From Article Discussion to Lesson Planning

March 15, 2013

The discussions we have been having about the two newspaper articles has given me a great idea for a connection to the social studies curriculum, and I found a great lesson plan idea from Joseph M Kirman's book, Elementary Social Studies: Creative Classroom Ideas (2008). The chapter that I found useful was titled "Studying Media Bias in Current Events with Newspapers". I thought the connection between what we have been discussing in class (feeling bad for Mr. Cook because of the tone of his article vs. Mr. White's impersonal article) could be applied into teaching my own lesson about bias and the media.

The section of the text that stood out to me was "To be human is to be biased about some things and people. Ethics demands that we do our best to prevent biases from entering where they do not belong; for example, we do not want judges to be biased, but to make their decisions based upon facts and law". This example fits perfectly into the theme of our last two classes. 

To teach this lesson in an elementary classroom, you would have to choose articles that are relevant for the intended grade level, however you can still teach the same important types of issues that we have been discussing in our own class. For example, if you start the class off with a working definition of bias, you can start a deeper discussion and create a very authentic lesson.

I think the most important thing to take away from this topic is that it is okay to have some level of bias the first time you hear about an issue because it is a natural instinct. The important thing is to be able to recognize it and be able to view an issue critically to see a number of different sides that influence an issue.