Preparing for Challenging Conversations

Dialogue is necessary for collaboration and growth. However, conversations involving difficult topics, giving clear instructions, or providing feedback can be challenging. For example, we strive to ask for and give feedback to maximize growth. As much as a person reflects on their own actions, they won’t know their blind spots and all of their growth areas without insight from others. Through dialogue, we can request and receive feedback and discover strategies to try.  

As teachers, we need to try every day to improve our conversations with students, colleagues, and families in order to communicate effectively and build a sense of belonging and value. This is where rehearsing can help.

Rehearsing Dialogue for Difficult Conversations

When preparing for conversations involving giving or receiving feedback, it's helpful to script dialogic moves, then rehearse the language. This helps us prepare high-impact conversations, enables us to feel more ready for challenging conversations, and builds pathways in the brain to support future conversations. Planning and rehearsing our talk moves helps us refine language to be clear, concise, and intentional in our message.

Educational and communications consultant Jen Abrams offers an outcome map that’s useful in planning hard conversations. I have used this on a number of occasions to gather my thoughts and prepare for a difficult conversation. I prefer to call these courageous or healing conversations, because language matters, and the goal of such a conversation is to provide feedback and nurture a plan for growth.

When planning, I jot down short phrases for each of the following questions, with examples in italics. Preparation is key to feeling ready and sustaining trust with others.

How will I approach the person to ask when might be a good time to talk? I’m wondering if we could chat for five or 10 minutes today or tomorrow about team meetings. I value how you are open to feedback and would like to discuss something I've noticed.

What is the recent issue or problem and its impact? On Tuesday you forgot to bring student work to our meeting. The impact of this was that you were unable to reflect on how students did and plan responsive actions. Teammates were also impacted because they could not fully collaborate with you.

What needs to happen instead? What does that look like and sound like? We have a team commitment to bringing student work, in order to focus on student growth. This means coming to the meeting with all of the artifacts we agree to bring from week to week.

Why might the person not be engaging in the desired behavior? What are your thoughts about this? Have you noticed this as well? What might be getting in the way of you not bringing work?

What support can I offer the person? What can I do to help you? [Give them space to brainstorm ideas, and come prepared with a few suggestions should you need them.]

What support do I need to feel as prepared as possible? Before I approach the colleague, do I need a thought partner? A rehearsal? Are there resources I plan to bring, to offer as part of our strategizing?

I find that preparing for feedback conversations has led to much more productive results and provides me with some ideas to use in future conversations. As I prepare, rehearse, and engage in conversations, I’m building neural pathways so that I can access the strategies and language in future conversations. 

Rehearsing Dialogue for Instruction

Practicing is also extremely helpful for me to prepare for facilitating professional learning sessions and lessons with students. When I know the learning goal, jot down notes and approximate times for each section, and consider precise language, colleagues and students gain more and are more actively engaged in learning instead of listening to me talk and talk. I think of this as an “economy of words”; how can I be clear and concise to allow participants time to talk, design, and practice?

When I am learning a new strategy or curricular resource, rehearsing also helps me build confidence. This can look like my rehearsing lines I will use or highlighting words and phrases in a lesson plan or jotting down a few key phrases on a sticky note. 

This year we have a new language arts curriculum, and when I prepare to teach a lesson, I envision how long students will be watching me model. I consider when I will directly teach and when I will ask students to turn and talk or practice a skill. I star sections of a lesson where students will talk, write, gesture, act out, etc. I plan for sentence stems that students might use when talking with each other. Sometimes I practice an entire section of a lesson to time it out and see how long it takes, which helps me get a sense of the lesson flow.

My preparation also includes asking what visual supports, like anchor charts, colored tiles, a document camera, etc., are needed to ensure that I’m making my thinking visible. When I say, “Watch me do this and then you will try,” I am making the strategy much more concrete. This increases engagement, and deeper growth  is essential for students to build independence.

Often my preparation will include interactive modeling where students or teachers will watch me or a student or teacher/participant practice a skill. Then students tell what they noticed while watching the practice. When preparing for these, I think about what students will notice.

For example, when I model a turn and talk with a partner, I hope they notice: You thought for a minute before turning to your partner. You listened to your partner and showed that you made a connection by using the agreed-upon signal, and then you told what you wondered about. You were focused on the objective.

When I take time to brainstorm these success criteria, I can make sure I show them during the modeling and I can probe if students don’t share the ideas during our sharing. 

As Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life, One Conversation at a Time, says, “Speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have with this person. It could be.” Yes, courageous conversations matter. We do build relationships and trust, one conversation at a time. We provide feedback and grow through conversation and reflection. What might happen if we listen as if each conversation were the most important conversation? I truly believe that we can improve our relationships, our teaching, and our communities one conversation at a time.