TellDear in the Classroom: A Practical Guide for Teachers
Media literacy and critical thinking appear in curriculum frameworks from Germany to New Zealand. They are listed as competencies, addressed in subject descriptions, and debated in educational policy papers. But when teachers actually go to teach them — what do they use? A list of 24 fallacies from a poster? An op-ed clipping? TellDear exists to change that.
What TellDear Gives Teachers
At its core, TellDear is a structured reference: 535 reasoning patterns across 6 dimensions, each with a precise definition, examples, verification steps, and connections to related patterns. For teaching, this is valuable in three distinct ways:
- Vocabulary — Students can only discuss what they can name. TellDear gives precise, shared terminology for patterns that students already intuitively recognize but cannot articulate.
- Structure — The 6-dimension taxonomy organizes the landscape. Students learn not just that "this argument is bad" but why — which specific mechanism makes it fail, and which cognitive or rhetorical vulnerability it exploits.
- Practice tools — The AI-powered apps turn passive recognition into active practice. Students don't just read about fallacies; they identify them in real texts, generate counter-arguments, and test their own reasoning.
Entry Points by Time Available
10 minutes: The Fallacy Trainer warm-up
Open the Fallacy Trainer on a projector. Run three rounds as a class — each round presents a realistic scenario (a news excerpt, a political quote, an advertisement) containing one reasoning error. Students vote, then discuss. The Trainer gives immediate feedback with an explanation.
What makes this work pedagogically: the scenarios feel real. Students aren't analyzing "Socrates is a man" — they're analyzing a tweet that went viral, a politician's deflection, a supplement company's health claim. The pattern recognition transfers because the examples are drawn from actual discourse.
45 minutes: Group text analysis
Select a text — a political speech excerpt, an editorial, a product advertisement. Project it on screen. Run it through the Text Analyzer together and display the results. Then:
- For each flagged aspect, ask: "Does this label feel right? Why or why not?"
- Ask students to find the specific sentence or phrase that triggered the flag.
- Discuss: if you were the author, how would you make the argument without this flaw?
- Click through to the aspect detail page to read the full definition, examples, and verification steps.
This moves students from passive reading to structured critique. They learn to distinguish between "I don't like this argument" and "this argument fails because of X."
One lesson: Steelman assignment
Give students a position they are likely to disagree with — a policy they find objectionable, a view from across the political spectrum, an argument they've already rejected. Their task: use the Steel Man app to construct the strongest possible version of that position.
The pedagogical purpose is double: students develop empathy for positions they oppose, and they discover that most positions they've dismissed rest on concerns and values they hadn't fully considered. This is harder than it sounds. The app scaffolds the process by prompting students to identify the best evidence, the strongest framing, and the most charitable interpretation of the argument's premises.
Semester project: Aspect presentations
Assign each student one aspect from the Aspect Directory. Their deliverables:
- A precise definition in their own words
- Three real-world examples (found independently, not from the site)
- The verification steps — the questions they would ask to identify it in practice
- Related aspects and how they differ
- A 5-minute class presentation
Over the course of the semester, the class builds a shared repertoire. By the end, when an example of loaded language appears in a class discussion, the student who researched it can name it — and the class recognizes it.
Which Subjects
The most obvious homes for TellDear are media literacy, ethics, and philosophy. But the taxonomy applies anywhere argumentation matters:
- History — propaganda analysis, primary source critique, historical rhetoric
- Social studies / politics — political speech analysis, policy argument evaluation
- Biology / science — statistical errors, cherry-picking, false authority in health claims
- German / language arts — rhetoric, persuasion, argumentation structures
- Debate / rhetoric — the argumentation schemes dimension maps directly to debate theory
What No Setup Means
The Aspect Directory and Fallacy Trainer require no account and no API key. Students can access them directly on any device with a browser. For the AI-powered apps (Text Analyzer, Steel Man, Spin Doctor, etc.), students need an Anthropic API key — either a shared class key or their own free account. The cost per analysis is a fraction of a cent.
The practical implication: a teacher can incorporate TellDear into a lesson tonight, without waiting for IT approval, budget allocation, or administrative setup.
A Note on the Taxonomy
Not every one of the 535 aspects is appropriate for every level. For younger students or beginners, start with the high-frequency, high-accessibility patterns: ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma, appeal to authority, confirmation bias, anchoring. These appear constantly in everyday discourse and are intuitively understandable once named. The more technical patterns — formal fallacies, statistical errors, discourse mechanics — can come later, once students have built the habit of looking for structure in arguments.
The Aspect Directory filter (coming soon) will allow filtering by accessibility level — making it easy to build a curated starter set for a given class level.