In this activity, students explore and practice different online dialogue strategies and tools - including strategies for visible listening, connecting with others, voicing ideas, and seeking to persuade others to understand and agree with specific perspective. Then students consider the role of online guidelines in supporting productive discussions.

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Activity #1: Strategies for Online Civic Dialogue

(30 minutes)

Below is a collection of dialogue strategies intended to support youth to engage in authentic, respectful, and productive dialogue about civic issues on social media. These moves can also be used to support productive in-person conversations in the classroom. The toolkit contains different types of moves that represent important features of productive dialogue.

First, introduce the toolkit to students and discuss the different dialogue moves

This toolkit was inspired by several different sources, including: Youth Voices and National Writing Project educational resources (especially work by Chris Sloan); the Out of Eden Learn Dialogue Toolkit (collaboratively developed by Project Zero and Chris Sloan of Youth Voices); and findings from qualitative research with young people who frequently talk about civic issues on social media.  

Ask the students to work in small groups and discuss the following questions:

• What’s familiar? What moves feel familiar or are commonly used by people in online discussions you’ve been part of or observed? Describe.

• What’s new? What moves feel less familiar and even intimidating?

• What’s missing? Are there any commenting moves that should be added to the collection - based on your commenting practices or things you see other people doing in online discussions?

Ask each group to report out from their small group discussion to the class. Invite them to teach the class about any commenting moves that they use but which are not represented in the collection. Document the new moves on chart paper for the class to consider using in future in-class and online discussions.

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Click here to download this exercise as a PDF.