[00:00:00] Silence in a classroom can look like calm, but sometimes it's actually risk management. Today, I break down new research on why students really go quiet, and it's not the reason most teachers assume. Here are three questions that I'm offering you to think about while you're listening. First, what does silence symbolize in your classroom? Is it compliance? Is it a need for safety, or is it something else? Second, when a student in your classroom goes quiet mid-response, what does that mean? Who are they intimidated by? What is stopping them from sharing their thinking? And third, what would it look like to lower the social stakes of disagreement without lowering your academic standards?
Schoolutions is the podcast for educators and caregivers who are ready to grow alongside their children. Each episode delivers research-backed [00:01:00] strategies rooted in the five practices of expert teachers, so every student finds their spark and receives the support they need to thrive
91%. That's the percentage of students in a brand-new national survey who said that when they hold back their honest opinion in civics class, the person they're worried about isn't the teacher, isn't the principal, isn't a parent scrolling social media, it's the kid sitting next to them.
I'm Olivia Wahl. Today's episode is a solo one. No guest, just me, and a report that landed on my desk this month that I think every teacher, not just civics teachers, needs to hear about. To understand why this new report matters, you need to know a little bit more about the one that came before it. Last year in 2025, the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute released a brief called Why Are Teachers Uncomfortable Teaching Civics?
And the findings were [00:02:00] sobering. Almost 80% of civics teachers admitted they had self-censored in their own classroom, avoiding a topic because they were afraid of pushback or controversy. Nearly 86% said fear of controversy was a primary challenge to teaching civics at all. And fewer than one in five said that they got clear guidance from their school or district about what they were actually allowed to teach.
So picture that for a second. Teachers, the adults in the room, trained professionals, experts in their craft, hired specifically to teach this material, going quiet because they didn't feel safe or supported enough to teach it fully. That report definitely made headlines. It got picked up by Education Week, the Chicago Tribune, Arizona PBS, a dozen major outlets, and it raised an obvious next question: If the teachers are self-censoring, what is happening with the students?[00:03:00]
This year, the Institute went and asked them. They surveyed recent high school graduates nationally over the summer of 2026, and the report that just was sent to me is called Why Are Students Self-Censoring in Civics Class? That's what I am breaking down today. Let's start with that top-line number I've already mentioned, because it reframes the whole conversation.
58% of the students surveyed said that they had held back from sharing what they really thought about a political or civic topic because they were worried about how others would react. Now, here's what gets interesting and where I was a little surprised, and I'm guessing you may be, too. This wasn't, for the most part, a story about hostile classrooms. 73% of the respondents said that they were generally comfortable sharing their honest views. These weren't kids describing a room where they felt attacked or shut down. But the report did go more in depth, and 51% of those comfortable students, the ones who [00:04:00] said that the room felt safe, had still self-censored at least once.
So that's where I wanna pause for a second, because that's the thesis of this whole report. We can build classrooms that are open to disagreement in principle, and students may still hesitate to actually disagree out loud. So if it's not that the room feels hostile, what is actually happening? That's where the 91% comes back in, because when researchers asked students who they were worried about when they held back, 91% said classmates. 41% said the teacher, not the other way around, not even close.
And here are some other stats from the report I think are critical for you to know. 26% of students who self-censored said that they were worried about being discussed or posted about on social media. 21% worried about it affecting their grade, and 12% worried about caregivers or other adults hearing about their views. But the [00:05:00] number one concern by a wide margin was simply: What will the kid at the desk next to me think of me? So why does this actually matter for civic learning? You might be thinking, "Okay, teenagers care what their peers think. That is not exactly breaking news," and that's fair. But here's why this matters specifically for civics and really any subject built around discussion and disagreement.
Civic education has two jobs. One is content. How does this government actually work? What are the branches? What are your rights? The other job is skill-based, practicing the actual muscles that citizenship requires, making an argument, listening to one you disagree with, staying in a hard conversation instead of leaving it I talk about this all the time with colleagues and try to remind students about this. A view that never gets said out loud cannot be examined. It can't be challenged, defended, or [00:06:00] revised. If a student is doing the math in their head about social cost every time they consider responding or being part of a conversation, they're not just being quiet - they're losing the opportunity to practice disagreement in a low-stakes environment before they have to do it in a high-stakes one.
And listen, not every decision to stay quiet is a problem. Listening itself is a civic skill, but there's a difference between a student choosing to listen and a student staying silent because they've calculated it isn't worth the risk. Those can look identical from the front of the room, and they are not the same thing. Here's a piece of this report I don't want you to miss because it connects directly back to that 2025 teacher study. 53% of student respondents said that they had sometimes or often seen a teacher avoid, cut short, or shut down a discussion of a political or current events topic. Now, the researchers are careful here, and I [00:07:00] want to be careful too.
This isn't a story about one group silencing the other. It's not students are being too sensitive or teachers are being too cautious. It's more accurate and honestly more useful to think of it as one room where two groups are independently assessing risk. The teacher hesitates to open a hard conversation, the students hesitate to enter one, and the room gets quieter without actually getting better at disagreement. But that is the trap. Quiet can look like calm. It can look like a well-managed classroom. But quiet built on avoided risk isn't the same as quiet built on genuine safety. And it's definitely not the same as a room where kids are actually practicing the hard work of civil discourse.
Here's the part of the report that gave me hope. The researchers didn't find a bunch of students asking for less discussion or less debate or fewer hard topics. It's the opposite. Students said they wanted more and better opportunities for discussion, debate, and current [00:08:00] events. That is an exciting finding because these are not students who want to be protected from disagreement. They wanna learn how to disagree well. They just don't yet feel like the conditions are in place to do it without social cost attached. That is an invitation for us as educators, and we are well-positioned to respond to it.
So I want to take this report and make it practical for you as a listener. That's what this podcast is for.The report lays out several concrete recommendations, and I wanted to walk you through the ones that I think matter most for you moving forward.
First, treat constructive disagreement as an explicit teachable civic skill. That means giving your students direct practice making evidence-based arguments. They need to represent an opposing view accurately, ask good-faith questions, and this is important, they need to be able to distinguish between criticizing an idea and criticizing a person. That last [00:09:00] distinction is one a lot of adults have not mastered, let alone teenagers, so naming it explicitly matters. Second, make the peer norm visible. Here's a specific strategy straight from the report. Ask students anonymously whether a hypothetical classmate who voices an unpopular opinion should still be treated with respect, and separately, whether they think most of their classmates would agree with that.
Very often there is a gap. Students support the norm more strongly than they believe their peers do. And if you can show them that gap, you correct a false assumption that's been keeping people quiet for no reason. Third, lower the social stakes without lowering the standards. This is the phrase from the report I keep coming back to because you're not softening the challenge. You're changing the delivery mechanism. Assigned positions where a student argues a side whether or not it's their personal view, [00:10:00] anonymous opening responses before a discussion starts. These give students practice disagreeing before disagreement becomes personal.
Fourth, and this one's concrete, set a plain rule about what happens to what's said in the room. Remember that 26% of students surveyed worried about being discussed or posted about on social media. Address that directly. Say it out loud. What a classmate says in this discussion doesn't get recorded, screenshotted, or circulated out of context.
And fifth, back the teacher. This is where the 2025 and 2026 reports connect directly. Remember, fewer than 15% of civics teachers said that their district gave them clear, helpful guidance on what they were allowed to teach. If you're a school leader listening to this, that is your action item. Teachers can't confidently open the door to hard conversations if they don't know whether the building has their back when it gets uncomfortable.[00:11:00] School boards and administrators can offer that clarity plainly and in writing, that engaging in contested civic questions is part of the job description, not a risk to be managed around.
Here's what I left the report thinking about time and time again, and what I'm leaving you with. Safe does not mean comfortable. An effective civics classroom, really any classroom, makes it possible for a student to lose an argument without losing social standing. Students leave that experience knowing that they can be wrong, they can be challenged, they can change their mind out loud in front of their peers, and they will still belong in the room afterward. I invite you to try something the week ahead right away. It can be something really small. You could try the anonymous norm check. Set up a Google survey or a Google form and ask your students privately whether a classmate who shared an [00:12:00] unpopular opinion should still be respected, and whether they think their peers would agree.
You might be surprised by the gap between what your students believe and what they think everyone else believes. Closing that gap, letting your kids know the results anonymously, might be the single most useful thing you do all semester. If this episode has you thinking about how to build a classroom where students feel safe enough to disagree, I would love to help you build that. Find me at oliviawahl.com, click Coaching and Consulting, and let's start that conversation. Make sure to follow Schoolutions on socials @schoolutionspodcast. This entire season, guests are sharing how they bring the five essential practices from my upcoming book to life.
Next week, I'm back for a two-part conversation with Jennifer Orr. She’s spent nearly 30 years teaching elementary school, holds National Board Certification, has mentored more new teachers than she can count, [00:13:00] and has written three books on teaching practice. You'll hear how to cultivate a classroom that runs itself and why the best teaching happens in relationship, not isolation. Don't miss it.
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