My best citizenship lesson: faking news and sparking riots for digital natives

Teacher Emma Chandler shares her tips on how to make reactionary students question what they read in the media

Using a fabricated news story based on the 2011 London riots sparked debate and action among Emma Chandler's citizenship pupils. Photograph: William Bloomfield/Rex Feature

Branding our young people as "digital natives" is as dangerous a label as any other in the classroom. Not only can it lead to assumptions that they have a natural talent to extract and interpret information simply because it arrives in a format they find engaging, but it can also foster a general acceptance of the idea that we need not plan as rigorously, that the students will teach us. This is just one argument for digital citizenship being the next priority in curriculum development.

Digital citizenship should equip students with the skills to question what they read and hear across the media. They should be taught to make informed choices and take positive actions for themselves. At a time when trending can be conflated with truth, this is a role that citizenship education must fill.

This lesson, from a scheme of work that focuses on campaigns, aims to help students understand the role of the media in forming opinions both personally and across society. When I share this lesson with colleagues it starts with the sentence, "I once let a class start a riot".

The class in question was a year 9 tutor group who had two lessons a week – Thursday and Friday. It's important to point out that this was a very reactionary class: they used Twitter to keep up to date with events in the world but never questioned their sources, frequently believing one celebrity or another had died or that well-known brands that were currently free were soon to start charging. They were constantly in uproar about something. This went locally too; they would often come into class claiming that a teacher was leaving or that they were about to be put in shirts and ties. As their citizenship teacher, I was constantly at pains to make them question before leaping into action.

So this lesson began with a fabricated news story. In this instance, it was a post-riots moral panic article that suggested that Oyster cards were to blame for the London riots as they enabled rioters to mobilise so quickly.

The story can be anything – in the past I have used stories claiming to ban mobile phones or the introduction of a curfew. The main thing is that the idea behind the story stands up to some initial scrutiny – it needs to have some basis in reality otherwise students will see straight through it.

In this particular lesson, students arrived to see the news story on the interactive whiteboard (IWB) and were asked to respond in pairs with a simple agree or disagree statement. During this discussion, I gave some students a reaction quote from David Cameron. Most of these actually went unread for the first five minutes of discussion because the class were so outraged about the blaming of the free travel for the riots.

Views were collected on post-its and placed on the board, arranged in an order going from agree to disagree. The question at this stage was simply how much we agreed with the story. When students showed a deeper questioning, I gave them a different coloured post-it and asked them to write down their question and stick it on another board.

Once it was established that very few students agreed with what they were seeing, I asked them to gather into groups to ask the 5 Ws:

• Who does this effect?
• What do we want to do next?
• Why is this important?
• Where can we find more information?
• When did the event occur?

During this phase, I put the reaction quote and a picture of David Cameron on the IWB. The quote outlined that the prime minister would be keen to restrict the use of the free Oyster cards to only during school hours as a way to reduce anti-social behaviour in our capital city.

The 5 Ws were revisited very quickly but this time they didn't get past the 'what'. What did they want to do about it? They were incensed at the idea that they would feel the effects of a policy designed to stop a problem that, for them, had long since ceased to be an issue. They wanted to take action and they wanted to do it now. We had previously used Twitter to share our work and they demanded now that we tell the prime minister they would riot if he tried to take their travel away – they would take him to theEuropean Court of Human Rights.

They very quickly made links to the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child and demanded I enable them. It was my responsibility they said: "You're our wellbeing teacher, how can you let them do this?" So I asked them, "what next?" "We want to riot," they said.

Every citizenship teacher knows the feeling of dread when informed and responsible action disappears from the minds of their students only to be replaced with words taken from the Human Rights Act. For this reason I always have a very large poster of Spider-man reminding us what comes with great power.

So there we were. In the middle of democracy in action. The class had voted on what they wanted to do next and they wanted to riot. They designed banners and logos, wrote chants and stood up for what they believed in. Except no one had asked that question "are we sure?" yet.

I took the different coloured post-its that students had stuck on the separate whiteboard and gently suggested to those who had come up with the idea that they might want to bring these up with their group. The results were mixed: one group listened but quickly realised that they wouldn't be able to take action or get angry if things weren't as they seemed; other groups just shouted down the idea or ignored it.

I was very careful to ensure that these students were aware I was listening and thought their questions valid and interesting. In a rights-respecting classroom it is vital that every child is heard, but this is even more important when you take a risk such as this. It would be very easy for students to learn the lesson of not speaking out again. When the lesson was over those pupils who had questioned the others were rewarded for their bravery as the single voice of reason or opposition with extra positive points for the whole class.

I find a positive to negative points recorder works really well in lessons like these to signpost what I think is working and what I think could be improved on. For this lesson, the mood was very positive – even when students weren't being listened to they were being heard and respected so it was easy to award positive points. I recall only having to record two negatives, both relating to running out of time.

To get to the final stage, I set them a research task. I gave the students one laptop per group to find out more about the story. Using the 5 Ws once again, each group set about exploring what others thought about the proposed ban of free travel for all under 18s in the UK.

It only took a few minutes for the story to unravel. They could only find the first story by using specific search terms and of course no one could find the quote from the David Cameron. A small but determined group kept digging but nothing came up. Eventually I had to reveal that tomorrow a Google search would only show everything that had happened in class today. And that's when the light bulb went off: it was a completely organic moment involving all 25 students who realised they had been duped.

The lesson was tailored for a class that I had teased and reprimanded in equal measure for months over their complete acceptance of everything they read online – and it worked. It makes it into my, albeit small, best lesson catalogue purely for the outcome alone – there are 25 students in south east London that now have a healthy distrust of all primary sources until they can be proven trustworthy. That's 25 young people that question and demand answers from anyone suggesting change that affects the way we live or, better yet, reporting that this is the case. They openly question those sources and share this knowledge with others.

As with all good lessons, they taught me something too. I hadn't planned the section with the different coloured post-its; I remember at the time wanting to tactically ignore the questions lest they bring down my house of cards. But I am glad I didn't. During my lesson reflection, many students expressed regret at not having listened to their group member who had written what we were calling the hang-on-a-minute questions. As far as unexpected outcomes go, increasing empathy and understanding for those with views different to your own is about as good as it gets.