Better conversations are something we can learn and practice. These resources can help you understand dialogue and deliberation, strengthen your own communication skills, facilitate conversations with others, and bring these practices into classrooms, organizations, workplaces, and communities. 

Start Here

New to this work? Start with the three resources below. Then explore the sections that fit what you want to do. 

What Are Dialogue & Deliberation? | National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation

A clear introduction to two related but distinct forms of engagement. Dialogue emphasizes understanding and learning across differences, while deliberation helps people consider options and tradeoffs when working through shared problems.

Conversation Simulator | Constructive Dialogue Institute

A short interactive experience for practicing difficult conversations. In about 10 minutes, participants practice establishing a collaborative goal, getting curious, and sharing a personal story. 

Facilitation 101: A Beginner's Guide to Dialogue and Deliberation | Democracy Resource Hub and NCDD

A beginner-friendly guide to designing and facilitating inclusive conversations. It introduces dialogue, deliberation, and facilitation and provides practical guidance on choosing a purpose, preparing a conversation, crafting questions, supporting participation, and responding in the moment. 

Lead or Facilitate a Conversation

Beginning a Dialogue Session: A Guide | Essential Partners

A concise two-page resource with sample opening questions and practical design and facilitation advice. It is a useful first tool for someone preparing to lead a dialogue. 

Guide to Question Design | Essential Partners

Good conversations depend on good questions. This guide explains how to design questions that invite personal experience, curiosity, reflection, and complexity rather than simply producing competing positions. 

How to Host a Community Conversation | Interactivity Foundation

Practical guidance for moving from an idea to an actual conversation, including organizing the event, developing a facilitation plan, facilitating exploratory discussion, and helping participants contribute productively. 

Fostering Dialogue Across Divides | Essential Partners

For someone ready to go beyond the basics, this comprehensive field guide covers planning, dialogue design, participant preparation, facilitation, communication agreements, and common challenges. It is designed for beginning and intermediate facilitators. 

Structures for Dialogue | Constructive Dialogue Institute

Simple ways to structure participation so that more people can contribute, including think-then-share, go-rounds, pairs, small groups, and other formats. Useful in classrooms, meetings, student organizations, and facilitated dialogues. 

Find a Ready-to-Use Conversation Guide

Conversation Guides | Living Room Conversations

Ready-to-use guides provide a straightforward way to host a structured dialogue. Topics span relationships and community, education, technology, culture, politics, values, the environment, and more. 

Issue Guides | National Issues Forums Institute

For conversations intended to move from understanding toward public decision-making, NIFI's issue guides help participants examine multiple approaches and consider the tensions, costs, and tradeoffs associated with different choices. 

Bring Better Conversations into the Classroom

Navigating Difficult Dialogues in the Classroom | University of Iowa Center for Teaching

A locally developed resource featuring student perspectives on how instructors and students can proactively create conditions for difficult conversations that support empowered and engaged learning. 

Collaborative Discussion Toolkit | Interactivity Foundation

Dozens of activities for helping students and groups practice collaborative discussion. The toolkit includes activities focused on creative and critical collaboration, working across differences, and civic collaboration, making it useful for both curricular and co-curricular settings. 

Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Resources | TILT Higher Ed

A collection of tools for making expectations, purposes, and criteria more visible to students. The TILT framework can support clearer communication and more productive conversations about learning, assignments, expectations, and feedback

Explore More Resources

For people who want to dig deeper, these organizations maintain extensive libraries of activities, guides, research, and facilitation tools. 

Resource Library | Constructive Dialogue Institute

Higher education-focused tools, activities, instructor guides, webinars, discussion resources, and other materials for building constructive dialogue skills. 

Resource Library | Essential Partners

Dialogue exercises, facilitator guides, question-design resources, classroom materials, videos, and topic-specific dialogue guides

Resource Center | National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation

A broad collection of guides, frameworks, participatory methods, assessment tools, and other resources for people who want to learn more about dialogue and deliberation.