6 Ways to Counter Hate and Build Welcoming, Supportive Schools

Key Points

• Our society is seeing more and more visible signs of hate and division that are impacting students in their schools and homes.
• In response, some schools and communities have tried to become “hate-free zones.”
• Education leader Dr. Maurice Elias offers six practical ways to encourage students to move beyond hate when encountering others who are different from them.

Regardless of what might be going on in the wider world, schools must strive to be places where understanding is elevated and hate is minimized. We know children cannot learn effectively in an environment characterized by antipathy. Incidents impacting specific groups, such as Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ+ populations, Asians, Blacks, Latino/as, or those with immigrant status, make addressing these issues even more urgent than they already would be because of their potential to bring hate into school spaces.

To address this, some schools have tried to become “hate free zones.” Often, these efforts are motivated by incidents impacting specific groups, such as Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ+ populations, Asians, Blacks, or Latino/as.    

But I would argue it’s not enough for schools to be “hate-free” (if that’s even possible). Instead, schools must actively work to build learning environments where all children are welcomed; are treated with dignity, respect, and kindness; feel cared about and supported by the adults and students they interact with; and are encouraged to extend caring, support, and kindness to their classmates and schoolmates.

How? We can’t simply tell people not to hate. Instead, the answer lies in the relationships we build and the bonds that connect us.

Research tells us that having positive interactions with those we think we hate correlates with a reduction in that hate. Having good feelings and thoughts about a “kind” of person one has been taught to hate creates a cognitive dissonance that can be quite powerful.

But to be effective, these positive feelings must be genuine. We can’t just tell someone to have “better” feelings toward others. Any true change of heart must be based on actual interaction, ideally collaborative.

Schools are a great place to create the conditions for environments that promote caring and understanding and guide responses to hateful circumstances. Here are six ways to do this:

1. Establish Core Values Around Caring and Understanding

Every classroom and school should adopt a variation of these norms and expectations: In our school/classroom, we will welcome all students, treat them with dignity and respect, show them they are cared for and supported, and extend kindness to them. This does not at all preclude having behavioral expectations for those who do not follow these norms. Instead, it makes a strong statement rallying students to be Upstanders, i.e., those who stand up for those who are being bullied or threatened.

2. Doubt What You Hear, Doubt What You Know

This is a more basic way to frame intellectual humility or healthy skepticism. In this age of misinformation, students need to resist forming opinions about other people based on what they hear, on slogans, or even what they have been taught or told by adults. When you have students check out multiple sources and seek out information from people from different perspectives, it’s less likely they’ll take on hateful attitudes toward others.

3. Treat Others as You Would Like Others to Treat Your Child, Sibling, Student, or Someone Else You Care Most About 

This variation of the Golden Rule is what we refer to as the 24-Karat Golden Rule. It’s not enough to treat others as we might want to be treated. We must treat them as we would want our most beloved others to be treated.

4. Have Diverse Groups Work on Projects That Foreground Collaborative Exploration

In the classroom, we can counter a culture of hate by offering students activities that combine collaborative work with the exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives. Recently, a speaker at the European SEL-related conference Learning Tapestry described this approach to teaching and learning as one of the most powerful anti-hate strategies he was aware of.

There are several ways to do this, each of which creates a kind of productive cognitive dissonance, as noted earlier, by exposing students to ideas and perspectives they might not have held, or have held without ever questioning them, and requiring them to arrive at common ground with their peers.

• With collaborative history, the teacher assigns a project in which a diverse group of students work together to produce a report about a controversial area of history. As students uncover information, discuss its validity and implications, and come to some kind of agreement (or alternative formulations), they confront and ideally reconcile stereotypes.
• With collective culture, the teacher applies the same approach to the visual and performing arts, foods, clothing, and customs.
• With collective similarity, the teacher applies the model to seemingly disparate groups, focusing on identifying areas of similarity as well as difference, and the history of how groups came to be defined as they are now.   

5. Use Respectful, Empathic Debate

In a respectful, empathic debate, students must grapple with understanding both sides of a topic. But in this context, it’s not simply “content” that they need to grasp. They need to connect with the underlying feelings of the different groups of people involved. So, when discussing the situation facing those trying to emigrate to the United States from the southern border, connect to content readings from varying sides of the issue.

To engage students emotionally, pose a reflection like this: “I want you to imagine a time when something very scary happened to you, when you were in a situation where you did not feel safe and were not sure what was going to happen. Think about it for a minute; close your eyes and try to remember how you felt at the time. Who can put that feeling into words? Who else would like to share what happened and how you felt?”

This will help students make an essential emotional connection to what is being taught, which they otherwise could not truly fathom.

Following this, ask students to debate first one side and then the other for a pro and con question: “If I were there, I would be focused on sending people back to where they came from.”

Arguing both sides of the issue builds careful listening, empathy and perspective-taking skills, and requires problem-solving. You can find more guidelines for leading a respectful, empathic debate in the ASCD webinar How to Foster Civics in Your Classroom with the Students Taking Action Together Strategies.

6. Create Classroom Cultures of Caring, Kindness, and Helping

If we attend carefully to the social and emotional learning lessons learned from the last school year, we can get valuable guidance for how to create classrooms in which the mental health of both adults and children is enhanced.

For example, everyone needs to:

• Be “seen” and “heard”
• Be in a place of sharing, mutual helping and support—a climate of comfort and respect
• Contribute
• Be reassured and have an optimistic perspective on the future
• Receive—and give—caring, kindness, help, appreciation
• Be understood with empathy and compassion—to realize that we are in trauma, beset by strong emotions and worries, even if we don’t see overt signs of difficulty

These practical, actionable approaches and activities can help students build bridges across divides and develop relationships and empathy that combat hate and bigotry.

The views in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CASEL.

Maurice J. Elias, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he also directs the Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab, and is on the Leadership Team of SEL4US.  He is co-author of Nurturing Students’ Character: Everyday Teaching Activities for Social-Emotional Learning. He can be reached at maurice.elias@rutgers.edu.

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