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Best Practices Library

Guidelines for successful discussions:

  1. Listen (or read) respectfully, with an ear to understanding others' views.
  2. Criticize ideas, not individuals.
  3. Commit to learning, not debating. Comment in order to share information, not to persuade.
  4. Avoid blame, speculation, and inflammatory language.
  5. Avoid assumptions about any member of the class, or generalizations about social groups.
  6. Support your statements. Use evidence and provide a rationale for your points. 

Detailed guidelines for discussion

The first and most fundamental principle for participating in this class is RESPECT.  

I promise to do my best to treat everyone with respect, and I expect everyone else to do the same. From this principle, I ask everyone in the class to follow these guidelines:

  1. Respectful participation – Take your fair share of class time for asking questions and speaking, but do not take more than your fair share. Remember that not everyone is equally confident about speaking in class, so leaving room for others, and allowing periods of silence, may be necessary to give everyone an equal chance to be heard. Ask yourself once in a while whether you are taking more than your fair share of speaking time if you know yourself to be a talker. Ask yourself if you are taking less than your fair share of speaking time if you tend to give way to others. If you are unsure, ask some other students or the teacher to give you honest feedback. Respectful participation in discussion is based on your ability to listen to, respond to and leave room for others, as well as your ability to contribute relevant thoughts and experiences to the discussions. 
  2. Respectful speech – For most of us, it is a struggle to recognize our false assumptions and our hurtful behavior. Most people occasionally say something that assumes that everyone else is like themselves. These remarks can make people who are present feel ignored and left out, and they can make it seem that we are describing or theorizing about everyone's experience when we are not. Learning to be more inclusive and/or more modest in our statements is a process. Therefore, although we all expect each other to avoid stereotyping or prejudiced behavior, we cannot expect moral and political perfection, nor should we claim to have it ourselves.
  3. Respectful critique – Please feel free to criticize points of view, beliefs, opinions, statements, behavior, institutions, and social patterns. Please avoid criticizing people (including your peers). For example, say, "I think what you just said is sexist, because..." and not,  "You are sexist." Better even than labeling language as sexist, racist, etc., state that you disagree or object to the point of view and explain why. Please do likewise when speaking about people who are not in the room and therefore unable to defend themselves. It is best to do this because people can re-think their own statements much better if they are not forced to identify with what they have said. Changing or defending a statement is a much smaller matter than defending one's honor or intelligence.
  4. Respectful assumptions – During discussions, please give everyone in class the benefit of the doubt. This means that if there is a more intelligent, interesting, plausible, or charitable interpretation you can give to what someone said, or a good idea you can derive from it, please do so.  It makes discussion much more fruitful, since we can then discuss interesting ideas rather than people's mistakes/weaknesses in expressing themselves. 
  5. Respectful disagreement – You are welcome to express disagreement with anything said in class, including anything the instructor says. Successful participation in the program is based on knowledge of the course material and your ability and willingness to work with the material to design a final project. You can disagree with the instructor’s views and still achieve the outcomes designed for the program.

Adapted from an original post on Women's Studies Listserv (H-WMSTL), ca. 2002 for Slavery in the Colonial North NEH Teachers Institute, 2019.

Other useful links regarding how to conduct discussions/debates on difficult topics: