How To Give Students The Edge On Misinformation

Honestly, it’s a challenge. How can I bring up my daughters in a time of rabid polarisation, anxiety and inane chatter?

As a parent, I know I’ll do everything I can to provide all that I can and I know I’m fortunate to share burdens with a terrific spouse, so I keep my head up and keep going. As a teacher, I consider the students in front of me and try hard to build on their skills. Sure, I could be the only teacher that day who asks them a question they’ve got a fighting chance of learning from, but chances are that I won’t change their life in the 25 seconds we use to focus on my question.

So I need to play the longer game. Developing a culture of questioning in a nurturing environment (without being scary) is challenging and takes us in the direction the scheme of work demands. In the end, it’s all about critical thinking – for both me and my students – and if I can get that right then we should be in safe hands.

Critical thinking is always relevant

We navigate our everyday lives with the tools of critical thinking, so it’s not too hard to contextualise this for students. When we move through a crowd and anticipate how it’s going to move in turn, we alternate between autopilot and Formula One-style reflexes that make split-second decisions for us.

Choosing the till in a supermarket can include the squinty-eyed forecasting of possibilities: what if that younger till worker scans everything really quickly? Does that elderly man appear to be a highly experienced shopper and will he zip through this process? Yes? Go behind him, quick! And so we apply those questions that help us delve deeper into the questions at hand and hope we made the right decision. But how do we get students to think critically in the classroom?

We can use a variety of techniques to enable students to garner depth and breadth from their learning. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a tool for structured thinking, where each hat represents a different perspective. The white hat focuses on facts, red on emotions, black on risks, yellow on benefits, green on creativity and blue on organisation. It helps in discussions, problem-solving and decision-making by encouraging students to consider multiple viewpoints systematically.

Students need to take on the hat’s perspective (I have done this literally with classes, where students use strips of paper for a headband and a little front piece stapled onto the band to signify the type of hat, so others can reference what role they have. During and after the discussion we can then suggest who in the real world might have been symbolised by each hat). It’s a rewarding activity that can give students a lot to consider when writing longer pieces on points of view, opinions and analyses of issues.

If you need a shorter version, then just draw a few stick people (there are six in de Bono’s version) on the board and give them little descriptions (e.g. ‘wants facts only’ or ‘wants to know the risks’) and elicit responses. Otherwise, we can posit an idea (e.g. ‘make smartphone use illegal before the age of 16’) and then consider responses from well-known people such as Elon Musk, Sir Kier Starmer, King Charles III, Lionel Messi or Nigel Farage.

Ah, here we go: what is the role of mobile phones here? Should students be able to differentiate between Musk’s controversial actions and whatever he ‘really meant’? How would anyone?

The prevalence of misinformation

We identified consumption of social media posts from Reform UK by members of Year 8 here at St Peter’s when, just ahead of the 2024 UK general election, I ran a tutor enrichment session and a mock election. Year 8 were the only group to elect Reform UK and TikTok was named as their main influence (multiple Year 8 students said they couldn’t name any other politician other than Farage). The other year groups consistently mentioned Labour and Conservatives were rarely considered.

We know that with the rise of the far right comes polarisation, popularism and a clear and present danger: people who blindly consume information without thinking about it are at risk of being lied to. If the aim of lying to people is to control them, then surely controlling information is one of the first steps. This was my reaction to the news that Facebook and X were to move away from moderators and embrace community moderation.

Now, to use my own skills of critical thinking, I headed to Reddit and examined how subs and communities there took on misinformation. I found some vibrant spaces filled with expert opinions that were verified by links or other users but I certainly found echo chambers in full swing; mods banning users every few minutes in response to hurt feelings on posts about Trump help users remember that a curated community can be full of censorship too.

The r/Conservative sub on Reddit is eye-opening – sometimes eye-watering, too – and really worth visiting to see other points of view. The X alternative BlueSky has enjoyed record numbers of new members since the election of the 45^th President of the USA, with users praising the friendliness of interactions and how similar it is to (very) early Twitter.

Keeping pace with change

The National Curriculum for Citizenship needs to catch up. I expect we could cover misinformation at Key Stage 3 when examining ‘the precious liberties enjoyed by the citizens of the United Kingdom’ and at Key Stage 4 when examining ‘the different ways in which a citizen can contribute to the improvement of his or her community, to include the opportunity to participate actively in community volunteering as well as other forms of responsible activity’.

People spreading hate messages via Telegram or Musk encouraging the far-right fits into these conversations nicely. Developing critical thinking skills around this topic is essential if we are to enable students to thrive.

I reached out to Nancy, Head of English at St Peter’s –and a longstanding English teacher who is an expert on spin and images selected to back certain viewpoints – to get a take on misinformation and how she views the context of this issue. We readily agreed that this is not a new thing.

One very clear point of hers was that our skills are being challenged by misinformation and we need to ‘respond by training students to be better listeners: to be mindful of what’s going on and to get students practising the skill of listening’. In her experience, talking and listening to each other is a vital skill, but one that’s now eroded by smartphones, readily available entertainment and a lower attention span.

Nancy wants to ’empower students to manage their world’, which came up as we discussed the idea that people aren’t allowed to get bored any more. Notifications, updates on orders, news alerts, texts, algorithms suggesting enticing things that are ‘only’ two and a half minutes long, all married to unstoppable psychological levers being pulled that cause us to react whether we knowingly want to or not, make her point for her.

Distractions everywhere

‘Social media and the availability of 24-hour so-called news is an issue,’ according to Nancy, ‘but it’s not insurmountable. It’s an acute issue that we can react to.’ She said she went into teaching hoping to teach children to not take what they read at face value but now the fight to grab our attention is part of the danger.

I asked for her evidence of this and she said: ‘I get more children recently who look like they’re listening and are very quiet but who, when I’ve stopped and it’s time for a response, go “What?” In the last couple of years, it seems there’s more of that. There are too many distractions from such a young age. I was watching some kids in a queue at Warwick Castle last year who were just scrolling – some in prams – and I thought ‘In the old days, kids would be up and down that hill, larking about and now no one’s allowed to open their mind and just… be.’

I added to this as I bemoaned seeing children in pubs and restaurants plugged into iPads (obligatory battery also in attendance just in case the device ran out of babysitting power). I feel it’s almost becoming a trope, but teachers have reported, for years now, the challenges of lower and lower attention spans and a desperate need to work with harder-to-engage children.

Taking this further, we considered that schools have a part to play where we can train students – as we do for exams –to build the skills they need for mindfulness. Listening, concentrating and taking things in just aren’t what they used to be and there are so many distractions. We agreed that when kids get bored they get creative, which draws in empathy and challenges the modern but superficial diet of news and updates.

Rachel, another teacher at St Peter’s and who grew up in Zimbabwe, got involved. She said where she grew up, children grew up listening to survive. The stakes were high; people might change their outward behaviour to fit in and avoid attention while saying and doing other things in private.

Nancy also lived in Africa for a time and she recalled how mums used to hold babies in their lap and talk to them for hours, unburdened by TVs and other distractions. But changes in the last 15 years or so mean that we now get multimedia packages delivered to our devices for us to race through – and all the while we’re training the deliverers how to hook us for longer. It’s a heady thought.

How far have attention spans shrunk?

Other evidence for what Nancy has observed includes a 2022 study from King’s College London on attention spans. The article ‘Do we have your attention? How people focus and live in the modern information environment’ explores how modern technology affects attention spans. It identifies a simplified trend of children’s ability falling from being able to generally focus on a task for 12-15 minutes in the 2000s to 5-8 minutes in the 2020s.

Most teachers use a starter or ‘bell’ activity to engage students from their first moment in the classroom. Without this, pupils’ attentions get focused on distractions and it can be hard to bring them on-task. At the extreme, pupils need activities to be broken down into stepped guides with reminders or lists printed and put on desks.

Perhaps this relates to an increase in the demand for the diagnosis of ADHD in younger people (there is now ‘unprecedented’ demand for ADHD and autism testing through the NHS, according to a British Medical Journal article by K Lang in 2024). The rise of smartphones, social media, short-form content such as YouTube and constant stimulation from even shorter content such as TikTok seems to correlate. For adults, the decline is similar: 12-20 minutes in the 2000s; 8-12 minutes in the 2010s and 3-8 minutes in the 2020s.

It’s not as simple as I’ve suggested; structured settings such as reading a book or watching a film are positive exceptions to the above. The report goes into excellent detail and is worth reading for any teacher. I enjoyed reading about the key factors that may well have contributed to these changes, which are not limited to TikTok!

I think ‘technology overload’ is a good term as it doesn’t place the blame on the user, particularly because users are disadvantaged by the robust use of psychology behind the interface. We can’t help ourselves because we’re hard-wired to get sucked into such engaging content that is individualised to us.

Addressing engagement in the classroom

Teachers can enable good progress by working with this to create engaging lessons. Breaking up longer tasks by using checkpoints (‘by half-past we’ll have mastered this’), countdown timers, mini-challenges like ‘beat the teacher’ and clear measures of progress every five minutes will help students to feel a sense of progress. Reducing cognitive load by providing printed scaffolded tasks helps pupils with lower literacy levels, potentially providing model responses for later tasks for all pupils too.

Teaching in smaller groups makes it easier to help students link content to their everyday lives or hobbies. Considering alternative ways for students to demonstrate their understanding, such as mind maps, bullet points or even recording audio responses can be highly engaging. Short film clips followed by some movement (such as an opinion line where students line up to show their opinion on a statement) can break up tasks well.

Adapting to the modern world

Adults may feel they’re winning by juggling shared calendars, WhatsApp groups and curating our own content, but in reality, we’re all chaining ourselves to more and more drains on our attention.

The King’s College report highlights an increase in stress and fatigue, with the demands of modern life making sustained concentration harder. I think that leads to people taking ‘just a few minutes’ out to go onto social media, which then turns into half an hour (I’m definitely not talking from experience, honest). This in turn links to other researchers like Gloria Mark, who suggests that our attention isn’t necessarily shrinking but rather being fragmented due to constant digital interruptions.

It’s clear to me that critical thinking is an essential part of modern living. It’s not new, of course, and it could be technology overload (and even that’s not new – listen to ‘Nobody Home’ by Pink Floyd and empathise with the line ‘I’ve got 14 channels of shit on the TV to choose from’) but teachers need to understand what’s happening. Children can be trained to think critically and I think they should be, certainly in order to get the most out of their own education and lived experiences.

Together, I think my family will do well to keep on talking. We’ll help each other to navigate life’s complexities and collaborate. I don’t want to leave that sort of thing to TikTok.

Martin Ridley is Head of Citizenship and International Coordinator at St Peter’s Catholic School in Bournemouth.