How to Facilitate Your Way Out of A Sticky Class Discussion
Dealing with controversial opinions, off-topic tangents, and harmful statements made by students
My first run-in with a sticky classroom discussion (and how I handled it)
The first class session I ever taught—a two-hour summer Education Technology course for fifteen rising high school seniors—was going according to plan: we started with one-on-one speed conversations for community building, then a pedagogical anatomy assignment that introduced students to the science of teaching and learning, and we were ending with a review of the syllabus. It was during this last agenda item that a student raised their hand and asked, “Mr. Davis, can you talk to us about what’s going on with affirmative action?”
Here I was, thinking that my first class session would go on without a hitch….then BOOM, a student asks the question of the hour. This question was relevant to all fifteen of my students, all of whom were high school students in a summer college immersion program; not a single student in the room was white. Discussing affirmative action just three days after the Supreme Court effectively ended it was an opportunity for me to practice the culturally responsive teaching that I preached.
I thanked the student for raising the question and gladly accepted the invitation to facilitate the discussion. I came down from the literal platform where I’d been presenting my slides, and I asked the students to help me create a circle with our desk chairs. I started with a brief description of what I knew at that point: the US Supreme Court ruled that considering race in college student admissions processes was no longer constitutional, lawsuits against Harvard and UNC were the impetus for this decision, and this will almost certainly impact how they would apply to college and how colleges treat their application materials, among other shifts in funding and programming originally intended for historically-marginalized students.
After my preamble, I asked them where they heard about affirmative action; most said TikTok. I asked them to share what they’d been hearing, and we all tried to dissect the dominant arguments for and against affirmative action. We also discussed how they were feeling, what concerns they had, and where they could continue to read about it.
No one “agreed to disagree.” No one left class disgruntled. Everyone walked away with three things: an understanding of how the decision affected them and their peers, an idea of where to find reliable information about it, and a set of complex emotions to further process.
The previous sentence contains what I believe to be a respectable set of learning outcomes for any difficult classroom conversation. If your students leave a challenging discussion having achieved just one of these outcomes—understanding the topic’s relevance to their life and others’ lives, becoming more information literate, and processing their emotional response—I’d call that a successful facilitation.
Although this ~20-minute discussion on affirmative action’s reversal is a simmer compared to boiling topics like the overturn of Roe v. Wade or the war in Gaza or anything involving the names "Trump” or “Musk”, my example reveals a few key tips that I believe are conducive to productive discourse, regardless of topic:
Build community among your students: I facilitated a community-building activity for the first 50—that’s right, 50—minutes of our first class. My class is small, so I was able to do a speed conversation exercise where every student had a 90-second one-on-one conversation with each of their classmates.
De-center yourself: I de-centered myself by stepping down from my platform and joining a conversation circle with my students. This signals to students that this is not a Q&A session, and that I’m participating in a discussion that centers them, not me.
Students talked to faces, not backs of heads: We created a circle so that all students could see each other, which made deep listening possible.
Emphasize information literacy: I asked students where they got their information from, a way of getting students to see patterns in where and how they consume content.
With these foundational pieces in place, we can focus on specific techniques for facilitating discussion when controversial topics arise.
How to Facilitate Sticky Discussions
Set Guiding Principles for Your Class
Guiding principles are not “rules for engagement”; they are collaboratively generated expectations that you and your students hold each other accountable to. Setting guiding principles gives students agency over their learning while serving as an anchor during turbulent discussions.
A simple way to do this in your class is to ask students to write to themselves a response to one or multiple of the following questions:
Think about a productive class discussion you’ve been a part of. What about that experience made it productive?
Think about an unhelpful class discussion you’ve been a part of. What about that experience made it unhelpful?
What do you need from your classmates to feel well supported during collaborative activities?
Next, ask them to share their answers aloud while you write the key themes from their responses on the board. Then, you can either ask students to turn these themes into 4-6 statements that’ll become the guiding principles, or you can synthesize them yourself and share them with students.
Having guiding principles—and periodically reminding students of them—can preemptively de-escalate charged conversations. You can resurface them at various points in the semester: at the beginning of a class session where you know a difficult discussion will take place, mid-way through the course as a sort of a mid-semester check-in, and after a challenging conversation, to get them to reflect on how well they aligned their participation with those principles. The earlier you set these expectations with students, the more useful they’ll be.
Here’s what my students and I came up with last year:
Be intentional about how you contribute to class: prioritizing understanding during discussions.
Show up ready to participate for others (because your peers benefit from hearing your ideas).
Extend respect to all when listening.
Welcome different opinions; be willing to let go of your idea to hear someone else’s.
Make learning fun and rigorous.
Strive for parody in small groups; prioritize the equitable distribution of labor.
Stay on topic! Connect what you’re sharing to learning goals.
Support others in their learning by gently calling students in and connect to their interests.
Situational Phrases and Techniques
In American football, effective offenses have audibles: a set of bread-and-butter plays they can switch to when the defense puts them in a compromising position pre-snap. Educators need audibles, too—a set of practiced, pre-downloaded, on-the-fly techniques for when things go left.
Here are some of my favorite audibles that I and the faculty I’ve worked with over the years use:
If a student says something hateful about a group of people or directed toward a student: “I want to pause the conversation for a moment. [Insert student name], I think what you said might be troubling to some of your peers; I want to better understand what you’re trying to say. What I heard you say was [insert your interpretation; you may need to rephrase to ensure you’re not retraumatizing students]. Could you clarify what you mean by that?”
This approach allows the student to hear their words spoken back to them. Most students never hear their words reflected to them in a non-accusatory manner; they hear themselves say it, and then they’re instantly met with a visceral response from the listener(s). Pausing the conversation and giving the speaker another chance to rephrase their statement in a non-hateful way is uncommon in day-to-day conversation, but it’s possible in our classrooms.
This strategy suggests that it’s worth understanding the true meaning behind someone’s words and other non verbal communication cues, especially in the classroom, where students are often thinking, learning and saying things for the first time. The hope is that the speaker learns that not all well-intentioned statements are well-received—most students who speak up in class aren’t out to maliciously harm their peers. Asking the speaker to explain allows us to uncover the value system behind their statement. Hate speech has no place in an academic setting; critically examining the value system that undergirds hate speech, I’d argue, does.
If the emotions of a conversation spill over into unhelpful territory: “I can feel things getting pretty tense in here. I appreciate your investment in this conversation, but we should take a 5-minute break and come back together once we’ve had time to cool off.” Because it gives you and your students a well-needed break to mentally and emotionally process what just took place.
If a really big event happens in the world that you know is important to your students: This situation requires a calculated risk assessment. Showing solidarity with what you perceive to be the majority of your students who might be affected by an event can cause a minority of your students to feel isolated or even attacked. Instead of assuming that all of your students are similarly impacted by a recent event, take ten minutes of your class to have students think, write, and then share in pairs or small groups about how they see the event as connected to their lives. If you find a good example of a podcast, interview, or short essay about an event that considers diverse viewpoints and offers a strong critical analysis, you can share that with your students ahead of the think-write-share activity. You can do this type of reflection and sharing in a discussion post. A low-risk, high-reward option would be to create an asynchronous reflection assignment in your LMS where students write a brief reflection that only you see. This allows all students to feel heard while helping you offer each student the support they need.
If a student shares a topic that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand: “Thank you for sharing that, [insert student name]. Could you share more about how this connects to [insert subject]?” In answering this question, the student either 1) realizes that their contribution doesn’t help toward the discussion’s learning goals, or 2) successfully explains why their contribution does help toward the learning goals, thus expanding the discussion for you and your students. When students know you’ll ask this question, they’ll more diligently filter their responses.
If a handful of students are dominating a discussion: “[Insert student name] I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I’d really like to give others an opportunity to think and weigh in.” You could even follow up with, “before I invite your response, I’d like us to sit with this question for a minute before we begin discussing and allow everyone to gather their thoughts” *starts timer for 60 seconds* *actually waits the whole 60 seconds, no matter how uncomfortably awkward it might feel*
If a student introduces a topic that’s kind of relevant, and students seem to know more about it than you do: You can handle this like I handled the affirmative action conversation—”What are you hearing?” “Where are you hearing it from?” “What concerns you and why?” You can then sprinkle in some of the critical thinking questions below. I put these questions in my syllabus and in Canvas for students to refer back to; I want the practice of raising these questions to become muscle memory for them.
Other things you can do in these situations:
As students share their perspectives, write them on the board and identify themes. This treats their ideas as just that: ideas, that change over time, that aren’t always a reflection of students’ personal views, that students don’t own, that students might be echoing before having the chance to reflect on.
Stop it at any time—to get back to the subject at hand, if things get a little too squirrely. My data on this is anecdotal, but I’ve found that most students will end a conversation if you ask them to.
I’m sure this sounds nice on a Substack post, but we all know these are hard to do in the heat of the moment. To do any of this well, you have to practice, try it out, reflect on how it went, and—most importantly—get feedback from students. Think about conversations you’ve facilitated in the past. If you were to use any of these phrases or techniques in those situations, how would things have gone differently?
Give yourself grace in advance. You might use one of these techniques for the first time and find that students respond in a way you did expect. No class discussion is perfect.
Remember that our top priority when leading these discussions should be the safety and wellbeing of our students. Simply telling them, “I care about how you’re feeling and doing right now” is huge because, though implied, very few of us explicitly say it. And students need to hear it, maybe now more than ever.
Which of these techniques are you most or least hopeful about? Do you have an “audible” that works well for you? Feel free to share it it with us in the comments below.