Teaching Lateral Reading
Hands down, lateral reading is my FAVORITE strategy for evaluating sources. It's concise, it's super practical, and it's accurate. It can be used for websites AND social media sources. It's also the strategy endorsed by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) in their Online Civic Reasoning framework. Here's a link to their collection of lessons for teaching lateral reading . There's also a Crash Course video on YouTube introducing the skill. To apply lateral reading, you Google the name of a source, then look at the results to see what OTHER sources have to say about your original source. It's called lateral reading because, instead of reading vertically (scrolling down the original website), you open new tabs in your browser to see what other sources say (reading laterally across your browser). Once you spend some time with lateral reading, it becomes a really organic process, but I've found that students need distinct steps when they're fir...