37 Difficult conversations in the classroom
💡 Please reflect:
What challenging moments or conversations might arise in your discipline/classroom?
Controversy in the classroom can arise when sensitive topics are part of the curriculum, for example, when course content addresses identity, privilege, and power. In addition to sensitive content, learning goals (e.g., critical thinking skills) or course format (e.g., discussion-based courses) may call for instructors to anticipate and plan for difficult conversations. Let your students know early in the semester that scholarly discourse includes disagreement and multiple perspectives and that difficult situations in a classroom can be a valuable learning moment for all. If sensitive material is an integral part of your course, educate your students about the reasons for studying such topics and how to tackle them during the course. Your students may be unpracticed in looking at sensitive topics from multiple sides and may feel resistant to challenging their own thinking or unable to see topics outside of a “right versus wrong” binary. These conversations are not debates, where one side emerges a winner. Instead, they are explorations of dimensions and possibilities, with the potential to better understand the complex nature of sensitive issues such as racism or free speech. Consult the Center for Teaching’s resource on understanding the challenge of dialogues.
When planning a class examining sensitive topics, identify strategies to address potential difficult situations and be mindful of your students’ identities and learning contexts, avoiding essensializing them. You could also ask yourself:
- What are the learning objectives? The instructor and students should know why something is being discussed in the context of the course learning goals. For example, students should be able to demonstrate that they understand the course material and be able to examine it from a disciplinary perspective. At the same time, they do not have to personally agree with it.
- What might come up as a result of this assignment or discussion that you need to consider in advance?
- What aspects of the material that might prompt conflict or harm should be explained ahead of time (terms in literature, scenes in a film, history of a scientific theory or discovery, etc.)?
Students will be more comfortable engaging in difficult dialogues when they feel a sense of safety and trust in the classroom. You can help to engender this sense of safety by checking in about your students’ experiences. Potential questions:
- What aspects of this course are you particularly concerned or stressed about?
- What are ways I/the instructor could support your overall well-being?
Make sure to use the feedback to inform your teaching plans, which might include enhancing existing practices, tweaking practices that aren’t having the right impact, or clarifying areas of confusion. Share with students how their feedback has informed your practice moving forward.
When introducing a hot topic, we recommend you collaboratively revisit and possibly revise community guidelines with your students. Based on these guidelines, discuss respectful ways to share ideas and perspectives. Consider asking:
- How could we discuss and interrogate complex and controversial ideas respectfully and productively? How is civil discussion different from attack?
- What do we risk by engaging others in a difficult dialogue? Is that sense of risk real? Can we work as a group to reduce it?
- How can we distinguish what causes a learner’s discomfort: complicated material? unlearning previous misconceptions and challenging biases? or disturbing and traumatizing experiences and topics?
After a heated moment, an offensive comment, or a microaggression, ask students to pause and revisit the community guidelines. A constructive approach for defusing a discussion that has gotten off track is to ask everyone to write their thoughts, ideas, and feelings for five minutes. You can then ask them to step back from what they think and feel and write about why they think and believe the way they do. Alternatively, ask them to write down something said from a perspective different from their own that seems legitimate. Consider asking the student outside of class about the intent behind a remark instead of immediately calling them out, if appropriate.
However, do not simply let the moment pass if a student says something harmful, regardless of their intent. This may make the classroom a hostile space for students affected by the comment. It is crucial to provide your students with structured ways to reflect and respond.
One way to handle a difficult situation in the classroom is based on the RAVEN framework (Wood & Harris, 2020), which involves the following steps:
- Redirect the interaction to prevent further harm from occurring. An example: “I’d like to pause this conversation here because I’m concerned with the language being used.”
- Ask probing and clarifying questions to help students understand the problematic nature of the statements and actions, to see the difference between the intentions and consequences, and to make the problematic nature more visible. “Let us pause. To confirm, am I right in thinking that you are saying that…”
- Values clarification involves identifying shared community values (e.g., trust, diversity, inclusion, welcoming environments, student success) and reiterating them, potentially highlighting that problematic statements are not aligned with these values. You could revisit your community agreements (see the Community Guidelines for Classroom Interaction chapter), the DEI statement in your syllabus, or organizational values (for instance, review the University of Iowa’s DEI definitions) or you could ask students to reflect on their core values (described in Who Are Your Students?). “Let’s revisit our community agreements. At the beginning of the semester, we all agreed to create a safe and welcoming environment. The statement you just made is not aligned with these values.”
- Emphasize your own thoughts and feelings around the impact using “I-statements.” An example: “I think we need to be respectful to all and use inclusive language. I feel frustrated and uncomfortable moving forward with the discussion. I think someone from that community would be hurt by what you said.”
- Next steps are to request appropriate action to be taken to address the harm that has been done as well as to reduce future damage. It can also involve revisiting and changing community guidelines. In their article, Harris and Wood (2020) share some examples, such as “offering an authentic apology to the person or persons who were targeted, being more mindful of their actions in the future, and guiding them to resources on implicit bias and microaggressions.” We encourage you to implement a restorative rather than punitive approach, focusing on understanding the consequences of one’s speech, prioritizing care, support, and education, and exploring ways to bring trust and healing to the learning community.
Another way to guide student reflection on a difficult situation or content at the end of a session is the critical incident questionnaire (Brookfield, 1995, p. 115) that involves the following questions (students are asked to respond anonymously):
- At what moment were you most engaged as a learner?
- At what moment were you most distanced as a learner?
- What action that anyone in the room took did you find most affirming or helpful?
- What action that anyone in the room took did you find most puzzling or confusing?
- What surprised you most?
- You might need to follow up by sending an email, revisiting the topic in another class period, providing additional context, or meeting with students outside of class to discuss their experiences.
- Take notes on what happened for your own learning. Why did the tense moment happen? What could you have done to prevent it, if anything? How did you respond, and how did students respond?
Chavella Pittman suggests concrete responses to situations like this. For example:
10 minutes ago/yesterday/last week, a statement was made in class that I did not address at that time but want to do so now. I want to return to it now because it is important for me to affirm and uphold the behavior expectations and/or learning objectives of this course. Specifically, a student said/did “_______”. This is not in line with the behavior expectations or learning objectives of this course and thus will not be allowed. In the future, I will do my best to address similar incidents more immediately.
To see more examples, read Pitman’s 10 In the Moment Responses for Addressing Micro and Macroaggressions in the Classroom.
For more strategies, see these CfT resources: Supporting Difficult Dialogues and Understanding the Challenge of Difficult Dialogues.
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