Leadership and Team Building
On the first day of the 2020-2021 school year, instead of walking to my class, I opened a Google Meet call. That first day of school rush was now history. I no longer got to experience the excitement of finding my assigned seat or peering at the window to get the view of a Kpod sunrise or glancing at the white board where we used to plan our weekly assignments. Instead, I debated on whether or not I should wear sweatpants or my best pair of jeans—but it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be able to see what I wore anyway.
On top of that, I was given my dream role of executive editor, but I never imagined to have to take on that responsibility in my bedroom—which was now the classroom. I twiddled my fingers as I anxiously watched a staff member join the call one-by-one. I didn’t know what to expect now that we weren’t together in person. I was beyond terrified.
But what was I afraid of? I was beginning my third year on the staff. 3 years ago, I sat in my seat, dreading the idea of talking to own peers, let alone strangers I had to interview. Today, I was an executive editor, overseeing each and every single staff member in the room.
A sense of unfamiliarity was no stranger to me. I spent my years as an underclassmen learning everything it took to become a leader and role model to the class. Now, my knowledge was being put to the test, and I was beyond ready to shine.
Adapting to this strange world
In a regular math or English class, building connections virtually among your peers and your teachers is difficult. For our high school newspaper staff, it was no different.
Our staff was made up of 21 students at the start of this school year. 3 of those students were returning members who happened to all share the executive editor role.
My co-executive editors, Connor and Jojo, and I were met with the challenge of building strong camaraderie among the staff in this entirely new setting. Here’s glimpse of how it went:
Mentor Groups
As a sophomore in class full of upperclassmen during my first year on the staff, I constantly asked myself 3 things:
Will they judge me because I’m new?
How do I start?
Who do I talk to?
I knew exactly how all of the new members felt when they joined the staff… and I knew being virtual didn’t help that anxiety one bit.
In order to make everyone feel comfortable on the staff, we established mentor groups. Each of the groups had a mix of 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. The mentor groups had multiple purposes:
The staff members would be required to send their articles to their specific mentor to edit and publish.
The staff will break off into their mentor groups to hold smaller staff meetings before we would reconvene as an entire group; they will also work to tackle specific workshops or activities we do that day.
The mentor will be expected to help work with their mentee with whatever they need, whether it is coming up with questions for their article, answering a grammar question, or guiding them to figure out the angle they want to take; breakout rooms will also be utilized for small conferences between an editor and a staff writer on a work day.
Creating these mentor groups lifts the weight off a staff writer’s shoulders. Smaller groups encourage more collaboration and allows for a staff writer to have at least one person to turn to.
While we eventually transitioned to full staff meetings instead of breaking off into smaller groups, the mentor group system still proved to be a success. Members in my team are rarely reluctant to reach out to me for help or advice. I was also able to get to know many of the people in my group and I found that the editors and I were able to establish solid communication among the staff, despite the circumstances we were put in.
Interview Practice Partners
At the start of every school year, returning and new members are paired up to do a practice interview, which serves two main benefits:
It acts as an icebreaker by encouraging both staff members to get to know each other
It allows them to learn how to conduct an interview by giving them the chance to experience one
Considering that we only had 3 returning staff members this year, however, we were just randomly paired up. It still served as a great activity to kick off the new school year.
Writing the Lede
After conducting practice interviews, everyone was assigned to write a lede for homework. The next day, we split off into our breakout rooms and critiqued each lede. As a mentor, I helped lead the discussion for my group.
Prior to this, we looked at some great examples on our site and from mainstream media outlets. We also reviewed a slideshow talking about the purpose of a lede and what makes one stand out. Based off of that, they expressed their opinions for each one.
I allowed the rest of group to comment first. I asked them to say what they liked and what they didn’t like. For whatever they didn’t like, they had to offer a suggestion. After that, I took over and said how I felt about it.
This activity encouraged everyone to be vulnerable. We witnessed good, bad, and strange ledes. I’ll admit, mine wasn’t the best lede I’ve ever written, but it challenged everyone, including the editors.
Throughout the past years on the staff, I took away one thing: it’s important to take risks. Through this exercise, we emphasized to the staff to give their best shot, even if they have zero idea on what they’re doing because if not now, then when? You can only learn something once you try it out.
Journalism Crash Course
At my school, there’s an Introduction to Journalism class which lasts for a semester, and there’s the full year journalism class (AKA The Knight Crier). There are no requirements in order for someone to be a apart of our actual paper, so the intro class is optional.
With that being said, joining the full year course allows people to get straight into writing (and also gives them more opportunities to get published), but before we could dive into business, we need to teach everyone how things work.
That’s where the “crash course” comes in. Obviously, we’ll give lessons and presentations throughout the year, but this is when we spend the first few weeks of school learning about the basics before we can get things running completely.
We don’t decide who specifically leads the lessons. Our advisor and the editors normally pitch in as a team and offer our tips and explanations. We encourage everyone to participate and answer questions that we ask throughout the presentation, so it’s not a boring lecture.
The lessons are then saved in a module on our Canvas, so members can refer back to it at a later time.
Organization
The most satisfying part of my day is when we get to erase assignments off the white board—but in a Covid world, unfortunately, that can’t happen. Instead, we made our famous board digital.
It started off as a regular Google Doc with our names on it. I cleaned things up by adding a table and our logo at the top.
We refer to this every week for our Monday morning staff meetings. The editors lead the meetings and every staff member provides an update on what they’re working on, what they’re finished with, and pitches at least one new idea for either themselves or the group to take.
Staff meetings last an entire period. When someone pitches an idea, the editors and our advisor approves of the idea. We typically ask them questions about what angle they going to take (if it’s a topic that is constantly talked about, how are they planning on making it unique?) and offer suggestions on who to interview or how to make it in-depth.
Keeping track of the articles on a document like this ensures that every staff member has something to write each week. It’s well organized so that the editors can have a clear overview on what will eventually be published on the site.
One-on-One Help
“You know what this writing reminds me of?” My advisor asked one of the staff members Julia Nardone. “It reminds me of Hannah’s writing.”
“Oh yeah, she helped me with the questions,” she said.
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I was a 100% virtual student while the majority of my classmates were at school, which meant that they couldn’t just walk up to me to ask me a quick question. I can’t tell you how many times I told staff members to reach out to me if they needed help. I knew some of them felt uncomfortable to, but I wanted them to know that I genuinely wanted to help.
Early on in the school year, rarely anyone reached out to me. I felt like I was doing something wrong.
One day, however, I received a text from someone on the staff. Here’s how our conversation went:
Let’s get one thing straight—Instagram stalking can be super beneficial for research… and I’m not ashamed to say it.
When I received that message, I was stoked. But that wasn’t even the best part. She asked for help with a profile piece on a student—my favorite type of article to write. Instead of giving general pieces of advice, I went ham but for a good reason.
Of course I didn’t expect her to ask the interviewee all of these questions, but I wanted to show her how she can make her article in-depth (or as my advisor would say, give the article “teeth.”) and show the interviewee that she did her research. I helped her out by doing my own mini research on the girl. From the information I was able to gather, I thought of multiple directions she could take.
As you can tell, I said a lot.
After she looked at my message, she had the interview and wrote a phenomenal article. Click this link to read it.
With my guidance, I was able to help her write a unique and in-depth piece. She didn’t write an ordinary story on a girl who had a passion for photography. She wrote Chloe’s story—it was different and personal to her experience.
Overcoming Obstacles
Ah, that time of year when production goes down and the staff starts to lose motivation.
I hate that time of year.
However, it’s a completely normal occurrence. But I still had to figure out how to fix it.
My fellow co-editors and I were brainstorming ways to better communicate with the staff, but we faced some difficulties:
Breakout rooms are kind of awkward
People are afraid to speak up, so they probably won’t express their feelings in class
I came up with the idea of sending an anonymous check-in form using Google Forms. Connor and Jojo loved it, as well as our advisor, so we sent it out the next day.
After we dropped the link in the chat, we had people filling it out throughout the day. Here’s what we got from it:
33% are happy with how much they’re writing; 42% said “most of the time”; 25% said “not really”
The biggest struggle for the majority of the staff was coming up with ideas
Everyone felt that staff meetings made them feel more comfortable
Of sophomores and juniors, 78% plan to come back next year
For what they wanted to get out of the class, they said, “journalistic experience,” “more writing confidence,” etc.
Overall, we were very happy with how this turned out. Nearly everyone on the staff filled this out and gave honest responses. With what we got from it, we were able to make changes in order to be better leaders.
Because they admitted that they struggled to come up with ideas, we created a list of students and teachers in the building that we could write about. The doc was shared with everyone, so they could add names. We found that people constantly looked at it during staff meetings and the list is constantly changing, either because people are taking ideas or because they are adding more names.
We also started doing daily staff presentations where at least 2 staff members would do research on what other schools are doing and then present what they have learned. One idea someone presented was to create a podcast. Immediately after they mentioned it, two staff members expressed their interest and took action. Now, they upload episodes weekly. We also had people mention that we should write more entertainment pieces. Since then, we’ve published more movie and album reviews. We also had suggestions on how to change up the layout of our site, and I took the lead with it (See web for more details).