Civil Discourse Handbook

This resource is a great place to start! It describes best practices and general advice for what to avoid as a facilitator.

This resource provides a list of behaviors that individual students or groups may exhibit that could hinder their learning or the productivity of a conversation, and gives examples of what may underlie the behavior and possible instructor responses.

Participatory facilitation is an approach that fosters shared power, collective decision making, and active engagement. This resource is a guide to consider how participatory facilitation (instead of conventional) could enhance class discussions and

As a facilitator, there are many ways to decide what format will work best for a particular discussion. These are some possible formats to use depending on your class and the topic. 

Questions can effectively elicit people’s thoughts, beliefs, values, and feelings and encourage more productive civil discourse. This resource gives instructors a greater understanding of the necessity of good questions and can be given to students to

This is a general guide for how to lead a small group discussion with key tips of facilitators and participants, and an example script with questions.

This resource defines norms, explains their importance in the classroom and in challenging conversations, and provides variations and examples of four key norms instructors should intentionally include while facilitating civil discourse.

This resource defines three types of process for setting norms and a guide for how to choose which process would work best for your classroom.

This guide has three lesson plans of different lengths (20 min, 30 min, 45 min) for instructors to use when establishing norms. This resource is helpful after deciding what process you want to use to construct norms with the class.

As the facilitator, it’s crucial to cultivate an environment that embraces moments of tension as opportunities for learning and acknowledges that mistakes are part of growth. This resource differentiates between a "call out" and a "call in," and gives

This resource gives facilitation strategies and example responses for when a "hot moment," a sudden eruption of tension or conflict, occurs in the classroom.

This framework defines disagreement as a potentially productive part of dialogue and aims to manage or move through disagreements rather than avoid or minimize them.  It gives language to define discourse as more or less heated and provides tools for each

Unpacking individual and group dynamics after a political or heated discussion creates valuable opportunities for learning. It allows participants to reflect on the relevance of the discussion beyond the classroom, practice navigating disagreements, and

This is a document for instructors to use or adapt when facilitating reflection.

This is a series of questions meant to help participants debrief their conversation. It offers a script so that facilitators and/or instructors who want to facilitate a debrief do not need to come up with their own reflection questions.

A creative, fun exercise to excite students about facilitating or taking part in civil disagreements. Students create their "dream" civil disagreement conversation, deciding on their ideal facilitators, topic, and question.

Students will analyze their social and informational environments, create a visual "map" of their echo chambers, and reflect on how these networks shape their perspectives, assumptions, and understanding of nuance. This is best paired with structured

This resource is meant to teach students about political typology to help them understand the complexity of their own and their classmates' political identities. A "civic self-portrait" is a visual representation of political beliefs, values, and