Day 4: Evlauating Sources, Media Use, and Stereotypes

For the first two class periods today was a bit of a catch up day. In step four I took the advice of my cooperating teacher and went slowly with the evaluating a news source activity, picking only one site that they could all evaluate and walking through it step by step with them. By choosing only some questions to focus on and using only one website, they were able to get a better grip of some of the questions, such as what kind of news site it was and whether it was reliable as a news source or not, and especially whether they would use it to find news. The site we used was www.nationalenquirer.com . We now finished this activity but I think it will be helpful to do one more day on this theme so that we can really drill in evaluating news sources. Tomorrow they will each have their own source to work with.

In step 6 we had 4 people today so we were able to cover some ground. We did the media use survey as well as evaluating a news source. With this more advanced class we were able to jump right into them all doing their own source and they did some good analysis which we will share tomorrow.

In step 5 we did the scheduled stereotype lesson today, which I was very excited about. I started with the warm-up this week of writing in their journal some media and news that they took in over the weekend. I then started out the lesson on stereotypes by asking them to imagine the following people and write characteristics of each down or draw them: criminal, basketball player, politician, Native American. For the most part we got some good answers, but not exactly what I was going for off the bat. We then waled through what a stereotype is, an assumption, and prejudice so that they know how they are different. It would have been helpful to define stereotype as opposed to racism however. The next part of the activity I put a different group label like "young people", "Latinos" or "women" in different parts of the room and gave everyone 3 post-its. They were supposed to write down 3 steroetypes, for 3 of the groups and then stick them under the label on the wall. It would have been helpful here to define these groups, like "homosexual" because some put the definition instead of an assumption.

The lesson was visual, kinesthetic,engaging, and I think well-scaffolded. Overall, I was very pleased with this lesson and will try it with the other classes.