To give you some context, my introductory journalism class is a year-long course. It meets everyday for 50 minutes. It has mostly seniors in it, but there are a few juniors and sophomores. These students earn an English credit for successfully passing the class. The sophomores and juniors that take this class usually enroll in the advanced class the following year. The advanced class runs the print and online newspaper.

I divide my year into two distinct experiences. First semester is dedicated to journalistic writing for print and online newspapers. Second semester focuses on broadcast journalism.

Below is how I approach semester one, but there is no correct way to do this. I included what we are working on in each unit to help give you some ideas. I also slowly work on a copy editing unit during profile writing, news writing and sports writing. I know not everyone teaches grammar, but I find that it helps with clarity in their writing. My students have a love/hate relationship with the copy editing unit.

During first semester, I teach these units:

1. Laws vs Ethics: This is where they learn about the SPJ Code of Ethics, major legal cases and current state laws.

2. Profile Writing: This is a short unit where they write a personality profile after they learn about the inverted pyramid, AP Style, finding an angle and quote integration.

3. News Writing: This unit builds on the two previous ones. Now they add additional sources, write without bias, craft leads, and go deeper into angles and the inverted pyramid.

4. Sports Writing: In this unit we revisit angle, talk about sports clichés, work on verb choice, talk about the use of stats and numbers and evaluate how their audience is slightly different in this section.

5. Opinion Writing (Columns vs. Editorials): We learn the difference between editorials and columns, craft thesis statements, identify strategies for addressing the other side, and learn how and when to use a call to action. If you teach English classes, you can take a lot from persuasive writing units and adjust it for this unit.

6. Entertainment Writing (Review Writing): This builds nicely off of opinion writing. I approach this as review writing. We experiment with mini activities in restaurant reviews, music reviews and movie reviews. They pick one for their final product. This unit tends to be the class favorite. We focus a lot on description, sensory details, analogies, how to include your opinion, and what major elements need to be in each type of review.

7. Feature/In Depth writing (Final product is a two-page spread): Throughout the semester they were learning to gather information and turn it into a digestible piece of writing. The final unit is a feature spread with a partner. They pick a topic and go in depth with reporting. They write several different articles, make an infographic and take pictures. They then put all of these together into a two-page spread. This unit is synthesizing everything from the semester. It also adds in design lessons. They use InDesign for this project.

I hope seeing an outline of my semester gives you some ideas on how to break down your year or semester. Students love learning about journalism. It helps them understand the news better, makes them critical consumers, teaches them about the government, and it makes them feel civically engaged and smart. Buy-in on lessons is high. Good luck!