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"While individual efforts are valuable, students can learn the skills of collaborating on civic issues by working together as a whole class. Here are the five broad steps they should follow: Identify issues important in their lives and community, and decide on one to address. Research the chosen issue and decide how to change or improve the situation. Plan an action, including determining a goal for change; identifying who or what body in the community has power to make the change; and deciding how to approach that person or those people. Carry out the action through letters, talks, meetings with officials, policy proposals, and activities, depending on the specific goals of the project. Reflect on the effort when it is over in order to understand their successes, challenges, and ways to continue learning in the future. Two features are especially crucial to making the experience authentic and empowering. First, students must own the key choices and decisions and figure out solutions to problems themselves, so they discover that they can do this. The teacher facilitates the work, of course, but leaves as much of the decision-making as possible to the students. Second, the work should culminate in some action focused on change in the school or community. It's not enough to just talk about change, practice mock legislatures, or serve in a soup kitchen (as valuable as these activities may be). Only when students see adults listening to them with respect, do they realize they have a voice and can make a difference in their world. Their efforts may not always succeed, but in being heard they come to value the studying, reading, writing and planning that they have done."

"It's especially powerful because students identify the topics and carry out their own explorations, rather than teachers determining everything in advance. However: while the effort usually concludes with students presenting their learning through videos, blog posts, multi-media presentations, demonstrations, genius hour advocates often conceive these final outcomes primarily as students "showing what they've learned," essentially to evaluate the work and give it a grade. There's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, and teachers and students in many schools enjoy the energy, creativity, and learning that genius hour generates. But there's also so much more waiting to be unleashed if the products involve a larger purpose that just a grade. What's especially valuable is the potential of geniur hour as a gateway to student civic involvement."

NewsTrust has created a set of teacher guides that will help you teach your students the difference between good and bad journalism. These guides include interactive lesson plans for college and high school classes in journalism, civics, social studies, communications and more