In the 30 years I’ve been teaching, much has changed, but one thing that remains the same is the need for educators to be well-equipped to facilitate and navigate productive and meaningful discussions about difficult topics.

Two factors make it arguably even more important than ever: one is the divisive and hostile environment that characterizes the broader national discourse on social issues, and the other is that students increasingly report greater difficulty and anxiety initiating, engaging in, and sustaining conversations.

We know that good, clear writing comes from good, clear thinking, and we know that rich, in-depth discussions help contribute to critical thinking skills and more effective writing. Conversations that nurture curiosity, nuance, and depth help students access these things outside the classroom as well.

When I refer here to classroom conversations, I’m talking about ones that can exist in any modality, including face-to-face, hybrid, and asynchronously online. Aspects of all these formats both constrain and enable open conversations, but the point of this article is that the necessity of supporting faculty to best support students’ active engagement in civil dialogue transcends classroom formats. Topics needn’t be super divisive or political to still be fraught and intense to deal with when teaching.

The writer Paulo Coelho reminds us that: “The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.”

Coelho’s clarion call can certainly be applied to cultivating the best

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