Across higher education, instructors are grappling with a familiar challenge: how to foster meaningful discussion in classrooms where students are often hesitant to speak, wary of disagreement, or unsure how to engage across differences.

Dialogue-based teaching is frequently proposed as a solution, but many faculty members wonder how to integrate dialogue into their courses without redesigning their curriculum entirely.

That question was the focus of a recent webinar hosted by the Constructive Dialogue Institute, where three faculty members discussed how they incorporate dialogue into their teaching across very different disciplines: Sara Mehltretter (Wabash College), Janelle Rae (Spalding University), and Michael Lee (College of Charleston). Their conversation offered practical insight into what dialogic pedagogy looks like in practice—and what challenges instructors are most likely to encounter.

Several themes emerged from the discussion that may resonate with instructors across fields.

1. Dialogue Works Best When It Is Built Into the Course

One of the most consistent points raised during the conversation was that dialogue works best when it's woven into course objectives, not layered on top of them.

For Janelle Rae, an assistant professor of social work at Spalding University, that integration begins with understanding where students are starting from intellectually. In her teaching, dialogue is less about prompting debate and more about helping students build on the knowledge and experiences they already bring into the classroom.

Michael Lee, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston, described dialogue as serving multiple pedagogical purposes.

“Dialogue is a teaching tool to organize knowledge,” he said. “Instead of asking for a single answer to a question, we can ask how different people have answered it.”

In this sense, dialogue helps students encounter competing interpretations, weigh evidence, and understand how knowledge is constructed within a field.

Lee also uses dialogue as a framework for designing assignments. “I try to design assignments as opportunities for conversations between competing and complementary voices,” he explained.

When dialogue is integrated into assignments and course objectives, it becomes part of the learning process itself rather than an optional classroom activity.

For instructors experimenting with this approach, Lee recommends thinking about dialogue along a spectrum. Low-stakes activities might include brief pair discussions or informal debates. Medium-stakes approaches might involve exam questions asking students to evaluate competing perspectives. At the highest level, entire courses can be structured around examining complex questions through multiple viewpoints.

For many instructors, the key is not starting large but starting intentionally.

2. The Quiet Classroom Is the Real Challenge

When faculty imagine the risks of classroom dialogue, they tend to picture the worst: a conversation that spirals out of control.

But in practice, Lee says, the more common challenge is something quieter.

Alienation and apathy are far greater threats to dialogue than antagonism. In over two decades of teaching, the “quiet classroom” has been a far more common struggle for Lee than the inflammatory one.

Survey data from his institution illustrates this dynamic.When questioned: “what keeps you from participating in class?” The overwhelming response is “I don't want to be that kid who said that thing.”

That fear of being labeled or defined by a single comment is what keeps students from engaging. For instructors, the challenge becomes creating conditions where students feel comfortable entering the conversation in the first place.

3. Let Students Build the Brave Space

One strategy the panelists emphasized is involving students directly in shaping how dialogue unfolds in the classroom.

Sara Mehltretter often begins courses with an anonymous survey asking students what concerns them about classroom discussions. Those concerns then form the basis for a class session in which students collectively develop community agreements.

Importantly, those agreements are framed as positive commitments rather than restrictions—not “don’t antagonize,” but commitments such as listening with curiosity or engaging respectfully.

“We’re intentionally undertaking inquiry together,” Mehltretter explained. “Learning from each other’s perspectives and assuming none of us has all the experiences.”

The payoff is tangible. Students begin using those agreements to hold each other accountable, not punitively, but with curiosity. The dynamic shifts from "Why did you say that?" to "Tell me what you mean by that." Faculty spend less time managing disruption because the classroom starts to self-regulate.

Janelle Rae takes a similar approach and dedicates her first class session to building trust and connection before any challenging content enters the room. In Rae’s experience, that early investment helps create the conditions for students to engage difficult questions later in the semester.

In her view, dialogue begins by recognizing the knowledge students already bring into the room.

“Students come into the learning space with different levels of knowledge,” she said. “My role is to understand where they’re situated, affirm their experience, and add to or refine their knowledge.”

She also shared a story that illustrates why this matters: a student emailed her after a tense discussion to say she thought the solution was to stop asking questions. Janelle's response was to affirm the student's presence, the value of her questions, and their shared commitment to leaning into discomfort as part of the learning process. That student went on to become a social work major, and Janelle watched her grow into her voice over multiple semesters.

4. Dialogue Works Across Every Discipline

A persistent misconception about dialogue-based pedagogy is that it belongs in the humanities.

In reality, the panelists emphasized, dialogic approaches can work across nearly any discipline.

Mehltretter described collaboration with colleagues in the natural sciences in which chemistry students deliberate about environmental contamination by examining the issue from multiple stakeholder perspectives—for example, a pediatrician, a water expert, and community members affected by the problem. The goal is not simply to share opinions but to reason through complex issues using disciplinary evidence.

Lee has seen similar results in his own courses. Engaging with competing perspectives does not weaken students’ convictions, he said—it often sharpens them.

“Dialogic pedagogy is essential for perspective-taking,” he explained. “It helps students move away from dichotomous thinking and toward more complex ways of understanding difficult issues.”

Students also gain confidence engaging complex or controversial topics and become better at evaluating evidence and articulating their own arguments.

5. When Things Get Tense, Think Proactive and Reactive

Of course, classroom dialogue does not always unfold smoothly. Difficult moments are inevitable when students explore complex or contentious topics.

Lee suggests thinking about dialogue in terms of proactive and reactive skills.

Proactive skills are the structures you build before difficult moments: co-created norms, open-ended questions, a posture of compassionate curiosity, and the practice of pluralism.

Reactive skills are what instructors draw on when tension does arise: calming yourself, depolarizing the room, maintaining the relationship even through difficulty. “The goal,” Lee emphasized, “is to sustain the conversation, not win the moment.”

Because classes meet repeatedly over time, instructors also have the advantage of being able to pause and return to a discussion later.

If a conversation becomes heated near the end of class, Mehltretter suggests asking students to write down one thing they heard that was new and one thing they are still wrestling with. Those reflections can shape how the discussion resumes during the next class meeting.

Dialogue as a Core Teaching Practice

As colleges and universities confront concerns about polarization, disengagement, and student participation, many instructors are reconsidering how discussion functions in their classrooms.

The experiences shared by these faculty members suggest that dialogue does not require sweeping curricular change. Instead, it often begins with intentional design: structuring assignments around competing perspectives, establishing shared norms for discussion, and creating opportunities for students to encounter ideas different from their own.

In the process, dialogue becomes more than a classroom technique. It becomes a way of helping students practice the intellectual skills necessary for navigating a complex and pluralistic world.

Faculty interested in exploring these approaches further can watch the full webinar conversation with Mehltretter, Rae, and Lee, where they discuss practical strategies for integrating dialogue into existing courses. The Constructive Dialogue Institute also offers a Foundations in Constructive Dialogue workshop designed to help faculty and staff build facilitation skills for classroom dialogue.