Cold and Hot Classrooms

In cold classrooms, few or no students are participating. Classrooms can become cold for many reasons, such as student unfamiliarity with new material, lack of student preparation for class, and student fears about making mistakes, asking questions, or voicing opinions that they perceive to be out of step with their peers’.

To warm up a cold classroom, we encourage instructors to:

• Use small-group activities. For example, instructors can lower the stakes by breaking students into pairs or small groups to work on a subset of problems or a section of reading.
• Warm call groups or pairs of students. After a small group activity, instructors can help students expand their participation to the entire class by calling on pairs or groups to share their thoughts.
• Use a variety of activities. Utilizing new and different types of activities can energize students and increase participation.
• Normalize difficulty and struggle by acknowledging that the course material can be challenging. Instructors can model intellectual humility by sharing what part of the material (or similar material) was difficult for them the first time they encountered it.
• Emphasize community by building trust among students and reminding the class that everyone is working together to understand the material.
• Assign roles as part of a debate if you suspect that students don’t want to engage with specific viewpoints. This can also help depersonalize a debate and thereby encourage students to participate more fully.

In hot classrooms, students are engaged, but there is tension or hostility that is at risk of boiling over and preventing students from achieving the learning goals for that class meeting. 

To redirect a classroom from hot to warm, we advise instructors to:

• Ask clarifying questions. If things become heated, it can be helpful to ask students to clarify the meaning of a given statement. For example: “What makes you say that?” or “Can you say more about what you mean?”
• Normalize the emotions involved. Remind students that there is nothing wrong with feeling emotionally activated as part of a challenging discussion (but also that such emotions don’t justify personal attacks).
• Diagnose whether the conversation is drifting off-topic. If it is, try to ask questions that make connections to course material. This will vary by course and context. For example, in a course with readings, instructors can ask how a given author or text might embrace a similar or different stance. 
• Slow things down. One way to enable students to refocus on course material is to give them time to make connections and develop thoughtful, reasoned reflections. Individual, paired, or small group activities give students a chance to think through ideas or specific parts of course material before rejoining a larger group conversation. 
• Integrate scripted facilitation moves: For specific examples of what you can say to refocus your classroom, Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics offers some helpful scripts that you can adapt to your specific course.