Navigating Difficult Moments in the Classroom

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University has shared what to do if a difficult (also referred to as “hot”) moment has arisen in your classroom.

While there’s often no single “right” response, as the instructor, how you address difficult moments in the classroom has implications for learning. Your response can communicate indifference or even hostility; alternatively, it can show that you’re aware of your classroom’s dynamics, you aim to promote learning even through struggle, and you care about your students’ well-being. Here are some tips for helping you to respond productively.

1. Attend to your own reactions. Take a moment to steady yourself. A couple deep breaths can be helpful here. Though it may be challenging, holding steady while navigating a difficult moment can help others feel safe, less reactive, and better able to slow down and explore the dynamics at work in the situation. There are likely many different, complicated responses playing out in the room. What are you feeling? Allow yourself a pause; you can even invite everyone in the room to pause along with you. How are others reacting to what is happening? You can offer everyone some time to think, write, or even leave the room for a bit. Observe your own reactions to what is happening. Try to distinguish between what you are experiencing, what is actually being said or done, and the various possible interpretations of what is happening. There’s a lot going on in this moment! Attending to your reactions is a skill to be practiced.
2. Understand the situation. It’s possible that, in the heat and complexity of the moment, there has been some misunderstanding. Maybe someone has misspoken or you’ve mistaken their meaning. Others in the room may be in the same situation, wondering whether they’ve heard and understood a comment correctly, for instance. It’s important to make sure that your understanding of the situation is as accurate as possible and sensitive to the different perspectives present in the room. It may be fitting to ask the person or people involved for further explanation or clarification. If the difficult moment was sparked by a comment, you could try repeating back the comment or its logical implications – not as an accusation, but to allow the speaker to clarify their meaning. You might ask: “What makes you say that?” or “Can you say more about what you mean?” Try to discern if there is a learning opportunity here, or perhaps a need for articulating boundaries.
3. Deepen and nuance your short-term response. You’ve slowed down the situation, attended to your reactions, and asked for further explanation or clarification as needed. As noted above, the dynamics at play in this moment are complex! How can you deepen and nuance your response in the short-term? For one, try and separate the utterance, idea, or action from the person who articulated or performed it. Hold people accountable for what they say and do; also recognize that a single offensive or even harmful act doesn’t reveal the entirety of someone’s character and motives. You can make it clear that a comment or act is unwelcome in the classroom, even while admitting you’re not sure precisely why or how it came about. For another, you might acknowledge the various emotional responses in the room as material that can contribute meaningfully to class discussion. Can these responses reveal something interesting about a concept that is being studied or a method being practiced? This move can both validate the different kinds of responses unfolding for individuals in the room and communicate that lived experience is relevant for classroom learning.
4. Consider your long-term response. Your short-term response to a difficult moment need not be your only response. Do you think the moment requires follow-up action so that future classes aren’t negatively affected? Would it be helpful to check-in with the class or certain individuals either via email or during the next class meeting? If you perceived harm being done or unease being instigated, you may offer to talk with a student or students after class, over email or in-person. You may also consider how chances for feedback and communication of personal experience might be incorporated in the ongoing class structure. Perhaps invite everyone to write or share exit notes at the end of every class, or maybe you collect feedback at several points throughout the semester. Regular opportunities to articulate one’s experience in a course can do much toward alleviating the pressure placed on any one emotionally intense moment; they also help cultivate a practice of reflection and self-awareness.

Five Strategies to Interrupt Hot Moments from MSU IDI:

1. CURIOSITY: Ask powerful questions and listen generously to answers. Lead a dialogue balancing all voices in the class. Make sure to surface historically marginalized perspectives.
2. WRITING EXERCISE: Have students write responses to: 
1. “What I know about this topic…”
2. “What I want to learn…” 
3. “What I want to say….” 
1. You may ask them to respond anonymously, collect and review to determine how to proceed next time.
3. SMALL GROUPS: Divide students into groups of 2 or 3 and give them prompts (from above or others); debrief or have them write.
4. CONTENT/DATA SHARE: Create a graph and ask students what they already know about this topic, what they need to find out. What do we know about this issue historically?
5. NAMING AND FRAMING: Sometimes it is useful to actually stop the conversation and ask the group to name and explore something that just happened during the conversation. Move away from the specifics of the issue and ask class “what happened here?” Solicit ideas about what, why, how to move forward.
   

Looking for more resources? Check out the amazing work done by educator development team at the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning. They provide strategies for anticipating and responding to difficult discussions as well as classroom incivility:

• Guidelines for planning and facilitating discussions on difficult or controversial topics
• Responding to incidents of hate speech
• Teaching and learning in a tense election season
• Strategies for making productive use of tense or difficult moments
• Facilitating Challenging Conversations in your Classes (blog post)
• Sample guidelines for class participation
• Guidelines for responding to particular topics and tragedies
• Responding to Incivility in the College Classroom

Thank you to colleagues in university educator development at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at the University of Michigan, Institutional Diversity and Inclusion at Michigan State University, and others for their materials that informed or were adapted into this resource. 

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash