The discussions and the stories are getting better

Today we distributed our newspaper and we had a number of positive comments from our readers and the reporters in class. We have changed our postmortem discussion to focus our attention on how we are covering the school in a socially responsible way and what quotes and pictures add the most dimension to the stories.

Not all of the kids engage as much as I would like them to, and they likely never will, but the students that do engage are pointing out the good things we are doing, the gains we have made as the year has progressed and challenging people to be better journalists. Our discussions are more focused and today we had as good of a discussion as we could have on a Friday.

The highlights are: a lot of students talked about our c-spread which was an under cover investigation of how students will friend people they do not know on facebook. The results were quite interesting, and the students at our school were talking about it.

We had a story about a teacher who is challenging the standardized testing officials. The teacher got feedback from colleagues congratulating her on pushing like she is.

We had more opinion stories than we could put in, and each of them were localized and relevant to our community. This is probably the area we have made the greatest strides in.

We have a strong team that will be interested in being leaders next year, and I am excited for the relevant and strong journalism in our program to get even better.