Agreements for Courageous Conversations and Active Learning

Stay engaged.

• Remain morally, emotionally, intellectually, and socially involved in dialogue.
• Stay present: guard against the learned tendency to disengage.
• Collectively make the commitment to embrace the conversation/dialogue.

Experience discomfort.

• Deal openly and honestly with challenges: open up and examine your own core racial beliefs, values, perceptions, and behaviors.
• Engage in the dialogue authentically: be personally responsible for pushing yourself into real dialogue.
• Recognize that discomfort often leads to real growth.

Speak your truth.

• Be willing to take risks
• Share honest thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
• We are experts in defining our own experiences and personal realities.

Expect and accept non-closure.

• Solution may be revealed in the process of dialogue itself: There is no "quick fix."
• Dialogue triggers a moral, intellectual, social, and emotional shift that allows for opportunities.
• The more one talks, the more one learns; the more one learns, the more appropriate and promising your actions and interventions.

Maintain confidentiality.

• Honor privacy by avoiding "who said what."
• Uphold discretion.

Listen with the intent to learn.

• Listening is a skill.
• Be present: attend to the conversation.
• Listening with an openness to learning: reciprocity of sharing creates an opportunity to learn from others.

Suspend judgment.