Part 1: Background of the Unit

This assignment uses an online unit known as Unit B: Become a Journalist to develop 5 terminal course objectives using Blooms taxonomy.  Unit B: Become a Journalist is an integrated journalism and language arts for middle school students. This online unit is presented by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation and has significant support from the John S. and James L. Knight (Foundation Newspaper Association of America Foundation, 2013). In this unit, students learn about the principles of media literacy. Students explore visuals and print media with additional emphasis to newspapers. Most of the media that students examine include magazine ads, television commercials, and movie trailers with an economic purpose.

The reason why Unit B emphasis on print media is because of newspapers, magazines, and journals  cover more stories and provide more information in greater detail. According to Arthur Miller, a significant late playwright in Unit B: Become a Journalist a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself. As such, newspapers are crucial to learners because they all need to talk to each other. Unit B: Become a Journalist helps students to think broadly about how newspapers are written and organized as well as the unique role they play in every democracy(Foundation Newspaper Association of America Foundation, 2013). The press is protected under the First Amendment in the United States of America, and therefore editors, newspaper publishers and reporters can carry out their roles without the fear of being censored by the government.

The first ten chapters in Unit B: Become a Journalist specifically focus on the newspaper’s role as students become engaged with issued related to the First Amendment. Students are taught in detail about the code of ethics that govern journalism (Foundation Newspaper Association of America Foundation, 2013). More so, the unit reflects on issues related to the ethics of objectivity in a manner that reporters find sources for their stories. These lessons are designed in such a way that learners will acquire critical thinking skills to decode and encode news messages in any media.

Part B: Lesson Plan, Grade 8

Topic: Press Ethics

Objectives: By the end of this lesson, students will

• Evaluatetheir thoughts regarding why codes of ethical journalism are important –affective objective
• Explain why maintaining standards of ethical journalism are crucial- psychomotor objective (Adams, 2015).
• Applythe standards of ethical journalism to actual and hypothetical news events in groups of four- nontechnical objective.
• Assess the central themes and ideas in texts and analyze their development-psychomotor objective
• Analyze how the point of view and purpose shapes the style or content in a text-affective objective

Part C: Reaching Terminal Objectives

To help students reach the terminal objective (IV), assess the central themes and ideas in texts and analyze their development-psychomotor objective, students will,

• Analyze the structure of texts, including how particular paragraphs, sentences, and more significant portions of the text such as sections, chapters, scenes, or stanzas relate to each other and the whole text
• Read a text comprehensively and analyze what it says explicitly and make logical inferences from it while citing specific textual evidence in writing to support conclusions drawn from the text

Part D. Decision- Making Process

Bloom’s Taxonomy classifies different objectives and skills that an educator set for his/her students mainly known as learning objectives. In essence, learning objectives are statements that describe specific skills or knowledge a learner will comfortably demonstrate as a result of completing a unit, lesson, chapter or course (Armstrong, 2016). The six levels of skills that Bloom’s Taxonomy measures include: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.  These are also the verbs used when creating the objectives.  They provide learners with clear goals through which they can measure their understanding and success as they can use the objectives to know what the instructor expects of them.

The second reason why the choice of verbs is essential is that they provide the instructor with directionwhen developing or assembling lesson materials and activities that support the learners to achieve the terminal objectives (Armstrong, 2016). Thirdly, they allow the educator to develop a clear assessment strategy through which to measure whether students meet the stated expectation. As such, students and teachers can easilycompile, implement, associate, estimate, present, gauge, and synthesize the information in a particular text. Using these verbs, teachers and students can also manage their time effectively and can be more self-directed in handling their performance in the class.

The choice of verbs in this assignment include: evaluate, explain, assess, discuss and analyze. Through these verbs, a student can determine if they are needed to break down information into component parts by analyzing it or if they are needed to recognize and recall facts by outlining or naming them which applies the cognitive skill of remembering. They can also determine if they are required to judge the value of information or ideas by evaluating it for instance in learning objective (i). Students can also know if they are needed to apply the concepts, rules, facts or ideas through an application such as in learning objective (iii). Conclusively, lesson objectives help a teacher to measure whether a student has mastered unit or course level objectives.

References

Adams, N. E. (2015). Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 103(3), 152.

Armstrong, P. (2016). Bloom’s taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

Newspaper Association of America Foundation, (2013). Unit B: Becoming a Journalist. https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/highfiveunitB.pdf

Do you need high quality Custom Essay Writing Services?