Listen to the interview with Noah Bopp (transcript):

Sponsored by foundry10 and SchoolAI

We’re living in a time when having a difference of opinion about anything other than pizza toppings is a potential minefield of hurt feelings, emotional outbursts, and severed relationships. This is a problem that has occupied my thoughts quite a bit over the past ten years, and I’ve found very few solutions.

So when I learned about the growth discourse framework used at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL), I wanted to know more. SEGL is a semester-long residential program for high school juniors from across the U.S. The curriculum emphasizes ethical thinking skills, leadership development, and international affairs, and their mission is for students to graduate ready to create positive change in our world. A foundational piece of their programming is growth discourse, an approach to discussion that equips students to have productive conversations about topics that many of us would be hesitant to bring up in a group setting. 

Looking at SEGL’s growth discourse guidelines, I liked what I saw. Their approach acknowledges and makes room for the heavy role our emotions and vulnerability play in these kinds of conversations, while also prioritizing courage and honesty in moving those conversations forward. And because it’s pretty simple and straightforward, I believe it’s a framework that could be replicated by any teacher who wanted to have better discussions in their own classrooms, so I thought it was worth sharing.

On the podcast I talked with Noah Bopp, who founded SEGL in 2009 and currently serves as the Head of School. He shared the story of why he founded the school, then walked me through their growth discourse model, including a classroom example, so teachers can understand how to apply it with their own students. 

You can listen to our conversation in the player above, read the transcript, or take a look at the highlights below.

An Introduction to Growth Discourse

SEGL’s growth discourse model is meant to challenge students, not make discussion easy.

“The motivation for doing it is in the title,” Bopp explains. “A lot of people are talking about civil discourse these days. But some people are asking, Why do I need to be civil in a time like this? We believe discourse that helps you grow is essential to our meaningful lives and is also central to a functioning civic ensemble. Calling it growth discourse also shifts mindset: For students, I am about to engage in discourse that may or may not be civil; the point is it’s discourse that’s going to help me grow. For teachers, the goal is not just keeping everybody  being nice to each other; the goal is what can I do to make sure that this conversation helps students grow?”

What About Bothsidesism?

Part of SEGL’s mission is to “convene and mentor students who have different values, viewpoints, experiences, and identities,” and the growth discourse model is set up to encourage differences of opinion.

But how do they work toward that goal without venturing into false equivalence or bothsidesism, the practice of presenting opposing viewpoints as equally valid, even those that have little evidence to support them?

“SEGL is nonpartisan. SEGL is not neutral,” Bopp explains. “We don’t say. ‘The Holocaust, good or bad, you decide,’ right? We don’t say in our science classrooms, ‘Climate change, is that real or not real?’ When there is a topic where reasonable, educated people are disagreeing, we give our students critical thinking skills so that they can evaluate arguments and then bring in people who represent the best possible arguments on those different sides and say, where do you stand?

“We’re trying to teach students how to think, not what to think. If we err on the side of teaching students what to think — which is so easy to do — we shortcut the critical thinking process and we make that kid susceptible to the next demagogue who comes along. And there are a lot of demagogues in this world right now.”

The Growth Discourse Principles

Begin with Belonging

Before any challenging conversations can happen, everyone involved needs to feel as if they belong at SEGL. They accomplish this by stating it directly, putting it in their discourse guidelines, and through activities that get students to share their identities and histories.

They also make sure their program participants represent a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, both in the student body and in the faculty.

“If we have a really homogenous group of students,” Bopp explains, “it’s very hard for us to address a difficult topic like Trump’s immigration policy, right? Because we’re going to get similar views and some students are going to feel excluded. But if I can set up an environment where I have students who represent many different backgrounds and many different points of view, and I show those students that they all belong here, then I can create an environment where those students are not on edge when we’re having these conversations.”

Value Intent and Impact

When we are talking about sensitive issues, we can easily say things that unintentionally hurt or cause harm; this can often lead to conversations about which is more important: our intentions behind what we said or the impact our words ultimately have on people.

Within the growth discourse model, Bopp says, “Both of those things matter. If I use, Oh, I’m so sorry, that wasn’t my intent, as if it’s a get out of jail free card, I probably need to do some reflection on the impact I’m having on others. On the other end of the scale, for me to assign a motive to another human being solely based on what that person made me feel, I am at least being unreflective and incurious.”

Avoid Echo Chambers

Many of us have a tendency to flock toward others who have beliefs similar to our own, but if we do this exclusively, it limits our growth.

“It makes sense that sometimes you need to go to people with whom you share some things, some ideas, some identity,” Bopp explains, “but at SEGL, we go to those conversations not to disengage, but to figure out how do we re-engage.”

Follow the STAR

Inspired by and adapted from some of the Thinking Routines from Harvard’s Project Zero, this critical thinking model encourages students to seek full understanding before they judge. This sample lesson plan shows how the model works in practice.

The model has four parts:

SEE: “The most important part of the STAR model is to make sure you are seeing something as fully as you can before you decide what to think about it, before you make a judgment,” Bopp says. “There are different questions that make for a good ‘see.’ There’s the essential questions, what can I see? What can I understand before I judge? Another question is what do the experts say? What voices are missing from this conversation? How can we find those voices before we decide what we think?”

THINK: “Ultimately, and particularly as a leader, you do have to decide, what do I think about this situation? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it right? Is it wrong?”

ACT: “Once you decide what you think — and this is a major addition we made to the Project Zero curriculum — as leaders, we have to decide what to do, how to act. We have to decide, do we vote for or do we vote against? Do we cheat on the test? Do we not cheat on the test? Do we lie to protect our friend or do we tell the truth? We have to act in the world.”

REFLECT: “We want to reflect on what we just did. Did we like it? Did we not like it? What was the response that we got? What might we do next time? The beauty of this model is that that R in the STAR becomes part of the next S. It becomes part of the ‘see’ the next time we face a similar situation.”

Advice for Teachers Who Want to Get Started

When asked what advice he’d give to teachers who would like to start using this model, Bopp offered three recommendations:

• Make sure leadership has your back.
  When teachers attempt to discuss more complex topics in their classrooms, they often get pushback. Having the informed support of school leadership in advance can be an immense help in dealing with this. “There’s all kinds of examples of parents getting mad, of donors getting mad, of school board members getting mad,” Bopp says. “But if you know that your head of school, that your principal has your back in having these difficult conversations, you can do almost anything.”
• Sometimes silence is the best response.
  Teachers may be uncertain about what to do when the conversation gets heated. “Unless you’re afraid that there’s going to be some sort of physical violence,” Bopp says, “sometimes the best response as a teacher is just to remain silent. Or just say something supportive, like ‘These are hard conversations.’ You can ask the kids, ‘Would you rather not have this conversation?’ Almost always kids would say, ‘No no, no. We would rather have it. We just don’t like the way we’re having it.’ Okay, great. Let’s figure out how we can have this conversation so that we’re all growing.”
• Spread the discomfort around equally.
  “Sometimes when you’re having these difficult conversations, kids from certain demographics get burdened more often than others,” Bopp explains. “It’s very, very important to set things up in your classroom where it’s equal opportunity discomfort. If you can’t do that, if you’re consistently burdening certain kids, then I would suggest you take a step back.”

Cultivating the Potential for Good

At the end of our conversation, I asked Bopp if he feels optimistic about our ability as humans to pull ourselves out of this chapter of intense division and toxic discourse.

His answer is a fast yes. Then he follows with a quote from Plato’s Republic: “Education is not about putting sight into blind eyes.”

“The effective educator assumes that the power to learn is already present in the soul of the learner,” he continues. “And that means the goal of the educator is to give the learner places to look and questions to ask. I have enormous faith that if we can give students places to look — the current challenges that face our world — and questions to ask, which are the classic ethical questions that cross culture and time and age and and language, that the goodness that is already present in the learner will be uncovered. I have a fundamental belief in the goodness of every human being. Maybe that’s naive. But it sure helps me as a teacher and it sure helps me these days.”

If you’d like support in using this framework with your students, the SEGL faculty would be excited to help. Reach out through their website or email Bopp directly at noah.bopp@schoolforethics.org.