The public dialogue consortium's school-wide dialogue process: A communication approach to develop citizenship skills and enhance school climate

A school-wide dialogue process was developed in the context of a community-wide project and designed to develop citizenship skills and enhance school climate. As we worked on the project, we were self-reflexively aware of working from a particular theory (the coordinated management of meaning, or CMM) and developing that theory in the process. Our reflections led to 3 criteria for evaluating our work and practical theory in general: engaging in continuing conversations with participants, practitioners, and theorists; celebrating and working with the interests of the participants; and developing principles and models that increase the abilities of all involved in the project to describe what is happening perspicaciously and to act into unfinished situations prudently These criteria are consonant with a particular theoretical temperament: taking a participant's perspective on social worlds understood as pluralistic in which the theorist's goal is the continued exercise of curiosity. The 5-phase, 10-step SHEDD model was developed in successive iterations of the dialogue process and is presented as an example of the work of practical theorists.