With the second, and likely the last, presidential debate of the 2024 election behind us, there is no shortage of emotional opinions and viewpoints on social media. Those opinions and viewpoints focus on who actually won the debate, which candidate answered more of the actual questions asked by the moderators, and, of course, memes about dogs and cats. It’s interesting that we can all watch the same presidential debate in real time and come away with such different views.

One of the issues that teachers and leaders are dealing with in their schools is they no longer feel safe having conversations about something as important as presidential debates. They worry that even the most brilliantly facilitated classroom discussion might be contorted or misconstrued when it is shared. They worry that parents may not support them. They worry that their principal or school board might have an issue with the classroom discussion. They worry about their job, and some find it easier and safer not to engage and help their students learn about the debate and choosing a president, which is at the core of our democracy. This concern is not new.

In Education Week’s Big Ideas for Upending Polarization, Education Week Staff Writer Lauraine Langreo writes:

Though it might feel to you as if the polarization we’re experiencing is in overdrive, this isn’t the first time the United States has experienced deep division. In fact, it’s integral to our history—and most, if not all, of these tense periods reached education.

Polarized Conversations Happen Everywhere

Take a recent trip we took to Australia to facilitate school leadership workshops. As we sat in the back of our Uber in route to Hammond Park, a suburb of Perth, our driver began asking us if we were Americans. That question led to others about our experience in Australia over the two weeks we’d been there. Perth was our last stop on the work trip.

The driver, who said he was originally from the Middle East, skillfully went from easy questions to a few that focused on which city we liked better and then whether we liked Australia or the United States best. We navigated each question by stating facts, such as we don’t compare one country with another, and that all countries have pros and cons. Then he turned the focus of his questions to politics.

As with any potential polarizing topic, there is a time and place to have the conversation, and it typically involves people we know. Place yourselves in our shoes for a few minutes. We’re in another country, in an Uber driven by a stranger who told us he was a political science expert and asking our opinions about the presidential candidates in our country, where he said he’d never been.

As the conversation continued and the questions became increasingly political, the comfort gap between the driver and us became a chasm when we revealed our choice for president was not the person our driver wanted to see as the next U.S. president. One of us turned quiet, as we have seen so many educators do with controversial topics, while the other became more vocal, asking deeper questions, for which the driver had limited answers and began to get angry.

Who Holds the Power?

You’d think that we, as citizens of the country he wanted to discuss, would have held the reins in the conversation. But we were in his car in a strange land, so the situation was actually the reverse. We were driving to a secondary school in the town where he lived. And while the driving rain poured down as he drove, both of us contemplated our options as we sat in the back seat. We were not sure that our answers to his questions would increase the driver’s anger, so we tried our best to diffuse the situation. He wanted to circle back to his original question and not let us off the hook.

Our situation represents a 20-minute drive from Perth to Hammond Park, but many teachers and leaders have to navigate this space in their classrooms and schools on a daily basis. Our driver had the perceived power in our situation as we sat in the back seat, but many leaders and teachers also feel that board members and parents have the power over polarizing conversations within the schools.

What if a classroom conversation that seems harmless is misrepresented by a student when they get home at the end of the day? When it comes to politics, social-emotional health, race and equity, every topic seems to be a potential minefield. Peter wrote about polarizing topics when a slew of school board candidates ran for the position and spread misinformation.

A matter of self-efficacy?

The constant pressure that an innocent conversation could go so wrong leaves many educators feeling like they don’t have the efficacy to engage. Bandura found that when teachers and leaders have self-efficacy, which is the confidence they have in situations, they will double their efforts in those situations. The issue with what people consider hot-button topics is that many educators will slacken their efforts because they don’t feel confident.

In our Uber ride, as well as the experiences teachers and leaders may have in school, we believe there are a few strategies that come in handy when we find ourselves in the middle of a discussion that could go negative:

Have a learner’s mindset

In a recent Education Week A Seat at the Table episode, University of Pennsylvania professor Andrea Kane said that we need to go into these conversations with a learner’s mindset. We need to be curious to understand the perspective of the person we are talking to.

Find common ground

In Margaret Wheatley’s book Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations, she writes, “Sane leadership is the unshakeable confidence that people can be generous, creative, and kind. The leader’s role is to create the conditions for these qualities to be evoked and utilized to accomplish good work.” It’s the realization that we have more in common than what divides us.

In another essay in the Upending Polarization special report, professor and researcher Eli Gottlieb writes:

“The term ‘polarized’ is often used as a synonym for ‘divided’ or ‘aggressively oppositional.’ However, strictly speaking, polarization is more than a tendency to gravitate toward extremes or to demonize one’s opponents. By analogy with the physical phenomenon from which it draws its name, polarization is a process whereby people’s beliefs and opinions form predictable clusters.” And he goes on to say, “One of the most interesting things about polarization in the United States may be our tendency to overestimate it.”

Use AI

In our work with school and district leaders in several countries, we engage in the importance of being internally and externally self-aware, particularly when engaging in 1:1 or group conversations that we know could lead to great division. We have shared that using AI as a thought partner to create the likely viewpoints of those in the meeting and the thoughts they may share or the questions they may ask before these crucial conversations decreases the anxiety of the leader and guides the conversation to better productivity.

In the End

We must continue to strive for commonalities. John F. Kennedy, in his commencement address at American University on June 10, 1963, told graduates, “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Would a first step be to agree that we all cherish our children’s future?

As we got out of the Uber, we both reflected on how we would have responded to the driver. We would have asked him more clarifying questions and respectfully asked him to explain his position. As much as we both tried to have a learner’s mindset, we were caught off guard during the situation and would have tried a bit harder to understand his point of view.