Amid increasingly divisive public discourse, civility has become a sought-after skill for colleges and universities struggling to maintain a rich set of viewpoints on campus, and for employers trying to build diverse workplaces.
Now, a new pilot program shows that it might be possible to instill an ability to disagree productively in adolescents—and some of the nation’s top universities want to consider proof of that skill in admissions.
As part of Dialogues, a pilot by the nonprofit peer-tutoring platform Schoolhouse.world, students ages 14 to 18 built portfolios showcasing their ability to disagree respectfully with other peers on hot-button topics.
Today, eight selective colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Vanderbilt University announced they will accept these “civility transcripts” among the factors they weigh in college-admissions decisions.
“I don’t want brittle students,” said Jim Nondorf, the vice president for enrollment and student advancement and the dean of college admissions and financial aid for the University of Chicago, one of the colleges that plans to use civility as a consideration during admission decisions. “I want students who can come here and add to the conversation on campus, but do it in the right way.”
Studies have found that adolescents need guidance and opportunities to practice difficult conversations and respond to criticism without falling into “outrage cycles.” In particular, students may have more difficulty picking up social cues and understanding nuance in virtual arguments compared to in-person disagreements.
“It’s very easy in anonymous or asynchronous forums to just completely ‘other’ the other party—to think they’re idiots, think they’re evil, whatever,” said Salman Khan, the founder of the virtual education platform Khan Academy and co-founder of Schoolhouse.world. “That’s very hard to do in this [face-to-face] setting.”
Many school- and community-based programs focus on argument and discourse, but it can be difficult to measure nonacademic aspects of these skills. There are no standard assessments of students’ civility, but a few other projects are trying to look at some of the necessary components—such as listening and considering feedback from partners.
This year, five states—Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin—partnered with the nonprofit Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which created the time-based Carnegie units for secondary credits, and the assessment group ETS for the Skills for the Future project, which is testing 15 different tools to measure underlying skills such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
“These types of skills are predictive of the success that we want to see for young adults, both with high school and college attainment, but also other dimensions of thriving ... that broaden the definition of commencement-level success,” said Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Carnegie’s vice president for innovation and impact.
For example, the partnership is testing one “test-less assessment” task in which a student coordinates with two artificial intelligence-run avatars to tell a story, according to Laura Slover, who leads the Skills for the Future project.
“They each build on each other’s ideas,” she said. “They have to listen so that they’re picking up the ideas and creating linkages to build the next part of the story ... [and] giving each other feedback in real time.”
Students would be evaluated based on things like how well they accepted and used the AI characters’ ideas and feedback. It’s not clear, though, how well simulation tasks of this sort can measure students’ ability to work with other people, particularly in problem-solving and healthy disagreements.
Students volunteer to talk about gun control, inequality, and immigration
The Dialogues program takes a different approach. It built off Schoolhouse.world, the peer-tutoring platform, in which secondary students develop a portfolio of tutoring subject “certifications” by passing online assessments and providing and reviewing video explanations of concepts. Then, as students begin to tutor, their tutees also review their support and effectiveness.
Dialogues participants, ages 14 to 18, volunteer to have conversations on any of about two dozen controversial topics, including AI, income inequality, immigration, mental health, and gun control. Each student reviewed guidelines for civil disagreements and discussion guides for particular topics, and was matched to peers with a different viewpoint on the assigned topics. The students had and recorded virtual conversations with their partners, then reflected on their own experience and provided written feedback for their partner.
The students participated independently of their schools and were not graded on their performance in these dialogues, but they received a portfolio transcript detailing the number of hours and topics of discussion in which they participated and feedback from their partners on skills like active listening and how well they challenged their own views. Students could submit these portfolios to colleges as part of admissions decisions.
During the year-and-a-half pilot, more than 600 students logged about 2,000 hours of discussion. Schoolhouse is expanding the pilot to school districts this week.
These structured peer reviews and self-reflections work in lieu of formal assessments, Khan said. “I don’t think you can truly fake respect,” he said. “You have to have real respect; otherwise the other party can tell.”
Khan said nearly all student conversations have ended with them finding at least some common ground, and “out of the several hundreds of these conversations ... we haven’t had one real incident of people yelling at each other,” Khan said. “People are much more polarized, but this has surpassed our expectations in terms of people being able to engage in tough conversations as long as the context is right, and they’re primed in the right way.”
While an overwhelming majority of K-12 educators told the EdWeek Research Center in 2024 that schools have a responsibility to teach students how to have respectful disagreements, about a third of teachers said they have changed or avoided lessons on challenging topics out of concern about backlash from students, parents, or the public.
Nondorf, the University of Chicago administrator, said students need more practice with managing conflicts both in class and out of school.
“As things have evolved, the red states are redder and the blue states are bluer, and quite honestly, it’s tough in high school to find somebody who has different opinions given how separated the country has become around things,” Nondorf said. “If you look at what’s gone on on our campuses over the last couple of years, I think students being better able to articulate their views in a non-confrontational, nonviolent way is the best thing we could possibly do for them.”
