Advice from skilled reporters on how to gain access and turn it into high-quality education coverage
By Will Callan
I think we can agree here: It’s important for education reporters to spend time in schools and classrooms.
There’s a certain vibe one encounters in a hallway or classroom that simply does not transmit through a telephone or screen, or even an in-person interview. Secondhand accounts rarely do the job.
There’s no substitute for seeing things firsthand and engaging students in person.
That’s why I asked a handful of education reporters whose work I admire to describe their in-person reporting.
How did they get access to the schools they covered in their stories? And how did they make the best use of the time that they had?
As you’ll see, they gained access to schools by building trust with teachers before pitching a story or honestly explaining to administrators what they were reporting on. They formed some idea of what they were looking for ahead of time — to help focus their observations — and they jotted down details of manner and gesture while they went. They told me about how to pull off the student interview and explained why doing them is so important. When they took the time to listen to students on their own terms, the results were often gold.
These reporters’ creative, thoughtful, and practical ideas helped bring color, detail, and a sense of individual humanity to their coverage. Their stories portray students as real people with distinct personalities and important opinions.
There’s a certain vibe one encounters in a hallway or classroom that simply does not transmit through a telephone or screen, or even an in-person interview.
Inside connections
The first step of any in-classroom assignment is getting in the schoolhouse door.
But don’t necessarily bring your request directly to the bureaucracy, says the Hechinger Report’s Christina Samuels, among others. Leverage a source with whom you already have a trusting relationship.
That’s what the Samuels did when she wrote about the new AP African American Studies course. She says she had an “unusually easy time” getting into Ed Allison’s classroom at Granby High School in Norfolk, Va.
Having been at the school for years, he’d built up a lot of trust with the administration. Once Samuels built a relationship with him, it was easy to secure permission.
The payoff came in the detailed description of Allison’s classroom: “Newspaper clippings and student assignments cover the walls … a testament to the years that he has spent at the school teaching history.”
She also included teenagers’ reflections on the eye-opening course material: “[It] helps you feel more comfortable in yourself — you feel confident knowing where you came from and the history behind it,” one student said. “I feel like everybody should be able to know that.”
Their stories portray students as real people with distinct personalities and important opinions.
Above: Christina Samuels’ How do we teach Black history in polarized times?
An honest conversation
In other cases, an approach from a different angle might be warranted.
Naomi Martin of the Boston Globe told me that before her October series with Mandy McLaren about literacy in Massachusetts, the Globe had struggled to gain access to Boston Public Schools.
So they approached the gatekeepers and proposed an honest dialogue.
“[We] asked to grab coffee with some top district administrators to give our sales pitch for classroom access,” Martin said via email. “We explained we wanted to show the public, not just tell them, what the new reading instruction looked like. It worked: They let us see two different teachers’ classrooms and interview the teachers and their principals.”
The inside access enabled Martin to describe the learning process and capture students’ enthusiasm.
Observing a unit about trees and recycling, Martin “heard kindergartners use words like ‘shelter’ and ‘oxygen’ unprompted” during a class discussion and was able to better describe “knowledge-building” in an article.
Two paragraphs down, during a crafts activity based on the reading, Martin notes one kindergartner’s precocious enthusiasm.
“Trees are ‘amazing,’ said one student, Lia Ramirez, as she cut brown paper. ‘I’ve read all about them.’”
Above: Naomi Martin’s ‘Out with the old’: Boston Public Schools attempts to raise reading scores through overhauling instruction
Narrating the room
Once you’ve gotten yourself into a classroom, you face the next challenge of divining the story in front of you and behaving in ways that encourage teachers and students to act naturally.
Kalyn Belsha of Chalkbeat, who recently reported on pandemic recovery in Chicago schools, suggests making as many physical observations as possible and asking questions about the “seemingly ordinary things you see in a classroom.”
“Being in person at Comer [Middle School] let me see whether or not there were still visible signs of the pandemic,” she told me in an email. “When I was in the English classroom, I saw a copy of Seedfolks, the book they were about to read. I didn’t make much of it at first, but when I asked the teacher about it later, I realized there was so much thought that went into picking that book to meet the current needs of her sixth graders.”
Belsha’s brief description of the book conveys a lot about the energy in the classroom and where the students are in terms of academic progress:
The teacher’s “sixth graders huddled close to one another as they tried to hop across the classroom, an exercise designed to give her fidgety students a chance to move around, while exemplifying the communication and teamwork skills that would be at the center of Seedfolks, the novel they were about to read in class.”
Above: Kalyn Belsha’s The pandemic is over. But American school’s still aren’t the same.
Looking for takeaways
Both during and after her classroom visits, the Globe’s Martin likes to think about takeaways for readers. For their big literacy story, she and McLaren wanted to show how kids in the Boston suburb of Randolph were using a reading program to improve their vocabulary and build knowledge about their environment.
“We wanted to show how students in Randolph were using a reading program that helped them learn about things like fossils and pollinators, deepening their vocabulary and understanding of the world around them,” says Martin.
So, as readers, we hear about how 9-year-old Yezlinet Arias “thought a penstemon plant would lure in bees — something she had learned about through her extensive reading. ‘If we didn’t have any bees, then we won’t have any food,’ Yezlinet said.”
Talking to students
Observing classrooms is great. But engaging with students is even better. And being there in person is a necessity, according to at least one of the reporters who shared their insights.
It’s “nearly impossible to interview teenagers unless you’re right in front of them,” notes the Hechinger Report’s Samuels. “They just do not respond to phone calls, they barely respond to texts from strangers, and when they do text, the ‘text speak’ is not always useful for news articles.”
Thanks to Samuels’ in-person interviews, we learn about how the AP African American Studies course is having an impact beyond the classroom. One student, who “ended up in the course by accident,” came to embrace it: “Often I go home and I always have something to tell. I’m telling my family what I’ve learned. I just feel like that’s a very crucial part for us.”
Chalkbeat’s Belsha always jots down details about the kids she speaks with in case she doesn’t get permission to use their name. “I write down little descriptions about them that help illustrate their age or a part of their personality so the reader knows they are a real child — things like sparkly shoes or white-rimmed glasses,” she said.
Those specific details didn’t appear in her pandemic recovery story, but she did fit in a few student portraits.
“Brandon Hall, a seventh grader at Comer, blended his first smoothie in a ‘foodies’ class and bonded with his basketball coach through chess. He came to see similarities between making plays on the court and moving pawns across the board.
‘I learned a lot from him,’ he said.”
Eye to eye
As for the student interview itself, EWA’s Emily Richmond suggests making it clear to student interviewees that they don’t need to answer every question and then asking open-ended questions.
“Priska Neely, now managing editor of the Gulf States Newsroom, once shared with me a terrific piece of advice for observing young learners,” Richmond said in her email.
“Get down on the floor, and let the children come to you. It’s a good reminder to meet kids where they are.”
As an example of great student interviewing, Richmond mentions this 2018 Chicago Sun-Times article from Lauren FitzPatrick, who asked students of all ages what advice they had for students entering the grade they’d just completed.
The result is a compilation of stern, thoughtful, optimistic, and deceptively straightforward advice — all of it intended for an audience of students.
First graders “should know how to read books, listen to the teacher, be nice to students — and don’t ever walk out,” said second-grader Destinye Vickers. “When a teacher tells you to walk out, that’s when you walk out.”
Third-grader Victor Williamson Jr. kept it simple: “Second grade is about getting you ready for third grade.”
“This was a brilliant and appropriate use of students’ voices,” Richmond told me.
Above: Lauren FitzPatrick’s ‘You can’t cheat’ and other good back-to-school advice from experts — Chicago schoolkids
The limits
Reporters who spend time in classrooms ask better questions. Classroom reporting adds color to stories that might otherwise be dry. A quote from a student, especially one that shows personality, rewards the reader. Time in the classroom also leads to new story ideas.
But the reporters I surveyed were careful to acknowledge that while a classroom visit might offer them the best opportunity to see what’s actually going on in schools, the reporter’s presence will always be planned for to a certain extent.
“Keep in mind that the students you’re observing have almost certainly been told to be on their ‘best behavior’ when there are visitors — including you,” said Richmond. “There’s no way to truly be a ‘fly on the wall.’ The best you can hope for is at least a semi-candid glimpse.”
“Often classroom visits for media are highly orchestrated,” says the Globe’s Martin. “I know there are many other classrooms with far less skilled teachers, far more challenging environments, and far worse facilities that they’re not letting me into.”
Martin says those stories are “still vitally important to cover,” but might require getting information in other ways: parents, students, teachers. In other words, source development.
To this end, Samuels suggests casting “the source net as wide as possible.”
“There’s no secret sauce for how to get people to talk to you other than to ask them,” she told me. “It may be the case that the first or the second or the 10th source won’t talk to you, but you just have to keep trying.”
Will Callan is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles who has worked on podcasts, radio documentaries, and investigations at APM Reports. He can be reached at wacallan@gmail.com.
Previously from this author
What makes Colo. public radio’s Jenny Brundin such a standout education reporter?
When more education coverage isn’t better
Drama, characters, and ambiguity: key elements of high-quality school innovations coverage
Why the National Reading Panel report didn’t fix reading instruction 20 years ago
Previously from The Grade
How to report from inside a school — even when they won’t give you access (Jenna Russell)
Back into school for reporters, too
Remote reporting doesn’t work, either.
Lessons from Portland
