As teachers we are constantly in a pattern of assessing what our students know, reflecting on what we need to do next, and responding by teaching to fill in the missing pieces.
While listening to my students' presentations on human rights violations, and reading their persuasive essays, I realized that I had missed an opportunity to teach my students some valuable skills.
Let me set the stage. Last year a few of my students attended the Me to We conference. There they learned about child labour, sweatshops, and that kids like them can help to initiate positive change. These students were knowledgeable and passionate about bringing awareness to these issues and being part of a solution. As a result, their project was on Fair Trade and they implored people to look for these products when they shopped. Sounds great, right? Well it was until they started to inform the class that Nike, The Gap, Old Navy, and many other local stores employed people in sweatshops and payed them a pittance. I asked them what their source of information was and they responded the internet. Well I have no idea whether these retails stores do in-fact employ child laborers in sweatshops, but that's not the point. The point is, at that moment I realized that I never taught them the skills needed to assess the reliability of a source.
I should have taught my students about bias, currency of information, reputation of the author, experience of the author, how to look at accuracy, relevancy, and to assess how convincing the information is. As well, I should have taught them about expertise, reputation, and corroboration. Fortunately I found three lessons to help. They are from the Tools for Thought collection at TC2. Not to keep harping about this resource, but it is a goldmine. Assessing the Evidence, Credibility of Sources, and Assessing Website Credibility are the three lessons I've selected to use over the next few weeks before we get into our next research project.
I had also noticed that the students wanted to go to the internet and type in their inquiry question. This may have worked well 10 years ago, but now Google is so full of junk websites that it's impossible to wade through efficiently. My students really don't see the wealth of information at their fingertips through the library. Our school backs the public library, so we're able to walk there whenever we want, but at this point, the kids wouldn't see why we would. With the support of our teacher librarian, we hope to change their minds. She wants to show them how to search for material in our library, the power of the encyclopedia, and the ease of finding good information in books. I've also been to the public library to pick up applications for the students. The library will process the applications before our visit, and I'm hoping that parents allow me to keep the small key-tag library card at the school for each student. This would allow students to look on the public library data-base and request books to the branch across the park. They will also be able to use their library card to look at online media like newspapers and magazines. When we're done showing them what's possible, I hope that they start to see "googling" as a last resort.
Giving them the tools needed to critically judge whether something they read is reliable, biased, opinion, or a hoax is exciting. It's teaching them HOW to think and not WHAT to think. I can also incorporate things like CBC's This is That, The Onion, and Adbusters. Using spoof news articles like the one from CBC's This is That about Texas adding sugar to their drinking water would be a fun way to put our new thinking skills to the test. After building these skills, we can even make our own spoof articles or advertizements. With such serious subject material, one must not forget the power of creativity.
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