English Class Without Books

Imagine an English class where you don’t have to read books or write essays. A class where you decide which projects to work on.

11th grade English class changed from a traditional English class to teach journalism all the year.  Before it focused on reading, writing essays, teaching grammar and now students write articles about interesting topics and post them in a newspaper.

“The new curriculum offers students a totally different chance, a different way of learning english,” Emily Butterworth, 11th grade English Teacher, said.

The Columbus School is using a new way of teaching that is called Project Based Learning. PBL is a way of teaching, where students benefit by working by themselves on their projects and having more time to solve complex challenges. This helps the new curriculum of journalism because students have more freedom, to do things they like the most.

“PBL lets you have more freedom. In your feature article you can write about whatever you want, PBL can make it a lot more appealing to students because they feel they have more control,” Butterworth, said.

Even though PBL is a great change, it is really challenging because many things had to change. Teachers need to plan their classes and for them it can be really stressful because students that are not responsible have more trouble adjusting to this changes.

“PBL is a huge switch, for students that are being responsible and are able to stay on task and can use this freedom wisely I think it’s a great thing for them. For the ones that need more structure and guidance is more challenging,” Butterworth, said.

In the past years they didn’t learn about journalism, this is something new in the school that has been a difficult process, because students didn’t know what it was, they were lost and were really stressed because they had to work a lot in something they didn’t understand.

“Journalism has been really hard, we have to learn a lot of new things and we have to turn it a lot of articles that require a lot of work and sometimes we don’t know how to improve them,” Simon Lopera, 11th grade student, said.

Even though it was hard, it was a change that brought a lot of good things to English class, students know more about what is happening in the school, and they get to post really interesting things in the newspaper.

“Students could practically choose what they wanted their beat to be, you had many options and they were really interesting, also for the feature article they could choose what to write about, so it is topics they like and enjoy,” Butterworth, said.

Even though there are students that enjoy it a lot, there are others that don’t because for them it is a difficult process and others just prefer normal english class, this means that they prefer reading books, writing essays once in awhile rather than writing articles.

“I personally prefer the past curriculum, because journalism doesn’t fit me. I am not used to writing that much. I know that we are improving our writing but I prefer writing essays or things we used to do in the past years. also I believe reading is important and a whole year without reading can affect us in the future,” Lopera, said.

Other students liked a lot this change, some students don’t like reading and doing the things we did in the past curriculum, or they like learning new things also so that’s why they loved the change.

“It was a drastic change, changing the curriculum has been a challenge because we were not totally prepared to take this step, but I think it is opening new doors for us, I love that we are learning different things and cool things,” Elisa Cuartas, 11th grade student, said.

The articles that they  have already published are really good, they have all types of categories and diversity. In the discoverer we can see impressing things, all the articles relate to the school in some way, it goes from stories of kindergarten to twelfth grade.

“I’m really impressed with what my peers have offered, and what they have written, since it’s the first time it is a complete challenge but they have demonstrated really good skills in writing and in journalism,” Cuartas, said.

The idea of changing the curriculum came from English teacher of  David Gold, who proposed it two years ago, and it was something really challenging because he had to change a curriculum entirely.

“When he decided he was going to change it I thought it was very adventurous of him, because this is a big project to take on,” Butterworth, said.

Even though this was a difficult challenge, all students have accomplished many things by now, they learned how to interview people, how to write different types of articles, about their beats and they have found out many things that happened throughout the school, this was a huge change.

“I will absolutely like to do it again, I would like to grow on the topic, and that everybody knows a little bit of journalism!” Butterworth, said.