Toolkit resource
A Community Discussion Guide for Evaluating Claims
A ninety-minute facilitation guide for running a claim-evaluation discussion in a library, congregation, or community group without it becoming an argument.
For communities
Schools & Educators
One period, one skill, taught to fluency. The classroom material here is built around lateral reading, with a modelled demonstration that includes the searches that fail.
The design decision behind these plans
Most classroom media literacy material covers many techniques briefly. The plans here teach one procedure to the point where students can perform it unprompted, on the view that a student who can reliably do one thing is better served than one who can name five.
The modelled demonstration is the part that matters most. Narrating your own evaluation aloud, including a search that returns nothing useful, teaches students that difficulty is normal. Students who see only a smooth demonstration conclude that they are bad at this and stop.
Where to start
- Read thefifty-minute lesson plan, which includes preparation, timings, differentiation, and assessment.
- Set the Evaluate a Source exercise as homework. It requires no account, collects nothing, and works without JavaScript.
- For a second period, use theclaim sorting worksheet with a short passage students choose themselves.
Student privacy
Nothing on this site requires a student account, sets a cookie, or transmits anything students type or select. Think Lab selections exist only in the browser tab. There is no analytics on the site at all. This should satisfy most school data-protection reviews without an agreement, and we are happy to confirm it in writing if your district requires that.
Choosing examples
For a first lesson, avoid claims connected to live political disputes or to anything currently dividing the school community. Consumer, health, and local-service claims produce the same learning with far less difficulty, and students transfer the method afterwards without help.
Material selected for this audience
Report
What the Evidence Supports in Community Media Literacy Programming
A short evidence review for libraries, schools, and community organizations planning free media literacy sessions, with confidence levels attached to each finding.
Article
How Confident Should You Be?
Confidence language, what it should be based on, and how to say what you believe in a way that can be checked later.
Think Lab
What Would Change Your Mind?
Practice naming the specific observation that would reduce your confidence, which is the fastest route out of a stuck disagreement.
Toolkit resource
AI Content Verification Checklist
What to check when content may have been generated or altered by an AI system, organized around provenance rather than visual artefacts.
Article
What AI-Generated Content Changes
Which verification habits still work when text, images, and audio can be produced at near-zero cost, and which ones quietly stopped working.
Toolkit resource
Classroom Lesson Plan: Evaluating a Source in Fifty Minutes
A single-period lesson plan for secondary classrooms, with timings, a modelled demonstration, differentiation notes, and an exit ticket.
Toolkit resource
Library Workshop Outline: Two Sessions, Two Hours Each
A two-part workshop outline for public library programming, with room requirements, promotion language, and a plan for participants who arrive only once.
Toolkit resource
Source Evaluation Worksheet: Lateral Reading in Five Fields
A structured worksheet for evaluating an unfamiliar publisher in about five minutes, with space to record what you found and what you still do not know.
Toolkit resource
Assumption Audit Worksheet: Finding the Load-Bearing Premise
A five-step worksheet for locating the assumption a conclusion cannot survive without, rather than listing every assumption it makes.
Lesson
How to Evaluate an Online Source
Lateral reading in practice: how to judge an unfamiliar website or account in about two minutes by leaving the page rather than studying it.
Think Lab
Analyze a Headline
Practice reading three headlines for what they establish, what they imply, and what they leave for the article to prove.
Lesson
How to Read a News Story Critically
A repeatable six-pass method for reading a news story: claim, sourcing, evidence, framing, omissions, and confidence.
Toolkit resource
News Story Reading Checklist: Six Passes
A printable card summarizing the six-pass method for reading a news story, with the question each pass asks.
Toolkit resource
Feed Audit Worksheet: Ten Items, Three Questions
A short structured audit of your own feed that makes the selection process visible and separates what you see from what is prevalent.
Lesson
How Algorithms Shape What You See
What ranking and recommendation systems optimize for, and how that changes the meaning of popularity, consensus, and urgency in a feed.
Article
What Else Could Explain This?
A structured way to generate alternative explanations before settling on one, adapted from analysis of competing hypotheses for everyday use.
Lesson
Understanding Confirmation Bias
What confirmation bias is, the three distinct behaviours it covers, and the small number of countermeasures that survive contact with real evidence.
Toolkit resource
Claim Sorting Worksheet: Observation, Inference, Judgment
A four-column worksheet for taking apart a paragraph of argument and locating where a disagreement actually sits.
Think Lab
Fact or Inference
Sort three statements about the same event into observation, inference, assumption, and value judgment.
Lesson
Fact, Inference, and Opinion
How to tell an observation from an interpretation from a value judgment, and why mixing them is the most common reasoning error in public argument.
Lesson
Correlation Is Not Causation
Four specific reasons two things can move together without one causing the other, and the questions that tell them apart in practice.
Other audiences
See the For Communities overview for the design principles behind every guide here, and for the other settings this material has been adapted to.