How to navigate difficult classroom conversations

Associate Professor Tricia Shalka offers strategies for preparing for, and leading, classroom discussions in moments of crisis and discomfort.

By Tricia Shalka. The essay was initially published on November 8, 2024, by Inside Higher Ed.”

I was traveling in the days immediately following Oct. 7, 2023, and consequently had my TA teaching my doctoral research methods class that week. When I returned the following week, I started the class session as I often do with some time to check in and see how everyone was doing.

It was soon clear that many students were not OK. One student broke into sobbing tears about world events and her personal attachments to them, then pivoted to profusely apologizing about her emotional release. Classmates beside her reached out with supportive hands on her shoulder while others provided Kleenex, and we collectively reassured her that there was nothing wrong with her tears—they were fully welcome in our classroom space. As we progressed through check-ins, additional students shared how they were struggling. Notably, those struggles spanned numerous sides of the conflict that was erupting in the Middle East.

Within minutes, it was abundantly clear to me that our class session needed to be different than what I had planned. I mentally started to shift toward staying in the moment and facilitating a conversation to help students share and process what was happening. As I made that decision, I felt a wave of anxiety as I acknowledged to myself that I didn’t yet know exactly how I was going to do that. But I trusted I would figure it out, together with my students, and that I’d already nurtured the right conditions for this class to be able to do that work.

As college educators, we are well attuned to and comfortable with cognitive discomfort. We live in marketplaces of competing ideas and opinions, and we relish opportunities to help students learn the skills to sit with and move through the discomfort that arises in navigating intellectual challenges. Whether implicitly or explicitly, we believe in some fundamental principles of learning theory holding that intellectual growth often occurs because of discomfort—in other words, that the kind of discomfort that arises in the midst of cognitive dissonance or “wobble” is a productive condition for learning, especially when students can engage in supportive dialogue with others.

Emotional discomfort, however, is a different thing, and I’ve watched many college educators become profoundly uncomfortable, resistant or even paralyzed in its midst. When that happens, we can falter in our capacity to see both the educational and human benefits of staying in that place of emotional discomfort and creating space for our students’ deep-felt expressions.

In what follows, I share some strategies for educators to foster learning environments that can hold both cognitive and emotional discomfort in productive ways. This work includes strategies for preparing for difficult conversations with students as we nurture our own comfort with discomfort.

Preparing for Difficult Conversations

After the difficult conversation in my own classroom that I described above, several students reached out to me with gratitude for how I helped our group move through the experience. I knew while walking to my car after teaching that day that it was an example of things going well, but I was also aware, given the context of the topic, that the discussion easily could have been harmful to students. I reflected on that reality as I drove home and pondered what had made the difference. An essential ingredient was that long before we’d had to navigate that kind of conversation as a community of learners, we had established the right conditions to do so.

In part because of what I research—trauma—I view my role as an educator as not simply about delivering content, but simultaneously about creating community. Students hear messages from me early in a course that we have important concepts to learn together, but that it’s equally important for us to develop skills to be in relationship with one another.

As we as educators imagine the possibility of difficult conversations erupting at some point in our courses, we must first be proactive in nurturing a humanizing space that is attentive to relationship building, trust and safety. There are complex ways this happens, but it happens in very small ways, too. Consider some of the following examples of ways to build community and foster relationships in both small and large classes:

• Start classes with a check-in question that offers students space to share and connect. In a small class, this can be done as a full group for everyone to hear and learn about each other. In larger classes, this can be done by asking students to share with someone beside or near them. To keep a sense of safety in the space, provide students with options to pass or several questions to choose from.
   
• Build in time to explore class content through pair-share questions or small group conversations, which provide students opportunities to connect more intimately with peers.
   
• Be attentive in selecting readings to incorporate authors representing diverse backgrounds and lived experiences so students can see themselves and their various identities represented in the course content.

Navigating Difficult Conversations in the Moment

As difficult conversations erupt, especially those that are emotionally charged, educators may feel twinges of a similar anxiety as what I experienced while formulating a strategy on the spot. We can certainly rehearse advance scenarios of what to do when, but we will inevitably find ourselves in novel situations in the classroom. In these moments, the following considerations and strategies can be helpful to lean on:

• Find your footing: As these moments emerge, an important starting point for us as educators is to find our balance. That may start with acknowledging to ourselves what we’re feeling (e.g., anxious, confident, tightness in our body, butterflies in the stomach, etc.), taking a few deep breaths and giving ourselves permission to slow down. It’s OK to feel uncomfortable. Some days we’ll feel equipped to continue, and some days we won’t. When the latter happens, it’s OK to acknowledge to ourselves we’re not the right person to host that conversation that day. Or we may choose to keep it very straightforward and reflect to students what might be felt by simply saying something like, “Today feels really hard.”
   
• Lean into flexibility: These kinds of moments nudge us to conclude that we should drop our previously planned programming. The choice to follow an uncharted path, however, demands of us a certain kind of trust and flexibility.

We should be aware that different students may need different things. For instance, in my own example above, I knew that some students might need to continue to process their thoughts and feelings while others might need to return to content, either because they needed that distraction or because they weren’t impacted by the conversation in the ways others were. After some time processing as a group, I offered that any students who needed to keep talking could join me outside the classroom to continue, and those who needed content could remain in the class with my TA to work through discussion group questions. In this example, I had the benefit of a TA to split things up, but if I were alone I could have achieved the same result by putting up some discussion questions for students to work through while I stepped out in the hall with a smaller group.

• Hold space: Students often look to us in the classroom as experts, and, as a result, we might feel the weight of needing to have answers. However, with these kinds of difficult conversations, it’s less important (at least initially) that we have wisdom to share than that we are able to create the right kind of space for a conversation to unfold. This means that we shift into the mindset of a supportive facilitator where we work to open up space for students to share as they wish. It means that we acknowledge and validate what we’re seeing unfold (e.g., “This is a hard conversation to have, and I appreciate your vulnerability in sharing your experience”), that we embrace silence where it’s useful and that we uphold the boundaries of respectful dialogue.
   
• Restore meaning: Shoshana Felman wrote a powerful article many years ago about teaching a course on testimony and how the class went into a crisis after viewing video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. It’s a powerful piece that I’ve come back to often, as it reminds me that part of my role as an educator is that of restoring meaning, especially when difficulty and crisis emerge.

As educators, we can’t wave magic wands to make difficulty go away, nor does it make sense to offer false platitudes. However, in these moments of crisis, students do need to feel a glimmer of stability, and some of that can come through us resuming our positional role in the classroom space, bringing the conversation to some resolution. What this looks like will vary, but this might include very simply reflecting back to the group what has been said and felt, acknowledging and validating the difficulty of their/our experiences, and offering a way to feel grounded again, whether by taking a deep breath together, sitting in a moment of silence or offering words that bring an intentional sense of closure to the experience.

We find ourselves in an era of polarization, and it is increasingly tempting to turn away from difficult discussions, both intellectually and emotionally. Yet the classroom space remains a powerful place to practice the choice to remain in community and connection through difficult conversations.

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Tricia Shalka is an associate professor of higher education at the University of Rochester whose work explores the impacts of trauma on college student experiences. She is the author of Cultivating Trauma-Informed Practice in Student Affairs (Routledge).