developing lessons and teaching lessons in my education courses.  However, I have never had the opportunity to teach a lesson to actual middle school students until my placement at Williston Central School.  My cooperating teacher was teaching a unit on spatial inequity in Mexico City.  For the summative assessment for the unit, she asked her students to write a newspaper article as if they were news reporters traveling to Mexico City.  Before they could complete this task, students needed to learn how to go about writing a newspaper article.  Sarah and I co-taught a lesson on how to write a newspaper article to prepare them for this assessment.

We began the lesson by handing out our school newspaper, The Defender, to each student.  Students took time (10 minutes or so) to explore the articles, making observations as they read and flipped through the pages.  Then, as a class, we shared our observations.  Students noticed the catchy titles, quotes, photos and captions, facts, etc.  Then, Sarah and I modeled what their articles should look like (see link).  The night before, I interviewed Sarah about an event that recently happened in her life and took notes based on Who, What, Where, When, and Why.  Then, after the interview, I proceeded to write the article, which I read aloud for the class.  After we modeled, we asked students to pair up and interview each other doing the same process.  Afterwards, students shared some of their interviews.  We made the connection that for their summative assessment, their readings and class notes act as this interview. Then, students had the rest of class (10-15 min) to start working on their Mexico City articles.

I thought the lesson went well.  Students were engaged throughout the entire lesson.  They especially liked looking through The Defender and interviewing each other (examples of how I achieved criterion 3.2).  The interview was also an example of how I integrated criterion 3.1 because students worked with their peers and they were very excited to share their interviews with the class.  My cooperating teacher gave us positive feedback.  Her feedback is the image below.