By Abi Barkley ’29 (DCI Fellow)
How Facilitating a Middle School Deliberation Helped Me Deliberate With Adults
When I mentioned that I wanted to host a deliberation with middle schoolers, I was met with the same question from almost everyone I told: “Are you sure?”
It was a fair question. Originally, I felt that teaching deliberation to middle schoolers would be a great way to give them some basic skills for having contentious conversations early on. But most of what DCI has done in the past has centered on college students or adult community members, and it’s only recently that we’ve started building programs that work with local high schools.
Middle school was, in many ways, uncharted territory. Because so much of what we do is centered around political topics, I understood going in that I might need to change not only the content but also the structure of the conversation.
I created this project with another DCI Fellow, Camryn Friedman ’27. Together, we decided to take the approach of deliberating on something that would feel relevant to the students’ actual lives at school, rather than jumping straight into national politics. We reasoned that this might be the closest equivalent to how adults engage with political topics: people tend to care most, and argue most passionately, about the things that touch their day-to-day lives directly. We also cut the length of the deliberation down from our usual two hours to just one, assuming that a group of 11-to-13-year-olds would need a shorter format to stay engaged. The group itself was composed entirely of boys, ages 11-13.
Underestimating Them From the Start
Going into this process, I assumed the students would be less willing to engage than the adults and college students we usually work with. To account for that, we built in a game component, borrowed from our own deliberation guide. For things like speaking for longer than a minute (but less than two), respectfully disagreeing with someone, sharing a personal story related to the topic, or bringing a new perspective into the conversation, participants could earn a piece of candy. The idea was to gamify participation just enough to lower the barrier to speaking up.
That game had to be scrapped almost immediately, not because it flopped, but because it wasn’t necessary. Our participants were so eager to contribute that we didn’t need an incentive system to get them talking; if anything, we needed tools to manage how much everyone wanted to say at once. It was a good problem to have, and it was the first sign that I had badly underestimated this group.
What surprised me even more was how quickly they picked up and started using the vocabulary of deliberation itself. We opened with a set of conversation agreements to be respectful, be a good listener, speak with purpose, assume the best about others, ask questions, practice empathy, avoid speaking in absolutes. The same ground rules we use with adult groups. I expected those norms to feel abstract or a little over their heads. Instead, the boys treated them almost like tools they could pick up and use immediately. One phrase in particular became a favorite of the group: “I respectfully disagree.” By the end of the hour, it wasn’t just a phrase we’d taught them — it was something they reached for naturally, almost competitively, as if using it correctly was its own small badge of honor.
Should Phones Be Allowed in School?
Our central question for the session was simple and, for this age group, immediately personal:
should students be allowed to bring their phones to class?
We laid out both sides for them the way we would for any deliberation. On one hand, phones can be legitimate educational tools — useful for research, note-taking, translation, calendars, and accessibility support for students with different learning needs. They can also double as safety tools, giving students a way to reach parents in an emergency or stay updated during the school day, which offers peace of mind for families. On the other side, phones can be disruptive and, some would argue, disrespectful to teachers who are trying to run a classroom. They’re a documented drain on attention spans, a vector for cyberbullying that can happen invisibly to parents, and a source of social comparison that can follow students into the one place that’s supposed to be a break from it.
What struck me was that the boys didn’t just repeat these talking points back at us, they complicated them. The boys who argued in favor of phones felt they should learn how to use them responsibly and that means having it but putting it away, while others who argued against pointed to cyberbullying and distraction with a level of specificity that surprised me, clearly drawing on things they’d actually seen happen to classmates. The conversation moved fast, and it moved with real conviction. They weren’t just talking and voicing an opinion for the sake of the exercise; they meant what they were saying.
Fun Is Not the Opposite of Serious
What I learned most from this group is that deliberation doesn’t need to be heavy to be meaningful, it can be genuinely fun. The fun also doesn’t have to come at the expense of substance. Most of our DCI deliberations focus on topics that carry a lot of weight: reparations, surveillance, criminal justice, the kinds of issues where people arrive with years of accumulated opinion and, often, some amount of guardedness. There’s a lot to be learned from the enthusiasm these boys brought to a conversation about something as ordinary as phone policy. They weren’t guarded at all. They just wanted to talk, and to be heard, and to win each other over.
That’s not to say the session was without friction. We had to intervene more than a few times to manage interruptions; when everyone wants to speak at once, and nobody’s especially worried about stepping on someone else’s sentence, the facilitator’s job shifts almost entirely toward traffic control. But if I had to choose between that problem and its opposite: a room where no one is willing to speak at all, I would take the interruptions every time. A conversation that’s too loud is still a conversation. A conversation where everyone is too afraid to say what they think isn’t a conversation at all; it’s a series of polite silences.
What This Means for How We Run Adult Deliberations
That contrast is what stuck with me the most, and it’s the question I keep returning to: how do we get participants in our standard DCI deliberations to feel as comfortable sharing their real opinions as these middle schoolers did?
In our usual sessions, I notice a recurring pattern: participants tend to stay on a theoretical level when voicing an opinion, rather than simply saying what they actually feel is right or wrong. I think a lot of that hesitation comes from a fear of appearing to violate the spirit of the ground rules, as if disagreement itself, rather than disrespect, were the thing we’re asking people to avoid. But that’s a misreading of what we’re trying to build. We don’t want participants to be unkind to one another, but genuine disagreement is the entire point of a deliberation. Without it, we’re not deliberating; we’re just taking turns being agreeable. And that disagreement needs to exist between the actual participants in the room, not just surface occasionally through a devil’s-advocate role played by the secondary facilitator, standing in for a position no one in the room is willing to claim as their own.
The middle schoolers didn’t have that hesitation. They hadn’t yet learned to hedge, to soften a position into vagueness so it couldn’t be challenged. When they disagreed, they said so, plainly, and reached for “I respectfully disagree” instead of silence. In a strange way, a room full of eleven-year-olds modeled something our adult deliberations often struggle to achieve: the willingness to actually mean what you say, and to trust that the room will hold that disagreement respectfully rather than punish it.
If I take one thing from this project into my future facilitation work, it’s that the tools we use to lower the stakes of disagreement, clear norms, a shared vocabulary, even something as small as a phrase like “I respectfully disagree” matter more than I gave them credit for. The middle schoolers didn’t need a devil’s advocate to manufacture disagreement, because they haven’t learned to be afraid of it yet. My job now is figuring out how to build that same freedom into rooms full of adults who have spent a lot longer learning the opposite lesson.
