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Advocate Online
Best Practices
Overheard at the Rest Stop
- Recently, a student reported that when her class had read Anne
Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, the teacher had gone around
the room and asked students who they identified with most in the book.
Students identified a wide range of characters, from white Southerners
who resisted integration to civil rights workers. Noted the student,
an African-American woman: "By the end of that exercise I knew that
there were people at the table with very different views than mine.
I also knew that all views would be heard and respected in the class,
including my own."
- The late Chris Christensen, a master teacher at the Harvard Business
School, loved intellectual conflict and actively fostered it. His
strategy was to protect all statements. If a student made an unorthodox
remark, he'd join the student, showing the idea as worthy of consideration
and making a majority of two.
- Jill Tarule, then at Lesley College, required pairs of students
in a social work class to learn about a social group other than their
own. Then, as the class read various materials, each pair would critique
the material from the perspective of the group they learned about.
- "Students can be surprised to find they have strong feelings, as
well as strongly held ideas, about diversity topics that they're often
not used to expressing," says Matt Ouellette, at the University of
Massachusetts. "Students can feel over-exposed after particularly
vehement contributions. When this happen, I interject a question to
normalizes their feelings and help them rejoin the dialogue."
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