Election Day Special Edition
Happy Election Day!
If you happen to be a United States citizen, I hope you are taking the opportunity to exercise your right to vote today, a core privilege and responsibility for Democracy. Perhaps you are one of the 75 million Americans who have already voted early or by mail. Hoorah! Tomorrow you will wake up and the election will be over. The bombardment of television ads and interminable text messages will finally cease. But most of us will just be beginning to feel the effects of the election results and we want you to be ready to face the day and weeks ahead as the best version of yourself.
Over the past few weeks, many of us at L+D have presented to groups both on-line and in person about how to prepare for this week, and especially the days following the election. In all of these presentations, we asked participants to time travel with us into the near future to November 5, 2024 and imagine the possible outcomes we might experience that day in our school and greater communities. We randomly assigned each participant one of three different scenarios for the day. Participants received the news either that the candidate they supported had decisively won, decidedly lost or that the election results were undecided, with protests beginning in major cities. If you want to play along, just use the QR code below that corresponds to your birthday month and read the news of the day.
When we asked people how they felt about the news they received, we heard a wide range of responses including “relieved” “devastated” “angry” “elated” and “anxious” and other variations of these emotions. Participants also shared their visceral responses as they read the news. One participant told us she was so joyful upon reading the news that her candidate had won, that she struggled to feel any empathy at all towards someone with an opposing view - an honest and vulnerable reflection. Most people also agreed that the third scenario - where the election results were unclear for an unknown length of time - was most unsettling.
We then asked them to reflect on what different community members might need that day including students, colleagues, parents, their own friends, families, neighbors and, of course, themselves. The goal was not to create a definite plan for the day, but rather to start imagining different possibilities for the day and prepare both emotionally and potentially logistically for a wide variety of outcomes.
Why did we start with this kind of time travel simulation and why are we encouraging you to join along?
In our work with futurist thinking and learning from futurists like Jane McGonigal at the Institute for The Future and Lisa Kay Solomon at Stanford University, we know that engaging in this kind of activity can make us feel more capable of showing up to any of the possible outcomes because we have spent some time living through the day ahead of time. We have thought through how we would feel and, more importantly, where we might have agency to meet any of the challenges or opportunities of the day. We actually feel more optimistic about the situation, even if we don’t love the outcome before us. We may not be able to control the outcome, but we can imagine how we want to show up and what we might need to do to be able to be our best for our students and one another.
In 2020 we shared some additional suggestions about managing the day and below is a modified version of that for 2024. Be sure to check out the students scenarios below as well which you might consider discussing either formally or informally today or early tomorrow.
1) Find a way to get “above the line.” We are borrowing this term from Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp, the authors of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. Being above the line means you are conscious of your own emotions and present with them. You are open and curious, and your guiding question is “What can I learn from this experience?”
Contrast this feeling with being below the line, which is when you feel defensive, disconnected or in denial of your emotional state. When we’re below the line, the driving question is “How can I be right?” It’s pretty easy to see which of these states is better for students. They need us, the adults in the room, to show up above the line.
So to that end, throughout the day:
Identify and acknowledge your feelings. Are you above or below the line right now? Are you falling into a pattern of your own cognitive distortions?
Focus on your students’ feelings.
Ask questions instead of making statements; be curious.
Take deep breaths.
Consider taking a break from the news and social media. Take care of yourself in helpful ways.
2) Meet students where THEY are. (And you can probably anticipate where many might be.)
Some students will show up engaged and really wanting to talk about the election; others will be indifferent. Some will be happy with the election outcomes and some will be sad, mad, or even scared. Let them know that all of their feelings are valid and totally normal. While you might feel a pull to commiserate or celebrate with a student, ask yourself, “Am I above the line?” Is sharing your own happiness or grief in service to that student, or is it in service to you? Can you focus entirely on them and what they need at the moment?
3) Expect students to say and do both the right and the wrong things today. As we have said all along, plan for discomfort. Expect students to say things that are insensitive, biased, unresearched, and not fully formed. Most adults are at a loss for how to manage election conversations, so why would we expect students to do any better? We offer this framework for managing these conversations. Print it out and have it at the ready. Plan, pause, reflect, repair (if possible). There are some key phrases in there that might help you have a way to respond that allows you to slow things down and de-escalate tension. But also expect students to show up as gracious and empathetic classmates and be ready to share your gratitude and appreciation.
4) Practice makes perfect. It may feel a little late to run through scenarios and drills, but we’ve included these student scenarios for you to consider. Just like the time travel exercise above, walking through these and other scenarios, might just help you feel more confident and even optimistic in going through the day.
5) Lean into the conversations that the students need and, when appropriate, agree to put aside the content we had planned for the day in service of learning about one another. While it is tempting to have a plan for class and stick with it because talking about the Mongolian conquest of China feels less polarizing, really think hard about expecting all students to be able to absorb content if they’re in an emotional state. “Business as usual” may make us feel more competent, but it may not be what students need. If Kamala Harris were to win the election, it would be an historic event for women and, depending on your community, a feat in itself worth highlighting.
Please feel free to forward this email to anyone in your network who might find it valuable. We wish you the very best in the days and weeks ahead. As we reminded you in 2020, "The conversation is the relationship." This quotation from the book Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott always reminds us that focusing on relationships, above all else, can help us stay grounded even in times of ambiguity, polarization, and conflict.
