On Jan. 6 two years ago, students in social studies teacher Anne-Michele Boyle’s virtual class urged her to turn on the news.

Boyle had been teaching at Whitney Young Magnet High School for 15 years. She’d created the school’s Global Citizenship class. But after watching the live footage of the U.S. Capitol insurrection in disbelief, Boyle found herself rethinking her approach to the class.

She scrapped her lesson plans for February and spent the entire month focused on media literacy. Among her goals: to help her juniors and seniors discern fact from fiction, identify credible sources of news, and spot misleading information. Before Jan. 6, 2021, she had devoted two days or less of her course to media literacy. Since then, she has dedicated a full five weeks to critically examining this era’s barrage of misinformation, comparing it to quality journalism and news posted on TikTok. Using Boyle’s lessons, her students have been able to talk family members and friends out of spreading conspiracy theories on- and offline.

This past fall, a first-of-its-kind Illinois law requiring all high schools to teach students about media literacy went into effect. Groups such as the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition — a collective of educators, librarians, academics, and others — rallied to help schools with the rollout of the law, which gives educators a lot of flexibility about what and how much to teach and includes no resources for professional development.

Chalkbeat spoke with Boyle about finding resources for teaching the topic and making it relevant to students.

Read the full article about media literacy by Mila Koumpilova at Chalkbeat .