The goal of our project and this workshop (https://serc.carleton.edu/mel/index.html) is to promote students' civic and scientific evaluations of sources and alternative claims when confronted with controversial and/or complex socioscientific issues (SSIs) in the Earth and environmental sciences. Given the current challenge of combating misinformation and disinformation about SSIs, these skills are important to address. Project activities support student exploration of a range of socioscientific issues from climate change to extreme weather to freshwater availability to food security and many others (https://serc.carleton.edu/mel/teaching_resources/index.html). We developed two complimentary instructional scaffolds: 1) Lateral Reading (LR) scaffolds focused on source evaluation and 2) Model Evidence Link (MEL) scaffolds focused on evaluating connections between lines of evidence and alternative explanatory claims. We have also developed a Reasoning About SocioScientific Issues (RASSI) instrument to assess individuals' knowledge, reasoning, and confidence when engaging with scientific claims on socially relevant topics. This instrument may be of interest to geoscience education researchers as well as educators evaluating their students' understanding. In addition, the project website provides multiple digital resources to support the teaching of these issues. Workshop participants will experience LR and MEL activities, discussing in groups as their students would. They will share their prior experiences of similar strategies they have used in their teaching. They will examine student data and assess their explanations as well as explore digital resources. All activities are available on the MEL-LR project website and available for immediate classroom implementation.