After years of kicking around the idea, and multiple meetings where member concerns dealing with the regional contest weather policy were addressed, the KSPA executive board passed a new inclement weather policy following its December meeting in Wichita.

The goal of the new policy (which you can find on the regional contest page of this site) is to make it possible for students to compete in regionals even if inclement weather forces cancellation of school or travel plans. While many schools may see this as great news (namely those who have been forced to sit out of regional and state contests because of this very issue), some of you will look at the policy and see the “bad news” in the fact that the policy will necessitate delayed judging of all regionals entries.

For years, we’ve all been fortunate enough (generally, at most contest sites) to have results in hand by late afternoon on the date of contest. In the past, the speed of results is what kept schools out of competition if they could not travel. There simply wasn’t the time or technology to easily get entries to the contest site to be judged all at once.

Taking into account the concerns of our membership, the board decided that trying a new policy that would allow all students to compete, even if we had to wait a little while for results would be worth it for the general membership.

The biggest question that we bounced around throughout the process is whether or not judging would be delayed even if there was no bad weather. Unfortunately, this is the case. It’s just not feasible or fair to ask the contest site coordinators to try to schedule judges for two different days, on a weather-contingent basis. Other than when the judging occurs, there will not be any other changes to the judging process. Board members felt it was important to continue our system of teams of judges looking at each entry and declaring winners and placers. We are committed to that.

Please take a few minutes to look over the new policy, and let the board know if you have questions or comments. We are here for you, and my goal, as president of the organization, is that we work for you.

KSPA President-Elect

After the fall conferences this past week, I’ve been contacted by several students and advisers across the state with some meaningful questions about staff relationships, leadership and dealing with problems that arise during production cycles.

We’ve all had to deal with these types of concerns on our own staffs, and I have some humble suggestions that have worked with my own students. In an upcoming series of blogs, I’ll be sharing some insights on these issues. Please, feel free to comment with your own ideas and solutions!

For what it’s worth, here’s the first installment of “What I’ve come to understand about motivating people to do their best work without totally destroying the staff.”

In this installment:

• How can I deal with a staff member who seems to make poor headline choices, design choices, or picture choices?

• How do lazy choices impact the audience’s perception of the product and the readership’s willingness to invest in it?
• How can advisers and editors help staff members see this relationship accurately?
• What are some concrete ways to help staff members internalize this relationship before the issue of the paper or yearbook is distributed?
• Why don’t staff members already understand this relationship?

Several students and advisers have recently asked me how to get staff members to put more effort into their work. While there are potentially infinite reasons a student doesn’t do his best, I often find a lazy approach to any of these things is rooted, at least in part, in a staff member’s misunderstanding of his relationship to his audience. A staff member has to be trained to understand for whom he is working and why that matters.

Let’s get started!

How can I deal with a staff member who seems to make poor headline choices, design choices, or picture choices?

Journalism students have to be trained to fully understand for whom they are working.

For instance, student journalists need to believe that the BEST pictures should be chosen so that the spread or news package BEST represents the story he is telling FOR the people he is covering. Specifically, if it is a low-quality football dominant in question, a staff member should learn to hunt for the best picture so that the football story is told really, really well visually as well as verbally FOR THE FOOTBALL TEAM.

The student journalist is a servant to the student body in this way and must be taught to understand that relationship with the audience. Staff members all volunteer to work as hard as they can for the people who pay good money for the product the staff makes. Whatever leads to laziness in a staff member, grasping this relationship to the audience can be a starting point for solving the problem and motivating the staff member.

What I’m NOT saying:

When I say the staff is a servant to the student body, I am not talking about content choices. Yes, the staff should be telling real, challenging, relevant and even controversial stories. Real investigative journalism may not always make the readers “happy.” What I am saying is that the readership deserves for all stories, no matter their affective impact, to be told well.

How do lazy choices impact the audience’s perception of the product and the readership’s willingness to invest in it?

If the readers feel the publication staff has been lazy or careless in taking or choosing good pictures, for example, there are a couple implications of which the staff must be made aware.

A) Doing lazy work turns people off from the product. Why would the student body want to buy the publication if the work seems careless?

B) Doing lazy work just makes future work more difficult. Why would the readers bother to give quality interviews if they perceive that the staff doesn’t care anyway? Why would readers respond to your emails if they’ve seen the way you handle information in the paper?

The readers need to feel the staff takes the job of making the publication seriously so that the readers themselves become willing participants in its creation and circulation; they’ll give better interviews, contribute their own pictures, and even support funding efforts of the staff if they honestly believe the publication is for and about them. Readers only come to believe that by seeing GREAT work in the publication, not just OK work.

How can advisers and editors help staff members see this relationship accurately?

Have open and honest training on the topic early in the year. Help your staff members see that every choice they make reflects on the sincerity of your staff, which has drastic consequences for the publication as a whole.

If a staff member can’t invest in that relationship from the start or see its importance after being trained to do so, maybe he shouldn’t be on staff in the first place.

What are some concrete ways to help staff members internalize this relationship before the issue of the paper or yearbook is distributed?

There are a thousand ways to show the students for whom they are working. These are just a few ways to bridge the gap between the staff and audience they serve.

A) Get a commitment from the start. Explain the relationship, establish clear expectations, and ask the staff members and their parents to sign a contract. I invite parents and potential staff members to an orientation night at my home before school begins for this very purpose, and I have a sample contract that I’m more than willing to share with anyone who wants it. Even if it is nearly October, it isn’t too late to go back to the basics and teach this relationship now.

B) Use by-lines. Always. Make the students put their names on the work, and direct praise as well as criticism from the readership directly to the student who did the work.

C) Ask staff members to imagine showing their work to the readers before it prints. Ask the staff member, “What would the choir director say to you, the writer, about that story?” Explain that if the writing is fair, balanced, thorough and accurate, the writer can hold his head high and defend the story. If it is not, ask how he would respond to disappointment or criticism. Role playing the situation can put the staff member in position to visualize the impacts of his work.

D) Illustrate the relationship in contexts they understand. Show them a really cool Hurley shirt in perfect condition and a one with a stain or tear, even a small one, on it. Ask which they’d buy. Ask which is more valuable to them. Ask if they’d buy anything at all from the store that tries to sell stained or torn clothing. Ask if they’d even shop there. Then tell them they are responsible for selling the damaged shirt, and see how they feel about being put in that position. You can do the same thing with a perfect iPad and one with a scratch on the screen. Chances are you could ask for all staff members to pull out their cell phones in class and come up with a perfect one and a not-so-perfect one. When they start to see how they, as consumers, feel about products that aren’t perfect, they start to understand how their readers feel about their mistakes – even the small ones.

E) Adopt a mission statement. I’m going to go into detail on the importance of a shared staff mission in a later post in response to another student’s question, but putting the publication-audience relationship in writing as a mission statement is a great way to help staff members realize what they’ve agreed to do.

F) Survey the readership. Get feedback after each issue. What did the readership enjoy? What do they want you to do in the next issue or edition?

Why don’t staff members already understand this relationship?

I’ll answer that question with another: where else in high school do students have to face this kind or relationship? Advisers, editors, and returning staff members have seen this publication-audience relationship in action. They’ve been to distribution events. They’ve passed out the paper. They’ve been complimented on good work, and they’ve been criticized for poor work. They’ve lived the relationship. New staff members have not.

In fact, in most of their educational career, their only audience has been the teacher, and quite frankly, some students are content with “C” quality work. Until they have felt the pride of a job well done as judged directly by the student body of their peers, they won’t know what it means to work hard and do well by someone else’s standards. Likewise, until they’ve felt the sting of criticism from someone whose name was misspelled or whose stats were recorded incorrectly, they won’t internalize the implications of their mistakes. It’s the task of the adviser and editor to help illustrate this relationship ahead of time.

Final Thoughts:

Like I said, there are infinite reasons that students may not always do their best work, and there are infinite solutions to this problem. In my experience, many causes as well as solutions have their genesis in the publication-audience relationship, and I’ve seen these principles work in my own classroom.

Please, feel free to add to the discussion by posting your own thoughts and sharing your success stories, too. What do you see as the root of this issue, and how do you handle it with your staff?

Next Time:

In the next installment, I’ll address another set of questions posed by a Kansas student editor:

• Why do staff members get so offended when asked to correct their work?
• How do I encourage them to make changes without hurting their feelings?
• How can I help my staff not take critique so personally?

A Common Problem

My basic journalism course is offered opposite band and choir – both very popular courses in my district. My J1 desks, consequently, have traditionally been populated by students more interested in avoiding music than embracing journalism. They confess it, and I’m fine with it. I think we’ll all take them however we can get them.

The problem this often creates for me is one of motivation. I can teach the basics of photography, writing, design, and ethics to anyone, but making them want to learn it has not always been easy.

I think it may be slightly easier this year.

A Different Start to the Year

On the first day of J1, I played a YouTube video highlighting social media statistics and the impacts that online communications are having on society in general. The greater part of the discussion following the video centered around this question: It is undeniable that people are consuming social media more than they are consuming traditional journalism, but what would it be like to live in a world where the only news you have access to is the name of the band Ashton Kutcher is watching in concert or the number of people who used to love Brittney Spears but can’t stand her now?

Of course it took some time and some serious Socratic questioning, but before the block period was up – the final block of the day on a Friday, no less – my openly disinterested kids had done three important things:

• They admitted that their participation in social media meant they actually were slightly interested in the business of information dissemination.
• They didn’t complain when I gave them a research assignment over Edward R. Murrow and Woodward and Bernstein instead of Lindsay Lohan and Lady GaGa.
• They asked me questions about the fairness doctrine and Watergate.

That’s more than I’ve been able to accomplish on the first day of school since I started teaching.

Isn’t Social Media Old News?

It is true that it’s been several years since “social media” became the buzzword of the day and journalism instructors were encouraged to create all sorts of accounts for their publications so that students could Tweet or Facebook the breaking news instantaneously to their audiences who, for better or worse these days, only choose to digest the “news” if it comes in 140 or fewer characters. I realize I’m not original in bringing up this issue.

But as the boom of social media continues to develop, authority figures are still frantically searching for ways to legislate and restrict access to the point criminalizing it for a teacher in Missouri to “friend” her own daughter on Facebook simply because her daughter happens to be her student.

It would be nice if administrators, school boards, and legislators could hear the discussions we’re all having with our students about the importance of using social media to circulate information, but I’m really not here to argue whether access to social media should be allowed at school or whether teachers should communicate with their students online. I’m just here to share a redirection in my own thinking on this subject that seems to have struck a cord with my students this week.

Do What You Do – Just Do a Little More

Yes, we need to deliver the news in these forums because that’s where our audiences live, and that’s how we use social media to teach the die-hard journalists in our classes to reach the audiences they serve. That’s an excellent application of social media in school.

At the same time, let’s not overlook the interest generating capacity of social media for a student who is simply not a consumer of traditional news and sees no value in becoming one. My kids seemed to appreciate traditional news more after being exposed to the impacts of social media and exploring the consequences of a society void of people who use it for anything but making narcissistic noise.

Confession of “Abuse”

Yes, social media sites were, in part, created for that very reason, and I am also guilty of filling my Facebook wall with photos of the wonderful meals my wife makes or the ridiculous clothes my sons put on to play spy games. To a degree, that’s why such sites exist. So Tweet on with fervor, Mr. Kutcher, for social media is lots of fun. I’m just asking that we help our most disconnected students see that knowledge of journalism fundamentals enables one to participate in a world of digital communication with a degree of discernment that most of the population lacks. Students trained to both recognize newsworthy issues and also to write intelligibly about them creates a better society for us all.

And at the very least, talking about it created a better class period for me.

Last week I was sitting at my desk working on American Literature lesson plans. Exhausted and overwhelmed from moving into a new classroom, I sat staring at my computer, knowing students would be arriving for the first time the next day.

My yearbook editors were also there doing some planning. A popular element in our book is  daily coverage highlighting school, local, and national news events from each day of the school year. One week, Monday through Sunday, runs along the bottom of each page of the book. When they began talking about this element, I shut my computer and listened to them talk.

“If we have all the pages on the ladder, we need to figure out how many weeks there are in the school year and start assigning those weeks to the spreads,” senior and editor-in-chief Alyssa Johnson said.

Before she had finished speaking, the assistant editor, junior Lydia Lambert, finished her count.

“There are 40 weeks including this week and all the vacations,” Lambert announced.

“There are 47 spreads if we don’t count the title page or colophon,” Johnson calculated. “We need to ditch seven spreads.”

And they did. No weekly coverage on the opening spread, the closing spread, or the division pages. Forty weeks, forty spreads. Simple enough.

But I was impressed. Not by their ability to subtract 40 from 47, but by how their conversation illustrated precisely the kind of thinking that, according to the latest trend in educational reform, we ought to be asking students to do.

Another Wave of Reform

Before I had finished my first doughnut at our first inservice this year, the discussion had turned to common core standards training and the soon-to-be increasing focus on students’ ability to interact with information, synthesize it, and reproduce it in a meaningful and accurate way.

In the context of language arts, this might look like a student reading several related texts, linking the commonalities and producing a research product that demonstrates connected understanding. Benchmarks and indicators that were once measured separately on standardized tests (reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc.) will eventually be measured as a cohesive unit.  To prepare in our classrooms for this change in testing, they say, a student’s ability to read and comprehend should not be evidenced not by his selection of the appropriate metaphor or Latin root from a list of choices but by the quality of an end product that showcases his assimilated knowledge.

We’ve Trained Them Not to Think

To demonstrate how one is to teach toward this end, Robin Webb, a math instructor in our district showed a video from Ted.com that truly got me thinking. (See video below.)

The video began with Dan Meyer, a math teacher from Santa Cruz, Calif., asking his audience when they had ever encountered a real problem in which all the necessary information was provided, had been filtered for distracting information, and was complete with a formula computing the answer.

Obviously, Meyer pointed out, those types of problems don’t exist in reality – they only exist in classrooms.

He showed an example problem from a math text that asked how long it would take to fill a given container with water. The question provided both the rate of flow from the water source and the volume of the container.

Some might call this type of word problem scaffolding; the students have already been taught how to calculate rate and volume independently, so this problem is simply building upon that knowledge and asking students to demonstrate how rate and volume are related.

That’s fine and good, but what struck me was not what this single math problem was asking a student to demonstrate but rather how problems like this one are indoctrinating all students not to think. As Meyer stated, such example problems (and thousands others like it in textbooks of all disciplines) are perpetually training students to believe that “problem solving” only involves recognizing the difference between numbers and letters and being able to plug those numbers into a formula located on the previous page of the text book.

No wonder we educators complain that kids don’t know how to think anymore. And no wonder 37 states have collaboratively signed onto completely revamping the way we measure learning.

Teaching Differently

Meyer suggested reducing the problem to its basic question and allowing the students to not only generate the answer but also the problem itself and the method for solving it. To do so, he used his cell phone and created a video of a hose (very, very slowly) filling a container similar to the one in the example problem. Without providing the front-loading context educators have been told for years is so essential, he simply started the video and let his students watch. After nearly seven minutes of awkward silence and anxious seat shifting, someone in his class finally asked, “How long is this going to take?”

What was intended as a sarcastic and impatient remark actually began the real learning and demonstration of comprehension. He asked the class to figure it out, so they started talking.

One student suggested they needed to know how much water the container would hold. Another recognized that language and labeled it “volume.” Yet another said they had to know how fast the water was coming out of the hose, and a fellow classmate provided the term “rate.” Before long they had, of their own curiosity (or, perhaps, impatience), orally drafted the word problem and were well on the way to solving it. In the process of discussion, they had proven who really knew what rate and volume were, how the two were related in this context and what mathematical computation would be required to answer their original question.

Looking for Applications

If any educator, regardless of his area of concentration, can imagine students in such a dialogue and not become intellectually euphoric, he should not be teaching anymore. My mind started reeling for applications to my language arts and communications courses.

Look No Further

It wasn’t until I overheard my editors’ conversation about weekly coverage that I, to torture a math cliché, put two and two together. Sure, the problem they had just solved only involved some counting and subtraction, but they had defined the problem, generated the methods required to solve it, and had completed the mathematical computations necessary to find the answer.

Just as I was thinking how great journalism is for teaching just about everything, their conversation got even better.

“If we include this week in the reporting, we have to start coverage with this past Monday,” Johnson said. “Students don’t come until tomorrow, so we need to think about what’s been going on since Monday.”

Lambert chimed in. “We’re starting late because of the construction. I bet a lot of schools have started classes already.”

“We could cover that,” Johnson said. “It’s relevant. Especially if kids complain about coming back to school. We’ve had more vacation than most schools.”

“So let’s do it.” And Lambert started to research school start dates. “Do you want to do national or just Kansas schools?”

“Let’s stick with Kansas schools,” Johnson answered. “When you get the total number of schools in Kansas and how many have been open since Monday, let me know and I’ll figure the percentage.”

I was at a loss for words. How many times during a publication cycle, I wondered, do journalism students engage in exactly the kind of mental exercise I had just witnessed? While I was sitting at my desk thinking about how I could make my American Literature course more in line with the new focus of the common core standards, my journalism kids were, without any interaction from a teacher at all, proving their comprehension of a whole set of logic, reasoning, research, and even math skills.

Recently, journalism teachers have been fighting valiantly to prove the validity of media courses in a secondary curriculum. How much more obvious can it be?

The common core standards ask students to comprehend information, analyze and synthesize it, and produce a product that proves they understood and learned. I ask this: how can a good student journalist create a publication and not do so? These teenagers in these elective courses observe the events of an entire student body over the course of a complete academic year, analyze and synthesize their observations in compelling images, carefully chosen words, and story-telling design packages, and then offer it back to an audience in an objective, accurate, and engaging publication. What more could a common core proponent ask for?

I didn’t work on lesson plans the rest of the day. Don’t get me wrong; I am going to adapt the literature courses I teach. But after thinking through all this, I had a simpler solution to meeting the demands of yet another wave of educational reform: require every student to enroll in journalism.

Welcome back for yet another year of scholastic journalism excellence! At this time of year, most of us are just getting our teaching “sea legs” under us again after what I hope was a relaxing and restful summer vacation. That re-acclimation process takes time (which we never seem to have enough of), and a whole lot of organization.

In the midst of attending beginning-of-the-year meetings, getting the gradebooks set up, initial meetings with your publications staffs, and Back to School nights, it’s important to take a few minutes to fill out your KSPA membership forms and get those sent to headquarters. I’d like to encourage you to renew your membership, or join, if it’s your first year advising. It’s easy to join the organization, and if you’re the type who likes to get everything done at once, you can pay for all contest entries at one time on the registration form.

The benefits of membership are great. KSPA gives your students a chance to compete in various contests, as well as receive valuable feedback on their publications through the All-Kansas critique service. In addition, KSPA provides a network for advisers. Chances are, you’re the only one at your school who does what you do. KSPA provides a place to commiserate with people who know how you feel – How do I get my kids to meet deadlines? How do I deal with administrators who don’t know about the Kansas Student Publications Act? How do I grade newspaper and yearbook classes?

Those are just some of the questions we’ve all faced at one time or another. The network of advisers you’ll meet being a part KSPA will help you find answers to those questions and many more, and in many cases, those advisers will become your friends. You’ll look forward to seeing them at KSPA events, and you’ll have someone to email or call if you need help with a lesson or just need someone to talk shop with.

Please feel free to contact me, or any board member, any time you have questions about the organization or its contests and programs. I hope to see many of you attend the Fall Conferences. I’ll be at the one in Lawrence on Sept. 21. Please stop and say “Hi.”

Good luck this year!

Jill Chittum
KSPA President

The students will be feted a the NFPW national conference luncheon honoring our high school winners. The conference is set for Sept. 8-10, 2011, in Council Bluff, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha, Neb.

The winners from Kansas:

Video Feature Story

First: Maggie Simmons, Shawnee Mission East High School, Prairie Village, Kansas, “Beauty and the Beast”

Feature Photo

First: Andy Wickoren, Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, Shawnee, Kansas, “Junior Connor Mitts runs around his backyard with his sister, Kaylee, 7, on his shoulders.”

Graphics

First: Andrew Goble, Shawnee Mission East High School, Prairie Village, Kansas, “The Assault on Productivity

Feature Story

Second: Kevin Simpson, Shawnee Mission East High School, Prairie Village, Kansas, “A Reason to Smile”

Sports Photo

Second: Meghan Leihy, Hillsboro High School, Hillsboro, Kansas, “On the mat & On the court: Senior Ben Bebermeyer tries to evade the block of a Garden Plain defender. The HHS boys are 2-3 and will travel to Marion Tuesday to take on the Warriors in a non-league contest.”

Reviews

Second: Alex Lamb, Shawnee Mission East High School, Prairie Village, Kansas, “Sanity Drifting Away”

Single-Page Layout

Third: Emma Pennington, Shawnee Mission East High School, Prairie Village, Kansas, “The Buyer’s Guide to Books”

Out of several qualified entries, Bell’s stood out among the rest with its simple, yet bold design featuring the 20 contests offered at the state contest on the back of the shirt.

Shirts can be purchased through state registration for $13 each, or at the KSPA State Contest on May 7 for $15 each.

• The Shawnee Mission East Harbinger Online was named a national online Pacemaker finalist. The Harbinger is one of just 37 news websites to earn the distinction and one of only 18 that come from schools with enrollments of 1,500 students or fewer. Logan Heley, Patrick McGannon and Maggie Simmons serve as the publication’s editors, and C. Dow Tate is their adviser.
• The Crusader from Kapaun Mt. Carmel High School earned Pacemaker finalist recognition in the Digital Yearbook category. Riley Tigert is the editor, and Ashley Perkins is the adviser. Only eight schools nationally received recognition.

The NSPA will announce national winners on April 16 at the semi-annual convention in Anaheim, Calif.

Their discussion focuses primarily on educating college students, but it also ranges into professional journalism and the new media landscape defined by technology but still underpinned by traditional practices of thorough reporting and engaging writing.

The discussion underscores what we’re discussing here in Kansas regarding CTE funding: that journalism education is a central part of a good education, and that journalism isn’t a dying profession, just one that ‘s changing rapidly.

You can listen here:

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Led by Karen Ford of Holton HS, committee members have lobbied state media to write about the decision, and they’ve lobbied KSDE decision-makers to re-visit the 2008 decision to remove Journalism and Broadcasting from the list of Kansas’ funded career and technical education pathways.

Laurie Folsom, the adviser at Lawrence Free State and a member of the KSPA committee, first shed light on the problem with her blog post for the Lawrence Journal-World.

A list of recent stories in the Kansas media underscores the committee’s success thus far:

• The Hutchinson News: “A sobering view: High school journalism classes may lose cash”
• The Kansas City Star: “Kansas altering school journalism funding”
• The Topeka Capital-Journal: “State to cut journalism funds”
• The ESU Bulletin: “State cuts high school journalism funding”
• The Arkansas City Traveler: “State alters funding for high school journalism programs”

A national political website, stateline.org, cited the Capital-Journal story in a story about the KSDE decision.

Please come to the advisers meetings at the Fall Conferences (Sept. 20-22 in Lawrence, Manhattan and Hays) to speak with committee members about their work thus far and the prospects for the future.