Professional Development

The Educator Guide for Beyond Blame is comprehensive, providing background information on media literacy methodology as well as teaching strategies. In addition, each lesson provides national education standards for language arts, health and technology, and gives detailed instructions useful for delivery. Goals and vocabulary for each lesson are also detailed.

A PowerPoint Presentation is included, that contains slides and notes on background on youth violence as well as an overview of the curriculum methodology and lessons. For teachers who have not taught media literacy before, CML suggests reading Literacy for the 21st Century or reviewing CML’s basic PowerPoint on media literacy, that also contains notes.

CML is also pleased to provide face-to-face training for introducing media literacy and Beyond Blame. CML’s experience shows that one day’s worth of teacher training can yield big dividends in helping to change students media use, attitudes and behavior.

Customized Professional Development

Using the Beyond Blame curriculum, CML provides face-to-face consulting and professional development services for schools and community organizations, and can scale its services to the size of the organization involved.

For a large-scale project in an urban school district, for example, CML suggests:

• Meeting and training with administrators, so that the Beyond Blame program is understood and administrative consistency is achieved.
• Coordinating with firms and counselors working with the district on interpersonal skills.
• Conducting focus groups with administrators, teachers and students.
• Conducting attitude surveys of parents, to set benchmarks for attitude and behavior change. Follow-up research would provide a comparison to see if change has occurred.
• Training sessions for trainers, focusing on basic media literacy pedagogy using the CML MediaLit Kit"!, the Beyond Blame curricula, and practice sessions. This training should be interspersed with time for practice and repeated, depending upon the ability and stability of the staff and the duration of the program.
• Training may cover how to handle parent meetings and/or community meetings. These audiences are quite different from teachers, and preparation is important in getting and maintaining support for and during these community meetings. In fact, this goal, to be reached effectively, should be a major grassroots effort that would require several years of effort to properly build the infrastructure for delivery.
• Working with administrators on communication and project management aspects of introducing media literacy into a school/community.

These ideas are only examples of the type of planning, project management, communication and training that is called for in a comprehensive approach to violence prevention.

For further information about CML's training services related to Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media, contact CML.