A Community Discussion Guide for Evaluating Claims

Who this is for

A facilitator running a single ninety-minute session with eight to twenty-five people, in a library meeting room, a congregation hall, a community centre, or a staff room. No subject-matter expertise is required. Everything you need is in this guide.

What the session is and is not

The session teaches a procedure for evaluating a claim. It does not adjudicate any particular claim, and the facilitator should say so at the start and mean it.

This is not a rhetorical device. A session that arrives at a verdict teaches participants that the point is to reach the right answer, and the ones who arrived holding a different view will conclude, correctly, that they were the target.

Before the session

Choose one claim. It should be checkable, currently circulating, and not tied to a live local dispute. Health, consumer, and local-service claims work better than political ones for a first session. Verify it fully yourself beforehand, including whichever way it resolves.

Print materials. One copy per participant of the source evaluation worksheet and the seven-questions checklist.

Check the room. Seating in small groups of three or four, not rows. Participants talk to each other far more in this configuration, and the session depends on it.

Session plan

0 to 10 minutes: Open with the mechanism

Explain that false content spreads mainly through ordinary people sharing, not primarily through automated accounts. Vosoughi and colleagues, analysing about 126,000 cascades shared by roughly 3 million people, found false stories spread further and faster than true ones, and reported that this difference persisted when automated accounts were removed from the analysis [2].

Say plainly why you are opening this way: the mechanism runs through decisions the people in the room make, which is what makes the session worth ninety minutes.

Set two ground rules. First, we are evaluating claims, not people. Second, “I do not know” is a complete answer and will not be treated as a failure.

10 to 25 minutes: Round one, what does it claim

Put the claim on the wall. In groups of three, participants write it in one precise sentence.

Take two or three versions from the room. They will differ, often substantially, and that is the teaching point: people were arguing about a claim they had not stated the same way.

25 to 50 minutes: Round two, where did it come from

Introduce lateral reading in two minutes: leave the page, search the publisher, find what independent sources say. This procedure is what distinguished professional fact checkers from other skilled readers in Wineburg and McGrew’s comparison, and it is faster as well as more accurate [1].

Groups spend fifteen minutes with the worksheet and a phone or laptop. Circulate. Do not answer questions about whether the claim is true; answer questions about how to search.

Reconvene for eight minutes. Ask each group for field five only, what they still do not know. This keeps the room away from verdicts and shows how much remains open after real effort.

50 to 70 minutes: Round three, what would change your mind

Ask each participant to write, privately, one observation that would change their view of the claim.

Then discuss in groups: is that observation obtainable? By whom? This converts a disagreement into a task, and it is the part participants most often report using afterwards.

70 to 85 minutes: The takeaway

Hand out the seven-questions checklist. Walk through it in five minutes, explicitly connecting each question to something the group did in the session.

Give it out at this point rather than at the start. Participants who have done the work read it as a summary of something they did.

85 to 90 minutes: Close

Say what the session cannot do: one session is a start, and the habits need repetition. Name the next opportunity if there is one.

When it turns adversarial

Two participants argue about the underlying issue. Return to the procedure: “Which step are you disagreeing at? Is it what the claim says, where it came from, or what it would take to settle it?” Almost every heated exchange resolves into one of the three, and naming it lowers the temperature.

Someone treats the session as an attack on their views. Acknowledge it directly and without defensiveness. Say that the method applies to every claim including ones you personally believe, and offer to run it on a claim they choose in round three.

The room converges too quickly. Rapid agreement usually means the group has selected a claim nobody held. Ask what someone who believed it would say, and take that seriously.

Measuring something

Before round one and after round three, ask participants to classify six short headlines as likely reliable or likely unreliable. Three of each, prepared in advance. Collect the sheets.

This takes five minutes total and gives your organization its own evidence about its own population, which no published study can provide for you.

Adaptations

Youth groups. Shorten to sixty minutes by compressing round two to ten minutes. Use claims from platforms the group actually uses.

Faith communities. Choose a consumer or health claim rather than anything adjacent to doctrine, and say at the start that the session concerns method, not belief.

Staff training. Use an internal claim the organization has had to assess. Round three becomes a real action list.

Version and reuse

Version 1.1, reviewed August 2026. Reuse terms are described on the Terms of Use page.

Facilitator notes

Written for facilitators without a background in media literacy. Requires no preparation beyond reading the guide and choosing one claim.

References

Numbered citations in the text above correspond to the entries below.

1. Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), 1-40. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/016146811912101102
2. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559

Next step

Read the evidence review behind this design

Topics covered: Community PracticeMedia LiteracyCritical Thinking