Planning Ahead and Scaffolding

Laying the groundwork by building trust and community in your classroom and establishing classroom norms will help students work together and be resilient when conflict emerges around difficult topics. You can also help students prepare for challenging conversations by giving them low-stakes ways to practice the skills of constructive and collaborative disagreement. Ways to plan ahead include:

• Including syllabus language and defining classroom norms that center constructive dialogue.
• Integrating activities like role playing and debate into classes that cover less challenging topics so that students can practice engaging with a topic from different perspectives in a lower-stakes environment.
• Assigning materials that purposefully disagree, or including readings that highlight complexities and nuances.
• Using anonymous online polling on a question related to the class topic in order to showcase the range of opinions in the classroom. This can help you as the instructor push back against premature consensus since it will give you evidence to show that other viewpoints are represented. If they are not, this can be equally revealing and can highlight collective blindspots that you might want to investigate with your students (e.g. it’s interesting that nobody in the class believes X, let’s spend some time with X).
• Being transparent with students and reminding them you’re helping them build the skills of productive disagreement because these are things we can only learn through practice.