Investigations at Animo Jefferson Middle School

Investigations at AJMS is an English elective for students with a high Reading Inventory (RI) score where they can get a glimpse of the experience as a journalist. Investigations at AJMS is a safe environment to make mistakes and learn from them as journalists. In investigations, students learn how to interview people, how to check for trusted sources, and how to make stories about things going on at AJMS, the community, and the world. 

English teacher Carl Finer takes care of running investigations successfully. Finer is an English and journalism teacher, which makes him very experienced in teaching this subject. He is also the founder of the class at Animo Jefferson.

A lot of people wonder how investigations became a class, so I interviewed Finer.

He said, “The publication originally started as a club, like during lunch or advisory, back in like 2011 and 2012. Some students said that they wanted a school newspaper and they asked the principal and he said why don’t you ask Mr.Finer, maybe he’d be interested. So it started just as like a club and then it was a print publication. Like we just ran them on the copy machines and it was students who wanted to be a part of the club.”  

“Then the next year there was a slot, a spot in the schedule. There was like room for one extra class and so they said “Why don’t you do your newspaper club as a class.” So I had one period and it was mixed [with] seventh and eighth grade all together and so for a couple years it was just one period of journalism and all different grades and it was print.”

“Then a few years later, when some schedules got changed, I got asked to teach investigations, which in most Green Dot schools, that’s like the eighth grade English elective, but in most Green Dot schools its like research papers and things. I thought it’s important to do research but also to keep students publishing the things they want to write about and interview about, so I kind of blended what Green Dot wanted me to do with what I’d been doing before and kind of made its own class out of it. So thats how investigations became kind of a combination of learning research skills but also learning to publish and learning to take photos. So it kind of became a combination journalism and research class.”

At AJMS the investigations class produces the website called Bulldog Bugle where students can publish their stories and AJMS can read the stories published.

Chelsea Ramirez, a student at AJMS said, “I remember hearing about Bulldog Bugle and seeing Bulldog Bugle being put on the advisory slides in seventh grade, but I never gave much importance to Bulldog Bugle until I became an eighth grader. Now I feel like Bulldog Bugle is a safe place to be creative and express your ideas and let people at AJMS know about things going on in the world. I really enjoy writing stories for Bulldog Bugle because I get to be creative and I can inform people about things going on at AJMS, the community, or anything going on in the world. I also really enjoy reading other people’s stories.” 

Students at AJMS enjoy investigations because they do a lot of things that help them in their daily life.  For example, not many students are comfortable speaking to people they don’t talk to daily, but when they are getting sources for their stories it requires speaking to people and sometimes they have to speak to people they don’t usually talk to. By doing this, it helps them get more comfortable speaking to people.

Ruth Ronquillo said, “Investigations helps me step out of my comfort zone when speaking to people I don’t really talk to because when I am interviewing them, asking questions, I actually have a topic to talk about with them and I think this skill may help me get more comfortable speaking to people I don’t talk to on a daily basis.”