Leah Clapman

Professional Title
Managing Editor, Education
About Me (Bio)
Leah Clapman heads the PBS NewsHour’s education department, overseeing content for the web and broadcast, tools for teachers and special projects for school-aged audiences. Leah created NewsHour Extra, which provides articles, lesson plans and daily video activities to help teachers incorporate current events into any subject area. The site has won numerous awards, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009 she started Student Reporting Labs (SRL) to build the next generation of public media producers and citizens. The SRL curriculum and mentoring network trains thousands of students in middle and high schools across the country to produce video journalism on important issues in their communities. It has been shown to increase critical thinking, curiosity, news and media literacy and civic engagement. Leah worked at C-SPAN and CNN before joining the NewsHour.

Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association
08/01/2015

The production of news stories and student-oriented instruction in the classroom are designed to increase student learning of STEM content through student-centered inquiry and reflections on metacognition. This project scales up the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL), a model that trains teens to produce video reports on important STEM issues from a youth perspective.

Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association
09/01/2019

In this project, Student Reporting Labs will develop an online curriculum delivery platform called StoryMaker and a unique set of tools called Storymaker:STEM that will supply in-demand interdisciplinary, multi-modal, STEM-infused teaching and learning tools to classrooms across the country. The project aims to produce unique STEM stories from a teen perspective and partners with local public media stations to provide mentorship and amplify the voices of young people.