#  Planning Ahead and Scaffolding 

 



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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](/suggested-syllabus-language-courses-include-controversial-topics "Suggested Syllabus Language for Courses that Include Controversial Topics") and defining [classroom norms](/classroom-norms "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](/polling-clickers "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.