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
Youth Groups
Young people are frequently more capable at this than adults assume and less well served by material that lectures them about their own platforms. These activities start from what participants bring.
What works differently with this group
Three adjustments matter more here than anywhere else.
- Use material participants bring. Content selected by an adult facilitator is usually a year out of date and signals that the session is about someone else's world.
- Drop the warning framing. Sessions built on the premise that young people are uniquely vulnerable to being deceived produce resistance, and the premise is not well supported. Frame it as a skill that adults are visibly bad at, which is both more accurate and more motivating.
- Keep it concrete and short. Twenty to thirty minutes on one thing beats ninety minutes on five.
Three activities that need almost no preparation
- Headline sort, twenty minutes. Use the Analyze a Headline exercise individually, then compare answers in threes. The disagreements carry the session.
- Image trace, thirty minutes. Give three images using the image context checklist: one correctly captioned, one re-dated, one cropped. Do not say which is which.
- Feed audit, thirty minutes plus discussion. The feed audit worksheet uses each participant's own feed. Nobody is asked to show their screen to anyone, and that should be stated before you begin.
Privacy
Nothing on this site requires an account, sets a cookie, or transmits anything a participant types or selects. Think Lab answers exist only in the browser tab. No analytics run on the site. Participants should never be asked to display their own feeds or messages to a room.
Going further
Groups that want something more substantial can work through the Start Here path across several sessions, or use the classroom lesson plan, which adapts to a non-school setting with minor changes.
Material selected for this audience
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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.
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Lesson
How Images Lose Their Original Context
Recontextualized photographs mislead more often than manipulated ones. Here is how it happens and how to trace an image back to its origin.
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Toolkit resource
Image Context Checklist: Tracing a Photograph
Six checks for establishing when and where a photograph was taken and what it can honestly be said to show.
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Think Lab
Spot the Missing Context
Practice identifying the specific missing piece that makes a statistic or a quotation uninterpretable.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Think Lab
Fact or Inference
Sort three statements about the same event into observation, inference, assumption, and value judgment.
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.