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In this episode, we are talking about transforming classroom dynamics by designing discourse opportunities that build overtime. This concept, “threading,” is from Matt Kaye’s book, “Not Light But Fire,” and is useful in creating open conversations in your classroom. It’s a vital approach for fostering empathy and understanding—especially before addressing emotionally charged topics.
This method emphasizes foundational communication agreements and intentional curriculum design to empower students and center their voices. It can be used in whole-class discussions and discourse experiences, as well as small-group conversations. Why? Topics like race, injustice, and any sort of identity-based injustices can be high-emotion conversations in the classroom. Learning to navigate those conversations effectively is an important skill for educators to develop. Using protocols to design discourse opportunities that build overtime is one way to foster empathy and understanding, leading to effective classroom discourse. What? Better classroom discourse comes by design. Building out a curriculum, unit, or activity around a high-emotion conversation requires careful thought and intention. Here are steps you can take to do so: Step 1: Start with the Foundation of Discussion Before introducing high-emotion conversations into your classroom, practice the art of discussion with other topics. You want to build this skill with your students so that they are comfortable to speak with each other. Do this by co-creating communication agreements about how you’ll speak with each other and making sure everyone knows the baseline assumptions surrounding the conversation (i.e., “we never debate someone’s right to food and shelter”). Step 2: Design the Conversation Prompt Once the foundation of conversation is established, you’ll design the conversation prompt—what are you asking students to engage with? Depending on the format, you’ll likely start with some kind of prompt—a text, image, video, infographic, etc. This is the factual basis that kicks off your conversation together. Step 3: Select Protocols There are a variety of protocols you can implement over the course of a discussion, and having them “build” on each other is a great way to go deeper while ensuring safety and openness in the conversation. Here are some protocol options to try during class-wide conversations:
These are just a few of many protocols you can use, but the idea is to use them in a progressive way, deepening the conversation by building trust and empathy in the classroom. Step 4: Build Time for Reflection It’s important to allow students time to reflect on the conversation that just took place. They can provide self-feedback or feedback to others, based on a rubric you’ve co-designed with your students. You can also dive deeper to understand their experience with the conversation by having students share their feelings through drawing, photos, text, talking, or any other format they’re comfortable with. Final Tip When preparing for classroom discussions that can be emotionally-charged, focus on designing protocols in succession. You build your base of trust, comfort, and empathy, then go a bit deeper through facilitated conversation, until eventually students are leading and sharing what they’ve learned. To help you continue implementing discourse, I’m sharing my Discussion Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 201 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 201. Today we are talking about designing discourse opportunities that build over time. They build on top of one another, and so you don't have for thinking of Matt Kaye's concept of threading. You don't have the idea that this is the only conversation about this topic that you will have. I've kept that concept from Matt Kaye in my brain for a while, since reading Not Light but Fire, which is his phenomenal book about talking about race in classrooms. And, of course, this is not the only conversation you're going to have about high emotion topics. Topics like race, like injustice any sort of identity-based injustice is really what my heart goes to, and so we have talked on the podcast a lot about general steps of building curriculum and class culture around discussion of injustices and striving towards justice. So in the context of all of that, I want to name there are many, many resources previously on the podcast that you can listen to for other components, but today what we're focusing on are the specific protocol options for discussion and discourse in your class, particularly, for the most part, whole class discussion and discourse experiences, although I will name at least one that is a smaller group level piece, of course, always using things like turn and talk as well. But I think the large classroom pieces are where we sometimes struggle for ideas for how to build and at what point of the unit we use which type of protocol. So that's what we're getting into today. I'll kind of go through the general steps first and then you can always reference previous podcast episodes for other components that you want to dive deeper into. So, general steps here is the overview of how I would build out kind of curriculum and a unit specifically around a particular topic. 01:52 First, of course, you want to have the foundation of a culture of discussion built. Before you introduce any high emotion topic. You can discuss things and practice the art of discussion with some lower intensity topics. So you want to build the foundation. You want to have things like baseline assumptions or agreements in place. For example, we never debate that people have a right to life and water and housing or something right. We want to have communication agreements. So this is how we will communicate with one another. We will not talk over someone else, whatever the things are right. 02:26 And then, once you've kind of built the foundation for culture discussion, you design the prompt what is the particular question that we are asking students to engage with and discuss. Potentially, depending on the particular discussion format, you will select a text or texts. I always use texts in air quotes, so that could be a video, it could be an infographic, it could be a lot of things, but it's kind of the fodder for conversation, the factual basis. Then you will select the protocols. So, again, you want to thread them over time. That's the focus of this episode. So what protocols are you going to do? We'll talk more about that momentarily. 03:01 And then, finally, after students have had conversations, you want to build in time for reflection. So build capacity for student discourse by giving them feedback and having them give feedback to each other and self-reflect, giving themselves feedback. And this should be based on a rubric that you design, and ideally co-design with students, and or a framework which I've talked about before. The discourse analysis framework that Dr Shrubry, bridges, patrick and I have used and published is a good one. We also want to make sure that we're gathering student experience data in multiple ways. So having students share their feelings, drawings, photo, voice, whatever kind of format it takes. We want to make sure that students are sharing their experience in the classroom, in the class discussions, specifically with you so you can make adjustments based on their experience. We don't know students' full experiences until we ask, so we want to make sure we build in time for that. 03:52 Okay, that was a very fast overview of all of the pieces. Now we're going to dive deeper into the protocol options. So that was step number four selecting the protocols to thread throughout the unit all around a particular topic. So what we're going to talk through are kind of general protocol options and then I will give you an example of how these kind of come to life in a particular unit based on identity and I'm pulling from Boston Public Schools has a really cool identity unit. I think they call it like unit zero for the start of the year, and so I love this concept and have been working with them. And so just thinking about how do we maybe apply this concept of discussion threading and discourse threading, building a conversation on a previous conversation around the concept of identity, because we're talking about identity-based injustices. Those can have heightened emotions and it's even more important to be intentional about how we design the curriculum. So possible protocol options, again thinking about specifically class-wide conversations Whenever I am building a unit or starting a topic where we haven't gone there before, we haven't discussed this topic, it might be unfamiliar or it might cause high emotion. 05:06 I like to start at the beginning with building some empathy and some emotional engagement and censoring students' experiences and stories. Now, my favorite protocol for this is circle practice, and so I like to come together in circle right no desks, chairs in a circle, ideally. Obviously, different people have different spatial requirements in their classrooms and spaces, but we see each other's bodies. We are connected to the stories students are sharing and we invite students to share a story connected to the topic, but maybe a story about their own lived experience or feelings on a particular topic. So we're really centering in students where they are in the moment they're coming into that first class discussion. They are not concerned with necessarily like factual things. It's more of kind of an emotional lived experience thing. However, students can certainly bring in facts that they know and we want to honor and value that expertise. But if we have misconceptions here, know that we have time to address them later. We're not engaging in debate here, we're just learning about each other and again, I think it's really important when we're giving feedback to students to identify specifically what the purpose of each discussion is, I would say, at least for you as an educator. What we want to know about the beginning stages is we want to encourage and foster curiosity, a deep understanding of others, a practice of listening deeply, of emotional engagement Like that's the beginning stages. We also I think we also want to make sure that students see value in what they are bringing. Their current experiences Often particularly for students who feel very disconnected from traditional schooling have not maybe been successful, quote unquote, in a traditional way, in a grading way in school. 06:57 I think a lot of that brings itself into class conversations and when you see the students who might be shutting down a lot of times, that might be because they're fearful that they're going to get an answer wrong or they don't have the correct background knowledge. And I think sometimes we use the phrase and I've talked about this before background knowledge as like this very specific set of factual things that students must bring in with them from, like the previous years of formal schooling. And we don't value as much I'm saying this as a we, because I've done this as well, of course we don't value as much the things that students are bringing from their own lived experiences and lives and things outside of formal schooling and so when we invite all of that, we also invite that engagement. That might not happen if we introduce this topic in a more formal discussion setting where we're citing evidence immediately and that kind of thing. Okay, so after the beginning stage we have built community with circle. We have emotionally engaged students, we have valued their experience. 07:58 Coming in Then kind of along the middle parts of the unit, we could vary these, we could use several different protocols. Here's my two favorite for kind of the middle portion of a unit or discussion kind of thread. One is human barometer. This is great for inviting students' initial thoughts. So take a position and we're going to discuss your reason for taking that position in small groups wherever you're standing. 08:22 So imagine a classroom where one side of the room is agree and one side of the room is disagree, and then I have recently come to love the part in the middle. So I think sometimes we particularly part of, I think, us culture we are like you know. We're going to create arguments, we're going to stand firm in our position, and I think students have seen a lot of that in the political landscape lately. They are very familiar with take a position and defend it and I want to foster and encourage kind of a nuanced understanding of topics and the ability to change one's mind based on deeply listening to others. So I have renewed my interest in the middle standing in the middle, not fully agreeing or disagreeing, but you have to explain why and it has to be kind of a thoughtful nuance and, honestly, many times when students stand there and explain that nuanced opinion, I really I think that is sometimes the most thoughtful opinion or the most thoughtful stance is like one a person who really truly understands the depth of the topic. So I don't want to exclude that. 09:31 And if it turns out that everyone in your class stands in the middle, you know you might have to be like, okay, where are you like 75% leaning towards stand on that side of the room just to like, foster a better discussion. But, human barometer, take a stance. So you would share a statement. You would have them take a stance on one side of the room and then, wherever they're standing, turn and talk to the people next to you. Why are you there? And then you're going to have one person be the spokesperson to kind of share out to the larger group and you can invite students to move where they are standing, based on whatever the group said, if they are convincing, so, encouraging that deep listening. I also want to name, of course, if your students are more comfortable or if there are physical considerations to take into account, like you don't have to physically move about the room. You could do this digitally. You could do this on like a scale. I've done this via Zoom where we annotate like a line. You can hold up fingers one, two, three. There's a lot of different ways that this could look, but just envisioning kind of one example how I've used it in my class. 10:32 The second example of a protocol in kind of the middle range is a discussion diamond. I get this from Investigating History, which I think this protocol specifically was written by EduCurious, which is an organization out of Seattle, I believe Washington, and they I just I love the opportunity for written and verbal discussion in groups of four. So they propose that students get a question. Usually it's like the question for what they call a cluster or a set of like five lessons or something where they've been learning about things. They can certainly cite evidence at this point and they are asked to think about their response to the cluster question or the kind of like mini essential question or driving question for the week and students will have some think time. They will get a piece of paper with a diamond drawn on it and because there's four people, the diamond will be divided into four quadrants and each student gets to write in one of those quadrants On the paper. You could also do a chart paper, you could also do post-its that go on the paper. So whatever you need for accessibility, students will think, write the response on the post-it or the square of the diamond and then, after everyone has written, they will verbally kind of share and explain a little more deeply because maybe they just wrote one sentence or two sentences, their idea. They will have about one minute to share and then they will have a few minutes after everyone has shared their initial idea, to come to consensus or at least synthesize their understanding, and they will write that in the middle of the diamond, in the center of the paper. And so that's just another example of a way to engage with the discussion diamond. 12:07 Now there's with a question, excuse me, is a discussion diamond. There's a ton of other things you could use in this middle kind of format where we're starting to base our opinions and ideas of things on factual information. We've already started examining sources and that kind of thing. You could certainly do something like a collect and display. Everyone gets a Post-it. What are your thoughts on this? Write it on a Post-it, come stick it on the wall. We're going to cluster our collectively, our class's, ideas into different categories and group them based on themes we're seeing emerge. There's a lot of different things you could do, but these two are my favorite. 12:42 Um, finally, to kind of end the unit, I really like Socratic Seminar and I specifically like it because it's very student-led. The teacher ideally does not even sit in the seminar itself. They sit kind of behind the seminar. And I'm encouraged by a recent book I've been reading. I think it's called Hands Down Conversation. I'm interviewing the authors on this podcast. I'm very excited about it, so stay tuned for that episode. But this is something that is possible even at the K through five level, because that book is specifically about elementary students in kindergarten through fifth grade and how this is possible there as well. 13:16 But students are really leading the conversation around a question. This is really good for nuance. This is great when students can cite sources so they've really done a deep dive not just looked at one source, but they've been looking at sources for weeks now. They have fully developed their kind of opinions as much as they can in a unit of study right, and this is where they have enough that they can just kind of take the conversation and go with it. They do not need constant teacher intervention or redirection or further kind of active questioning in the sense of oh, they don't understand this and they need to clarify. But this is where they really thrive and so I like some sort of structure that gives them the ability to run with it. And, of course, as a teacher, you are on the outside right, or as a coach, you are collecting information, maybe writing a transcript, identifying misconceptions to, of course, address later. 14:08 Or what I love about that hands-down conversation book is that there are several mini lessons where it's like, okay, if this is happening in discussion, this is a skill students need to build or this is a gap in the skills. Here is a three to five minute mini lesson where you can teach them this idea of, for example, building on one another. Here's a poster that's like step one, two, three, that you can teach them this idea of, for example, building on one another. Here's a poster that's like step one, two, three that you can have as an anchor chart for this mini lesson or skill and then we can teach it to them in the next day. And then we come back to this idea where we're constantly building skills. So all that say Socratic Seminar are some sort of whole class, completely student-led conversation where we can get to nuance, where students can cite a plethora of sources and, of course, having more sources or even opportunities where students have like a kind of like a jigsaw, but even more like students do their own research or we have a ton of sources and students can take on the ability to be like the quote-unquote expert in a particular, like niche area of this topic, so that we have a lot of students bringing very different sources to this conversation and we're not all citing the same three sources. I'm sure we've all engaged in conversations where we're like, okay, yes, we got it, we've heard the source cited and this specific sentence of the source cited like 10 times in this conversation, like let's get something new going. So again, also a testament to your selection of texts and make them varied and make Socratic Seminar come at the end of like a really robust unit where students have had many chances to find sources. Okay, that's enough talking about all of the protocol examples. 15:41 What I want to do now is take you through a specific kind of progression for an identity based unit. So here's an example. Again, we're starting at the beginning. Let's do a circle. I might do an opening ceremony. So circles have opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies and kind of a full circle round, or more than one. So here's what I would do to start the circle In one word or movement or image, if you have, I like using climber cards, which are just I'm sure there exist in different iterations, but then these have some art from the author and they're just kind of like metaphors for how you might be feeling, and so I like giving students the option to pick one up and say that you know, this is how I'm feeling in an image. So how do you feel right now? Get everyone participating in some form, perhaps not verbally, but some way, so we kind of get to experience everyone's where they are. 16:31 Then for the full circle, I might invite students to say what is the story of your name? I might give some sentence starters. My name means I like my name, because the person who gave me my name is my name makes me feel right. So tell us about your name. Every student is going to have something to contribute, at least in conceptually right. Content-wise, we might have some supports available for students who need a translation partner or think time to be able to translate, but the story of their name, like all students have an opinion about their name, or maybe it's. I totally don't have an opinion about my name, but that is something I can share. Right. 17:09 Then, as a closing ceremony, I would invite students again the practice of deeply listening is what's important here to share something, just one thing that they learned about someone else during that circle. Okay, and then from there, what I would do is I would maybe move on to a human barometer protocol. Right, I might say, you know, actually, first I would do maybe an adaptation of this where we're doing four corners. Okay. So when I'm describing who I am, the most important thing I first say is about my hobbies or skills. If that's true, go in quadrant one of the room my family or friend groups. Go in quadrant two. If the most important thing to you is your race or gender, go in quadrant three. Most important thing is the language you use or where you were born or where you lived growing up. Quadrant four, right. And so then we're kind of seeing what's most important to people. So, again, kind of a witnessing and building on of our previous conversation, learning about students' names, then formally start human barometer, perhaps with agree, disagree or like even more basic, like a yes, no, do you think would be how I would start these questions. 18:19 Do you think people are treated unfairly because of their race in the United States? So again, we're building on these identity concepts, yes or no? Right, move your body to one side of the room, stand with the people nearby. Why are you standing there? Right, do you think people are treated unfairly because of their gender in the United States, because of their language or nationality in the United States? Right, you would keep going with this progression. Then you might say do you think people are treated unfairly because of their race in this school, their gender in this school, their language or nationalities in this school? Right, we're kind of building conceptual understanding and starting to get to some more perhaps high emotion or kind of intense, maybe uncomfortable topics, particularly for the teacher or school leaders. But we are inviting students to share these opinions and they are based, again, in student experience, predominantly at this point. But then I think that the last one I would do for human barometer again, we're building on previous human barometer questions Do you know of any news or current events that relates to people being treated unfairly based on their identity? So now we're inviting students to bring in factual understanding and things that they've noticed, their lived experience outside of class right. So we are kind of inviting a wider variety of things there. 19:31 I would do an emotional check-in after this. I think that would be really important. And then you know, I would do obviously several other pieces throughout the unit. But then to just skip to the culminating piece, once we've really engaged in lots of texts and understanding and grounding in facts, built our skills over time, I would do a Socratic seminar. So, socratic seminar usually I push all the desks together. 19:55 I like to give students, unlike Circle, some space to write. I would want them to have something, whereas Circle we're just truly listening, purely listening. And Socratic we might be taking notes, we might be preparing a response to something someone else said. We might be like, ah, that's so good, I need to like remember that concept. So light, if any, facilitation by the teacher desks together. Teacher sits outside of that kind of desks together, circle or square and students are really leading us. And again, I would give a worksheet to kind of track your thinking in real time. Also, some students just really like the idea to pause and think. So there might be moments where you pause the discussion, the Socratic seminar, and say all right, we've, you know, we've heard from half the class. At this point I'd like others to speak. Maybe we need a little quiet think time. If you already spoke, feel free to, like you know, write down something that you heard or kind of engage with the worksheet during some quieting time. So my discussion question for the Socratic seminar might be what would it look like if the United States enabled people of all identities to thrive? Right, so what would it look like if is a really good question starter, because you are inviting students to envision a future that does not already exist. So again, there's not a right or wrong here. All possibilities are welcome. The other thing I really like about this is McAvoy and Hess. 21:10 Diana Hath and Paula McAvoy have written and I've interviewed them on the podcast, about how, when we discuss political topics, it is better not to discuss, like the factual things, but and I'm totally forgetting exactly what they call this but kind of like, oh, policy, policy issues is like where it is most fruitful to discuss because we can agree that something is an issue. We don't need to debate the facts about whether all people are thriving in the US. We know that people are not. I imagine we have built that understanding over the course of our unit and now we're inviting students to say like how could, how could it be better? Right, what would it look like if there's no wrong answer? Like what would it look like if, as long as we're holding to our baseline understanding or assumption that all people deserve life and you know water, food, shelter, healthcare, all the right, whatever your baseline understandings are in your class? 22:10 Within that context, and remembering our agreements for communication that we have built the foundation for in previous conversations, discuss this question right. And so we have some generative, creative ideas where students are building on a factual understanding not to be right or wrong about something, but to create a possible future that is more free, that is more just, beautiful, more desirable. I guess is what I'm going for. So I think in that progression and of course it's not perfect, of course it's not fully fleshed out. You can kind of see the building from the initial circle to the human barometer, to the Socratic of ways that we center student voice and leadership in the conversation, to ways that we grounded students experience and imagination and the possible, and we are thoughtful about our own kind of actions or interactions as we are kind of pulling out or designing some of the questions to surface student discussion in ways that are not super teacher driven in the moment but are really thoughtful in the design principles of how we create the space for students to really thrive and lead conversation once the class starts and once the discussion begins, because we've set them up for success in that way. 23:22 So, as you are heading out today to go do your thing, I want to leave you with a resource which is the Discussion Resource Bank. Several of the examples shared today, including Human Barometer, which could be a new setup for some folks have these kind of template slides that I use and I share with folks who want to engage in those. So lots of templates for discussion-based activities in this slide doc. I'm gonna link it in the blog post for today's episode. You can access that at lindsaybethelyonscom slash blog slash 201.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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