At the first DebateCiti international meeting in Belgium, the partnership tested a complete workshop design on media literacy and verification. The PowerPoint presentation used in that session is not just a set of slides; it is a structured pathway that any school can adapt to train students and teachers in evidence-based thinking.

The workshop sits at the heart of DebateCiti’s goals:

• train participants to recognise mis-, dis- and malinformation

• practise verification workflows for images, videos and headlines, including AI-generated content

• transform verified facts into clear, civil, structured debate

The slides guide this path step by step, using Team-Based Learning rather than a traditional lecture.

A workshop built around real decisions

The workshop is designed around concrete decisions, not passive listening. Every block converges on a specific choice: is this claim true, false, or inconclusive? Is this workflow adequate to verify a viral video? Should a newsroom publish a claim now with caveats or hold the story?

The slide deck structures the session in short, repeatable cycles:

1. A brief primer to align key concepts (mis/dis/malinformation, paratext, bias, verification workflow).

2. An individual readiness check to make sure each participant has a minimal operational grasp.

3. A team test on the same questions with instant feedback.

4. Application tasks where teams work on the same case and reveal their answers simultaneously.

5. Short debates to stress-test the reasoning behind each verdict.

At every step, participants must show claim → evidence → verdict, with explicit caveats and next steps.

Why Team-Based Learning

The method used is Team-Based Learning (TBL). The slides are built to support its logic.

Key choices:

• Stable teams of 5–6 people, mixing teachers and students.

• Rotating roles (Lead Verifier, Skeptic, OSINT Scout, Spokesperson, Timekeeper, Note-taker) so everyone practises different cognitive skills.

• Readiness Assurance (iRAT and tRAT): first individual quizzes, then team quizzes on the same items, with immediate feedback and short micro-lessons on the most common errors.

• “4S” application tasks: Same problem, Significant problem, Specific choice, Simultaneous reporting.

Pedagogically, TBL shifts the focus from “I listened to a presentation” to “our team took a position under constraints and defended it with evidence.” This matches the project’s ambition: debate as practice, not theory.

The core pedagogical ideas

The workshop structure translates several non-negotiable principles of DebateCiti into classroom practice. The slide deck makes these explicit and operational.

1. “Inconclusive” is a mature verdict
   Participants are trained to reject forced certainty. When there are not at least two independent lines of evidence, the default verdict is “Inconclusive” plus clearly stated next steps. This protects both truth and people.

2. Evidence must be observable and reproducible
   The materials insist on checkable signals: datelines, paratext, landmarks, shadows, weather, chain of custody, known tools and their limits. A detector score alone is never treated as a verdict.

3. Claim–Evidence–Warrant (CEW)
   Every explanation follows the same pattern:

   • Claim: what is being asserted

   • Evidence: at least two independent observations

   • Warrant: why this evidence actually supports the claim

4. This structure makes reasoning auditable and reusable across subjects.

5. Civility as a working condition
   Debate segments in the workshop use the RACC model (Respect, Acknowledge, Clarify, Cite). Ideas are challenged; people are not. The slides supply ready-made sentence frames for qualifying claims, naming uncertainty, and rebutting respectfully.

6. Ethics and harm are part of verification
   Verification is never reduced to “is this true.” The PowerPoint incorporates questions about privacy, potential harm, and publication thresholds. Some scenarios are technically verifiable but ethically high-risk; the method forces teams to confront that tension.

What participants actually did

Using the slide deck, teams moved through a sequence of concrete tasks:

• Carousel reading: short, focused reading of four one-pagers (mis/dis/malinformation, paratext, bias and emotion, six-step verification). Each participant distilled key ideas and examples for their team.

• Concept checks: rapid A–B–C–D card questions to correct basic misunderstandings before more complex work.

• Headline triage: teams assessed a set of news headlines using only paratext and internal coherence, issuing True/False/Inconclusive verdicts with two observations each.

• Verification planning: teams built a 60-minute verification plan for a deliberately ambiguous viral video, choosing among different workflows and writing a definition of “done”, a stop rule, and a fallback plan.

• Micro-debate: two sides argued whether a contested claim should be published now with caveats or held, using CEW, qualifiers, and explicit harm assessment.

At the end of the workshop, participants left not only with new concepts, but with concrete artefacts: fact-checking templates, glossaries, workflows, sample verification plans, and debate sentence frames that can be reused in their own schools.

How this connects to the DebateCiti Toolkit

The PowerPoint presentation used in Belgium is one of the building blocks for the DebateCiti Ebook Toolkit. The workshop design and its classroom artefacts will feed into the module on online research and first-level verification.

The logic is straightforward:

• teach common language and concepts;

• stabilise good habits through repeated, team-based practice;

• capture the best routines (checklists, workflows, rubrics, sentence frames) and make them available to any school that wants to integrate debate and media literacy into its curriculum.

The result is a method that treats media literacy as a set of disciplined, collaborative practices rather than as a one-off awareness session.