Activities that promote higher-order thinking and the acquisition of 21st Century skills aren’t always a part of the official curriculum.

Every morning at 8:05, the news anchors of WPIN-TV straighten their notes, check their hair, and then stare directly into the camera lens as the director prepares to give the “On the Air” hand signal.

Behind the cameras the show’s producer bustles about, checking to see that everyone on the crew is ready at the controls of sound boards and other complicated-looking equipment.

The anchors for WPIN rehearse their lines as they prepare for the daily closed circuit television show broadcast to over 1000 students and teachers at Paine Intermediate School. The show is then re-recorded as a podcast available to the public.

“Good morning,” begins the male newscaster, “welcome to WPIN news.”

“And now,” says his female co-anchor, “here’s today’s lunch menu.”

Fifteen minutes later, the broadcast team at Paine Intermediate School wraps up another smooth production. Their audience of more than 1000 students and teachers have not only learned what’s for lunch, they’ve reviewed the daily events calendar, been reminded of an ongoing book fair, watched a commercial for the gifted program’s Marketplace sales day, reflected on a positive character trait, and listened to a camera-shy art teacher talk about Youth Art Month while an image of the Mona Lisa fills the screen.

Closed-circuit television broadcasts are becoming more and more common in secondary schools across the nation. What’s unusual about WPIN’s rather polished presentation is that it’s accomplished entirely by students in fourth and fifth grade, many of whom have yet to reach their 11th birthday.

What kids can do

On the WPIN organization chart, technology teacher Kristi Stacks might be said to fill the role of “network president,” and like many smart executives, she’s hired a capable staff and mostly stays out of their way.

“Whatever’s going on in the school, we cover it,” she says. “They’re pretty self-sufficient. I try to make it like a job and let them do as much as possible.”

The students, who are selected through applications and auditions, fill positions as anchors, directors, camera people and script writers— “very much like a TV production studio,” Stacks explains. As technology teacher, she has all of Paine’s students in her classes “and I’m always kind of watching to see who might be good at different jobs for next year.”

To add verisimilitude, a former broadcaster at Birmingham’s NBC affiliate drops by now and then to talk with the kids. Last fall he agreed to judge the auditions for student anchor positions. “He and a friend sat in the library and the kids were in here in the studio,” says Stacks. “We had the cameras on so they could watch the tryouts over the air. The kids couldn’t see the judges. They would read their little part and the judges had their score sheets.”

“It was grueling,” she laughs. “Of the 1000 students in the school, over 250 auditioned!”

Stacks selects four teams, each with a mix of fourth and fifth graders, who rotate a week at a time. Her two producers take turns working two weeks on and two weeks off. At the end of each daily broadcast, the anchors for that week use a laptop with a plug-in microphone to recreate the audio portion of the show as a podcast, which is immediately posted on the school website for parents and other visitors to hear.

“We also try to videotape the show every day,” she says. “And after the show goes off, our student crews like to watch the show to see what they can improve and what they did really well.”

A project high on the Bloom scale

The WPIN broadcasting project is just the sort of 21st Century project-based learning that Trussville City superintendent Suzanne Freeman and her leadership team are eager to propagate. It reaches into the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (analyzing, evaluating, creating) and integrates many of the skills identified by national study groups as essential for careers in today’s workplace—including information and media literacy, critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork and collaboration, self-direction, accountability and adaptability, entrepreneurship, and civic literacy.

Best of all, putting on a daily news broadcast is very high on the student engagement scale. It’s fun, and it’s done for an authentic audience.

“It’s real work that serves a real purpose,” says Stacks. “It’s about as far as you can get from passive seat time in a classroom.”

“The kids put together the whole show. The producers schedule the teams and manage all the production details. Everybody keeps binders to organize their work. It’s really neat to have a child who works on a laptop to create graphics and makes slides to go along with things the anchors are saying. If they’re talking about lunch, there’s a menu and a picture.”

“Then I have a child who operates our video board and can switch from camera to slides to commercials,” Stacks explains. “Whatever we have planned, they manage the transitions. We also work with an audio board, and we have audio kids who run that. They have to do the mic checks and control the sound. They have three different mics they run, and when we do a commercial that’s a different set of audio. So there are a lot of skills involved and they make all the decisions.”

“When you look into the studio, it’s almost like an alien spaceship, there are so many knobs and buttons,” Stacks laughs. “But they handle it really well. They know what they have to do before the show to make everything run well.”

When the camera-shy art teacher arrived at the last minute to make an announcement, “the kids were furiously working before the broadcast to see if they could come up with a way to just show the art teacher’s lips on a picture of the Mona Lisa, talking,” Stacks remembers. But the school clock is merciless, and the news production team wasn’t quite able to pull that off.

“Instead, they put up the picture of the Mona Lisa and let the teacher just do the audio. And when the anchors came back, they had a little ad-lib: ‘Wow. How did she do that without moving her lips?’ They’re always trying to come up with funny and interesting lines.”

Students in Mrs. Jones' 5th grade science class at Paine Intermediate School recorded their Mystery Science Reader's Theater script about the sun -- then published it on their class website.

WPIN logistics and funding

The WPIN project began in early 2006, when April Chamberlain, Paine Intermediate’s previous tech teacher (and now the district’s technology integration specialist) secured the grant funds necessary to purchase the broadcasting equipment. (It’s not “all that expensive,” Chamberlain says, if your school is wired for TV broadcast.)

Chamberlain began the broadcast using 3rd, 4th and 5th graders, and Stacks expects to reintegrate third graders into the teams next school year now that she has “authentic experience” of her own.

Students come into the studio (which laps out into Stacks’ technology lab) at 7:30 and leave at 8:45 when her first class arrives. The schedule works because Paine Intermediate sets aside the first 45 minutes of each morning as reading intervention time. Before Stacks selects a student for one of the teams, she checks with teachers to make sure they are not required to attend the program for struggling readers. One student with a learning disability runs the camera and then scoots out for a session with a special education resource teacher. “She’s doing a great job,” Stacks says. “We try to work with schedules as much as we can to involve as many students as possible.”

WPIN producers plan a news broadcast.

Stacks agrees that if Paine Intermediate were, say, a K-8 school, it is unlikely that teachers would consider students as young as third, fourth or fifth grade capable of producing, directing and broadcasting their own television show. And yet, she says, the 8-to-11 year olds do the work with a great deal of confidence and competence.

“WPIN really says something about what kids can do when we give them the chance,” Stacks believes. “As teachers who aren’t always comfortable with technology, we need to ask ourselves whether we’re hesitating because we aren’t sure they’re ready – or we aren’t sure we’re ready.”