Fighting Fake News: Teaching Students to Identify and Interrogate Information Pollution

Critical thinking and online reading need to go hand in hand―but they often don’t. Students click, swipe, and believe because they don’t know how to do otherwise. At times, so do we. And that’s a problem. Fighting Fake News combats this challenge by helping you model how to read, myth-bust, truth-test, and respond in ways that lead to wisdom rather than reactivity.

No matter what content you teach, the lessons showcased here provide engaging, collaborative reading and discussion experiences so students can:

• Notice how teacher and peers read digital content, to be mindful of how various reading pathways influence perception
• Identify the author background, the website sponsor, and other evidence that help set a piece in context
• Stress-test the facts by evaluating news sources, reading laterally, and other critical reading strategies
• Use "Reader’s Rules of Notice" to learn to identify common rhetorical devices used to influence the reader
• Be aware of how for-profit social media platforms feed on our responses to narrow rather than widen our reading landscape

We are still in the wild west era of the digital age, scrambling to impart a safer, ethical framework for evaluating information. Thankfully, it distills to one mission: teach students (and ourselves) how to think critically, and we will forever have the tools to fight fake news.

A classroom teacher for fifteen years, Jeffrey D. Wilhelm is currently Professor of English Education at Boise State University. He works in local schools as part of a Virtual Professional Development Site Network sponsored by the Boise State Writing Project, and regularly teaches middle and high school students. Jeff is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State Writing Project.

Michael W. Smith, a professor in Temple University′s College of Education, joined the ranks of college teachers after eleven years of teaching high school English. His research focuses on understanding both how adolescents and adults engage with texts outside school and how teachers can use those understandings to devise more motivating and effective instruction inside schools.

Hugh Kesson trained as a high school teacher in London and has since worked in a variety of educational roles and settings in the UK, US, and Australia. He earned his PhD at Temple University’s College of Education where his doctoral work investigated the influences of digital technologies on reading and reading instruction. Hugh′s writing has appeared in English Teaching: Practice & Critique. 

Deborah Appleman is Professor of Educational Studies and Director of the Summer Writing Program at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her primary interests include adolescent response to literature, multicultural literature, and the teaching of literary theory to high school students. A high school English teacher for nine years, Deborah works weekly in urban and suburban high schools.