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In this solo episode of the "Time for Teachership" podcast, we explore strategies and protocols for student-led discussions, especially those that are controversial or high-emotion topics. We draw on insights from experts who have appeared on previous episodes of the podcast, including Dr. Chad Dumas, Dr. Laura Lipton, and Carolyn McKanders.
The goal here is to equip educators with practical strategies to prepare and facilitate student-led discussions that are productive and engaging. Tip #1: Set up the foundational culture Drawing from Dr. Dumas’ research (guest on episode 231), it’s key to understand that there is no trust without dialogue. In both student-teacher relationships and student-to-student relationships, healthy dialogue and trust are built on the concept of psychological safety. Teachers may consider doing a climate survey to understand whether there is psychological safety present and how to adjust if not. Here are some guiding questions:
Dr. Dumas also emphasizes accountability for upholding co-created norms and agreements. While we often identify those things, the accountability piece is harder. One of Dr. Dumas’ ideas is to randomly assign different students to break the agreement to see if the class will hold them accountable. Set up the process at the beginning and emphasise how important it is to maintain accountability in the classroom. Tip #2: Design conversations with purpose Drawing from Dr. Laura Lipton’s episode (#220), educators can embrace the concept of being purposeful with conversations and designing them with intention. This is important for any conversation, but even more so for class discussions around challenging topics. One key way to design conversations with purpose is to understand the different types of discourse. Dr. Lipton identifies three that allow educators to move through to create intentional conversations in their classrooms:
While these can all be whole-group discourses, you can also break students into smaller groups to have in-depth conversations that everyone gets to engage in. Tip #3: Facilitate the conversation in your class Drawing from our conversation with Carolyn McKanders in episode 221, there are some tips on how to facilitate the actual conversation in real time. Educators can:
Make sure to go check out the episodes featuring Dr. Dumas, Dr. Lipton, and Carolyn McKanders to dive deeper into these tips and strategies to prepare for and facilitate student-led conversations. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Co-Creating Class Agreements slide deck with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 232 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.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. I am delighted to tell you that this episode is going to be implications for student-led discussions, based on the brilliant experts we had on the podcast for our July series and I think one actually aired last week in October on facilitation of teachers and teacher groups, and so I'm really excited to think about how these adult-level strategies and protocols are going to work with our students, particularly around discussing controversial or high-emotion topics. Here we go. The first idea is from Dr Chad Dumas, whose book we talked about in last week's episode and was all about kind of supporting teacher teams. Now, what I want to pull from that book that is relevant for students, I think, is to set up the foundational culture. So if you want more on the things he says, check out episode 231. He talks about a Paulo Freire quote. That's basically, like you know, we can't have trust without dialogue, and that is so critical. This idea of trust and student-teacher relationships is so common, but also student-to-student relationships is so common in what we talk about. But how do we do it right To be able to have dialogue? We often say we need trust, but that's a wonderful kind of flipping the idea on its head to say we actually need dialogue in order to have trust. So let's do it. Let's show the kids, let's show ourselves right that we can do this thing and we can do it right. I love that. 01:32 He defines Dr Dunas defines Edmondson's psychological safety term right Psychological safety being the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns. One will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. He has a bunch of items that I think you could kind of use for a climate survey, just to kind of note whether or not you know you have the presence of psychological safety, and so you can kind of itemize this for your students to determine you know, do I have these or not? Is this present in our environment? So I'll read some of those to you now, if I make a mistake on this team, it's not held against me, right, I would say, of this class. Right, members of the class are able to bring up problems and tough issues. We're able to accept others for being different. It's safe to take risk here. It's not difficult to ask other members for help. No one would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts and when working with others, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized. So I mean, think about that for students. Are those things present? Also, thinking about a particular action that Dr Davis talks about, I loved this tip and we talked about it in episode 231, but I just really love it. For students. 02:49 We often talk about, you know, norm or agreement generation and co-creating those with students. But how do we maintain accountability for things like this? It is so hard to have even adults remain accountable to the things that they co-created, that they agreed to live out in discussion, remain accountable to the things that they co-created, that they agreed to live out in discussion. So his suggestion is that you randomly assign agreements to break to different students throughout the year. Right, and that's a way to test if students are going to hold them accountable. And I think you could even say to students you know I'm going to randomly assign students to break these so we never know if it's like someone's actually breaking the agreement or if it's just they were told to break the agreement, which also, I think, lessens the I don't know tension or people pleasing attitudes of like, oh, I don't want to correct a student or this feels uncomfortable, like, well, it's part of assessing our ability to hold each other accountable. So love those ideas from Dr Chad Dumas and again, this is episode 231 if you want more on his ideas for facilitating teacher teams. 03:48 Dr Laura Lipton we talked to in episode 220. And for this I want to pull some ideas around designing the conversation with purpose. So the biggest thing I think that we really parsed apart in that conversation and is really really important, both for adult planning of meetings and PD, but also for students, what we would often call, like you know, like a class discussion, but students' conversations in the classroom. We need to know what the purpose is and then we're going to design accordingly, right? So I think let's parse apart her definitions and I think we can figure out how best to move forward once we know what our goal for the conversation is. 04:28 So three types of kind of discourse she says One is dialogue. So this is the non-consensus model. You just want a lot of ideas. Every idea is kind of welcome, right, we're just brainstorm mode and we're cultivating a spirit of inquiry by sharing everybody's voice, everybody's perspective. It's not about agreeing with each other. But we're really in seeking to understand mode. So we might really have some questions to just make sure that we get what all of the ideas are. We're not saying I like that or I don't like that, but we're just kind of okay, here's all the things that are possible. If we are, for example, generating ideas for a civic action project, if we are trying to grapple with a really sticky, interesting, compelling question or essential question for an inquiry circle, for example, like let's get it all out, what are our initial ideas? Okay, then and again this can progress one to the other, like you could design kind of a sequence of class conversations or I think you know, you could go out of order, as Dr Lipton told us in that episode where we talked together. 05:34 So the second piece or type of discourse is discussion, and so this is moving from the dialogue where we have many, many ideas. Now a discussion is a little more discerning. She says, right, they're breaking the ideas into smaller components, many ideas. Now a discussion is a little more discerning. She says, right, they're breaking the ideas into smaller components. And so the purpose of discussion specifically is to generate and analyze ideas and also to define the success criteria. So your goal here in this type of conversation is actually to choose one, or maybe more than one idea and move towards action. 06:02 So again, you could see, for a civic action project, this is like what will we do for a project or what is our next step for gathering data or whatever. But also for a conversation about a concept, if you're discussing an essential question or the discussion question for the day right, we want to figure out where we're landing. We don't all need to land necessarily in the same place, but it would be pretty cool if we kind of have this synthesis of ideas of where we are collectively landing and to kind of have broken apart the pieces of our understanding and analyze all that stuff, right? So I imagine this working really nicely. With a question stem like you know, what would an equitable world look like? So I envision someone saying like okay, well, here are the success criteria, and so we have to discuss that, we have to agree on the success criteria of an equitable world, right? And then we're going to throw out some of those ideas or pull those ideas from the dialogue part, analyze them and figure out which of them most align to our success criteria, and then we can go forth and kind of propose as a group, you know what our idea is. 07:11 I could also envision this happening in smaller groups. So a discussion could happen, not class-wide necessarily, but this could be, you know, a group of five, a group of 10, and having multiple groups within the class. And this is kind of the approach that they're taking to get their poster or success list or whatever ready for you to present to the wider class. So I think there's a lot of different formats. This could take the discussion, the purpose really being we're choosing something at the end that we're gonna move forward with. We're either gonna implement it or we're gonna share it widely with the whole class, with external audience members, whatever. That is Okay. 07:46 And then the third type of discourse that Dr Lifton talks about is decision making. So this is after we generate ideas, we parse them out, the group can move to that choice making right, and there might be predetermined criteria. You might have decided that you might kind of parse that out a little bit more here, but the goal on this is that you're agreeing on the most viable outcome based on that criteria and building on the previous discourse steps. So when you have kind of dialogue you're very broad, right, discussion. We've kind of figured out this is kind of narrowed, a narrowed version of what we're going to implement. We're going to move toward action. We're going to define our success criteria. Whatever Decision-making is like, we're really going to take that. Or you could also skip that step right and have predetermined criteria. That's provided by the teacher, right? What's an equitable world? Look like that has X, y, z, for example, but that here you're saying, okay, so, based on the criteria that we agreed on, based on like all these components that we really got to in discussion mode, now we're going to build on that and we're going to come to kind of our final decision and that there might be some protocols specifically in here to make sure that we have consensus. So I am imagining this happening. Right, we have the question like what would an equitable world look like? Right, we have dialogue where we're just kind of all over the place. Maybe that's whole class. Here's all the ideas. 09:14 Now we break into groups for discussion. Now each of these groups are coming up with a success criteria. What does it mean to have equity in the world? Here are some of our ideas. We're going to pitch these to the whole class and now as a whole class. Potentially this does not have to go this way, but as a whole class. We're learning everyone's pitches. We're kind of seeing what the outcome of those discussions in smaller groups are. We're kind of evaluating all those success criteria and we are kind of coming to consensus, not necessarily 100% agreement. 09:42 I like to think of the fist to five as a consensus protocol. To say three and above is agreement. I can live with it. Right, five out of five would be like yeah, I really like it. And we're kind of coming to consensus. Maybe that means we're going to take pieces of this group's ideas of equity and pieces of this group so we're going to put them into something new. But we're making a final decision. We're coming to consensus as a whole class. Again, just one way I'm conceptualizing this. I'm sure there are many, many others. 10:12 Okay, now McCanders, carolyn McCanders, episode 221, if you want to learn more about her, she has a lot of stuff. I think that is relevant during a class discussion. So, okay, we're having a class conversation. We've kind of planned it out. We've talked about kind of setting the foundational culture with Dr Dumas, with Dr Lipton. We talked about designing the conversation with purpose. We got to figure out if it's dialogue, discussion or decision-making that's going to happen. And then we plan the prom. We plan the setup, format, everything's ready to go. Now we're in the discussion. 10:39 What do you do as the teacher or as the facilitator? Again, this comes from facilitating adults. That's where the original book came from, so you can imagine its applications, I think really nicely as a teacher, facilitating a student conversation. So here we go. We could record indicators of engagement. I love that she talks about the nature of participation. I think there are so many of us who have, you know, sat with a list of student names and kind of checked oh, they talked right Later on in my teaching, after I initially did something like this, I wanted to really think about were they asking a question? Were they sharing a claim? Were they sharing evidence? Were they inviting another student to talk? So what she names as like kind of the elements or different types of participation is the use of inquiry right. So I can imagine that could be a question or showing curiosity in some way, advocacy, so kind of a statement or kind of claim, aligned and paraphrasing, so kind of evidence that you are listening and you're trying to move the group towards synthesis or identifying the various pieces present in the conversation, so really being an effective group member here. 11:45 And I think you want to teach paraphrasing so McCandless you can tell from the title of that episode on our show. You know, paraphrase your butt off is a common phrase that she uses quite effectively and she talks about you know three types of kind of paraphrasing in here and she talks about, I mean, acknowledge, organize and abstract paraphrasing are the ones she writes about in the book, but in the podcast she actually gave us some examples and some new names for some that I really found compelling both for adults and for students. So here's one. One is just kind of acknowledge emotions right, I think this is basic but so important. She says you know, people want to have their emotions acknowledged and she says I always say you've got to be able to paraphrase emotions and content while keeping the resourcefulness of the person or the group. So she uses this phrase your paraphrase should light a pathway. 12:36 And she talks about how you know if we're in a group with adults and we're talking about frustration with family members not coming to a particular thing, right, we can root that and like, oh, I hear your frustration because I know that you are excited to. You know, build something together with family members to better, have a better experience for your students in school, right, like your commitment, the desire that you have is why you're frustrated, because you're committed to this thing and it leads them down the pathway to positive action and not just ruminating on you know the feelings and getting kind of stuck in kind of a negative state. So there's this idea of acknowledging emotions. We acknowledge it, we paraphrase what we're noticing and this becomes an opportunity to kind of anchor in or understand the why or move toward action. Then we have common ground. I love this. So this really listens across diverse perspectives. 13:37 She says, reaches in and grabs out a common value, common belief, common identity, a common goal and offers it to the group so they can kind of move forward together. I love this idea of you know we're kind of all over the place. I think about a lot of conversations that we hear in media, with adults, with students, I mean everywhere right where we're kind of entrenched in positions and we're kind of speaking across a divide. But how cool would it be to reach in and grab a common goal or value? Right, we're all working towards this thing, we all care about this thing, we all value this, right? I mean, I'm just going to grab something, but, like we all value freedom or the ability to make our own choices, right, okay, great, so we can ground in that. Now, where do we move from here? Knowing that that's important to us all, right? 14:23 The next piece is kind of, I think, where you could absolutely get some great nuance. I love this is kind of polarity paraphrasing, so it normalizes the tensions within a group and it says you know what you're right and you're right, your underlying values, your polarities. And again, you want to use this when we are having I always think of Dr Diana Hesse's term here, a phrase that she shared on the podcast a while back, a year or so ago on the podcast competing good values right, so competing good values, not like offensive hate speech, right. But when we are talking about good values, right, so competing good values, not like offensive hate speech, right. But when we are talking about good values, freedom versus safety right, both of you are right, right, and we actually need each other because polarities are interdependent. You can't put one down. She says if you expect a positive outcome, both the answers are needed for positive outcomes. I love how she explains this. Right, both are needed, needed. Freedom and safety are needed in kind of tension with each other. We can't have all of one to the exclusion of another. So I love this idea of just again, think of a student. 15:30 I think it would be great to do as a teacher, but even better if you can teach students to do this. Think of a student listening to people and being like, okay, I acknowledge these emotions, like I see that you're feeling really upset by this or I'm feeling you're very frustrated by what's happening in the world today. Right, acknowledge emotions, paraphrase. I noticed that we're all talking about these different ideas. It seems like we're all interested in this idea of freedom, common ground paraphrase. Oh, that's so fascinating. I'm hearing a lot of people talk about gun control from the perspective of freedom and also people talking about the perspective of safety. That's so interesting that we have this polarity happening. Right, freedom and safety, polarity paraphrase. Now, I imagine you're thinking, okay, my students are not going to speak like that, lindsay, sure, but how cool would it be if they could start to identify some of these things? And, again, we have to teach it. But I think they're definitely capable of doing it and how cool once we can sit back and just observe and listen to them be awesome, as opposed to like us constantly having to do it. I think we do it to model at first, but I think this would be super cool if we're talking about a true student-led conversation. 16:33 She also McCanders also talks about never letting a conflict go to waste. It's a whole segment of her book and one of the protocols that she suggests is an assumptions wall. So really just bringing that cognitive conflict to light. That preserves kind of that psychological safety we talked about at the top. So here's where we would have each individual list assumptions about a topic. So we're having a discussion about a topic or a conversation about a topic, let's list the assumptions, choose one that most informs their behavior and then write it kind of like a short phrase. She says eight to 12 words like a short sentence. Write it on a sentence, drop or post it, put it on the wall and then the facilitator you as the teacher, is going to model inquiry, right. So we she talked a lot about how to do this, but we basically want to invite conversation about, for example I'm curious about this. Can you help me understand what it is that you value about this or what's the belief underlying this or what data informs this. You know, why is this so important to you? That kind of thing, right. So we're modeling those inquiry questions and then the students kind of take over the inquiry, kind of a round-robin fashion. She's saying this will take about 15 to 25 minutes and you could really do this in smaller groups of like four to six. So this could be a protocol where if you have a conversation that is either just beginning and we feel like we want to get some assumptions out there, or we kind of have the conversation, we have this point of stickiness. We're like, ooh, we're stuck here, let's try to move through it by unearthing some of those assumptions. I think that could be used there as well. 18:18 I do want to note too in the book she talks about how teaching groups ways of addressing conflict generates high interest. So that is super fascinating to me on a meta level, right of students just learning how to address conflict in a healthy way. But actually we do want to nurture conflict as long as it is perceived as psychologically safe. But students are actually interested in that and adults are interested in learning how to navigate conflict because it's relevant in their own lives, in learning how to navigate conflict because it's relevant in their own lives. So, when we're thinking about increasing motivation and engagement, I know we may feel a tendency to avoid conflict, but actually if we can get through it positively, right, and we can teach how to nurture it and parse things apart and paraphrase in these ways, that actually it's gonna be beneficial to student motivation. Fascinating, okay. Final tips and inspiration from our three brilliant authors and podcast guests. So from Dr Jamis basically, kids can do it. So he cites Ferrari and Rizzolotti. I hope that's correct In 2014,. 19:15 They talked about we're hardwired to quote, understand the intentions of others and they say this is because, quote or sorry, we have the quote, quote capacity to infer others' internal mental states and ascribe to them a causal role in generating the observed behavior. End quote. So basically, we are hardwired as human beings to know kind of what's going on with people and say, oh, that behavior, that's a result of that feeling. Right, that's a result of that. I think about that a lot with kids that kid being tired, like I know that I can sense that kid being tired, right, that's where that's coming from, right? Or that kid is really sad about something that happened in their life and maybe that's connected to this topic. That's where that behavior is coming from. They just snapped at me. I understand that's coming from an emotion, an emotion of sadness, right, or anger. 20:05 From Dr Lipton she says, quote I think we really confuse purpose with tasks. We're not here to rewrite math curriculum for the teacher example. We're here to ensure there's equitable and effective approaches to math for all our kids. That's the purpose. To do that. We're going to take a look at the curriculum end quote. I think about this a lot with student conversations as well. The purpose is not to answer the essential question necessarily. I mean, yes, it is. But more importantly, lifespan wise, I want students to be able to have conversations. I want them to be able to exist in conversations about high emotion topics, about politics, about current events, whatever it is, and do well like, feel psychologically safe, help spread the psychological safety to others, nurture conflict and have disagreements, while paraphrasing effectively and being an effective participant. Right, I think that is far more critical than them being able to answer an essential question with three pieces of evidence. You know, in a claim From Carolyn McCanders. Basically there are several questions. 21:09 She says you can ask yourself as a facilitator to make sure that you are thinking in the mindset that you need to be to effectively facilitate conflict-rich conversations. Here they are. Realize the quote nice thing to do is speak up. So if you notice someone inflicting pain, saying something oppressive, like you need to speak up. Right, and I would also say this is true for students as well. 21:37 As a facilitator, ask how valuable is my personal comfort compared to the effort I would have to make to result in long-term gains for others. Right, think about the learning opportunity that is missed if you don't hop in and say something or nurture a conflict. That is happening. Right, when you are silent when someone says something. If someone says something oppressive in a conversation, ask yourself who am I or we protecting by not speaking, and how might this be affecting student learning? So so many positive, rich things to do. 22:10 And if you are thinking the what if? What if? I'm afraid that students are going to say something problematic or that will harm others, I think you follow all of these pieces early on the whole setup and then Carolyn McAndrew's final tips for us are kind of the if this happens, you jump in and here are some questions right and some mindsets to coach yourself on to make sure that you do hop in and hop in effectively. Okay, you got this. I am so excited to hear and learn and just be in space with you as you share about all of the brilliant student-led conversations that are happening in your schools and districts. Feel free to grab my freebie for this episode, which is the Culture of Discussion playlist. I should probably rename that Now. Discussion, I know, is different from dialogue, which is different from decision-making conversations. Thank you, dr Laura Lipton, but it is available for you at the blog post for this episode lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 232.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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