Welcome to the teachers’ lounge, an occasional newsletter to keep you posted about happenings in the data journalism teachers’ club.
This issue: Sign up for the “Teacher School 101” course design workshop series ✏️, reflecting on the Masterfile with Eva Constantaras 🤔, and our summer book club 📚!
Don’t wait until August to figure out how to spruce up your fall courses! This summer, we’re using ‘backwards design’ methods to rethink our data journalism curricula so that they’re most effective for students. Dr. Anita Sundrani, who led us in a conversation about standards-based data journalism instruction in April, will join us for this three-part workshop series. Together, we’ll explore and discuss what are the best methods to determine how much our students are learning, how to design a syllabus that helps them succeed in building their abilities, and what strategies to use in class to reinforce these short-term and long-term goals.
These sessions will be two hours each, with a break; we’re excited to learn in community with you!
Part 1: Are you effectively measuring your students’ learning?
July 10 @ 12:00-2:30 ET Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/939722765087
In the first session of the series, we will focus on the lynchpin of course design - how to measure what your students have learned during your course. You’ll learn about the different categories of assessments and how to use them in class, and you’ll have the opportunity to develop one specific assessment for an upcoming course. We’ll discuss the current assignments, projects, and exams on your syllabi and brainstorm how they can build on each other.
Part 2: Does your syllabus chronology help your students build their skills?
Aug 14 @ 12:00-2:30 ET Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/939767569097
In our second session, you’ll learn how to use the assessments we developed in the first session to design or update your course syllabus. You’ll understand better how to connect the sequence of your course with the course’s stated learning outcomes, and how to make those connections clear to students. We will talk through how to evaluate whether or not the assignments you’re giving your students effectively determine your students’ abilities, and we will practice this using one specific learning outcome that is common to most journalism courses: pitching a data story.
Part 3: How do you align your teaching with your new and improved syllabus?
September 2024 (Date TBD)
In our final workshop session, we’ll build on our learning outcomes and syllabus design to brainstorm teaching methods we can use in the classroom to increase student engagement and learning. You’ll learn about different pedagogical approaches and activities that align with those approaches to use in class, and you’ll share what’s worked for you in the classroom. You can apply the takeaways from this session in your classes immediately!
Lighthouse Reports data editor and journalism trainer Eva Constantaras joined us in June to talk about her experiences running trainings around the world for working journalists. Eva walked our group through the creation of the Masterfile–her teaching tool for a successful data-driven investigation–which she built over the course of a decade of trainings. Over the course of the event, Eva shared how to convert a well-formed data hypothesis into a full-fledged investigation, rather than just a data-decorated story, using rigorous documentation and thorough reporting. With almost 50 participants tuning in for this one, Eva was also able to answer questions about the different challenges students encounter wrestling with the Masterfile, the importance of spending time on new concepts for even seasoned journalists, and how writing about data fits into the process of checking and double-checking our findings. Check out our workshop video with Eva here!
Everyone seems to be talking about AI these days, and many professors are worried about students using ChatGPT to write their assignments. But AI generated text detectors have significant reliability concerns, leaving some educators scratching their heads about what to do. One solution to this new problem may be to lean into old (well...pre-ChatGPT) knowledge. This book was recommended to us by pedagogy experts at Harvard during a teaching and learning session as a resource to lean on when re-thinking course design for the era of ChatGPT. It encourages instructors to ask deeper questions about why students cheat and provides practical research-backed solutions that instructors can implement in their classes to create the conditions that disincentivize academic dishonesty. We’re planning to read this book over the summer and schedule a time to discuss in the fall . Read with us!
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674724631
Want to invite friends to the club? The more the merrier! Sign up on our website, http://datajournalismteachers.club/, to receive updates. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Please message [email protected] or find us on the #teaching channel in the NewsNerdery Slack.