Creating Thought-Provoking Questions and Prompts
Setting Goals and Purpose for the Dialogue
Before engaging students in discussions of racial justice, it’s critical teachers should clearly establish their intentions for the conversation. There may be many intentions that you hold for doing this work with your students and below, we offer several suggestions for making these intentions clear to your students.
Ensuring Purpose
Matthew Kay in his book Not light, but fire: How to lead meaningful race conversations in the classroom (2018) reminds us that students should not only be aware of whythey are having conversations about race in the classroom, but teachers need to make sure the conversations have a purpose worthy of student’s attention and energy. He offers three propositions that can help ensure a clear purpose: