Helping Students Hear Each Other After the Election

Coming to work on November 6, 2024, I found middle and high school students milling about in their usual way. They stood in friend groups with voices slightly elevated, excited by talk of the election.

Most looked eager to share or hear the opinions of their peers, though of course they also had other topics on their minds. From my vantage point, I saw no outward signs of triumph or despair. The sun had risen and it was another day at school.

I teach at Pacific Ridge (PRS), an independent school in North San Diego County. Last summer, members of the administration presented a plan for how we would greet the coming U.S. elections. This was part of a larger theme for the school year, which Bob Ogle, our head of school, called “Challenge and Care.”

Students, families, faculty, and staff at PRS are politically diverse. So our purpose was to promote students’ civic engagement while attending to the needs and experiences of everyone in our community. Instead of broadcasting our own partisan opinions, faculty and staff would encourage students to listen to competing views and come to their own conclusions.

By emphasizing respect for differences and curiosity over self-righteousness, the culture at PRS fosters what researchers call intellectual humility. Ideally, this means that students are “more willing to learn about opposing perspectives and are better able to engage in conversations about controversial topics.” As Darcia Narvaez and other developmental psychologists have noted, this degree of flexibility and openness to others’ perspectives also contributes to moral imagination and mature moral functioning.

This effort to stay neutral about politics felt new to me, as someone who had previously taught at a progressive middle school in San Francisco. But over the first few months of the school year, I saw its wisdom more clearly. Especially now that the election is over, I’ve come to appreciate the challenge to care for students in this particular way.

Encouraging participation

PRS is a Harkness school, meaning that most classrooms are defined by an oval table where students and teachers sit together seminar style. The expectation is that everyone is a participant in the discussions that emerge, and students quickly learn that this requires both stepping up and sharing the air. The balancing process of Harkness pedagogy takes patience for all of us. Yet the regular practice space builds students’ confidence while holding them to a high bar.

Before each formal Harkness discussion, I typically ask students to set goals for themselves, then we reflect afterward on how we did. There are opportunities to give other students a shout-out to celebrate their unique contributions, and together we settle on an area of improvement for the group as a whole next time. The idea is to make these debriefs as nonjudgmental as possible so that everyone feels safe and able to keep making progress.

In their four-part Integrative Ethical Education Model, Narvaez and Tonia Bock emphasize that the first step to supporting students’ moral character development is “establishing a caring connection” with each student, which “allows mutual influence for mutual benefit.” This can happen in many ways. But community practices like Harkness discussions integrate both depth and levity, so that students know they are challenged and cared for.

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In my eighth-grade English class this fall, we also took on a collaborative pen pal project with students and teachers at St. George’s College in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Part of our purpose was to investigate the role of bias, censorship, and propaganda in news media and the literary texts we read (ours was Fahrenheit 451). Simultaneously, the project was an opportunity to dialogue across differences with curiosity and respect.

Using Google Docs, students shared a total of four letters with their pen pals detailing their own media uses and what they observed about politics in their home countries. It was fascinating for students at PRS to learn how their Argentinian peers saw their political system as distinct from the U.S. And they wrote their final letters the day after the November 5 election.

After the election

That first morning after we finally knew the result of the presidential election, I started class with a journal prompt. My students entered the room quietly; whatever they were feeling, it seemed that most expected a normal day of class.

Continuing safe and familiar routines is one way to regulate intense emotions, along with subtler hues of confusion when the wider world feels disrupted. But I wanted to mark the historic moment and show them that we could begin to pause and reflect as a community—that it was worth doing so today. So, in any order that felt right, I asked them to write about these questions:

• What do you know so far about the election results?
• How do you feel?
• What do you want to understand better?
• What do you want to ask or tell your future self four years from now?

My goal was to give students space to reflect and to create a time capsule of sorts. I wanted to challenge and to care for them. And, almost immediately, they started writing. I hoped the open-ended questions would slow down their thinking and prompt deeper curiosity.

Listening to the sound of their keyboards, I felt my own strong emotions and intention to stay grounded, to be resilient for them and for myself. It wasn’t easy on little sleep and amid the jarring sense that everything had changed. But the morning sunlight shone brightly through the windows of my classroom, and the students kept writing. I felt strangely anchored by their ability to carry on. I hope my presence also signaled to them that we were in this together, whatever the election means and whatever the future holds.

After seven minutes or so, I let the students know we would have some time for a brief Harkness discussion. I reminded them of our school policy that teachers would not share how we voted, but they could share anything they wrote. My challenge, and our shared purpose, was to create space for respectful dialogue where they could learn from each other, and where we all might understand more clearly what had just happened.

The discussion started slowly when one brave student spoke of the fear they felt about the future. Others voiced more academic questions about the margins in particular battleground states, and together we worked to interpret the electoral map. No one said directly who their family had voted for. And there were no arguments or instances of name calling.

For the most part, I sat quietly and let students talk to each other. Their conversation was respectful, curious, and open-hearted. They also seemed careful not to veer into statements that might hurt someone else who had a seat at the table.

In a post-election reflection, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein emphasized the choice between contempt and curiosity. Both are possible responses when the shock of difference presents itself. And right now, many Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are tempted to choose contempt.

We might ask ourselves what future we help to create when we choose contempt. What becomes possible if we choose curiosity instead?

The sun will keep rising. The students will keep coming to school. The question is: How will we meet them, and what can that change?