Exciting News from the Mental Immunity Project
Announcing the Launch of Our Lesson Plans Page
Are you an educator looking for fun and engaging ways to protect your students from misinformation? Visit our new Lesson Plans page!
Our lesson plans empower educators with comprehensive toolkits for teaching critical thinking skills in fun and engaging ways, helping students develop resistance to manipulative information in today’s complex media landscape. These lessons are designed to be engaging, informative, and practical for middle school, high school, and early college classrooms.
Each lesson focuses on a different type of misinformation, teaching students techniques of misinformers by having them use those techniques to create their own examples.1 Developed in collaboration with Thinking Is Power, each Lesson Plan is free and alterable to fit your needs. If you want to help students develop resistance to misinformation and have fun in the process, these lesson plans are for you!
The first three lesson plans, available now, are:
Horoscopes & Personality Tests
This lesson tackles a crucial first step in skepticism and critical thinking: acknowledging our own vulnerability to deception. Students will experience how fake personality assessments can fool them, demonstrating how common techniques used by psychics and astrologers—such as the Barnum effect, confirmation bias, rainbow ruse, priming, and appeal to authority—exploit our psychological vulnerabilities.
Logical Fallacies
Dive into the world of logical fallacies, where students will learn to identify and understand common errors in reasoning that can lead to misinformation and manipulation. This lesson plan provides clear examples and interactive activities to help students recognize fallacies in everyday arguments.
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories can be alluring, but this lesson plan equips students to analyze and debunk these kinds of misleading narratives. Including a fun feature of the spoof conspiracy theory “Birds Aren’t Real,” and interactive elements, students will learn how to identify conspiracy theories and approach them with a skeptical, evidence-based mindset.
Easily Modifiable and Printable Lesson Plan Materials
Each lesson plan includes at least one video and links to publicly viewable Google Documents that contain all the essentials for administering the lessons. Once opened, a lesson plan Google Doc can be easily modified by either making a copy of it (you need to be logged into a Google account to do this) or by downloading it as a Microsoft Word document (i.e., click File > Make a copy or click File > Download > Microsoft Word (.docx)). Easily print lesson plan documents by clicking File, then Print.
Why These Lesson Plans Matter
At the Mental Immunity Project, we believe that fostering a culture of critical thinking and skepticism is essential for building resilience against manipulative misinformation. Our lesson plans are not just educational tools, they’re part of a larger movement to cultivate mental immunity and empower the next generation to navigate our complex digital world.
Join Us in the Fight Against Misinformation
We invite educators, parents, and community leaders to explore our Lesson Plans page and experiment with integrating these materials into their teaching and community engagement. Together, we can build a more informed, critical, and resilient society!
Thank you for your commitment to the cause!
Together, we can make a difference.
Warm regards,
The Mental Immunity Project Team
This is called active inoculation.