Teacher training course - Dialogue workshop

Come to a teacher training course

Students must be taught to show the tolerance they want others to show them. This can be something as practical as accepting a classmate's choice of clothing or membership of a particular soccer club. Or accepting classmates who have a different approach to alcohol and parties. School is a unique arena for training tolerance for what is different and creating communities across differences. Here, teachers play a crucial role as role models and as the foremost representatives of democracy in the classroom. It is a big responsibility.

Since 2018, our association has been working on dialogue and bridge-building among school students in Copenhagen, and since 2021, teachers have also been attending bridge-building courses. Experience from the pilot project shows that the teacher courses create ownership, so that the bridge-building methods become firmly established in the schools in the long term, and that after the course, teachers are motivated and professionally equipped to work independently with the Bridge Building Week teaching materials.

The purpose of
the Bridge Building Week

The Dialogue Workshop is a course for elementary school teachers who want to develop skills to strengthen dialogue and create space for conversation about difficult topics in the classroom. After the course, teachers will be equipped to use the Bridge Building Week teaching materials on their own—either by integrating them into subject teaching, for teaching a theme module, or for a whole week of theme teaching.

On the course, teachers meet skilled instructors in rhetoric, conflict management, and norm criticism, who inspire and ensure academic ballast. Teachers also work with their own norms, prejudices, and cultural blind spots, and they try out exercises from the Bridge Building Week teaching materials.

"This is the first time I have seen all the upper school teachers support a project, and that is because it is 100% relevant to what we face every day, which is difficult. It has been rewarding to be given some tools to tackle the difficult stuff."
– Deputy head teacher at a public school

"The best thing has been working with colleagues, gaining new knowledge, and getting people from outside to talk about some of the topics that can be controversial."
– Teacher, upper secondary school

See example of program

Photos: Sophia Danker

Book a Dialogue Workshop

Write to us at kontakt@beobyggerne.dk or call us on 22 34 68 92.

Order the teaching material

The teaching material can be used whether you are planning an entire theme week or looking for inspiration for a single module.

The material consists of an easily accessible teaching manual, which is divided into six sections with material for 1-2 modules on each theme, and a large exercise catalog with 25 exercises with detailed instructions that are easy to pick up and get started. In addition, you can find definitions of terms and instructions on how to organize the training, as well as an overview of organizations that conduct school visits on the topics and recommended literature.

Students are educated and trained in six themes:

Democracy and diversity
Language that opens and closes
Norms
Prejudices and preconceptions
Dialogue and communication
Conflicts and solutions

You will receive the training material digitally in PDF format.

Order the teaching material

Cooperation partner

The dialogue workshops were developed in collaboration with the William Demant Foundation.

Bridge Builders

The Bridge Builders - Center for Dialogue Coffee was created to strengthen dialogue, tolerance and understanding between people with different opinions, values and ways of life.

We want to promote a society that handles its conflicts and disagreements with words and arguments - not violence and threats.