Public Service Announcements in the Classroom

In Kylene Beer's and Robert Probst's Disrupting Thinking, they focus a lot on Book-Head-Heart reading. When we read, we read what the text says, we consider what it really means with our heads, and lastly we use our hearts to consider how we can use this information to change ourself or the world.

Additionally, this assignment allows me to really redefine (R in SAMR) the lesson and empower my students to offer their ideas to a wider audience - the world. To create this lesson, I had to combine my content knowledge of PSAs and teaching reading comprehension and analysis, with pedagogical knowledge of effective lesson delivery and grading, and a bit of technological knowledge of video creation and editing (TPACK).

In an effort to have my students spend more time with reading both with their head and heart, I was motivated both by Beers and Probst and A.J. Juliani to have them create Public Service Announcements. In class, we read and watched Emma Watson's HeForShe speech utilizing CommonLit for the reading and EdPuzzle and Youtube for viewing her speech to the United Nations.

Additionally, we took our learning to the next level using The World's Largest Lesson and the Global Goals which allowed students to research gender in leadership locally with some activities which helped guide them. They were doing ratios in ELA class (which brought me joy in spite of my own struggle with math content knowledge). It allowed my students to see that this really is an issue we're facing in 2018. I was even able to reach out to our local mayor who happens to be a woman for an interview about what she does and what she thinks of women in leadership roles:

After viewing and participating in all of these activities, students researched the reasons behind gender inequality, looking at the gender equality targets on the Global Goals website, and we discussed these reasons as a class. From there, I created a HyperDoc as a guide to how to create a Public Service Announcement. This allowed me to weave creativity into something that might otherwise appear to be nonfiction and research-based. Students could creatively and cleverly capture their audience's attention about the concern of gender equality. We viewed a few great examples of famous PSAs in class, and I gave students about 3-4 hours of class time to work on them.

Here are a few student examples:

While I see a lot of room for growth, I noticed that students did a great job applying some the concepts we covered in PSAs, and they still need some work with editing (and maybe I need to get some microphones to improve the sound). They applied their research skills, and most cited their sources! I think I may expand how I instruct this particular project in the future to include more tasks reviewing other PSAs and discussing what makes them work to help build their skillset.