Her group has been working with the city's most troubled high school, Harding High, to increase involvement from the community. The model they've used features discussions led by teachers and students. She called the dialogue model a success and said it'll continue at Harding and will be duplicated at the district's two other high schools this year.

Taylor Willingham, the founder and head of Texas Forums, an initiative of the LBJ Library in Austin, trained 120 moderators for dialogues on the achievement gap in six Central Texas communities last fall. She agrees that it’s important to nurture grassroots interest in deliberation.

“I really want to build the civic capacity of a community,” she said. “We see the moderating role as another way of exercising citizenship…We wanted to have a large group of volunteers that organizations can call upon in the future.”

Training to Ensure Quality

In building that network, Willingham put volunteers, one third of whom were students, through five hours of training that included a forum on the achievement gap and modeling of what would actually take place in their forums.

“So, when we did the introductions, we used the same introductions in the forum,” she said. “We did a personal stake, talked about the principles of moderating, the importance of being neutral. We gave them information about the project, spent time talking about different roles…We went over the forum discussion guide, and (it) had the questions moderators could use. The guide essentially was what we used for the training.”

Patty Dineen, a public engagement consultant from Pennsylvania, agrees that participating in a forum is critical. So is familiarity with the material. Ideally, she said, training would last up to two days.

“People like to do quick training, like two hours” she added. “And I’m thinking, ‘How can it be that people aren’t willing to spend as much time in training as it is to have a forum?’ That doesn’t bode very well.”

Just as student achievement involves expectations and hard work, Dineen thinks organizers should expect certain things from moderators.

“There should be homework, expecting people to take notes, think about it, try it out, and practice,” she said. “That’s probably the only way people succeed: putting in the time and doing the work.”

Tim Eubanks, Lead Community Organizer for Austin Voices for Education and Youth, said it’ll help if organizers recruit the type of person most likely to succeed as a moderator: “Someone who’s capable of being self-confident…has a desire to be social and interact with others. You’d want someone who wants to get other voices to the table, someone who’s comfortable with a certain element of not knowing and with other (communications styles).”

Enforcing Neutrality

Eubanks helped train the 40 students who moderated in the six Central Texas communities, and he praised them for taking their jobs so seriously. It was the first moderating experience for many, and each received a stipend of $100 to do the work. But Eubanks saw one example of a student moderator who failed the neutrality test.

“Someone said we need more programs like Garza’s, an innovative school that offers individualized attention, and the moderator said, ‘Let’s talk about something else, because we can’t make more schools like Garza because of outside budget realities.’ That was kind of crossing the line, taking that idea and throwing it out…I had to tell the moderator it was important not to inject personal opinions.”

Marge Hiller would agree that it’s important to catch and correct misperceptions of the moderator’s role. “It’s essential that people understand they’re not participating in the conversation, they’re there to guide it.”

Calling in a Professional

One way to prevent problems created by inexperience is to hire a professional moderator. That’s what the coalition in San Francisco did recently as a way to kick off their project.

Kelley Abraham, Public Engagement Manager for the San Francisco Education Fund, said an outside facilitator helped bring trust and focus to their meeting with a group of community-based organizations in December. One thing moderator Ayoka Turner did was re-tool the agenda to best address participants’ concerns.

“We were looking at having a coalition brainstorm about a statement of purpose,” Abraham said. “Instead of doing that, we spent more time thinking about the different opportunities we could use right now that are happening in the city, and we came up with work that we might do together.”

Taylor Willingham said she wouldn’t bring in a professional to moderate a public forum, but agrees they can be very helpful, especially with strategic planning.

San Francisco’s big forum, to be held in January, will be moderated by their “skilled, inside people,” Kelley Abraham said. And that’s a resource many organizers in the achievement gap project are calling upon.

Moving to Action

In all the training strategies, however, there’s still the difficulty of getting to action steps. Patty Dineen called that the “64 million dollar question” that nobody’s cracked. Willingham said she didn’t really train her moderators to push for action; their strategies for doing that evolved over time and varied depending on the community they were in.

In San Francisco, a June ’08 election on a parcel or property tax could become the focal point for change. Abraham said the people who will be attending their upcoming forum tend to be activists, so it would be natural for them to advocate for specific ballot language describing how the education money is to be spent.

In Bridgeport, Marge Hiller suggested that the way you frame the achievement gap issue can naturally lead to action.

“The conversation around the achievement gap (is really) how are these schools doing, and what are your aspirations for your children? We can’t use those words, ‘achievement gap’ as much as, ‘Are my kids safe? Are they going to learn? What are the biggest issues as you see them? What do you see as the solution, and how are you going to be involved?’ We tell them we want them to step up.”

So, by presenting the discussion in a context that is important to communities, well-trained moderators can push the conversations toward actionable steps that help close the achievement gaps among students.