One way of thinking about the job of a philosophy instructor is that it’s about teaching students to disagree well. Yet when it comes to some moral, social, and political issues, students may seem reluctant to voice their own views in the classroom, let alone argue about them there.
To help encourage and facilitate constructive disagreement among their students, a pair of philosophers have developed a new teaching tool: an AI-based chat platform that has already shown some promising results, and that they are making available to other teachers for free.
In the following guest post, Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella (both at Carnegie Mellon) introduce us to this technology, which they’ve named Sway.
[Laura Owens, Untitled (detail), 2016]
Sway: an AI-Based Teaching Tool to Promote Constructive Disagreement
by Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella
Over half of American college students are afraid to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Other important issues like abortion, gun control, and affirmative action aren’t that far behind. Clearly, campuses need more respectful, scaffolded environments where students can practice constructive disagreement, honing skills like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, and critical thinking.
We created a new kind of chat platform—called Sway—to address this need. Sway connects pairs of students who disagree over topics chosen by their instructor and then uses AI to facilitate more open, reasonable conversations between them.
Sway scaffolds discussions in two main ways:
- Discussion guidance. An AI Guide participates in every chat. We’ve designed Guide to de-escalate tense moments, ensure students aren’t talking past each other, and make sure everyone’s voice gets heard. More importantly, Guide aims to improve student reasoning: it poses challenging questions, prompts students to clarify vague or incomplete arguments, unearths implicit assumptions, detects tensions and inconsistencies, and provides relevant factual information.
- Charitable rephrasing. When a student composes a message that contains unconstructive language, the platform suggests a better way for the student to make their point. This feature aims to preserve the core meaning of the original message while providing immediate feedback to help students develop a habit of clear and respectful communication. Students are free to dismiss suggested rephrasings, but doing so will invoke Guide; this ensures the conversation doesn’t get derailed.
You can see Sway in action in this demo video, in de-identified transcripts from actual student discussions, and (for interested philosophers) this snippet of a metaphysical Sway chat with Alan Hájek. You can also check out student feedback on our website.
Using Sway with students
Instructors can use Sway with their students in several ways. One of the coolest we’ve seen is as preparation for in-person discussion sections. For example, one instructor ran weekly 30-minute “discussion assignments” on Sway that started at the beginning of the week and finished a day before students met for in-person sections. Students came better prepared and their discussions were, we’re told, more thoughtful. It can also be offered as an optional course component—with no deadlines or time limits—for students who might want to continue discussing course topics with each other outside of class.
We’ve built Sway to be easy for instructors to use: the platform automates the administrative work involved in offering a discussion-based course component. This 3-minute explainer video walks through setting up a discussion assignment for students. Instructors can find more info on our website, including language that can be adapted for syllabi and course announcements.
After an instructor inputs potential discussion topics, Sway elicits student opinions and then tries to find every student a chat partner who disagrees with them. When this isn’t possible, it pairs students in other ways. For example, Guide might lead an exploratory discussion between two students who each have “no idea” about a topic. Or, if students who share the same opinion have to be matched, one is randomly selected to play devil’s advocate—and, crucially, is supported in this role by Guide. That said, we’ve found that the vast majority of students do get paired with a chat partner they disagree with. (When a class has an odd number of students, the platform creates one group of three.)
Sway notifies students of new messages, reminds them about upcoming deadlines, administers personalized post-chat quizzes to evaluate how well they understand each other’s arguments, and collects post-discussion feedback (see the figure below for results). To encourage students to talk freely, chats are private and encrypted and their instructors can’t read them. However, the platform collects post-chat student feedback and analyzes anonymized transcripts to provide instructors with a high-level summary of each discussion as well as any common themes that emerged across the class. These findings are then summarized in Instructor Reports.
Background
Grounded in the approach Simon developed for his award-winning CMU course, Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society, Sway builds on our research on improving reasoning and communication. The success of Dangerous Ideas demonstrated that students thrive when they’re given a scaffolded environment that fosters charitable and rigorous discussions of controversial topics. Unfortunately, as with many approaches to promoting better student discussions, Dangerous Ideas required substantial resources: with the help of a 15-person teaching staff that included specially trained TAs, Simon could teach at most a few hundred students per semester. With Sway, we aim to make it easy for instructors everywhere to give students the same kind of challenging and rewarding discussions regardless of what resources are available.
We’re also excited to offer Sway for broader campus activities—including first-year orientation, residential community dialogues, student government, and to enhance events that promote debate and civil discourse. In this last case, events can be followed by Sway chats that let students put ideas into practice. Rather than discouraging controversial student speech, we hope Sway will make it easier for campus leaders to turn disagreements between students into opportunities for learning and community building.
Many educators, ourselves included, worry about AI undermining learning. But we don’t think this is a risk with Sway. To the contrary, we’ve designed Sway to be demanding, to challenge students to engage intelligently with important disagreements—not to outsource their thinking to ChatGPT. This is also why copy-paste is disabled in Sway: students can only type or dictate their messages. We’ve found this all but eliminates AI-based cheating. And to be clear, students can’t complete discussion assignments by chatting only with Guide; they have to talk to each other.
We address other common questions in our FAQ, and we recently discussed Sway’s backstory on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.
Early results
Sway’s development has been guided by our empirical studies involving cross-partisan discussions of divisive topics, including January 6 and the 2020 election, Israel’s war against Hamas, American support for Ukraine, and U.S. abortion policy. These studies provided strong initial evidence that AI-scaffolded discussion can be a powerful tool to help people connect more constructively across moral and political divides.
Since then, we’ve also seen an extremely positive response from the first students who have used Sway. For example, around 250 UCLA students enrolled in a sociology of gender class discussed a range of contentious topics, including: the appropriate public response to educational disadvantages faced by boys and men, whether it’s Islamophobic to oppose mandatory hijab laws, and whether Kamala Harris’s defeat is best explained by misogyny. Despite the potentially divisive subject matter, the vast majority of students rated their chat as “Awesome” or “Good,” and virtually all agreed that their partner was respectful (see figure below).
These self-report data are consistent with student behavior: of the tens of thousands of messages students have sent, only 0.3% have been flagged by the platform as potentially unconstructive. Reproducing Simon’s classroom findings, nearly all students felt their partner was respectful and genuinely tried to understand their perspective. This is noteworthy because “gender” is consistently high on lists of difficult-to-discuss topics according to national student surveys.
Students can also volunteer as research participants, allowing us to use their de-identified chat and survey data to improve Sway and rigorously study how to promote great discussions—especially across moral and political divides. We expect this data to be valuable far beyond our own work (e.g., in social psychology, human-computer interaction, conflict studies, and so on), and we invite interested researchers to get in touch with us.
Conclusion
We’re collaborating with faculty, campus leaders, practitioner organizations, and funders to normalize reasoned conversations between students with opposing perspectives. Over 100 faculty members collectively teaching around 9,000 students have registered to use Sway thus far. We expect—and hope to demonstrate empirically—that, like many students who took Simon’s Dangerous Ideas course, students who use Sway regularly will transfer its lessons. They may come to genuinely believe and even act on J.S. Mill’s famous observation: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
For many students, this would be a significant transformation.
If you’re a college instructor or campus leader who would like to use Sway with your students, you can sign up for free here.
Below is a video demonstrating Sway in use.