You know the moment: a student in the classroom says the thing everyone was thinking. A headline nobody planned for takes over the room. Someone goes quiet, and the class keeps moving anyway. In these times, we as faculty improvise with a racing heart, and try to find the right words to make the moment “better.” Many faculty in higher education describe this part of the job as invisible, and a heavy weight to carry (Gonzalez et al., 2024). Charged moments can occur in teaching 200 freshmen in a lecture hall, or eight graduate students around a seminar table. However, we can prepare for these moments the same way. The following steps reflect research-based approaches to preparing for challenging, charged moments, regardless of discipline (McGowan et al., 2021). Importantly, none of the following prevents hard moments. Prepare anyway. You'll walk into the next class having already made a few decisions instead of making them all at once with your heart pounding. And, ultimately, students can tell the difference. 

Five Things to Set up Before the Hard Moment Arrives

1. Take inventory of your own body signals while you are calm. Charged moments show up in our bodies before we have words for them. Often, this looks like our chests tightening, faces warming, or the urge to talk faster. Envision a potentially charged classroom moment (either past or future). Acknowledge what comes up for you, the quality of the feeling, and where it is in the body. Write yours down now, while nothing is happening. Naming the signal allows you to better catch it and address it when it arises in you (Bitanihirwe & Imad, 2023).
2. Line up two colleagues before you need them. You want two people you can text after a class that feels emotionally charged. Make one of them someone outside your department; a colleague who teaches differently will usually ask a better question, because they won't assume they already know what happened. Faculty who navigate hard conversations well almost always have a couple of trusted people they can think out loud with (McGowan et al., 2021. So ask now, before anything goes wrong: "Can I text or call you after a challenging/charged class?”
3. Tell students early that hard conversations are allowed here. Charged moments arrive in every discipline, whether that’s through the material, through something in the news or on campus, or through a student having a terrible week. Until you say otherwise, students don't know whether your classroom is a place where any of that can be named out loud. So say it early. If your course heads into contested territory: "We'll touch things people feel strongly about. That's not a detour from work… it is the work, and I expect it." Or even opening with: "If something out there or in here is affecting your work, say so, and we'll figure it out together." Raising a hard subject on purpose builds trust and credibility; whereas leaving it unspoken tends to erode both (Day-Vines et al., 2021). And when the hard thing is personal, students are often already waiting for the opening: in a recent study, 38% of students named a professor as the person they'd talk to about mental health affecting their academic work, while only 17% had actually talked with anyone on the academic side (Healthy Minds Network, 2025).
4. Write agreements people can actually act on. Simply writing on your syllabus "be respectful" on the syllabus doesn’t often impact student behavior. A short list of things a person can actually do works better: anyone can ask for a pause; we speak for ourselves, not for a group; we can go back to something we said last week and revise it. Build the course agreements and culture with students, if you can. A list you wrote alone tends to protect the students who were already comfortable, and it takes away everyone's say in how the class handles a hard moment when one shows up (Harbin et al., 2019). Importantly, most students with marginalized identities (Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color; LGBTQIAP+ students, first generation students) often opt out of contentious discussions (Parker-Shandal, 2023). Asking a room to be equally brave asks more of some people in it than others.
5. Decide now that postponing is a real answer. Pick your sentence and give yourself permission to use it: "I want to come back to this next class, when I can give it more than the few minutes we have left." Make that call now, while nothing is happening, because at the moment you won't have the bandwidth to weigh whether stopping is right. Students rarely need an answer on the spot, what they need is to know it's coming back.

Conclusion

Think about the working relationships you actually trust. Most of them survived something. Somebody dropped the ball, or said the wrong thing, and then came back and dealt with it, and the relationship became stronger. Research on relational repair supports this (Eubanks et al., 2018). Students describe courses the same way. When someone tells me about a class that mattered to them, it’s because the instructor came back to something. None of this is about avoiding hard moments. It's about becoming the kind of teacher who returns to them in an intentional and open-hearted way. This is a skill, and a skill can be practiced. 

References and Resources

Bitanihirwe, B., & Imad, M. (2023). Gauging trauma-informed pedagogy in higher education: A UK case study. Frontiers in Education, 8, 1256996. 

Day-Vines, N. L., Cluxton-Keller, F., Agorsor, C., & Gubara, S. (2021). Strategies for broaching the subjects of race, ethnicity, and culture. Journal of Counseling & Development, 99(3), 348–357. 

Eubanks, C. F., Muran, J. C., & Safran, J. D. (2018). Alliance rupture repair: A meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 508–519. 

Gonzalez, I. A., Newhart, S., Arcot, R. R., & Hudlin, M. (2024). “A weight to carry”: Experiences of masters-level counseling faculty teaching a multicultural counseling course. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 52(4), 242–256. 

Harbin, M. B., Thurber, A., & Bandy, J. (2019). Teaching race, racism, and racial justice: Pedagogical principles and classroom strategies for course instructors. Race and Pedagogy Journal, 4(1), Article 1. 

Healthy Minds Network. (2025). Healthy Minds Study: 2024–2025 national data report. University of Michigan, Boston University, UCLA, & Wayne State University. 

McGowan, B. L., Jones, C. T., Boyce, A. S., & Watkins, S. E. (2021). Black faculty facilitating difficult dialogues in the college classroom: A cross-disciplinary response to racism and racial violence. The Urban Review, 53(5), 881–903. 

Parker-Shandal, C. (2023). Participation in higher education classroom discussions: How students' identities influence perspective taking and engagement. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 11. 

Additional resources

• Guidelines for Discussing Difficult or High-Stakes Topics — Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan
• Managing Difficult Moments — CETL Teaching Tip
• Student Perspectives on Navigating Difficult Discussions — CETL Teaching Tip
• Recognizing and Addressing Student Mental Health Concerns — CETL Teaching Tip
• In-The-Moment Responses To Mental Health Challenges — CETL Teaching Tip

About the Author

Dr. Clark D. Ausloos is an assistant professor in the counseling department, in the School of Education and Human Services. His teaching philosophy centers on a constructivist, student-centered approach that values developing meaningful connections with students. Beyond teaching, Dr. Ausloos holds licenses as a Clinical Counselor and School Counselor and has received high recognition from students for his engaging and sensitive handling of diverse topics. 

Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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