Teachers have long understood that students come into our classrooms with great challenges before them. They enter naive, and often willing to accept whatever is told to them as truth. They also enter filled with acceptance, yet at the same time must battle the world around them and the hatred they see and experience every day. We teachers have to work hard to make a difference. To turn the tide in those individual lives. To teach truth and kindness.
With so much swirling in the news lately about these exact issues, I have teamed up with other teachers from TeachersPayTeachers tasked to create resources to help students learn the important lessons. We’ve also pledged to make these new resources FREE FOREVER!
My TpT Store is filled with mostly Social Studies resources for grade 6-12. In tackling this project, I wanted to stay true to my store followers and to create a resource that would be valuable for their students. That brought me to the idea of creating a Experiential Exercise Walking Tour on Checking for Reliability.
In most secondary classes, we deal with two types of students when it comes to verifying information. We have those who accept everything we present as absolute truth and we have those who don’t care about the information we present, making them even more gullible for misinformation.
My resource will lead students to accept misinformation, helping them to experience being duped, and allowing them to better grasp the importance of checking for reliability in anything they do. Hopefully this lesson will go beyond the classroom, and students will learn the significance in checking for accuracy in everything they live and do in the world.
What is an Experiential Exercise?
An Experiential Exercise is a class activity with a lesson built into the tasks students will complete. By living the lesson, student gain a better understanding of how that same lesson would apply historically. These lessons can be very powerful for students, leaving them feeling both broken down and then empowered in the same day. That emotion and buy in makes the lesson much more powerful than any other you can do in the classroom.
What is a Walking Tour?
A Walking Tour is a powerful strategy for the secondary classroom. It allows students to walk around the classroom as they learn and gather significant event on a period in history or a topic of study. Students are provided varied resources, allowing them to better see, feel, hear, and read the information at hand. This type of strategy also appeals to all learning types, helping to draw interest into the learning process and better students engagement from all.
An Experiential Exercise Walking Tour on Checking for Reliability
This particular activity asks students to gather information on the creation and use of the Internet. One tour group will find accurate information, while the other will collect misinformation. When students must collaborate to discuss their findings, they will encounter completely different “facts” from each side. Students will then be able to return to the tours to investigate further, examining and practicing some tools for checking source reliability. Classroom discussion should follow, where guiding questions can help students to understand the importance of checking for truth in everything they read, see, hear, and experience in the modern world.
I hope you will find great value in this lesson resource as we are all challenged with teaching our students to find the truth in our world and exhibit the kindness they should to make that world a better place.
Thank you to Desktop Learning Adventures and The ELA Buffet for sponsoring this resource hop!
Also a great thanks to Rachel Lynette and Minds In Bloom for organizing this resource project!
And please link through to find other great freebies for teaching truth and kindness in the secondary classroom.