“That’s insane and wrong! I’m going to tell my parents” – is the phrase that school teachers are concerned to hear from their students when teaching sensitive and controversial topics in the classroom (Tribukait, 2021, p. 558). It is quite common for some teachers to report their worries about parents or grandparents coming to the school and complaining that students just learned another way of thinking about particular issues (Christophe & Tribukait, 2019; Chikoko et al., 2011). This guide is designed to help teachers prevent or reduce tension between the school/teacher and parents in a respectful, sensitive, systematic, and solution-focused way when teaching controversial issues in the classroom. This guide is also a self-reflection tool for school teachers to reflect on the way they approach communication with parents. Through their guide, Mikhail Mogutov and Bjorn Wansink provide three main systematic approaches that might help teachers to handle conflicting parents on different levels.
Students as Mediators of Conflicts
Find out what New Students Bring to the Classroom
As a response to an increase in new students in the Swedish educational system, the Swedish Board of Education tasked a group of schools and universities to find a way to assess what newly arrived students know in order to provide the best possible education for each student, as well as focusing on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. This resulted in the formation of materials for conducting discourse around history for the purpose of assessing the historical competencies of newly arrived students. This is done in the form of a 70-minute conversation between a teacher and a student. The assessment is meant to provide valuable insight into what the students are already familiar with, so that teachers can take this into account when creating lesson plans.