SoJ Web Report | Dec. 13, 2011
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When I first came to IU two and a half years ago, I figured I already had what it took to be a journalism teacher. I’d worked for two decades as a daily reporter, run a large overseas bureau for The Associated Press, and collected more than enough anecdotes about being a foreign
correspondent — from daily bomb blasts in Colombia to playing hackysack with homeless kids in Mongolia — to keep students engaged for a semester. As AP bureau chief in Tokyo, I spent a large chunk of my day training younger reporters. Teaching a roomful of eager IU students how to write a news story would come naturally.
Only it didn’t come naturally. In fact, it was like pulling teeth — my own.
The roadblock I ran into may be a common one among journalists who become educators: How do we teach others to perform a skill that is so ingrained that we feel as if we were born with it?
One problem is that I tend to forget the myriad failures and humiliations involved in becoming a competent reporter: exasperated editors’ top-to-bottom rewrites of my stories, or the pieces that were so bad they never made it to print, or the good stories that never were written because I missed them. Instead, I recall the successes: the nice leads that surprised my bosses, the stories that won some notice, the times (not often enough) when I scooped the competition.
It sometimes seems, in this fanciful view, that I always knew how to write a news story. So my methodology as a beginning teacher was straightforward. I showed students journalistic works — daily news stories, longer feature stories, books — and taught them why those stories worked.
Then I told them, “Just do that.” Yes — just read the newspaper with intelligence and attention to detail, keep writing stories, and eventually you’ll get it. Or I’ll rip apart your stories till you do. A few students each semester would understand right away. A larger group of students perhaps didn’t understand so well, but they worked hard and made progress. And some students, perhaps more than I care to admit, just didn’t get it at all. What, exactly, they asked, do you want me to do?
Just pointing to a newspaper and saying, “Do that” wasn’t enough. |
So, with the help of a seminar run by IU’s Course Development Institute, I went back to the drawing board this summer to learn a methodology called “backward design.” Roughly stated, this requires that we start with the goal of the course. In my case, that would be a competent international news story. We break the goal down into its components, such as a novel story idea, or quotes from appropriate sources, defining our terms as precisely as we can. The grading grid, too, is very specific. This helps answer the question about what I want students to do. Then we ask ourselves: What are the skills needed to be able to do these things? Once we lay that out, we work on assignments and class activities to teach those skills.
Does it work better than what I do already? I’ll find out in a few months. During the seminar, I wondered whether the method requires us to
spoon-feed students too much.
Why all this detail about what a news story is? Shouldn’t they learn what that is directly from reading, reporting and writing? Shouldn’t they learn the way I did, by having their stories trashed until they get it right?
My answer for now is that we don’t have time to learn the old way. We don’t send lawyers straight from college to the courtroom; we don’t drop biology majors into the ER. In today’s media job market, we need to train journalists to hit the ground running. There is no time for osmosis. There are no reporting jobs like my first one at UPI in Panama, which I stumbled upon after having published only two news
stories in my life.
The fact is, I wasn’t born a journalist. It took me years to learn to write the kind of story my students need to be able do on their first day on the job. Just like it’s taking me time to learn how to teach the reporting skills I worked so hard to master. I hope I finally get it right before I run out of teeth.
Joe Coleman is the Roy W. Howard Professional-in-Residence at the School of Journalism.
