Teachers and Students Can Learn How to Have Difficult Conversations. Here’s Where to Start

Classroom conversations about values and other contentious topics can feel difficult and even scary. But educators and students alike can learn how to navigate these essential conversations successfully.

That’s the message researchers from EdEthics have put forth with a new website aimed at helping teachers learn best practices when tackling controversial issues and ethical dilemmas in the classroom.

December saw the launch of Values in Teaching, a resource for educators in “contentious times” that offers a free set of tools designed to help K–12 educators working in politically charged environments.

“The website helps people engage in deep reflection and have open communication about the values that ground their classrooms, schools, and districts because values are always at the heart of education,” says Meira Levinson, a professor at HGSE until December 2025 who co-led the creation of the site. “It also helps educators make sound instructional decisions and helps students understand why and how they can express their own values in the classroom even, perhaps especially, when they disagree with others.”

The website is the result of a three-day create-a-thon held at HGSE that saw collaboration among EdEthics, the Democratic Knowledge Project, Project Zero, others at HGSE, and dozens of teachers from around the country, with support from a grant from the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative.

The project itself, explains Tatiana Geron, Ph.D.’23, a former HGSE postdoc and EdEthics researcher who helped organize it, was sparked by a weeklong professional development summer institute held at the Ed School in summer 2024, titled Past to Present: Teaching the History & Legacies of Enslavement and Facilitating Classroom Conversations on Complex Topics. Educators who attended those sessions were keenly aware of how it was becoming more difficult to address complex issues in the classroom, especially as some states began to pass legislation limiting lessons that made students “uncomfortable,” such as so-called “divisive concepts legislation.”

“From the beginning, we wanted to create something that would feel really accessible and safe no matter where you were. And also honoring the expertise that teachers already have,” says Geron. “That was one of the biggest takeaways from the affinity group: teachers are doing this work every day and creating really complex strategies for navigating these laws and talking within these communities. They already have the expertise.”

Reflecting On Values

The website features four modules. The first module enables educators to explore their values, or principles that are important in one’s life and professional practice; this work acts as a foundation for the other three modules. Visitors engage in exercises that helps a person define their own values, in the process strengthening their sense of purpose and building confidence.

If someone only has a few minutes, a brief survey of pre-selected values like “courage” or “truth” can be selected from a list and then reflected on. For those with more time, there’s an interactive value sort activity created by Project Zero’s The Good Project, or suggested reading about what a teaching philosophy is, which can help educators refine and better articulate their professional values more clearly before moving forward.  

“If we can help teachers define and articulate the values that are at the core of their practice,” Geron explains, “that can help them make the tough decisions in the moment and also communicate those values to other stakeholders.”

Reflect, Learn, Practice, Teach 

Once an educator has reflected on their own values, the other three modules are designed to help visitors learn how to navigate risk, prepare for challenging conversations with other adults, and execute those conversations in learning spaces with the aid of student-facing resources.

The Values in Teaching website includes links to legal resources, law and policy explainers for various states and parts of the country, and even guidelines on how to determine if something may be deemed “controversial” in a certain school or classroom setting. One activity that can be used by educators, school and district leaders, parents, or students, for example, helps people understand why and how others may disagree about whether something is an “open” question where there are multiple competing views, or a “settled” question that may have once been controversial but no longer is, and then decide what should be treated as “open vs. settled” in their own classrooms and schools.

“We're living in a time of rapid norm-shifting,” Levinson notes. “It makes this a really challenging time for teachers, school and district leaders, parents, and students to figure out what kinds of values it is appropriate to model and teach in schools, especially if values they have been committed to for years — with community support — are suddenly under attack. The Values in Teaching website is designed to help all the different educational stakeholders talk about these challenges and move forward in instructionally, legally, politically, and ethically sound ways.”

A Skill Learned

Those involved with Values in Teaching make it clear: No one is born with an innate ability to successfully navigate difficult conversations. But anyone can learn how to better prepare themselves for when they come.

“There are skills you can learn, and there’s a pedagogy to it, too, as a teacher. It’s everything as minute as sentence stems you can use or moves you can make in a group,” says Geron. “There’s also a lot of room for self-reflection and getting to know yourself and your values and being able to communicate those.”

One module highlights the ways someone can listen for and learn about the values others bring to conversations, which can help a teacher have a difficult conversation with a parent or diffuse moments of tension. Highlighting shared values, for example, with phrases like this: 

• “I hear you saying that ___________ really matters to you. That’s important to me, too.”
• “I respect that your concerns come from a place of ___________. I feel that way, too.”
• “Since I know __________ is important to you too, I wanted to let you know that _________ is raising some concern for me. Is this something you have already thought about?”

Like many things you have to learn, Geron says, all it takes is a bit of study and practice to help make tough conversations easier.

“Maybe it’s the middle school teacher in me, but you can break this down,” she says. “We can break this down and make people feel empowered that they can do it, so it doesn’t feel as scary so when you get in the moment and it gets heated, you will have a few things that you can do or say.”