As technology advances the way education is shared, high schools are finding innovative ways to engage students in everyday learning, especially in the mornings. One trend that has been adopted at Malden High School is morning meetings. Ever since they began in 2020, the way the meetings have been performed has been quite different.
“We used to do morning announcements a different way,” shared James Valente, a teacher of media courses at MHS “We did them for some time in a studio where the school had an enrichment-similar-schedule, which allowed us to gather information from two to three days we had anchors on screen and we would use the way traditional news channels would,” he continued.
Students in his Advanced Media course would spend weeks to a month gathering local information around campus, combining their efforts into videos that summarize all the exciting news that students would be able to watch, typically optionally, during homeroom. “Although it used to be time-consuming, it was really fun to do, and it was a valued item that the school looked forward to,” Valente stated.
However, after years of modifying MHS’s schedule, the production of the material started to get less and less prioritized, as there was not much time or space during class times to be able to focus on making, designing, and publishing the short videos for the student body.
There was a suggestion for a new way to capture student engagement in the morning by giving them school updates. According to Valente, English teacher Jennifer Clapp proposed during a faculty meeting that students could make morning announcements on a Google meeting that would be broadcast during homeroom for students to actively watch news get told to them, and Principal Chris Mastrangelo was automatically drawn to the idea.
Years prior, according to the past article, Media Brings New Morning Announcements Feature by Krishany Marius, Mastrangelo had shared that the morning announcements are “going to really grow—what you see now is going to get bigger,” and this was only giving steps closer to finding a resolution to that goal. “I wanted to make sure Mr. Masterangelo was supported in his efforts to do this, so I worked with the kids to make sure to deliver the messages,” said Valente in response.
Students were allowed to apply to be morning announcers through a Google Form at the beginning of the year, and production has proceeded this way ever since.. Morning meetings have been executed in this format since late August and have not stopped since, making more students want to apply and find ways to be involved. “My friends Yen and Chelmie suggested the idea of doing these meetings in the morning, and I thought it would be a really good opportunity to be able to fix my public speaking,” said sophomore Sofia Vargas, who hosts some of the morning meetings along with sophomore Lead Reporter for the Blue and Gold Chelmie Hyppolite and sophomore Reporter Yen Nguyen.
“I enjoy doing morning meetings because they’re a fun experience, especially since we didn’t have them last year,” shared sophomore Jhillian Dumo, hosting morning meetings alongside sophomore Aya Tafraoui and freshman Sophia Zhang. “I love making announcements and knowing my friends see them. It also helps them stay updated. Plus, I’ve made new friends and found shared interests through morning meetings,” she continued.
With the year ending soon, morning meetings are still evolving, and to Mastrangelo’s standards, meetings only evolve to better the way students learn more about MHS and the way they share the news throughout the year.
