Intention setting has become common practice for good reason. Faculty who care about classroom dialogue open the semester by building norms with their students. The exercise signals to students on day one that the room welcomes the ideas of everyone in it, and it gives a class shared language to return to in tense moments.

But how do we keep those intentions alive over the entire semester?

At a recent CDI webinar called Setting the Tone: Building Classroom Trust from Day One, Mary Om Yaung, a social work student at Spalding University, gave an answer that encapsulates why modeling behavior is the key. Mary is candid about how she spends the first week of a class. She stays quiet and watches, taking the measure of the professor and her classmates before she risks saying something wrong. What eventually draws her out to speak is evidence that the instructor is listening and paying attention, and that a question raised in one session might get picked back up in the next, once students have had time to think.

Mary is describing a test of continuity and sincerity. She's waiting to see whether the instructor’s behavior helps her distinguish a stated commitment from a real one.

Showing, not just telling

The most direct version of this can be procedural. Dr. Janelle Rae, Director of Undergraduate Studies at Spalding University's School of Social Work, co-creates intentions with her students, sometimes drafted by them, sometimes offered as a list they revise. She then puts those intentions on the opening slide of every class session, reviews them, and treats them as something students can edit when the semester surfaces something unanticipated. The list stays in the room and it stays editable rather than being filed away and forgotten.

Dr. Collin Anthony Chen, Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Programs at Stanford's McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, described another tactic: personal modeling.

Students want to see intentions modeled and practiced. When an instructor models the intentions personally, students read a signal that the intentions govern real behavior, including the instructor's own.

Speaking is not committing

Chen calls his answer "trying on hats," and it targets students who stay quiet not because they lack a view but because they suspect any view they voice will be treated as final, and as a full account of who they are. “Swearing an oath” to an idea in Chen’s words.

The remedy is to establish, early and often, that speaking is not committing. Sharing an idea is not the same as signing a contract on the dotted line. He contends we maintain a myth that students arrive pre-formed with fixed ideas, and that whatever they say fully represents them. That myth can become self-fulfilling if that's what students believe the rules are. Silence becomes a rational reaction.

Where an instructor can change this reaction is by demonstrating a different rule. By modeling intellectual humility and the grappling that comes with difficult questions, students pick up on the opposite signal to speech as commitment. Instead they pick up that in this room a stated view is provisional.

Why vulnerability is not a simple lever

The obvious way to model openness is for the instructor to be vulnerable first. Take the risk you're asking students to take. But Chen complicates that instinct in an illuminating way. When you share a personal story or your own view, he argued, it should expand the conversation rather than close it. Experiences that establish surprise and curiosity are easier to work with than experiences that establish a conclusion. Instructor disclosure is not automatically a positive.

Two cases from his own teaching show the line. In a session on a Supreme Court case concerning conversion therapy, Chen had personal experience relevant to the subject and chose not to share it. Disclosing would have set a conclusion students might feel pressure to adopt, narrowing how freely they could explore the case. In a session on gun control, a student wondered aloud whether any liberal would want to carry a gun. Here Chen did share, describing a colleague he'd once noticed carrying a handgun, who explained she'd survived an assault and felt safer able to protect herself. The story introduced a possibility the student hadn't considered and opened a real line of inquiry. Chen's recounting of the story along with his own reaction to it, namely one of having your assumptions challenged, created permission for other students to grapple honestly and openly with the question.

Mary described the version of this that reached her. Assigned to build a family genogram, a map of one's own family history, her professor shared his own first and was explicit that no one had to disclose anything uncomfortable. She volunteered to go first. She felt the professor's disclosure was sincere, and it demonstrated the method rather than announcing a verdict. It gave her a floor to stand on along with permission to proceed in her own way.

Reaching the students who won't volunteer

None of this reaches the quieter students on its own, and the panel gave practical advice about this group. Rae, who describes herself as an internal processor, does not call on students by name, because being named in a group is exactly what makes people like her freeze. She broadens instead. A student shares something, and she asks how it lands for everyone. She also leans on structure, using pair and small-group work so students can speak in lower-stakes settings. Chen added a companion move often called, “brainwriting”: give everyone sixty seconds to write before anyone speaks, which lets students who need to think first arrive with something to say.

Mary was just as clear about what shuts her down. In large classes where professors never learned her name, the trust never formed. Being known, to her, is different from being called on.

The Instructor Goes First

The three practices differ in kind, but each one puts the instructor at risk before the students. Chen puts his own shifting views on the table before asking students how theirs have changed, deploying or withholding vulnerability to bolster what he signals. Rae gives up the efficiency of calling on someone by name to create opportunities for everyone to feel they can speak up. Mary’s professor not only goes first, but proactively removes judgement.

These are decisions made repeatedly, in the moment, countlessly throughout the semester. That makes it a harder part of the work, but it's also the accumulation of these moments that creates a culture of dialogue in the classroom. Mary said she waits to see whether a question comes back. A class that sees an instructor consistently modeling a commitment to dialogue becomes a class that understands it’s a genuine part of the classroom’s culture.

Watch the full conversation from our webinar now.

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