216. Responding to Emotions & Charged Comments in Schools (Inside Look at a Workshop)

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In this episode, we follow a different format and respond to clips from a workshop co-hosted by our host, Lindsay Lyons, and Dr. Eric Soto-Shed. The workshop centered on responding to student emotions in conversations about challenging topics or controversial issues. 

Dr. Soto-Shed is a lecturer in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research centers on curriculum development and teacher training, with his work aiming to promote inquiry and equity in education. He also consults on school district initiatives and conducts professional development workshops for educators of all levels. 

Responding to Student Emotions: 5 Action Steps

Dr. Soto-Shed addressed the challenges of managing diverse student emotions, especially when some are very strong (i.e., hurt, threatened, confused). He suggests following these five approaches: 

1. Name the emotion using an emotions wheel to give students language for what they’re feeling. 
   
2. Check in with students who have surfacing emotions, allowing them space to share what’s happening. 
   
3. Process emotions through the use of journaling or sharing circles. 
   
4. Validate emotions so students know this experience is part of being human, and they are safe to share. 
   
5. Anticipate what may come up in your classroom discussions around curricular topics that are more emotionally charged (i.e., social studies and ELA classes that discuss current events). 
   

These strategies can be part of your proactive planning, knowing emotions are likely to come up in certain situations. The more you think ahead about how things may be, you’ll be better prepared to manage student emotions in the classroom. 

Lindsay’s Debrief

One additional point here is that naming emotions can be challenging for students. You may need to spend significant time building language around emotions, like a vocabulary word bank they can draw from. 

Another follow-up to Dr. Soto-Shed’s strategy is to have responses in place for when students do share. You may want to use “scripts” in the back of your mind to help assure students they are in a safe place. For example, you can say, “I’m not going to tell you your emotions are wrong,” or “Your feelings are real. I believe you.” 

Action Steps to Respond to Charged Comments

Dr. Soto-Shed discussed responding to charged comments. For example, the election or other current topics may elicit strong emotional responses or comments. They could be disrespectful or inflammatory, potentially hurting other students by drawing on misconceptions or stereotypes. 

To address these charged comments, it’s important to do the self-work of knowing where you stand with certain issues, what biases you have, and what emotional responses may come up internally. From there, educators can always implement a pause to process or give a student time to process. You can then lead with curiosity, such as “Can you tell me a bit more? Why did you think that?” Other times, you may need to correct what’s being said and address it later on. 

Lindsay’s Debrief

Recognizing that some charged comments need to be shut down and others can be explored, it’s important to pre-establish a classroom set of non-negotiables. For example, you may create baseline assumptions for your classroom discussions, like “everyone has the right to food, water, and shelter.” These set the standards for how you discuss charged topics and allow you as an educator to hold appropriate boundaries. 

If harm is done during a charged conversation, consider implementing a restorative circle that allows students to be clear on what happened and process the impact of charged words. 

Stay Connected

You can learn more about Dr. Eric Soto-Shed’s work on his Harvard Faculty Page.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Circle Planning Template & Restorative Conference Companion with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 216 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.

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​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

Transcript
Lindsay LyonsHost
In this episode we're going to do something a little bit different. So we are pulling clips from a workshop that Dr Eric Soto-Shedd and myself did with San Francisco Unified School District on responding to student emotions in conversations about challenging topics or controversial issues. So we're going to play little clips, I'm going to respond to them and that will be our episode today. So let me tell you a little bit about whose voice you are going to hear today.
00:32
Eric Soto-Shad is a lecturer in education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His professional and research pursuits center on curriculum development and teacher training, and his work aims to promote inquiry and equity in education, particularly within K-12 history, civics and social studies classrooms. He co-leads a civics thinking project, a research initiative focused on creating innovative research-based civics assessments and curriculum. Dr Soto-Shed co chairs HGSE's foundations course, how People Learn, and instructs courses in curriculum design as well as instructional methods for history and civic education. Outside Harvard, dr Soto-Shed consults on school districts initiatives to develop and implement social studies curriculum. He conducts PD workshops for educators at all levels, including this.
01:12
One focuses on historical inquiry, teaching controversial issues and making learning accessible. He's received several grants from the Library of Congress to train educators to teach with primary sources. He also serves on the Board of Self-Evident Education, a nonprofit that uses multimedia curriculum to educate about the history of race and racism. With a 25-year career in education, dr Soto-Shud has consistently advocated for teachers and students. His roles have included founding director of Harvard's Teacher Residency Program, director of Secondary History social studies education at Brown University and teacher educator at Stanford and NYU. His work is deeply influenced by his eight-year tenure as a social studies teacher in New York City and his enduring commitment to supporting youth from underserved communities. So let's take a listen.
Eric Soto-Shed
02:00
One of the things that I might be imagining that's going on for you all is you're naming the motions like different students are feeling different things, and then the same student might be feeling different things on any given day or any given moment, depending on what's happening in the world, what's happening in the class, what's happening in their own personal lives, right. And so one of the challenges of this work is that there's a range of emotions, right, and the other challenge that I think you are lifting up is some of these are really strong, like hurt, threatened, confused, right, and so how do we work with that? Okay? So, similar to how we were thinking about with us, it's important to surface. We want to kind of lay out sort of five general approaches and then dig into some opportunity to think about specific things we can do. Okay, dig into some opportunity to think about specific things we can do. Okay, so I like to think about our responding to student emotions. The five things I like to think about is first is naming the emotion. So we just had an emotional wheel, an SEL check-in. I know a lot of teachers do this kind of like normal warmup, but to give students like language, right, there's a difference between you know hurt and angry, right, and so for students to see a lot of language to name what's going on really helps, can help them articulate. Number two would be surfacing emotions, right, so we can do those with our check-ins, we can do those with other sorts of processing opportunities, and so it's an opportunity to say you know I might be sitting with something, but let me get an opportunity to say it. Oftentimes kids might be like I'm fine, I'm good. Other times it's a real opportunity for them to lift up some things that are going. That's largely for themselves, but also for you as an educator to think about okay, what am I seeing and how might I respond?
03:35
Number three in terms of that responding, in particular heavier moments, processing emotions can be really, really powerful and important, and so those can look like journals or circles. The thing that I love about journals is those can be kind of really quick to do. It's a great, it's a private way, so students might feel more comfortable sharing, and then it gives you an opportunity to teach or to follow up. One thing we'd like to say is that if you are going to ask students to journal about how they're feeling, it is important to check those journals and respond, particularly if something heavy does come up. Circles can be powerful community work and I imagine many of you do this. Some of us may not, but that's a really great opportunity to do some collective processing as well.
04:14
The fourth thing that's really important is to validate emotions right. I think that's one of the big under themes that's going to undercut our work today is that emotions aren't something we try to avoid. They kind of feel icky and creepy sometimes. Unless we're a class, we have objectives and learning goals and big questions we're trying to answer. But we're humans and we have feelings, right, and sometimes when those feelings come up, they can be like a side thing or a problem to address. And no, that's part of being human, that's something to care for. So one of the things we can do with our students is to validate like totally it makes sense that you feel that way, thank you for sharing, and let's begin to sort of think about, like, how we can engage in that, and so the um.
04:53
Fifth thing, finally is um connected to learning right part of what you're doing, particularly in your social studies class, your ethnic studies classes, your ELA classes, or as you're dealing with humans and people right and there's hurt and feeling and all of that right. And so when things come up for our students and related to the world or related to what we're learning, really it's an opportunity to say like, wow, we have some anger going on. I mean, what we're seeing in this past event or what we're seeing in this current event could really cause some anger because and so connect that feeling to the cognitive, to the intellectual, to the academic work as well um, so those are five broad approaches. Some of these, can you, uh, are used in combination and almost in not almost always but in many cases some individual follow-up is warranted. But this is something you can do with the whole class. So that's broad strokes, okay. What we want to do is now get into some specific. You can do with your planning, okay. So the biggest thing we can do not the biggest thing, an important thing we can do is that we don't need to wait for it to happen in the moment and be the sort of magician that sort of figures out what to do.
05:56
Oftentimes, again, particularly because of the content you're teaching or what's going on locally, nationally and globally, we can anticipate a range of emotions you all have done such a beautiful job of naming what you're seeing from your kids already, so we can anticipate those and plan ways to support those as they come up. Okay, and that's going to be the crux of our work today. So at the end of this session, I will share a framework where I've identified some strong negative emotions, what they might look like and some potential responses, right, but what we want you to really focus on today is your capacity to do that and give you three simple things to think about and try this out, right. So when you're thinking about your lesson or a topic that's coming up in your classroom or work that you're doing, can we anticipate the emotion, can we consider how those emotions may appear so we can see them and be aware of them, and then can we plan potential responses. And so the idea is how can we be proactive? And so, if you see this next bit we have, I want to do acknowledge that learning for justice and if you could hit the next advance, learning for Justice has a great resource that's linked here on the slide for you that you'll have access to, where they have a whole set of strategies of how to have difficult conversations, and they have a great thing that they do around anticipating emotions, and so that's a great resource, and what I think is that we can take that framework and apply it to our own work, and so that's what we're going to do right now.
07:30
So, if we can turn to the next slide, I want to give a broad example of how emotions may appear and what responses might look like, and then work through an example together, and then you can work through one on your own. So how may emotions appear? Let's take the example of anger, right? What might anger look like? It's like strong language and tone, right? Cursing, shouting, insulting. It might look like express anger at a group, right? So it's the generalization of an individual with a group. So somebody pisses me off and I hate everybody right.
08:02
Number three is it could look a lot like the non-verbals right, and so it could look like rigid posture, some facial expressions, maybe some rapid breathing, right. So that's what it could look like In terms of ways we might respond. There's a few things we could do. We could think about reflect back and validate right. So if we hear someone's using some language that sounds like angry, it sounds like you might be really angry, we can check in with the rest of the group via a live poll. If it's a response to something that's happened again, locally in your school, nationally, globally, like, ooh, I see a couple of students look angry, Let me just check in and see how everybody's doing. So you could do a quick poll with hands or sort of, if you have the technology to use the phones, but a quick poll to do a check-in. Then, once you get a sense of where folks are at all, right, you can think about, like, let's give some processing time, okay, Is this going to be? Journal with some guided reflections. What do we feel in our body? What do we need to see? Like, give some specific prompts to get kids really thinking about that. And then, finally, we can think about following up with the students Express the anger, okay. So that's a broad example of how we can do it respond to anger. And again, I want you to think about some of the strategies not only that are here that you may choose. So let's go to the next slide and I want to walk through an example of what we're going to ask you to do. So we're going to ask you to think about a moment where emotions can come up for students. The example I'm going to use is like the post-election right. So this is November 7th, right, Coming into class, I want to anticipate a range of emotions.
09:33
So I anticipate the election results might be upsetting for some of my students. Many will likely be indifferent and some will be happy, right? And so this is me thinking about, like a student group that you know I've worked with in the past, right? So if I think about that, or the likely emotions, I might see a range of emotions through facial expressions. I might see smiling and frowns. So I'm really going to be thinking about those first five minutes of class.
09:59
What am I looking for when I come into that class? And then what might my response be, right? Well, I definitely want to surface. I don't want to sort of assume and I want to give them some time to process. So I just want to say hey, how are you feeling?
10:11
If you have a lot of emotion, give me a five. If you're feeling like a very little emotion, give me like a one or a zero. If you're feeling somewhere in between, give me a two, three or four right. And then, based on that, I might have a journal or an opt-in circle of several students or three or higher right. So if I see a lot of emotion from several students, great. If not, I have a pivot plan. So it's not just one scripted plan. If it's just a couple of students, I'll say, all right, let me just do an individual check in like 10 minutes into class and see how those students are doing right. And so, again, what we're hoping that you can walk away with here and do a little bit of practice around is when you think about a topic that's coming down the pike and you've seen some emotions you can anticipate. How could you proactively plan some steps in your lesson to address them?
Lindsay Lyons
10:54
Really good stuff in there and I want to kind of touch on a few points. One the naming of emotions can be really challenging, particularly for younger students but even high schoolers. I'm reminded of a time when I was running a PLC and a high school teacher was like I'm just going to invite students to kind of name whatever emotions come up from them each day or every couple of days and we're just going to chart them, we're going to put them in an index card and we're going to kind of hold on to them and see if we can just see what happens, kind of build the vocab word bank of emotions. And actually a student came up to the teacher after a couple of weeks and said you know what? I've noticed that every time you invite me to share my feeling, it is sad or depressed or some version of that, and I don't want to feel that way. So I'm actually going to take action based on this aha moment I've had, because you invited me just to name the feeling with no additional instruction. So that was really powerful. The second thing is circles are a really good place to surface emotion and stories behind emotion, and if you're unfamiliar with circles, we have a free lesson plan template that I will link in the show notes in the blog post for this episode, so you can go ahead and grab that at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 216. So feel free to grab that and start planning a circle that kind of invites students to share stories and emotions. And the third thing I'll say is that Dr Becky Kennedy she is the creator of Good Inside, which is a community and an amazing podcast and parent resource space. I've learned a lot as a parent, but I also actually think that her resources are brilliant for students as well. So, whether you're in a class setting or you're just kind of in a school and you're a leader or you're a non-classroom teacher, I think this is a really cool place to be able to respond to student emotions. And so she has these scripts, three of which I want to share here and really premised on.
12:38
I'm not going to tell you that your emotions are wrong. I'm not going to tell you you're overreacting or that I don't understand where you're coming from. And here are the three I like and you can use them in conjunction with one another, one right after the other. One your feelings are real. Two I believe you. Three I'm here, whether you want me to fix it or you want me to just listen or just be literally silent next to you. I am here. I'm here for you. Your feelings are real. I believe you. I'm here for you.
13:02
Think about something. Maybe one of these resonates. Maybe it's a different something, but think about something that you can just have in your back pocket, write it on a sticky note, just have ready to go in those moments when you're like I don't really know what to say and students are kind of having an outpouring of emotion. So that was kind of our first chunk of the workshop, where we're talking about responding to student emotions. The second chunk, we're really talking about responding to charged comments, kind of harmful comments during discussion or maybe just kind of said out loud in the hallway or in some other space in a school setting, and how do we respond to those. So let's listen in to Dr Soto Shedd.
Eric Soto-Shed
13:34
So now we do want to shift to responding to charged comments. So what happens when things come up? So when we say charged comments, right, you can think about the election, but we can also think about this broadly and you know, I'd say in this moment, really in our careers as teachers, like what happens when a charged comment comes up and what do we do? So when we think about charged comments, these could look like disrespectful or inflammatory comments, potentially hurtful to other students, a misconception, a stereotype, a strong position on a very controversial issues. Right, these are all potentially have some charge where they bring some intensity to the room, and potentially emotional responses. I also want to name that. You know, I always assume kids are coming from a good place, that you know the thousands of kids that I've worked with are. Most of them are total sweethearts, but they can say some really charged things at times in their lives, right, and so what do we do with that comment once it's out in the air in our classroom? So I'd like you to take a moment and think about again the past few months this year of teaching what is a charged comment that a student has made or might make in your classroom? Okay, so let's just take a moment. We don't need to put that in the chat, we don't need to lift these up and name them publicly, but I want you to center that in your head so you can think through potentially how we might respond to that. Center that in your head so you can think through potentially how we might respond to that. Give folks about 15 seconds. If you want to give us a digital or physical thumbs up once you got your comment that you thought about, you can or like a little one in the chat. If not, we'll just give folks a brief moment to do so. I think I saw a thumbs up, a couple. Let's think about 15 more. All right, with that sort of in your mind, what we want to do is we want to maybe spend about 10 minutes or so talking through some ways to think about responding to charged comments, give some sort of different approaches and then have you take about 10 minutes again to work individually in a group to think about how you respond, and the theme here is proactively planning.
15:38
So let's think about responding to our charge comments. I kind of want to begin by naming that. There's really sort of three buckets of things that I like to think about that are really important. The first two that we put up here self-work and classroom culture are unbelievably important. I think we've already heard from some of our colleagues. I know, sarita, you've really talked about your classroom culture and how students can really know each other and can really kind of be a support but also insightful about each other. The self-work that we've done a little bit about is really important, like how comfortable are you with certain issues, what's sort of the emotional response that you might have with certain issues, how aware are our biases and the perspectives that we bring in things that we might be missing. So that is unbelievably important and maybe falls outside the scope of our little 75-minute session today. So what we want to focus on is the sort of middle part, which is really facilitation.
16:27
Moves right, recognizing self-work and classroom cultures are the foundation. What can we do that's going to push for learning, address and mitigate harm and also address some of those motions right. And so we kind of want to talk through some moves right now. So on the next slide, my colleagues Aliyah El-Amin and her colleague Kimberly Osaji really came up with these sort of different sets of moves that you can do when they call hot moments in your class I like to think about those are really charged. I'm going to highlight just a couple for today's session but you'll have a link to all of the moves for you to look at.
17:03
But when things are really charged, when something comes up in your classroom, a couple of moves you might want to do is sort of clarify misconceptions. So if somebody says you know something, that's just like you know a misconception, a stereotype, you can really just kind of directly correct that misconception. Right and related to that is sometimes, if it's really kind of inflammatory, you can pause and what you're doing is you're giving students some time to process, but you're also giving yourself as a teacher the time to process. I feel like there's, you know, silence is always like kind of a little scary, but sometimes you might need to collect yourself and so when things are really really charged, one approach is to directly correct it but also pause for a second. So if you need to collect yourself, it gives students a time to collect themselves you can do that and you're also going to interrupt the student from going further with this sort of misconception. So that's one set, the other sort of extreme, the other response that I like to lift up from this framework that my colleagues put out with when things are a little less charged, and that you might really lean into that right Like use curiosity.
18:04
Can you tell me a little bit more? What did you mean by that? Why did you think that? And here's an example, and I'm thinking about you know, sarita, you're coming around, you know leveraging the group where you could also bring in folks and Lindsay, if you can go to that next bullet to leverage the groups, to ask other students, do you want to sort of jump in here? What do you think about this? And so when I look at this and we'll come back to this it's like how much do I want to kind of stop the comment and address it to really lean towards more mitigating the harm, versus how much do we want to like probe and dig deeper to really maximize the teaching? Right, and you don't have to do one or the other, but it's just a way of thinking about some of the tension that you can kind of work with.
18:45
What I want to kind of lift up and the thing that you might want to be wrestling with when you're thinking about how to respond to the charge comment is when do you really want to lean into it as a teachable moment, use curiosity, probe and push versus when is it like wow, this is just really inflammatory and I feel like the students in the class that might be really hurt and harmed by this and I think it might be a little bit more appropriate for my initial thing to pause directly, correct, we'll talk a little bit about the end around ways you can kind of follow up the next day, but I think that's the real tension to sort of wrestle with, or an interesting tension to do that a lot of good stuff there.
Lindsay LyonsHost
19:19
So, thinking about responding to charge comments, I just want to name that. A lot of it is proactive as well and we talk about this in part one of this kind of two-part series that Dr Soto shed and I did with San Francisco Unified, and we can identify things whether we're a classroom teacher or not, but easier, I think, if a classroom teacher that are kind of our baseline understandings. This comes from the baseline assumptions idea I've talked about before, which comes from Justin Dolson-Masacolo Garrett and Katie Cubano I'm sorry, justin, if I mispronounced your name and that's basically like an agreed on kind of set of non-negotiables. Example all humans have a right to food, water and shelter. Another example all humans have a right to belong right and so thinking about this idea of what is in place beforehand just as part of the school culture or class culture is really powerful. I'll also name that in addition to some of the examples that Dr Soto Shedd talked about in terms of, like, how one might respond. He talked about clarifying misconceptions.
20:15
I've also done kind of a fact checkers lesson after a class discussion. If something is not super important to correct in the moment, less harm is done. Maybe we could assign statements to groups like I overheard this in the class conversation yesterday or in another class's conversation. I need you to go ahead and find reliable sources to evaluate Is this true or false and why so, using some evidence checking. But I also think if there's harm done, you can do a restorative circle. We've talked about on the podcast before how to do these. We have resources for those and so I think I can maybe drop that in as well and give it an extra bonus here for this podcast episode.
20:50
But three key questions if you're doing a restorative circle, I would do it with the whole class. If it's at a no class discussion, everyone is impacted in some way and everyone needs to kind of collectively repair the harm. So question number one for everyone, kind of what happened? Let's get clear on the facts. Two everyone responds to this one. You're like how did you feel? I mean you can have everyone respond to all of them, but how did you feel is really important or what did you need? You'd use BASE as an acronym that I like to use for kind of basic human needs. So belonging, autonomy, survival, enjoyment, right, these are all things that people need and so you can just kind of frame, that for students, if they're having difficulty saying what they need, but how you feel, I think is an easier one to respond to. And then, how can harm be repaired? Right, how do we restore our sense of belonging in the community for everyone? Right, how do we move forward from this?
21:36
And so, as I kind of like wrap up this episode, I just want to say thank you to Dr Eric Sotoshed for putting together so much brilliance and sharing it in our workshop and then again on this podcast. I also want to name that Dr Sotoshed and I are going to continue doing work with San Francisco Unified School District where, as of the time of this recording next week we're still in May. As we record here we are going to go and work with leaders and listen to stakeholders and really gather some information about what it is that all stakeholders students, teachers, leaders are experiencing when it comes to conversations about what I call high emotion topics and think about what they would like as well, right, so we're going to learn from their experience a lot of kind of street data collection happening here, or student experience data, stakeholder experience data and, as we listen, kind of putting together these themes and ideas for action steps. We will co-plan with those stakeholders and think about the ongoing work, and I just want to name that. I think this is really critical. It is not a one and done, it is not a one workshop, and then you get the info or the framework and then you go do it and you're like good for the rest of forever.
22:41
So much of that, so many of my moments in teaching that I continuously like 15 years no, not 15 years I haven't been out of the classroom that long. Like seven years later I'm like, wow, that moment, that moment and usually it's a class idea. Here's how I would do that differently those key moments that stick with us. We're going to have those, and you're going to want to talk to somebody. So find a colleague, find an instructional coach, find a leader, find someone who you can talk through, who can kind of like coach you through the challenges that you face, and have ongoing conversations about this stuff, get ongoing feedback, have a thought partner, because I think the implementation aspect of many things that we do in PD is really critically important.
23:28
This one especially, though, because current events are always changing. Student populations are always changing. Everything about like these relational conversations is very nuanced and we need that kind of reflection, individual and collective, to be able to do right by students. We need that kind of reflection, individual and collective, to be able to do right by students, do right by kind of the class culture and school culture we're trying to build and to do all of this well. So again, freebies for this episode. You can find them at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 216. Thanks for checking in Until next time.

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