Connecting the Dots

The brief

CEFIG International needed a training course under its Erasmus+ accreditation that would build youth workers' competence in media literacy and critical thinking. The group was coming from seven countries: Poland, Romania, Slovakia, North Macedonia, Spain, Malta and Germany.

Three things made the brief demanding.

The audience was extremely uneven. Participants ranged from eighteen to forty-seven years old, from students to NGO directors, with English from basic to fluent. Self-assessed competence at the start ended up spread across the entire five-point scale, from 1 to 5.

The topic slides easily into moralising. Courses on disinformation often end at “check your sources”, which moves nobody anywhere. I needed participants to experience manipulation from the inside rather than hear about it.

Participants are multipliers. The point was not only that they learn it themselves. These are people who go on to run their own workshops, so they needed a method, not just content.

I joined the project as co-author of the programme and lead trainer. The critical thinking strand was led by Lukáš Hána (Skeptik.cz, critical thinking course at Prague University of Economics and Business); I led media and information literacy.

How I designed it

The programme rests on four decisions I made before a single slide existed.

1. Experience always comes before theory

Every block opens with an activity in which participants mostly fail, and only then is the phenomenon named. Roughly 15% of people solve Wason’s 2-4-6 task correctly. When a group plays it through and only afterwards learns that what they were just doing is called confirmation bias, it lands differently than in a lecture.

A classic Kolb cycle, applied strictly: concrete experience, reflection, then conceptualisation and application to the participant’s own topic.

2. Active inoculation instead of warnings

Rather than warning participants about manipulation, I had them manipulate. First inside the game Harmony Square, where their task was to destabilise a harmonious town with a disinformation campaign. Then for real: six groups produced their own articles with a double brief. Anyone writing a true article had to make it look fake. Anyone writing a fake one had to make it believable. The rest then voted with coloured stickers and had to justify out loud what they had based their judgement on.

This builds on inoculation theory: controlled exposure to manipulation builds resistance, much like a vaccine. Crucially, the game alone is not enough. Research from the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab shows that a group which tried manipulation could recall the techniques a month later, while a lecture-only group could not. The difference comes from the structured debrief afterwards, not from the game itself.

3. Your own problem as the through-line

On day two, each participant built a “bug list”: the problems about media that personally bother them. From “I spend more time on social media than I want to” to “a specific narrative is spreading in my country and I don’t know how to respond to it”.

Every tool introduced over the following days was then applied to that personal list. Abstract methodology became a concrete personal instrument, and it removed the problem most critical thinking courses have: that everything is practised on someone else’s examples and never used at home.

4. The group writes its own rules, but only once it has a reason to

I did not build the learning contract in an opening circle. First the group played a team challenge in which its own strategy collapsed into chaos. Only on that fresh experience did they write the rules for how they wanted to work together. Nine agreements came out of it, including an “I don’t understand” signal that participants with weaker English genuinely used all week.

What happened in the course

38 hours of programme across seven training days, with a free day in the middle that is deliberately part of the design: the content needs to settle between the media literacy strand and the tools strand.

Day	Content
1	Safe learning environment, learning contract, experiential team challenge, decision-making under pressure (System 1 and 2)
2	Algorithms and the dopamine loop, data types and personalisation, media history as a sequence of technological panics, building the personal bug list, introduction to cognitive biases
3	Mis-, dis- and mal-information terminology, active inoculation, manipulation techniques (greenwashing, pinkwashing, fake experts, one-sided framing), producing and assessing participants' own articles
4	Free day
5	Four critical thinking tools: working with evidence, decision-making, group judgement and the limits of intuition, testing assumptions
6	Robust planning, pre-mortem, a five-hour systems simulation and its debrief
7	The Erasmus+ ecosystem, Youthpass, dissemination plans, reflection and closing

The tools participants took home

Not as concepts, but as worksheets filled in with their own content.

• 3Cs for testing claims: challenge the claim, consider alternative explanations, gather targeted evidence that rules them out
• Goal Factoring for decisions, which unlike a classic pros-and-cons list forces you to generate alternatives and account for opportunity cost
• Failure Simulator (pre-mortem) for planning that holds up against what cannot be predicted
• Deliberate Mistakes for testing your own hidden assumptions
• Problem Tree for reframing a problem and finding root causes
• Media quality criteria and a three-step fact-checking routine, including how to verify an expert’s existence and relevance
• A map of inoculation games usable in their own teaching, with documented research effects

They left with twelve subject handouts covering algorithms and digital footprint, the media and information literacy model, terminology, manipulation techniques, inoculation, fact-checking, and communicating across opinion divides.

The simulation as the peak of the week

Day six was taken up by a five-hour systems simulation in which five teams run fishing companies on a shared fishery. The economics are set up so that rational individual decisions lead to collective collapse.

Participants discovered that their own feedback had been misleading them: at the moment they had the highest catch and the most money, the resource was already collapsing. That is exactly the kind of unreliable feedback they had discussed the day before in the session on intuition. The simulation was therefore not an add-on but the place where every tool of the week met under pressure.

12 of 21 participants named it as the strongest experience of the course, often as the only thing they wrote.

Which competences the course builds

I designed the programme against European competence frameworks rather than by intuition.

DigComp 3.0, the current version of the European Digital Competence Framework, which now integrates AI across all competences. The course targets primarily Area 1, information search, evaluation and management, and Area 4 in the part covering safe and responsible conduct in digital environments.

LifeComp, the European framework for personal, social and learning to learn competences:

• L2 Critical thinking: assessment of information and arguments to support reasoned conclusions. The core of the whole course.
• L1 Growth mindset: normalising error as part of learning, which the entire experiential methodology rests on.
• S2 Communication and S3 Collaboration: group decision-making, negotiation inside the simulation, working with differing perspectives across seven cultures.
• P2 Flexibility: managing uncertainty and change, trained both in the simulation and in the assumption-testing exercises.

Youthpass and the eight EU key competences for lifelong learning. Each participant formulated their own learning outcomes and mapped them to the competence framework.

The multiplier layer: participants are youth workers and teachers, so the course simultaneously strengthens their ability to develop media and information literacy in their own target groups. Every method was therefore handed over with its methodological frame, not just as an activity.

Results

The evaluation was completed by 21 of 21 participants, a 100% response rate.

Indicator	Result
Overall satisfaction with course outcomes	4.8 / 5 (nobody below 4)
Self-assessed competence before the course	3.1 / 5
Self-assessed competence after the course	4.2 / 5
Would recommend a similar course	5.0 / 5 (21 of 21)
Methods for verifying facts and reliability of information	4.6 / 5
Assessing information critically across media platforms	4.4 / 5
Constructing and evaluating hypotheses	4.4 / 5
Identifying logical fallacies	4.3 / 5

On the fact-verification objective, not a single participant scored below 4 out of 5.

What participants valued

"I really liked how she uses 'children’s' games to explain something as important as manipulation or fact-checking. Creating a safe space to play like children and learn like adults. Her creativity in applying games that parallel real life is her greatest asset."

“Gaining practical tools for media literacy, critical thinking, and understanding how misinformation and algorithms influence our decisions.”

"Great facilitator, gave time, acknowledged opinions and created a no judgement environment. At the same time there was clear time keeping. Great exercises and balance between body movement, creative work, logical thinking."

"The training was excellently organized, I gained a lot of practical information, learned many new games and workshops that I will apply in my work."

“Now I know I have more resources to deal with problems.”

Quotes from the anonymous final evaluation, January 2026.

How I measured it

The evaluation covers the first two levels of the Kirkpatrick model: reaction and learning. The behaviour level is tracked indirectly through the dissemination plans that national teams built on the final day. These produced school workshops, training for participants' own volunteers, club sessions for schoolchildren, a meeting with a city council, and the purchase of the simulation through a school parliament.

Alongside the final questionnaire, reflection groups with fixed membership ran every evening, and a mid-term evaluation in the middle of the week fed into the second half of the programme.

What I can build for you

The programme is not tied to Erasmus+ or to youth work. The core transfers, and I already use it in various forms with corporate employees, civil servants, teachers and librarians.

For Erasmus+ hosting and partner organisations

I can design and deliver a training course from the Activity Programme through daily dramaturgy and methodology to evaluation design and Youthpass. Including work with a multilingual group and a wide spread of entry-level competence.

For companies and institutions

The same logic in a shorter format: a half-day to two-day programme on recognising manipulation, verifying information and making evidence-based decisions. Suited to settings where people work with information under pressure and an error in judgement carries a cost.

For schools and educational organisations

Methodology for teachers and trainers who want to teach media literacy themselves. Not a deck to hand over, but a frame, activities and debrief questions they can build their own lessons on.

For programme designers

Bespoke learning design: needs analysis, learning outcomes, dramaturgy, choice of methods, evaluation design against Kirkpatrick.

Project facts

Title	Erasmus+ Training Course “Connecting the Dots”
Programme	Erasmus+ KA151, Mobility of Youth Workers
Host	CEFIG International, Czech Republic
Dates and venue	10 to 18 January 2026, Kolín, Czech Republic
Scope	7 training days, 38 hours of programme
Participants	21 people from 7 countries (PL, RO, SK, MK, ES, MT, DE)
My role	Co-author of the programme, lead trainer, media and information literacy
Co-trainer	Lukáš Hána, Skeptik.cz
Partners	Fundacja To Ja!, GEYC, Youth for Youth, MUYA, Youth Empowerment Association, Asociación Youth Vision, Lernlabor