Teaching critical thinking

One of the main concerns of teachers is to teach students critical thinking. To do so, teachers should create and monitor media projects in the classroom. One of these projects could be to have students create a news channel and deliver the news to the rest of the classroom. In this project, students would be responsible for gathering information, deciding what to film and what topics to discard and finally filming this as if it were a news channel. I think that having students make a media project would develop their critical thinking and allow them to rethink about the role of media in our society. In this project, students would have to analyse the information and decide critically what to film and what to dismiss.

In our society, media controls what we see and hear. When we turn on the news, the content that we see has been viewed and revised. There are many topics and information that are not aired because they are “not suitable” or “unimportant” or because of any other reason. A good example of this would be the real story of 2 reporters that refused to lie to the public, after unravelling a story that would have endangered an important corporation. I have written about this story before, so I will not go into more details, but I will give you the link once more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AL4yml3bw.

After this project, the teacher could show this short video and ask the students what they think of this false representation in order to start a class discussion. Moreover, the teacher could also have the students research more on this subject and reproduce the story that the reporters in the video were not able to show the public. By having the students analyse and produce a news channel, they would have to think critically about every story as well as how to present it to their classmates.