This week a team of of my students ran their own live stream on YouTube called YES TV. YES TV (Youth Eco Summit TV) was a live stream from the Youth Eco Summit. This summit allows students and teachers to to gain first-hand experience at how to be more sustainable at school and in their everyday lives. YES TV was an one-hour live stream on YouTube where students interviewed participants at the summit so that a global online audience can also learn about sustainability.

YES TV was a massive risk in learning for me and my students. It was one of those “say yes, then learn how to do it later” projects. YES TV was essentially a live TV talk show that students ran almost all by themselves. I have zero experience at running a live TV talk show. The students also had no experience. However, it was one of the most authentic learning experiences for all of us.

Firstly YES TV showed me and the students that we can push the boundaries and take on a challenge. So what if we didn’t know how to run a live TV talk show. We can learn how to do it. I applied everything I learnt from being in the audience of a live show called QandA a few years ago. We watched breakfast news TV clips on YouTube to learn how hosts improvise based on the guest’s responses to their questions. We devised and assigned roles. There were 2 anchors, 3 interviewers, camera operator, “audio person”, a student who held up signs like “hurry up” and “ready for next guest”, students who monitored social media feeds for online questions, a student who held up a mini whiteboard telling the on-camera crew who the next guest was, “runners” who were in charge of organising guests before they went on camera. And then me. I had no idea what my roles were called but I decided which guests were on next according to the schedule and told the kids with the signs and whiteboard what to do. These roles are probably nothing like the roles in a real live TV talk show but we pulled it off and it worked for us. The students and I were in awe that we did pull it off. YES TV proved to all of us that passion, initiative and determination enable us to rise to any challenge.

YES TV was also an authentic experience for students to learn job-ready skills. The actual live stream for YES TV was 2 hours. But a lot more other hours were spent preparing for it and this included liaising with the guests on YES TV. Students learnt how to make phone calls in a professional manner to YES TV guests (I modelled this to them first by having my phone on speaker) and writing professional emails. This might not sound like much but many students don’t know how to do these things and they’re often not taught in traditional subjects. Students involved in YES TV mentioned how they appreciated learning how to write and respond to emails in a professional manner, using formal language.

Finally for me as a teacher, YES TV provided validation for me to continue to push the boundaries and to continually seek out new learning opportunities for my students.