Helping Students to Disagree Respectfully

This week's article summary is How Teachers Can Build Civility as a Classroom Norm.

Learning how to respectfully disagree is becoming an obsolete skill.

Our reliance on technology has made us more polarized and less open to opposing viewpoints. Think of how brazen people are online versus in person.

And when we use technology for news, entertainment, or social media, we get constant validation of our views because the apps we use, wanting us to stay on their site, provide us with options that match our previous choices. Pandora, Netflix, and Flipboard know me better than my wife!

Yesterday’s TTW included a letter to parents about how Trinity will handle the upcoming presidential election. Not that long ago schools looked forward to presidential elections, typically having all-school student voting and presidential debates in class. It was a fun way to have kids learn about the elements of democracy, including the right to vote. It didn’t matter which candidate won the school vote (or the actual election for that matter); it was more about learning about how our government operated.

Now, however, classroom discussions about politics run the risk of enflaming either side.

The article below refers to our current age as a time of outrage culture where two sides of an issue (like those in the upcoming presidential election) can’t stomach the other side and abhor ideas different from theirs.

For us as an elementary school, we’re lucky that our students are usually respectful and caring toward one another. We stress sharing and caring as a school value.

But as I read this article, I recognized that we need to be even more overt with our students in explaining and practicing how to disagree respectfully. Part of our character foundation building is getting kids to see that not everyone thinks alike. While our kids are at a developmental age in which they assume everyone lives the same kind of life they do, we help them see difference through collaborative learning as well as through windows and doors.

As our kids move into middle/upper school and college, they will need the skills to navigate a complex, varied, and ambiguous world. Let’s hope that in the not too distant future we can begin to be more civil and inquisitive towards others and difference.

 Joe

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At their best, classroom conversations can engage students, build communication and critical-thinking skills, and help students connect learning to their lives.

But so-called “outrage culture"—in which students react collectively in disproportionate and intensely negative ways during disagreements—can derail attempts to have substantive conversations about divisive or challenging topics.

Michael McQueen, a psychologist and the author of Mindstuck: Mastering the Art of Changing Minds, spoke with Education Week about ways educators can help defuse overreactions and outrage culture among students.

Why do we react so negatively when someone disagrees or we are told we are wrong?

The challenge is that our instinctive minds respond to psychological threats the same way they do physical threats. This response to physical threats has kept us alive for millennia: A tiger jumps out, you run, you stay alive. That’s been great for us as a species. The challenge is that when our instinctive minds are confronted with ideas, information, perspectives, data that are confronting, uncomfortable, or unfamiliar, we respond in the same way.

But we don’t go into fight and flight. We go into denial or defensiveness.

These dynamics so often play out for all of us as humans, but particularly with young people who still don’t have complete development of that frontal part of their brain, which is where the more reasoned, measured, linear part of our thinking apparatus lives.

How can teachers establish structures for more difficult conversations with their students?

Life is complex and nuanced. For teachers, one of the most important things they can do is build the skill of intellectual curiosity and humility in young people.

One of the precursors is that sense of psychological safety—that if I acknowledge that I don’t know the answer, that I hadn’t thought this through, that there are things I doubt—that I’m safe enough to do that. I think teachers modeling this stuff is incredibly helpful. So a teacher may say, “You know what, this text we’re going to study—personally, I find this a really confronting text, but we’ll stick with that, and that will be OK.”

A lot of schools are trying to add specific instruction in social-emotional skills to their curriculum. Do you think that’s the best approach?

The tricky thing is often those lessons become principles in a vacuum. And so there’s not that connection between what I’m learning in math class and English and geography and the politics embedded in geography and history and how that plays into ideology. 

Ideally, you want to arm students with not just a set of skills but a lens through which they see the world. And I think the best way to do that is to give them that lens to hold up every time they’re looking at any number of different topics or subject areas, rather than just describing a set of principles or ideas. Each time you teach subject-matter content, there are micro-moments where you get the chance to model some of these principles and ideas of civil disagreements and intellectual curiosity and ask the questions that allow young people to think differently, to see those nuanced perspectives. If you separate it out as a class in its own right, it can all very quickly become ideas that make sense but don’t apply to something the students are living and seeing every day.

How can a teacher de-escalate a challenging conversation that has spiraled out of control?

We often assume that when someone doesn’t agree with us that there’s a knowledge gap; if we can just educate them better or give them more information or better data, they’ll see the light and they’ll change their perspective. That’s so often not the reality. And in fact the challenging thing is, coming to agreement is often about how do we address the things that are causing the other person to be stubborn, rather than trying to pile on more information or logic in a way that leaves them no option but to change their perspective.

There’re practical things you can do in that moment. First is not respond in kind from an emotional standpoint. Sometimes, we assume that we need to match someone’s emotional intensity if we’re going to have a robust conversation. But actually the best thing that a teacher can do is stay incredibly calm and listen through, not listen to, what they’re saying, to find what’s going on that’s triggered this incredibly strong response, this defensiveness, or this defiance. People who are listened to are more likely to listen.