The author challenges her students and herself to engage with tough issues like class, race, gender, disability, and homophobia. In this article, she discusses how she helps them learn from, and even embrace, the conflict that inevitably arises. Constructive management of classroom conflict begins with creating a cooperative learning environment that allows for the building of trusting relationships and the differentiation between disagreeing with an idea and disliking the individual who holds that idea. Certainly establishing ground rules and revisiting these ground rules periodically during the term makes for a more authentic sense of community. Students often confuse a cooperative learning community environment with one that is conflict-free. Dispelling this myth at the outset and creating opportunities for simulated conflict via role playing or case studies can serve as important building blocks to students' understanding of conflict as critical and useful to their learning. Creating opportunities for managed debate where students work in groups and are required to contest the point of view of other groups is a useful means of scaffolding the merit of alternate points of view. In the learning community format, it is also particularly useful for instructors to consider how exercises in each of their classes impact each other and how the outcome of particular disagreements in one course might provide an impetus or restrain discussion in other classes. Another means of drawing on the strength of conflict in the classroom in relation to students' learning is to create multiple opportunities and formats for reflection on this dissonance. This can be in the form of journals, one-minute papers, or, as in the case of the learning community, creative projects like a photo montage, a digital story, or a performance. A curriculum that reflects students' lived experiences or encourages them to intentionally find application between their lives and material studied in class also provides a richer context for students to build meaning from the conflict they may be experiencing. Finally, students are at different levels of emotional maturity and identity development. These variations, coupled with a blend of personalities, can sometimes lead to conflict that is unproductive and negatively impacts the class as a whole. Talk with students about this reality when they are developing ground rules. Share concrete and specific examples of how verbal and nonverbal behavior can impact creative conflict.