How to Teach Critical Thinking in an Age of Misinformation

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone and welcome back uh really excited to introduce this session because one of our big themes that has emerged from discussions this morning is about the importance of critical thinking it's one thing to say that but in an age of misinformation or disinformation a word that was used quite heavily two days ago on this stage how do we go about preparing young people to deal with that massive information to sift the fact from the fiction so to help us explore this i'd like to welcome our chair ian anderson hey

well look good afternoon everyone i hope you've all been sustainably fed um and i don't know what this is the great the traditional graveyard shift but um hopefully there's something buzzing inside you uh to get our conversation going this afternoon so look without any more ado let's uh welcome um our fantastic panel pedro donald and zebedee come and join me on stage [Applause] great i hope you're all feeling sustainably fed and ready to go we're going to have some hopefully uh disagreement because um that's a good idea i think sometimes when you're having these debates

but but not not violent disagreement um in any way shape or form so this session critical thinking in an age of misinformation when we're kind of reading headlines today positively and negatively one of our social media platforms i'm clearly being accused i'm not even going to name it clearly being accused of spreading yet more disinformation than ever and yet the um the anti-climate change if i can put him that way blogger um that has repented for what he did to sussex university uh about a a decade ago so it's only taken him a decade to

wake up and and and uh smell the coffee if you like but he's he's done that um what we want to try and do in this session though is just explore um the level of misinformation that's going to go on we've got you know academics think tankers and um one of this country's most prominent journalists to be able to do that and and i think hopefully in terms of the dynamic in this conference um try and get to some solutions and not just talk about it but try and get to some solutions well look i'm

feeling quite hopeful i must admit um i've probably learned more about climates in the last five or six days than i've learned in the previous five or six years let's go down the panel and pedro let me kind of start with you with the sort of provocation on this youth and empowerment day um are we going backwards um really badly backwards in terms of misinformation or other reasons for hope um the the the boring answer is both but i want to formulate it in a different way today i've heard a lot of pleas for critical

thinking in this room but i'm not sure that everyone wants this because if you take the anti-vaxxers if you take the climate change deniers they do a certain form of critical thinking maybe we have even more critical thinkers now than ever and if you want people to think like you you don't want critical thinking you want followers social media but if we want to move beyond this then we have to look back to some research and then it's getting quite depressing for instance if you look at pisa everybody is talking always about rankings in pisa

but they also look on how good young people are dealing age 15 with information and then you get depressed because then we see that a lot of young people they can read but understanding what they read is a very different element and if you look at another study 2017 or 18 in the united states they look even at the best honor students of the top universities but they also are being convinced by an image rather than a source so to find a solution if you look at the old simple view on reading then it's a

multiplication it's decoding multiplied by comprehension and the most important element in this case is multiplication so if you only feed young people information if you give them background knowledge that's key but that's not enough because if it's multiplication if you leave one thing of the table then the end result is nothing the second element is something can i do an experiment really quick experiment okay i have a quick question sorry for you can i introduce to you linda linda is 32 years old studied philosophy in oxford and really likes poetry can you imagine linda yeah

now i have a simple question for you linda 30 years philosophy poetry works in a bank that's option one or option two linda two years old uh likes poetry studied philosophy works in the bank and is really really into human rights which option is the most logical one she works in a bank or she works in a bank and also is very strong on human rights who says option one not that many option two well if you look all the lindas who studied philosophy and who are informed or very fond of a poetry that this

circle and a small group works in the bank and even a smaller group is also into human rights what i just demonstrated is one of the biggest biases we have the confirmation bias i only gave you three elements but you already knew oh i know linda she never would work in a bank if she doesn't is very fond of human rights okay and that's the confirmation bias so we need besides background knowledge we need to give them the opportunity to learn the biases right i feel like we should invite linda up on the on the

panel in a minute actually to to talk to talk about that the great great uh you know are we going forwards are we going backwards on this one so i won't be a linda on this obviously however let me start maybe by putting forward the proposition first which is the question itself it's quite yes no true false so the dichotomy of choice is false from that point of view and if we're talking about critical thinking if we're talking about educators if we're talking about students we need to get the gray areas within the discussion because

i think one of the points around the environment is often couched in are you for this or are you against this so we simplify first of all that discussion uh you know do you think social media has got more of a handle on this than traditional media for example so it kind of again pits one against the other and i think that that question in itself kind of manifests what that initial problem is i won't dwell too much onto this but perhaps we can explore it further when it comes to critical thinking i think it's

really important that where educators have the power because again listening to some of the sessions this morning when we talk about critical thinking when we talk about educators i think we're looking at it we're excluding the concept of power within this and because the classroom has an essence of power it's all very well saying to young people that you have the solutions you are the agents of change when in fact we are working within the power parameters that also operate so critical thinking would be fundamental in the sense of the power that we would empower

young people as the agents of change but what will they be because it's very easy to say we're giving you the power but when people challenge you how will you interact with that right and i'm also very much for disruption so one of the things that i was kind of perhaps weighing quite heavily i'm still not quite sure i've got the equation on this but one is we talk a lot about topics both to students and young people and we have something called kind of where that power parameter uh exists so when you move from

an idea which in a democratic society so crossing the line is my middle line where you move from a democratic society in terms of encouraging people to push for change uh where you challenge power doing so protest for example and then when you cross the line it's using violence to achieve those aims becomes problematic so we then mention are some of our role models uh whether we talk about greta thundberg whether we talk about nelson mandela whether we talk about all these rosa parks they push for change but they did cross the line so within

the concept of environment within the concept of critical thinking when we equip someone with that power where where who draws those kind of power parameter shifts and what do we do with it so i'm not going to answer it yet but i feel i'm going to kind of put push that into this equation because it's important that we shift the neatness of the discussion into a lot of the grey areas and a final point that i kind of want to maybe throw out there is about agency and diversity so being a very visible asian lady

born in the uk i often feel that this debate is often couched from a power perspective of race within the global north uh put it putting forward some of those suggestions uh and actually incorporating that power we often um again uh exclude the voices and the visibility of voices of people who are also already going through the shift in environment so when we talk about diversity when we talk about young people are we putting in our own biases as educators and as teachers so are we putting in that bias from that forefront and then are

we excluding uh the voices that need to be heard because we want to contain that neatness within there so who are the role models that we are pushing and are we pushing them as well so i'm going to kind of leave those publications out no so so kind of neural diversity i definitely want to kind of come back to uh donald we're doing this conversation you know just as i said up front you know one of the biggest social media platforms is again being accused of in this conversation spreading more misinformation than ever um again

would you think we are um as editor of a uh newspaper right in the heart of the the cop city um are you feeling positive i'm feeling relatively positive there's a bit of a fudge of an answer but i think there's more agreement and alignment around established facts i think also there's greater acceptance of this spread of misinformation so you're kind of balancing both of that what worries me is i think there's still too much emotion and for me that's all about as you've talked the reinforcement of some ill-informed views and i'm concerned about the

future generations coming through are we preparing them right so that they can have an intelligent rational debate and i don't think we're doing that i think it's incredibly hard for us to do that but is there a safe space for healthy debate look at it from a newspaper point of view probably my printed letters pages are because i'm moderating that and there isn't uh we talked offstage about when you used to get crackpot letters and people criticized was always in green ink but the beauty of print was you know in the old days you had

a spike you just put it there or an email you just delete when it's online it is horrific it would be full-time job for a lot of us just to moderate that because you're criticized for holding somebody up for scrutiny so bring back to climate change when there's something said and you scrutinize it it goes against public accepted views but isn't that isn't that the commercial model of our modern media i mean it benefits a social media platform or indeed your newspaper or any newspaper you know conflict the binary choice yes or no for or

against drive traffic doesn't it yeah it depends what your goal is you know i can drive traffic by saying this is bad and this is exceptionally good particularly here and scotland will be about whether it's part of the union or independence but if your model is selling subscriptions it's about the quality of content and that quality of content means that we need to have in-depth analysis and insight and provide the public with a better understanding than i think they're getting if they just troll social media right okay so so i i promised you we would

try and get to solutions and i don't want to do that in the last five minutes pedro um how do we move to a conversation as opposed to this binary stuff um how do we do that amongst educators amongst um kind of my world donald's world the media as well too how do we get there as opposed to all this shouty you're wrong i'm right stuff well it would help if a lot of people would say i don't know as a starting point and yeah i was almost saying i don't know how to fix it

yeah but i do think when donald was saying and you were explaining that there is a business model in a lot of media with conflict luckily we have one place a lot of people have to go to that don't have to sell some subscriptions and we call it schools and that's that's a good thing people come to school and that's a very safe place hopefully it should be like people like you are working for this to have this kind of a debate but it does ask a lot of teachers but also a lot of families

and the pupils and students themselves because for instance i have a very strange rule with my students when i guide them through through a paper i tell them the first four weeks i don't want to hear your opinion and they are shocked because i explained to them first i want you to read everything about the topic and after four weeks then i want to hear your opinion because then you have the background right right zamina you were you were starting to unpack this for us so look let me give you a little bit more time

to do that how how do you think we get out of the binary cul-de-sac too so in some ways a quick answer is we don't because the sh the stands are always shifting so we will never get to that end point first of all however there are lots of practical things that can happen in terms of framing discussions and so for example how you introduce a question um quite often i think some of my initial thoughts around this topic was around making sure that when we talk about the environment and obviously there's a lot of

subsets within that we don't treat it as one we've ticked off environment in one lesson so there are many things that we should be embedding within a whole school environment within other subjects the critical thinking skills that we've talked about so you know embedding throughout that kind of that lifetime around the who what why when how when it comes to for example social media you could for example frame it in terms of where did you get that information who provided that information which platform did you get it from was it from a mainstream kind of

you know was it endorsed in different so fact checking from different sources and again recognizing the fact that where we as adults may consume news might be different from a young person's consumption of news one doesn't negate the other but it's about learning together the other thing is about understanding where your biases are and again this is something that i talked about in the morning about confirmation bias so what as an educator is your bias recognizing your bias and perhaps even introducing the question making sure sometimes there are limitations there in that question itself so

i mean look we're all used to and there's i mean there is a debate about it absolutely you know unconscious bias training in terms of gender in the workplace um what about the unconscious bias wrap around this conversation do you think there's something in that and i you know i say that on a day that you know i think just down the road the uk government has said hallelujah that it's going to bring climate into the curriculum go on pedro you're itching to come in and i'll bring donald it's all about falsification do we need

to learn to teach our students but also the rest of the world that if you have an opinion instead of trying to find elements that support you it's much healthier to look for a falsification of your idea and if we learn that well i think we can help them be resilient against misinformation and disinformation so the element of falsification is maybe more effective than teaching about you have this bias no teach them approach to be sure and just very quickly but it's also within that you then start to couch in propaganda so you talked earlier

about you know again if you view something on traditional media uh you might have the facility to kind of moderate but on social media that facility isn't there and again if your skill sets aren't there um it's not so much as a kind of this is propaganda that's put out because propaganda will view negatively but if the critical thinking skills aren't embedded within us to question you know why why has someone put that kind of piece out who is behind this and so forth then you the starting point is in there and as educators we

are members of society so you can't distance what's happening in the classroom from what's happening you absolutely can't and donald we were talking before we came on stage two about you know the fact that there are state actors the state actors acting around cop who are um adding to that level of misinformation the starting point is teaching people or giving a greater understanding of how social media works and all the powerful influences you know there are biases obviously there's a spread of misinformation disinformation different the deliberate tactics but then it goes even further you've got

experts on social media but why are they experts are they experts because lots of people piled in to say well we agree and it comes back pedro your point is it context i combine the fundamental principles of journalism the five w's who what when where and why you know i think we need to teach that so that people at school at school that's cool i love your poems just wait four weeks before you offer an opinion i think what's happening now is people are almost encouraged and by social media to have an opinion right away

than to step back and i think what really annoys me about social media is the way it taps into emotions so you can't calmly reflect on what has been told to you okay but can can it help us uh so you know um the greta effect the millions millions of young people we've seen we've seen some of these hugely impressive um uh students on this stage this morning who can with their voice reach the world can social media help us pedra yes but we have to be very much aware that we are seeing a part

of the youth um i'm very much in favor of youngsters but i also know the research and then you're in favor of young people yeah pleasure is in favor of young people this is excellent um sorry for my english sorry thank you for saving me um but the thing is if you look at research there are a lot of young people all the people who are not interested in all of this who are not taking the streets right and um actually i think it's very easy to convince the young people who are here but the

real job is convincing the others and people know in the room they're going out of the room and i think that's something overlooked if you put too much emphasis on only the young people who are doing a great job but they are activists we need to rest just having criticized or highlighted some of the shortcomings of social media it is a power for good and it can be you just need to learn to interpret it and provide context and i say that that for me is fundamentally missing and it comes right back to education right

we need to teach people how to do that properly okay so we've got a um you know there are many teachers educationalists in in this room i don't know if i can describe it as a room it is a forest of ideas uh more than anything else but are we do you know my earlier point about the uk government about to unleash this uh climate um curriculum um do we have the teaching capabilities in place to make that works a bit um anywhere around the world actually not just yeah it's not just about the uk

i think it's about the skill sets about individuals about so i think the limitation is always when you're competing against time or you feel you're competing against time to fit something in into 60 minutes and so therefore that becomes problematic which so that was my point and other people's point in terms of this has to be kind of mainstreamed into other areas so that you're not the environment you know isn't another cause that you have to subscribe to but it's your skill set which is what you're doing what do you mean by that mainstreamed into

other areas so mainstreaming it in terms of uh we don't kind of think this is about the job you know geography lessons or right this is something that if you join this society then this will happen if we in the same way that i would argue that when we talk about racism for example when we talk about deconstructing a lot of that in terms of curriculum material into history in terms of kind of other sciences in the same way if we looked at the environment in our areas of work in those diverse curriculums you're not

competing to kind of start off the discussion where you will bring in critical thinking so something along the lines it's about ownership so that we don't just see some staff members being the champions as well i'll come to you in a second bedroom donald yeah i think it's important to understand how hard working teachers are and you can build into the curriculum but we invest in enough in teachers and teaching hours and i think it also goes slightly beyond it's not all about the teachers responsibility are the schools bringing in outside speakers like the you

know to talk about these issues are they investing in that but i think the biggest problem you've maybe got is that it's about exam passing and you're judged right on your performance tables on exam results does that really show you how many well-rounded pupils that you have at the end who are capable of rational thought analyzing things maybe becoming the entrepreneurs the future who are able to provide the solutions so the league tables are driving the binary stuff i think we've made a startup here in scotland with the curriculum for excellence but in the minute

it switches into the exam years it's all about getting the results right okay we're having that i guess sorry it's a bit like saying if the infrastructure is kind of weak yeah you're competing against a weak infrastructure to kind of then create the skill sets as well right yeah pedro sorry but but sometimes we are making it too big because can i make it more practical for instance if every teacher in school when they are using a source discloses how they pick that source and just as a starting point why i pick this source why

do i trust the source and you do it as a model throughout every single class it doesn't give you a lot of extra work but it shows the pupils and it will be much more effective than one 60-minute class about critical thinking so i think that make it more practical make it more achievable by being asking the teachers to be good models showing what selections they are doing what biases they try to overcome and and again within that something we touched on earlier was about what happens so let's say we create this wonderful environment we

have the critical things embedded but when students might be demanding uh as a result of those discussions some of the changes so some of which was talked about in the earlier sessions what happens next so is it enough just to provide critical thinking skills what happens when you want some of that shift to occur within that classroom within that environment within within that infrastructure that you've also created as well yeah and how do we create that shift so let me just stay with you at the minute because i i think we're getting the general flavors

through this there are some students in the room there are some students who lean into this and there are millions who do not for for lots and lots of reasons um you know a lot down to frankly access um and opportunity so how do we widen that germ how do we make that grow across the student base i have perhaps one element of an answer so one is unless you've created the environment or a democratic kind of environment so if i can persuade you that something that i'm passionate about is you know beneficial for the

school you will start to talk passionately about something you might have student committees for example so again you're harnessing the current infrastructure that's there but again i will come back down to we let's say we create all these committees let's say that the student or the students have spoken to the governors or the teachers and yet it rests upon action so then what will happen as a result so i think some of the infrastructure is there i think it's what we then do with it so you won't win over everyone obviously we live in that

democratic society but what happens when that change is demanded so i guess i'm still pushing on that one aspect of the question as well yeah donald what um you know if we look back on this week at the these two weeks um and as i said up front i'm certainly feeling better informed i'm probably the rest of this audience is probably feeling better informed um but when you look at your readership online or in print who's tuning in who's who is interested um is it you know is it just a small part of the population

i i tried this conversation i um on the way up to cop i stopped off to do an event in northeast england and i said to someone yesterday i felt i feel more energized and more interested and more informed than ever and they just shrugged at me it literally said i've just stopped watching this stuff because because it makes me anxious because it makes me anxious when you think about your readership who's listening in well you've got to understand that every newspaper probably has a slightly different demographic that they're aiming for if it's the herald

you know we've got highly educated readership um who will be probably over 50 let's be honest online a little bit younger my readership tends to be you know a lot of them are involved in education or maybe doctors and public sector jobs i think are they listening i can see from some of the stats online we're getting good traffic and good engagement on the environment i don't think they engage when it's shouting and preaching right okay so they're turned off by the the binary stuff and that comes back to creating a safe place for healthy

debates yeah um so my readership how would they view the youth march i think it'll be mixed you know i think they'll be well there'll be some they'll say why are they not at school you know some saying it's fantastic that they're taking action and i think it's because do they fully understand all the issues and what's driving them and again this is coming down to it's ownership is on us in the media provide the proper context yeah pedro from from your point of view how do we do we widen this conversation and get get

more critical thinking there are two elements from both of you that i want to take and you know we know from research that passion can be very contagious and but there are two kinds of passion roughly a negative passion and a positive passion a negative passion that is somebody you don't want to meet in a pub because they can only talk about one thing and then young people think i don't want to be like that positive passion is somebody who has a life who has hobbies who has something else but is also very passionate we

all had teachers who got us interested in topics we never thought we would be interested in and that's the positive passion and i think that we need role models with this kind of positive passion because we've said here we have to think rational but we tried this for the past um two two or three millennia and we we remain emotional people so we can use this passion also in a good way i think i want to come to um the the room uh the forest uh hopefully a forest of hands um in a minute so

i'm gonna pose one more thought to the panel but if you've got a thought start to put your hand up and i'm going to try not to just go for the people at the front and hopefully the team can can can let me know um what role we talk about role models we've talked about people who can inspire what role um do we see again coming out of cop for young people to continue this momentum of frankly educating um older generations you know we've talked a lot about how educators can make this happen but what

role for young people in in in media um you know generating the ideas or indeed um actually coming up with the thoughts themselves to uh to drive the curriculum to drive um the the change uh that you know we the step change that we need to see pedro what i really liked for the past two years with all the climate marches by youngsters young people sorry i did it again sorry um is is most of the time they were asking questions and asking questions is a very good starting point yeah if i look to to

some of the the people who were leading the marches in my own country they said we want to listen to scientists answering these questions and i think that's a great starting point that's the beginning of critical thinking asking questions thank you oh sorry that's all right um i think it's also uh again reflecting on a lot of the young people that talk about these issues one one thing that i've learned is about climate anxiety so it's really important that we take what young people are saying to us the way and the manner in which young

people are engaging and are already engaged in a way that informs us um so that again it's about uh where if we're saying that this will impact this issue is going to impact on you 30 more than it's impacting on our generations then again how are we listening to those voices second thing is also about the complexity of the issue so when we talk about the environment which bit of the environment are we talking about the bit that they can impact on the bit that gives them that power already in that space and the bit

to ask those questions so whether that's in a public space where they're learning but they're also engaging where are those spaces so whether it's traditional media um again i think i'd be interested in learning if if you have a traditional media in the sense of the herald uh if you're saying your age demographic is you know specific from that point of view so where is it that young people have that voice to engage and kind of put forward some of those views um when something is so specific from that point of influence and complexity as

well so yeah i mean look yeah it's a great challenge where do they have that voice you know just actually just listening to the radio on the way into uh cop today this sense that you know young people really are being listened to but is it just for this moment how do we you know how many young columnists do you have um [Music] how can media kind of lift those voices in a more permanent way simple economics the future is a younger generation we need to tap into we need to have more young voices coming

through but i've also got to balance it against some of my more traditional columnists that built up a following over years but what's great about this week is you see young activists yeah being confident enough to challenge those in power you know that's a real strength in that i'm positive about that and then bring it back well young people i think more and more young people are interested in the subject and going well will i get into science shall i study it shall i try and find a solution and i think it's helped stimulate news

well they always have over time but right now they're at the heart or perceived to be at the heart of the solution for climate change yeah yeah let's go to the floor um are there any hands that we can see yeah great go on sure hi um i have a question that kind of ties in what you were talking about with your readership how it tends to be more academic um maybe they have you know a higher level of schooling and then also tying in those that are really the youth activists that are involved tend

to be kind of from that demographic typically maybe a more privileged background maybe have the resources in time to kind of start their own organizations or the time to really get involved in the climate activist space so my question is especially when it comes to using media as a tool of education how do you go about including students from low-income backgrounds or students from more disadvantaged backgrounds um in climate education right let's get it submitted first i mean you know you you you talked about democratizing this conversation that's the democratizing question what do you think

i guess it's a bit i mean it's no different that question uh it's a very difficult question to grapple with but it's not different from when we talk about representation in politics it's no different from uh the fact and the reality uh the the environment impacts on us all and yet the spaces that we've already created the infrastructure that's there excludes a lot of those people who may might not have uh who might not be involved because you know those forums exclude whether purpose or by design so i think it's about what we would normally

say which is go out and find these people to then encourage because quite often we use the word hard to reach but actually they're not hard to reach it's just the fact that we don't know how to reach them so i think that's the starting point for me it's it's our fault and our problem in terms of how we create and recreate those same problems or pedro education models don't want to reach them for lots of reasons quite often we do want to reach them but those schools are or the children who are in those

schools quite often well there is a lot of people coming in and out as a teacher there's a lot of issues with retention of teachers and to have role models for a longer time you need teachers for a longer time so i think investing in schools so that good teachers stick there with more challenging conditions i know this could be a starting point for a lot of issues not only for climate change yeah so this is more fundamental stuff yeah donald your your view on this one well just bringing it back to the point i

think we are now getting more people from different demographics and younger intermediary than we ever did before because quite frankly they are the social media experts and people like me are regarded as dinosaurs you know i might have them you know a nice iphone but they know how to use it to to reach a wider audience so we're tapping into them the biggest danger we've probably got is that some of the youngsters come through are still are emotional and passionate about things and want to report on that whereas our model is more about objectivity so

it's just harnessing the two together but i think there are greater opportunities to get involved look um i would love to continue this conversation a bit longer but the the clock is ticking in every sense directly um in front of me i hope you have i hope you've been sustainably fed in terms of your minds uh in this conversation i've hugely enjoyed it and i hope we haven't been too jurassic in terms of our uh thinking in this wonderful space it's been it's been an absolute pleasure uh to cheer uh donald zubida and pedro and

can you i ask you to join me in thanking them thanks can guys give me a hug upside down