Civil Conversation Challenge for Teenagers by NY Times

     As this year kicks into high gear, and the days start flying by...I think it's a perfect time to: slow down, take a deep breath, and simplify. Education sometimes feels like it's always changing, but at the core the basics remain the same. We want to provide opportunities for kids to problem solve, make meaning, and ...talk!!

In previous blog posts we have discussed different instructional strategies to encourage student talk, and co-constructing meaning. This is a graphic organizer Steve Williams and I made adapted from the "8 thinking moves". If you were at our first science planning workshop we introduced this in our notebook toolkit. Please feel free to make a copy in your drive and adapt/revise to use with your students.

Many people across our district are engaging kids in a unit around the election. Indeed whether I am listening to NPR, social media feeds, or just talking with colleagues and friends this election has been like no other I can remember. In fact, sometimes it gets so edgy that we have to remember how to have civil conversations. As an adult it can be frustrating...and even emotional to engage in discussions with people that hold different political views, and imagine how tough this can get for kids.

I have frequently mentioned the NY Times Learning Blog as a resource for teachers as it has complete free lessons for all content areas and usually attached informational text resources, essential questions, and relevant topics to what is going on in our world.

Right now they have a unit designed to create opportunities for Civil Conversations for teens around the election, and the heated topics that are associated with different points of view.

(from the NY Times Learning Network Blog Post)

Welcome to an experiment.

For much of this year we’ve been thinking about what more we could do on this site to help students grapple with both the issues of Election 2016 and the classroom challenges of a race marked by extreme rhetoric and deep partisan divide.

Here’s what we’ve come up with:

Every day during the week of Oct. 3, we will be posting a newStudent Opinion http://www.nytimes.com/column/learning-student-opinionforum related to one of the big issues dividing Americans this campaign season. The forums will be open to comment from Oct. 3 to Nov. 7 and will focus on the following:

Oct. 3: Immigration

Oct. 4: Gun control and Second Amendment rights

Oct. 5: Climate change and energy

Oct. 6: Race, gender and identity

Oct. 7: An open forum for students to post about any other election-related issue they care about

The challenge? We are asking students from all over the nation and, perhaps, around the world, to practice the skills of respectful, informed conversation across ideological and demographic divides by not only posting their own thoughts, but by reading the thoughts of others and replying to them. What we’ll be looking for are not so much excellent posts by individual students, but civil, productive discussions between students.

Asking teenagers to post their opinions is nothing new for us, of course. Every school day since 2009 we’ve asked a Student Opinion questionabout something covered in The Times, and all year long we runcontests that invite students to interact with news in a variety of ways. In fact, we chose the four issues we are spotlighting in this challenge because we know, from our Summer Reading Contest and last year’sStudent Council, that teenagers are particularly passionate about them.

But what we’re asking for this time is different. Most of the hundreds of thousands of comments we’ve fielded over the years have been just that — lone comments. With the exception of our weekly, live What’s Going On in This Picture? discussions, students rarely seem read what others write, or respond to each other.

For this challenge, we invite you to have a conversation, and we’ll be “listening in” as we moderate, and looking to find exchanges between students that:

1. Follow Times commenting standards and are civil and respectful. No name-calling, no profanity, no SHOUTING.

2. Advance the conversation about an issue somehow, whether introducing a new idea or perspective, asking useful questions, making connections to other issues, finding themes or commonalities among comments, presenting new evidence, or anything else.

3. Are grounded in fact, and buttressed by sources. This is not to say that everything you post must be footnoted sentence by sentence, but commenters should provide reliable sources for any controversial claims they make.

4. Show evidence of “listening” and attempting to understand other points of view.

To help students learn to do all this, we’ve published a companion lesson plan: Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation On Difficult Issues. You can find teaching activities for each of our guidelines there.

Although this isn’t exactly a “contest” with traditional winners, sometime after Election Day we plan to reflect on the results and call out some of our favorite comments and conversations from the five forums.


This lesson is coming in a little late to follow their exact posted timeline, but you can use any/all pieces as you see fit within in the time we have.

As always please leave comments below if you try this lesson in your classroom. Share what worked, challenges, and cool things you switched it up with:) 

Have a great weekend,

Sara