Lesson Plenary - The Unbelievable Truth

As a follow on to Alex Heggie’s ‘Would I lie to you?’ blog below, I tried a game of Radio 4’s game ‘The Unbelievable Truth’ as a different revision lesson. It takes rather longer than Alex’s idea - students need time to prepare for it and might need some encouragement to engage in some blatant or creative lying!

The idea is this - each student is given a business topic, which might be something from the syllabus like Business Legislation or Ratio Analysis, or might be the name of a business or high profile business leader (Tescos or Starbucks, Alan Sugar or Steve Jobs) and has to prepare a brief speech about their topic. The speech has to be based on fact, but also has to include five lies.Those lies must be listed on a separate piece of paper which is given to the teacher, who will be the compere for the game.

They are then divided into two teams, and take turns with one member of each team giving their speech. The other team has to try to spot the lies, and ‘buzz in’ to interrupt the speaker each time they suspect them of lying. If the interrupting team is correct, they get a point. If they are wrong, and accuse the speaker of lying when they are really telling the truth, the speaker’s team gets a point (this is why the teacher needs to be given the list of prepared lies in advance). At the end of the speech the speaker’s team also gets a point for every lie which was not spotted by the other team.

It proved to work best when the students had enough time to prepare their speech with some research into their topics, some help with preparing creative ideas to include, and the opportunity to find some unlikely facts to include which might bamboozle the other team into thinking they are lying. They had to think about what they knew about the topics quite carefully, and we found out some interesting facts that otherwise have gone un-noticed - for example, did you know that in 2006 Sir Terry Leahy gained 3rd place in the annual Rear of the Year competition? That piece of research may not have been so useful in preparation for BUSS4 essays, but it definitely earned a point for the speaker’s team in this game!