Dialogic Aims and Sample Tools to Achieve Them | Dialogue and Learning Resources (Student Life-Housing and Residence Education)

Dialogic Aims	Sample Tools for Facilitators and Participants
Promote generous listening Promote reflection before speaking or acting Promote genuine, thoughtful, and heartfelt speaking	Giving everyone an equal turn to speak while others listen Encouraging reflection before speaking Limiting responses by setting time limits Encouraging listening as a form of inquiry Sharing participants’ concerns and questions in advance without specifying their sources
Promote participants’ recognition of and commitment to their relational intentions, their long-range purposes, and their capacity to shape what happens	In premeeting conversations, inquiring about · Hopes for the conversation · Images of satisfying conversation · Long-range purposes Collaboratively developing meeting agreements that support people’s intentions and hopes Inviting and using written questions Pausing to reflect
Promote participants’ ownership of the process	Soliciting hopes and concerns; relating these to possible group- process agreements Soliciting design ideas; co-creating meeting frames, formats, content, focus, and procedures with participants Using participants’ language Refraining from interpretation Being open about facilitator aims and actions Intervening on behalf of agreements; inviting participants to do so also Relying on participant reflections in planning subsequent meetings
Promote openness to the other Promote mutual recognition and acknowledgement	• Clarifying differences between · misunderstanding and not understanding · acknowledgement and agreement · intentions and effects • Posing questions for all in the group to consider • Inviting questions of genuine interest among participants • Inviting shared concerns as well as differences

Promote recognition of the complexity of self and other

Promote an inquiring stance about self and other

Grounding conversation in the personal (e.g., beginning with how people’s concerns about the issue connects with their life- experience)
Asking questions crafted to surface gray areas and experiences of value conflict
Countering stereotyping (exercise)
Turning assumptions into questions
Creating and asking genuine questions of self and other

Promote a sense of sufficient safety, security, and trust

In collaboration with community members, preparing a warm invitation that spells out the purposes, processes, pragmatic details, and expectations for participants
Soliciting, suggesting, and monitoring shared agreements, ground rules, or covenants
Involving participants in selection of content and questions they will address
Inquiring about questions participants want to ask others and hope others will ask them
Circulating their questions and concerns (without attribution) prior to meeting
Facilitating fairly and as agreed

Promote equal conversational power for all participants

Adopting a shoulder-to-shoulder, non-expert stance
Involving all sides equally in planning
Beginning with anticipated, sequenced, and timed exchanges, a kind of ritual providing equal airtime for all.
Developing agreements specific to each group
Clarifying maintenance of group agreements as a responsibility shared by all
Setting time limits for exchanges
Arranging the physical environment to support equity
Inquiring in ways that bring forward accounts of fairly equal coherence for all sides

Created by
Sallyann Roth, Senior Associate Robert Stains, Program Director Public Conversations Project, 2005