ILLUSTRATION BY VIKTOR KOEN - in an Era of Fake News - BY WILL COLGLAZIER

Oct 15, 2026

A high school U.S. history teacher argues for civic responsibility in teaching democratic ideals and emphasizes explicit instruction in argumentation. Motivated by questions about “how you know what you know,” he explains adopting inquiry-based methods inspired by Sam Wineburg, replacing memorization with evidence evaluation. He describes student difficulty distinguishing reliable from suspect online sources, then recounts curriculum redesign and classroom practice using a deceptive minimum-wage article to expose fake news tactics.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages2

Reading Time3 min

AccessFree to download

Teaching democratic ideals

Argumentation and evidence

Inquiry-based history instruction

Learning from Wineburg’s investigations

Curriculum redesign for online fact-checking

Minimum-wage source exercise

ILLUSTRAT ION BY VIKTOR KOEN in an Era of Fake News BY WILL COLGLAZIER Against the backdrop of our country’s current political climate, I sometimes wonder if I’m doing my job as a high school history teacher to the best of my ability. I don’t see my role as simply covering what’sin the textbook or helping students analyze current events. Rather, I believe it’s my professional responsibility—my civic duty—to teach students the democratic ideals necessary for an enlightened citizenry. This statement may sound dramatic, but it’s something that has often come to mind since I saw the play Hamilton last spring. Wowed by the grand themes of grit, democracy, identity, and agency, I experienced a moment of self-doubt common to many caring educators: Am I doing enough to prepare my students for life after school? As the education writer Denise Clark Pope claims, many students are merely “doing school,” so am I only “doing teaching”? I’d like to think my focus on explicitly teaching the elements of argumentation isone way I can keep students and myself from merely “doing school.” By helping them learn to make a valid claim, marshal evidence in support of it, and critique others’ views, I’m imparting to students some of the real-world knowledge and skills they will need to succeed not only in college and in career but also in an increasingly uncertain world. * * * “How do you know what you know?”The question intrigued me when I took Sam Wineburg’s social studies methods class in the summer of 2005, while I was enrolled in the Stanford Teacher Education Program. It wasn’t until Wineburg’s class that I realized I had never before been asked to explicitly discern reliable evidence from suspect evidence, even as a history major at the University of Virginia. Wineburg took the class through a series of investigations—Where did Rosa Parks sit? Who fired the first shot at Will Colglazier teaches history to 11th-graders at Aragon High School in the San Mateo Union High School District in California. He has been an educator for 12 years. Lexington? Why were Japanese Americans interned?—and, in so doing, opened up a whole new way to teach. Instead of straight lectures about the facts or how one should interpret a historical event or modern-day policy issue, I learned to teach through inquiries. Questions would soon anchor my lessons instead of content memorization before regurgitation. Hired to teach U.S. history at Aragon High School in the San Francisco Bay Area, I introduced my students to this approach. My hope was that I could share my passion and knowledge of history through questions that students would begin to recognize as vital for historical analysis and crucial for navigating present-day controversies that affected their day-to-day lives. If they asked whether Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith’s life and thoroughly researched that question, I assumed they would be able to take the same approach to deciphering whether vaccines would save their future children. My assumption, however, proved a bit misguided. I found that some of my highly skilled students were able to decipher credible information but other students were not. Why? To some degree, I was to blame. I had spent countless hours creating documents that allowed my students to access and wrestle with a historical controversy. But for the sake of brevity and clarity, I kept excerpts of documents to only a few hundred words, provided header notes that explained sourcing information and relevant historical context, and included guiding questions. My scaffolds, though, did not mimic the real-world scenario my students experienced when they went online. Was President Obama really born in Kenya? Websites that perpetuated the myth that he was did not acknowledge on their “about us” page that they were created by partisan snake-oil salesmen allergic to credible evidence. If I were going to help my students decipher fact from fiction online, I would need

FAQs

Why does the author emphasize teaching democratic ideals in history class?

He views it as a civic duty to teach the democratic ideals needed for an enlightened citizenry, not just textbook coverage or current-events analysis.

What change in teaching approach does the author attribute to Sam Wineburg’s methods class?

Wineburg’s class shows him to teach through investigations and inquiries, using questions to anchor lessons rather than lecturing or relying on content memorization.

What problem led the author to retool his curriculum for fake news literacy?

Students could decipher credible information in some contexts but struggled online, especially when materials did not mimic real-world web scenarios and sourcing cues.

What classroom exercise did the author use to help students practice spotting unreliable information?

He gave students a minimum-wage task pointing them to “Denmark’s Dollar Forty-One Menu” on minimumwage.com and asked whether it was a reliable source, revealing how they were misled by the site’s claims.

Oct 15, 2026

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