Disarm Your Critics By Consulting Them

Hello. Today, my daughter came home and told me how upset and uncomfortable she was in class today. I understand that you talked about the minimum wage and when you showed students a Bernie Sanders video, students were shouting, “Trump Sucks!” She tells me that not once did you ask students to be respectful.

My family and I are not only Trump supporters but Republicans/Libertarians. I am not only appalled at students' behavior but appalled that you would allow this kind of demonstration in class. As an educator, I am always mindful that even if you do not share the same beliefs, you treat each other and others with respect. This school prides itself on maintaining an inclusive environment. I am not sure why you would show a video from Bernie Sanders, which shows a specific political view and not facts.

If you would like me to come in, please let me know. Thank you.


I was pushing my one-year-old son in his stroller, walking from our pediatrician's office to the pharmacy across the street to pick up his prescription for pink eye. I’ll admit that I shouldn’t have been checking my phone at this moment, but I’m glad I was, because it meant that when I first read this parent’s email message, I was not sitting at my computer. I worry that if I had been, I would have instinctively pounded out a lengthy, spirited defense of that day’s Grade 7 social studies lesson, correcting all the inaccuracies her daughter had relayed to her, and pressed “Send.”

But instead, I found myself waiting in line at a pharmacy counter, needlessly monitoring my son’s eye while stewing with rage at this email I had now re-read for the fifth time, wondering how I had ended up in this situation and what I should do about it.

And I remembered the best piece of advice my principal had given our faculty at the start of the school year: Make it a phone call.


In short, the rationale is this: Email and other text-based communications are great for conveying information, logistics, and reminders. They are potentially abysmal for conducting conversations, especially difficult conversations. So as a teacher, never send an email to a parent or caregiver (or to a colleague, for that matter) that might be received with defensiveness or anger. And never reply to an angry email a parent or caregiver has sent to you. Instead, talk to them. With your actual voice, and theirs. You’re both more likely to interact civilly and respectfully over the phone, on a video chat, or in person. You might even find yourself nurturing a valuable relationship with your would-be antagonist.

Before I continue, two caveats to this advice. First, I’ve enjoyed some incredible, in-depth, reflective email exchanges over the years. These are typically with people I’ve already gotten to know well, once we’ve established mutual respect and admiration. The point is not that text-based conversations are by definition poisonous. Rather, they don’t work well for difficult conversations, because we don’t accurately convey or pick up tone, emotion, and sarcasm over text — and because it’s much easier to enter attack mode when we’re not sharing space with the person as a fellow human being.

My second caveat is that it’s perfectly fine, therapeutic even, to type that angry message you’d like to send to a parent or caregiver. Just send it to yourself instead, and file it away as a memento of how you were feeling before you picked up that phone.


As soon as I returned home from the pharmacy, I looked up this parent’s phone number in the school directory and cold called it.

She picked up, and when I identified myself, she sounded grateful that I had called. We chatted for more than 15 minutes. I led with my concern that her daughter felt the way she did, and I asked to partner with her to figure out how this had happened and how we might support her daughter. This “figuring out” allowed me to narrate my version of events without becoming defensive. I explained to her the purpose of our study of business and labour, our focus on the minimum wage as a current controversy in the news, and my use of a Bernie Sanders clip to illustrate one side of the issue along with an interview clip featuring the CEO of Popeye’s to illustrate an opposing side, after which the class leapt into a vigorous discussion about the merits of both positions.

After hearing this, she expressed her appreciation for my effort to expose the class to arguments on different sides of the issue. She noted that her daughter had not picked up on my pluralistic intention; in response, I expressed regret at not framing the lesson more clearly at the outset. We realized that her daughter may have shut down upon seeing Bernie Sanders, before she was able to register the presence of an opposing view.

I also assured her that in our classroom of nearly 30 talkative students, I had not heard any disparaging remarks about President Trump, but I promised to reiterate our classroom norms with the students the next day. We didn’t have to litigate whether or not students were “shouting” anti-Trump slogans to agree on the importance of respectful political discourse. (I left the irony of her concern for another day.) I thanked her for advocating for her child, she thanked me for my honesty and passion for the subject, and we hung up.

The long exhale of breath I took was well earned. I felt as if I had willingly walked onto a battlefield and emerged unscathed. But that was the wrong analogy, because while I did avoid damage by giving this parent a call, I also established a relationship with her based on trust and candor. For the remainder of the school year, she continued to let me know, over email, when she suspected that left-of-center ideas had made their way into my lessons, and after receiving reassurances from me, she passed them along approvingly to other right-learning families who supposedly had similar misgivings. She came to view herself as my ally, and I improved as a teacher by considering her potential feedback as I crafted my lessons.


By the time I became a teacher of Grade 8 U.S. history at a different school two years later, I had fully internalized the importance of being not only wisely reactive to parent critiques but also deliberately proactive at helping families understand my approach to teaching controversial topics. For many years, I had sent periodic email updates to all my students’ parents and caregivers about what we had been studying and ideas for follow-up conversations they might initiate with their children. Yet now, in person at each September curriculum night, I delivered a direct plea for partnership with families in advance. My short talk went something like this:


In this class, we will explore a variety of ways Americans view their country and approach its history. We will evaluate decisions American leaders and political parties have made about a range of important issues, including many that remain controversial to this day. This is part of what makes studying history exciting, meaningful, and relevant.

I know there are parents and caregivers in this room who represent many different political ideologies, affiliations, and issue positions and priorities. This is a strength of our class.

So here’s my request: If you have not yet passed down your political values to your 13-year-old, I encourage you to do so now. I hope that your child comes to our class with some understanding of what you believe and why you feel strongly about those beliefs. My job, as I see it, is to build upon that foundation, to guide your children as they encounter a range of different political beliefs — some from our texts and sources, some perhaps from others in the room. If they are already steeped in your values, they will have a better sense of what questions they need to ask and what more they need to learn in order to make sense of these new viewpoints.

As a group, we will practice engaging respectfully with opposing positions and maintaining an open mind about ideas that seem wrongheaded. I will never ask your children to change their minds. But I will regularly challenge them to expand their thinking, to incorporate the most compelling aspects of others’ positions into their own approach to the issue on the table. And if I’m doing my job well, your children will come home and ask you additional questions about your beliefs, sometimes mirroring your thinking, sometimes pushing back. I hope you’ll enjoy engaging with them in these conversations.

I will do my best to ensure that each viewpoint we encounter is portrayed accurately and discussed fairly. If your conversations with your child ever suggest otherwise, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me; I’m eager to learn from you and your life experience. I hope your child will also raise questions with me during or outside of class when and if they feel the need — this is when some of the best learning happens.

I look forward to partnering with you throughout the year to help your child connect history to dilemmas and disagreements we see in the world right now, and in doing so, come to love studying history as much as I do.


In the five years I taught in this predominantly left-leaning school community, the conservative families were often my biggest allies and cheerleaders — even as their children encountered ideas that would accurately be described as progressive or even socialist, and even as the rhetoric on the political right became more vociferous in its attacks on “woke” social studies curriculum. These families told me they appreciated the opportunity I was giving their children to learn more about their politics and to express conservative views without fear. Liberal families, too, appreciated the complexity of our classroom discussions and my invitation to engage their children in conversations about why they so strenuously opposed President Trump and his political movement.

Often the best way to enlist parents and caregivers as allies is first to enlist them as co-educators, in partnership with you. Help them value not only what you add to their child’s educational experience but what they themselves can add, and be sure they know that you, too, value their wisdom. Then, when you do encounter a bump along the road, you will be in a far better position to discuss it with the parent or caregiver in a spirit of mutual respect.

Though please, not over email.