S3 E25: Preparing for and Facilitating Difficult Conversations and Situations in Teaching

In our second Hear From Your Host episode, Dr. Rachel Yoho, the regular host of the podcast, becomes the guest as Producer Kelly Chandler guest hosts to facilitate a conversation on how we prepare for and navigate difficult situations in educational spaces.

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Kelly 0:08

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast. My name is Kelly Chandler and I am the Strategic Programs and Media Manager for the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University and producer for the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast, where we share impactful and evidence-based teaching practices to support all students and faculty. For this episode, I'm also your guest host in our second episode of our Hear From Your Host series. For these special episodes, we'll turn the tables and listeners will get to hear from our host, Dr. Rachel Yoho about keystone concepts in teaching. Dr. Yoho is the Assistant Director in the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. She is also a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy.

Rachel 0:55

Yeah. Thanks Kelly.

Kelly 0:57

So here in this episode, we're going to be talking about how faculty can best prepare for difficult conversations in the classroom. So what are we talking about when we discuss difficult conversations and situations in teaching?

Rachel 1:13

Well with those, we really could be talking about any number of things. We could be talking about difficult content, things that are maybe socially pressing issues. It could be something that's particularly controversial, maybe worth teaching with an established methodology like debates, for a reason, but maybe we're concerned about how that might go. Or these might be things that we are not prepared for. Things that might be said in the moment, something that might be posted in a discussion board in an asynchronous course, or even a conversation about grades with a student, either in class or in another setting. So with all of these, what we're really talking about is if we sort of draw on that crucial conversations framework, is there's really three key pieces. There's that strong emotional investment, so basically people care about the topic or issue. There's some differing strong opinion. So again, people on different sides of something. And that there's some aspect of being high stakes. So we don't often connect that. We don't often think about high stakes being like the teaching setting necessarily, but perhaps this might be something that has an impact on a student's sense of belonging in the course or their interest in continuing in the field of study, the major, the minor, whatever that might be. So some impact on lives.

Kelly 2:45

Okay, so since faculty build out their syllabi and, you know, know the topics they plan to cover and readings they plan to assign beforehand, can you talk us through some best practices when designing your course and preparing to facilitate those potentially difficult conversations before they take place?

Rachel 3:06

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean obviously when we're talking about for instance, like the critical conversations, again, we're not necessarily talking about it must meet exactly all three aspects, it could be any of those teaching situations that leave us in that moment of like, Hmm, I need to do something here. Again, might be an asynchronous class, might be a synchronous class. But here, when we're talking about how we prepare to teach, often we're looking at some of the known topics. And so we might be thinking about the topics that are going to be some of those ones that are going to have some strong emotions and, and opinions and all of that, and so we might be talking about different types of power dynamics. We might be talking about different types of social contexts. But with that, again, we can kind of extend that out into the critical conversations literature and framework. We're looking at how we are creating a deeper understanding of things like whatever the topic is, the subject matter, how those dynamics interact, some sort of interactions that impact perhaps the learning environment and how we produce change in that moment because this is good for our students. It helps their critical consciousness development, maybe their self-efficacy in terms of the content, but we also wanna be thinking about how do we do this realistically, right?

Kelly 4:33

So you've talked to us a little bit about why this is important, some of the context in which this might come up, so whenever faculty members are anticipating that there's gonna be a difficult conversation, what are those best practices or actual actions and preparations that they can do to mitigate this situation?

Rachel 4:53

Yeah, absolutely. So we want to focus obviously on student learning. We want students to feel involved in the class. We want the learning to happen. We want students to progress in their desired areas and careers and whatnot, of course. And so as we're doing this, some of the things that we might try with the important caveat that we don't have a one size fits all for everything. So depending on the modality, depending on the type of class, depending on the size of the course, lots of different things we might consider. However, one of the things that we might try would be something like creating classroom ground rules, or we might call them discussion guidelines or community expectations, whatever your preferred name there might be. And so really when we're talking about that, we as the instructor work with the students to generate those, again, whatever you'd like to call them, ground rules or discussion guidelines. And so with that, it's hard to start from a blank document, a blank, you know, slide or, or board or something like that. So really there often we're talking about going in and then having the conversation of, what's important in this class, in this particular discipline, in this level of the course? How do we as people in this class want to interact with each other? What do we see as productive and what does our profession perhaps see as productive? And so, you know, the goal there obviously is to have the students, and you of course as the instructor, really agree on those ground rules or guidelines. And also the key piece that's often left out of that conversation is the reasons they support learning, really connecting that piece, because even when we have those conversations with the students, it's more like, ah, how do we wanna interact with each other? Great, that's important. But also, why is this important in our learning and our development and our, you know, working towards whatever our goals might be. And having those before any sort of discussion begins.

Kelly 6:53

So I know that you, in a lot of your professional development workshops, you talk about how to support all students, but you also like to focus on how to support instructors, how instructors can support themselves. And so what are some of those things that you might recommend for instructors to kind of, you know, prepare themselves, and get in the right head space, if you will?

Rachel 7:17

So there are lots of potential ground rules, examples, there's lots of things, lots of resources online, of course. But we wanna be thinking about again, what's most relevant to the modality, what's most relevant to the class size, how people are discussing, sharing, and interacting. As we're preparing, we really wanna be thinking about ourselves as the instructor, ourselves, or teaching assistant, whatever our role might be. And so really how we show up as individuals also impacts a lot of the class dynamics. So it might be how students perceive us, what students might assume about our thoughts on a particular topic, whether correct or incorrect. And also something that we don't talk about in my opinion, nearly often enough, which is how do we handle challenges in the classroom? So again, classroom defined broadly, whatever our modality might be. But that's very much personality dependent. You know, you could be the person who is ready to go, ready to respond right there in that moment. Or you could be all the way at the other end of like, I will think of something great to say four hours later. And so odds are mostly somewhere in between, occasionally this, occasionally that. But really thinking about that aspect of self-awareness, how do I prepare myself? And that can be something really important there as well. And so there's lots of, especially when we're thinking through the preparation, even things like very much related to our personality, practicing some of the things that might be words to intervene, but even practicing how we will jump in, how we will, you know, get involved in a discussion board post that might be going off into some other topic, whatever the case may be. But overall, really what we're talking about here is everything from our syllabus. You know, Hey, we're gonna be talking about these particularly hot button issues, controversial issues, here's why we're doing it, the learning goals, bringing everything back to the learning goals and talking with our students. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? It's that it's transparency, but it's sort of leveled up because the stakes might be just that much higher.

Kelly 9:32

Just so that we're all on the same page here, are there some examples or scenarios that you might give us of what a difficult conversation or hot button topic might be in a classroom?

Rachel 9:44

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's almost a never ending list of things that these could be like I mentioned, I think here we're really talking about anything that makes you as the instructor go like, Ooh, I need to do something. Or, oh, that, hmm, not good. You know, anything that gives us sort of that reaction. But we might be talking about classes or courses that have some of those, like socially pressing issues. So it's not to say we must be talking about some of the common, you know, race, gender, you know, all of those types of things. It could be power dynamics, could be aspects of, you know, identity or whatever the case may be. Or it might not be. We might be talking about grades. But also we might be having different types of conversations. There's a very different way to prepare or think about something that, hey, I know in week seven the Tuesday class is going to be on, you know, some really pressing subjects versus someone said something and I need to respond. Or someone says something that's off topic or maybe someone else is offended by that. Those are very different situations, but we also wanna think about what does that mean to, again, continue student learning, continue trying to meet the learning goals, and hopefully everyone, like you mentioned, Kelly, feels included in the course. That includes the instructor. We're important people in that space as well, who are. Again, often forgotten in my opinion. So some of the things we might be thinking about, certainly I would definitely refer some of our listeners back to season one, episode eight, when we discussed writing about challenging topics. Because I think that gives some interesting examples, particularly from the humanities. But these certainly aren't necessarily just discipline specific. That's not to say in a STEM field or public health or some other area, that we're not going to have very challenging topics as well. So it could be, again, like I mentioned, you know, someone says something that might be offensive to another student. But also we might be talking about content. We might be talking about, how maybe a team of engineers could go into a particular community. How do we do that? How do we do that productively? How do you build connections, especially if there are different types of power dynamics? You know, you're not a member of that community. You're coming in to solve some sort of engineering problem. What are those dynamics? How do those interactions work? So lots of different things there. I mean, that's certainly just one tiny, tiny example in a whole sea of examples. But I think there's a lot of things that we wanna be thinking very expansively. What's difficult, what are the ways people might be interacting with topics even when they're not perceived necessarily as controversial?

Kelly 12:31

Right, absolutely. So earlier, like I mentioned, faculty build their own syllabi, right? And they can kind of anticipate when these difficult conversations might come up. But as you briefly mentioned before, not everything or every possible situation can be known in advance. So how might we prepare ourselves, our classroom, our course design even, for those unexpected situations?

Rachel 13:02

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a certain knowledge if you're going in you know a topic's going to be difficult, that might help a bit actually. But when we're talking about managing discussions in the moment, essentially we are attempting to manage emotions and events as they play out in that moment. So here, obviously I am talking about some sort of synchronous course, but also these do apply to asynchronous courses. Just discussion boards or other asynchronous interactions might be slightly different. But really what we wanna be thinking about here are some ideas of how we can support, how we can intervene. And also the other piece is how to follow up. And so one of the things that might kind of cross over in our conversation here from how we prepare to how we handle things in the moment is having pausing, for instance, be an expectation. So not only for us, obviously as the instructor or teaching assistant, whatever our role is, we can always say, okay, let's take a pause here. But we can also set that expectation for the class that students can also say like, Hey, let's take a pause here. Because the other thing is as the instructor, especially in an in-person modality or synchronous modality, we aren't always aware of everything that's going on in the moment or everything that's going on in the chat, or in a fully asynchronous maybe we didn't see the discussion board and what was going on in there that day. We checked it the next day. So lots of different things we wanna be thinking about, but here's the other place that we can be thinking about how we, especially in those synchronous environments, how we rehearse our own pause phrases. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but it's actually useful. It's like that sort of muscle memory thing. The more we practice something, whether it's a hobby or cooking or, you know, other interest, the better you get at it. Right? The same thing can be said here, so anything that fits obviously for your personality too. So it might be something like, Hey, I'm hearing whatever, I'd like to pause so that we can do something. That do something could be any number of activities. You know, we might just take a pause. We might ask students to do some sort of like 60 second writing prompt in their notes. We might take that opportunity to refer back to ground rules, whatever the case may be. Because here we're really thinking about how do we take that metaphorical temperature down, if you will.

Kelly 15:25

So we talked about some good strategies as far as how to handle those difficult conversations, whether you are prepared for it or unprepared for it. But particularly when you're unprepared for it, how would an instructor, how could an instructor know when they should jump in, when they should interject?

Rachel 15:44

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, this is again, across modalities. Certainly in a discussion board, we could jump in and say, Hey, let's take a pause here, you know, and you could have a statement or something like that. But really when we're thinking about these, deciding when and how to intervene, we have quite a number of things that might impact our decision. And so this certainly isn't a checklist. We're not gonna be like, okay, in the moment, let me think about this, and then that, and then that. But in general, the things we might be considering are, you know, is this a teachable moment? Certainly there may be many times that a topic is important. It might be a topic we're also personally or professionally interested in, but it might not be relevant to the class.

Kelly 16:30

I love a good, teachable moment. That's my favorite phrase. This is a teachable moment.

Rachel 16:36

Yeah, I mean, we can even point it out. It's like, Hey, if we're to use the phrase like, bringing people in, we wanna call in, let's discuss this as a moment. But, like I said, sometimes not everything is that moment, but if it is, great, let's dig in. But also before we dig in, we might be thinking about, you know, is there enough time? Because if there's not enough time, then we might do more harm than good. We might be causing some sort of issue if we just kind of superficially discuss something and then, okay, let's move on. That could be more harmful. It just depends on the topic, of course. And so if there's not enough time though, especially this is obviously most relevant in synchronous courses, we can acknowledge that, Hey, we need to talk about this. We don't have time today. I need to go over the assignment for this week. We need to talk about this, but it's important, so let's come back to it in our class on Thursday. Certainly, obviously the important part there is the accountability and actually coming back to it in class on Thursday. But also perhaps not everything needs to be a full class conversation. Maybe it's something that you follow up with an email. Maybe it's something that you connect with in a different way. A discussion board post, a post in the learning management system like Canvas, something like that. Other considerations we might be thinking about, like when and how to intervene are really things like, do I have the skills? Do I have the stamina? And the interest, especially, in facilitating this conversation, not only in this moment, but are there resources that I need? Because if we say, okay, hey, let's come back to it on Thursday, this is really important. I wanna make sure we do well in discussing this. Maybe there's some resources. Maybe you need to read something. Maybe it's not right in your, like, wheelhouse of expertise. Or maybe you wanna talk to someone in your unit, your administration of like, Hey, how do you recommend I handle this? Maybe you're a new faculty member. It's like, I am just getting into the practice of this. What do I do here? And so really thinking about what support you need is also important there.

Kelly 18:39

I think that was something that in a previous episode was talked about where we had our guests, Raven and Laurel, in season two, I remember them talking about the importance of sometimes admitting that you don't know it all to your students, and I love that. Just kind of leveling with them and taking this as a teaching opportunity also for yourself. Like, Hey, so we've come into a part of this conversation that I actually don't think I have all the resources, all the skills to handle right now. So let's table this. I'll do some more work and come back to it. I really like that. I think it can be really powerful to see faculty admit to that honestly.

Rachel 19:21

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it's hard as an instructor, I mean, there's sort of this pressure to know all the things, to be absolutely perfect to know every single thing and sometimes we just don't. You know, Hey, I forget. I need to go look that up. You know, we use our resources.

Kelly 19:39

And also, like you said, we bring ourselves, we bring our own experiences and identities into the situation. So we also might not know all the time when there is a difficult conversation coming up or when we might need to interject.

Rachel 19:54

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're not always going to be knowledgeable in every single thing that's said. Students might bring in something very interesting, very timely, and maybe that's not something that we are quite familiar with yet, but it's an opportunity for us as well. And so the other thing about on, you know, when and how to intervene again across modalities, we might be thinking about the other side. Again, it's not a checklist, but we might be thinking about the consequences if, for instance, we do or do not engage in the conversation, you know, in that moment. And so there might be impacts, like we were talking about earlier on student learning. You know, if you don't feel like you belong in the class or that you're part of the class, you're probably not going to learn very well. There could be that one class session, hopefully not, but there could be, that changes the dynamics for the rest of the semester. You know, obviously these are the kinds of things we want, perhaps, with this conversation to avoid. But we also might be thinking about the impacts on the instructor. Certainly things that might be said can harm the instructor as well, but also things like course evaluations, what students say in that type of anonymous forum impact different types of appointments differently. And that's something that just is how this, you know, system is set up and so reappointment, depending on different types of positions, can have different impacts, unfortunately. And also, you know, students' reactions beyond the classroom. We might be thinking about, you know, if something escalates further, how do I, hopefully prevent things from escalating further from moving into other spaces. But also overall the practice of teaching. You know, we're looking at our own growth, our own learning. As an instructor, you know, if you've been teaching long enough, you kind of get to that point of I've seen it all. And then in fact you realize you have not seen it all. 'cause there's this other thing that happened. So it's really looking at teaching as that sort of iterative practice as well. How do we show up? How do we learn from things? How do we continue to grow and improve just like we want our students to grow and improve?

Kelly 22:07

So what do you see as our keystone concept for today that you hope our listeners take away from this episode?

Rachel 22:16

Yeah, I think the keystone concept here is there are lots of difficult conversations and situations in teaching. It could be something we're ready for and know that, hey, this is gonna be challenging. It might not be. But they take a lot of practice, they take a lot of commitment, you know, commitment to student learning, commitment to a successful day or session or lesson, whatever the case may be. And there are a lot of internal and external factors that impact our decision making, impact the dynamics, impact the moment, whatever that is. I mean certainly as we're thinking about how do we not only prepare, but also how we handle situations in the moment, it's thinking through what might be likely, also what might be less likely. You know, so we've mentioned in other episodes maybe talking to other people who have taught the course. You know, if this is something that you inherited, but maybe if it's something that you're designing, it's really, what can you anticipate? Where might the sticking points be? And then being ready for the sticking points that you didn't know about. But as we do this, we really wanna be thinking about who our resources are and where our resources are. So obviously our key considerations there are really thinking about our own preparation, preparing early, talking with our students from day one. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Why is this important to your professional preparation? And we also wanna be thinking about our resources in terms of talking with colleagues. Certainly we want to be able to process, we want to be able to discuss situations. And get that support while obviously, you know, FERPA expectations like student privacy expectations, but we wanna have that community. We wanna think about is that in our department? Are there other colleagues who teach similar courses? Is this going to the Teaching and Learning Center and building my community that way? Or any other thing. We really want to be focused here overall on our own academic and professional integrity. And so as we do that, what does that look like? What do expectations look like? Where are our resources? That could be, you know, program director, department chair, you know, a college's faculty affairs dean or dean's office representative, something like that. But it might not be, we might not be going to someone in our academic line, if you will. Maybe we're thinking about people in other offices, you know, faculty affairs types of offices, teaching and learning centers. Maybe the undergraduate core office, if that's the type of course, or even campus affinity groups. But really here, you know, obviously, and this is a certainly a short episode, it's not comprehensive. We really wanna just be focused here on our keystone concept, our key takeaway's really being that difficult conversations happen and that they take practice and commitment and really rely on a lot of internal and external factors.

Kelly 25:01

Yeah. Speaking of community, it's been really cool on some of our episodes watching the dynamic between our episodes where there are multiple guests, because usually these people are either in a cohort already together or they've found each other through working on similar projects or on a grant or a Stearns Center facilitated program even. So it's been really cool watching these faculty members as our podcast guests find their community.

Rachel 25:31

Finding your community, finding your people whoever that might be, whoever your resources are, someone supportive to really have that resource for you as the instructor as well, that support is really essential.

Kelly 25:45

Great. Well, thank you for your insights on this topic, Rachel. Um, our, our host.

Rachel 25:52

Yeah, it's fun to be on this side.

Kelly 25:54

I know, I always look forward to these episodes because while I do like being in the background, sometimes it is fun to come into the foreground every now and then.

Rachel 26:06

Well thank you. Thank you for hosting.

Kelly 26:08

Yeah, of course. Well, thank you listeners for joining us on our second Hear From Your Host episode. Be sure to continue to listen along as we post episodes every two weeks as we explore keystone concepts in teaching.