Courageous Conversations Summer Intensive
Participant, 2026–27 faculty cohort
I came for the methodology and left with a set of moves for holding a room when people disagree in public and the stakes are real.
Five days in Washington, DC with faculty from campuses across the country, training in the Nine Skills for Courageous Conversations. The Nantucket Project built the program around multimedia case studies, live practice, and simulation, and the case material was the hardest available: Israel and Palestine. We worked it at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, at the Supreme Court, and on the ground at Gettysburg.
The conversations I lead about AI have the same shape. Faculty walk into my rooms cynical, and underneath the cynicism sits real loss: over authorship, over assessment, over the worth of expertise they spent decades building. Those rooms need the same conditions a hard political conversation needs. Ask the question people are actually carrying. Let disagreement sit in the room long enough to be useful. Keep turning participants back toward their own reasoning so they can see how it works.
That last move is the method in my AI classrooms, and it is why this training belongs in my facilitation practice. Metacognition is what makes both kinds of conversation productive. I am carrying the Nine Skills into the year-long faculty cohort and into the AI programs I design, where the material changes and the work of thinking together does not.