I f–king hate TikTok. It’s like heroin for distractable teenagers, which messes up my instructional flow, but even worse, they believe EVERYTHING they see on there. And I mean EVERYTHING. Flat Earth? Must be true. 5G chips in vaccines? Factual. Eating a tablespoon of cinnamon? Great idea. The internet can be a blessing if you know how to be a skeptical consumer of information or a curse if you just blindly accept what you see. A lot of kids fall into the latter category. I can think of some adults who ought to complete this assignment. But I digress.

We have got to help them.

Teach your students not to believe every ridiculous thing they read on the internet by debunking popular conspiracy theories AND teach them how to write a four-paragraph research essay with one easy and useful digital unit!

I wrote a research paper unit about debunking conspiracy theories that will teach them to:

• Differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources of information online.
• Produce a four-paragraph informational/research essay with an introduction, two body paragraphs, and a reflective conclusion.

I’ve done the planning and prepping so you can focus on teaching the kids not to be a bunch of wackadoos who believe anything they see on the internet!

This essay-writing unit is highly structured and comes pre-chunked into seven separate lessons with seven separate documents. Students will tackle one paragraph or task at a time, then will combine the drafts from each document into a final copy. There is color-coding to help them, as well as extensive use of prompting organizers.

Hop onto TpT and check it out. There’s a free sample and everything!

Tags: secondary ELA, informational writing, research essay, E2E, enraged2engaged, guided writing, writing template, writing organizer, graphic organizer, structured literacy, chunked essay, conspiracy theories