Toolkit Library/

Truth matters: teaching young students to search for the most reasonable answer

One way to search for the truth is to engage in dialogue with others, seeking to understand different perspectives and beliefs. Students need to be taught how to engage in these types of productive dialogues, what the researchers in this Phi Delta Kappan article call “inquiry dialogue.” They describe how they partnered with elementary school teachers to develop specific tools and strategies that educators can use to foster collaborative and rigorous argumentation, which “is a reliable, albeit imperfect, means of searching for truth.”

   Article

   30 minutes

   By: Alina Reznitskaya and Ian A.G. Wilkinson, Phi Delta Kappan

   Educator-prep | K-12 educators


Making connections:

Principled Innovation asks us to work with others and recognize the limits of our own knowledge so that we can better understand and tackle the complex issues our communities face.

More on this topic:

Why we believe obvious untruths

  Article

  10 minutes

  By: New York Times, Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman

The five whys

  Tool

  15 minutes

  By: IDEO

Icebreakers

  Tool

  15 minutes

  By: University of Florida

Mindful reflection as a process for developing culturally responsive processes

  Article

  20 minutes

  By: Barbara Dray, Debora Wisneski

Why do we believe things that aren’t true?

  Video

  16 minutes

  By: Philip Fernbach, TEDx

Access our collection of +200 learning materials

PI toolkit library