Discussing the news with students gives them a 'real world' context to their learning. It also helps students to understand the global context of their local lives, and explore similarities and differences.
The wide range of news topics, including politics, current events, and natural disasters, makes it easy to integrate the news into the curriculum, starting with the most basic areas of reading and numeracy. Encouraging students to read and discuss the news builds upon their language, vocabulary and reading skills. It’s also an effective tool for teaching Maths concepts, particularly fractions, decimals, currency, and averages.
The use of news in education can also significantly enhance broader curriculum areas, such as Citizenship, Environmental Studies, or Geography. Students become better informed, more reflective and analytical. It helps them understand issues of global importance, and the people and places associated with these issues, by seeing in practice some of the complex problems and challenges in the world today, such as how to resolve conflicts and combat disease. By debating on these issues in class, students develop their critical thinking and problem solving skills.
Following media coverage also helps students develop skills of recognising bias and stereotypes.
How to use the news
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Action and impact
- Tutor time
- Show a short video clip (the BBC news website has many suitable clips or you could maybe show a different perspective with clips from Al Jazeera) and follow it up with a discussion.
- Have a question related to a news story on the board which students then discuss – you could have copies of an article or newspaper (free papers such as the Metro can come in handy here) around the classroom for students to refer to. Pairs could be asked to come up with points on either side of the argument when asking ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ questions.
- Show a picture and ask students if they know what story it relates to or if they can come up with a question about it (the Development Compass Rose could be useful here).
- Bring up a world map and show where a news story is happening. What else do students know about that part of the world? Can they make any connections between themselves and/or the UK and there?