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The Stony Brook model of teaching News Literacy uses a "toolbox" method, providing students with a set of specific tools to drive active consumption of news and information. We also believe that you, the teacher, are best suited to bring these materials to your students, as you are intimately aware of their needs. Here, we provide a mix of practical and digital tools to empower you to bring this crucial 21st-century skill to your student population.

The goal here is for students to consistently practice these tools so they become "second nature" for students to put into practice.

We work with educators in all sorts of contexts (classroom teachers, college professors, librarians, community leaders, etc.) in providing training, coaching opportunities and teaching resources, including powerpoint presentations, case studies and lesson plans.

If you have other questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly by emailing: newsliteracy@stonybrook.edu
 

All of our materials are linked to our course lessons and concepts. If needed, you may want to to refer to our Training page for details on those lessons and concepts.

While these materials are made available for free, you will need to register on our site for access to all of them. We also make these materials available with an Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC License. You can read more about this here.

Full Course Materials

  • Our Course Pack features our most recently created materials being used in our undergrad course at Stony Brook University. This set of 12 lessons includes PowerPoint presentations with embedded multimedia, course recitation guides and related materials.
  • Updates are available each week during our academic semester. To sign up for email updates of weekly lectures, video examples, assignments and recitation guides, contact us to join the "news literacy feed."

Modularized Lessons 

  • CNL Modules - Each of these modules covers an individual News Literacy concept, separated from the larger lesson of which it is a part. They can be inserted into existing lessons or be used as building blocks in a new lesson of your own. 
  • The Secondary School 5-day News Literacy Sequence - Working with high school teachers, we developed a 5-day sequence packet of materials, including powerpoints and lesson plans for high school teachers, and guiding worksheets and assignments for students. Also included is an assessment tool, which can be used both before and after the curriculum is presented to gauge student progress on the topics.

Case Studies

  • In these case studies, we’ve used prominent news stories, ripped from the headlines, to illustrate key News Literacy lessons. The case studies cover a variety of topics, including balance and fairness in the coverage of climate change, truth and verification in the 2016 presidential campaign, and the power of images in the Syrian refugee crisis. The case studies are categorized by News Literacy concept.

Localized Lesson Plans 

  • We have been engaged in projects in which we have created lessons tied to media from a particular region of the country. Our first set of lessons were localized for the Chicago area. 

  • If you are a teacher in greater New York City, or Long Island, you may also be interested in learning how you can implement news literacy as an ACE course, where students can gain college credit for taking it. High schools that teach News Literacy are: Northport, Cold Spring Harbor, Kings Park, East Islip, Ossining , and Benjamin Banneker Academy. To learn more, visit https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/ace/ .
     

Teacher Created Lessons