Conflict resolution education in the schools

Conflict Resolution Education in the Schools: “Gett ing There” SANDRAV SANDY

Conflict resolution education is an important and productive component ofpublic education eforts. However, implementing and institutionalizing these programs is ofzen dzficzdt. By drawing on a better unrkrstanding of theory and research, this article suggests the best practices for conflict resolution education eforts.

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onflict resolution education (CRE) is something that most people strongly agree is needed by children everywhere. There is a great deal of supporting evidence to indicate that it holds the promise of changing children’s lives both academically and socially. Yet CRE is too often offered to children in a way that fails to make lifelong, or even discernible shortterm, changes in their attitudes and behavior. Why is this?

According to Lucy McCormick Calkins (2001), director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing project Getting There, becoming well educated means that a child learns to weave written texts into the context (relationships, projects, and motivational orientation) of his or her own life. Similarly, many eminent educators (Cookson and Schneider, 1995; Darling-Hammond, 1997; DeVries and Zan, 1994; Nodding, 1992; Stevenson, 1998) have stressed creating meaning and context as a sine qua non for learning and retaining facts. Defined from these perspectives, effective teaching connects classroom material to the relevant personal experiences and interests of the individual child. Good conflict resolution educators follow these guidelines in creating activities to develop skills in children.

Why have we not had better success in our schools, given all that we know about the correct pedagogy?

My sometimes exhilarating and frequently frustrating experience as a conflict resolution educator, practitioner, and researcher has caused me to CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTWLY, vol. 19, no. 2, Winter 2001 0 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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examine carefully what we are doing in these roles. I have spent time studying the issue in sessions with colleagues from around the country. In my own work, my colleagues and I gathered “scientific” evaluation data-but we also spent considerable time just observing what was going on and questioning the school personnel and students with whom we worked. Putting the personal and the professional information together, I have formulated a general hypothesis as to why we sometimes fail to reach our higher objective of implementing and sustaining the best-practice model of conflict management in schools.

In this article, I first report on the conclusions reached through research and the daily experience of educators and practitioners on the best practices in social emotion learning and conflict resolution programs. Second, I discuss the major obstacles to implementing the best-practice programs in schools. Third, I summarize some major points made by prominent educators who are interested in educating the whole child. (I do not discuss educators who concentrate only on a “back to the basics” ethos, for example, Hirsch, 1996). Finally, I reframe the problem in terms of the compatibility that actually exists between what most people see as two separate goals: social emotional learning and conflict resolution versus the core curriculum content as mandated by state standards.

This first section indicates how teaching social emotional learning and conflict resolution skills, as implemented in best-practice methods, actually promotes higher academic achievement in most children and gives teachers the tools and time to help students reach their best performance in terms of state and national goals of learning.

The Best-Practice Model of Conflict Resolution Education Although conflict resolution training intervention is possible at five levels, it should be noted that the most success is usually obtained when all five levels are included simultaneously (Coleman and Deutsch, 2000; Raider, 1995).

Student Disciplinary Sysrem

Discipline system intervention is typically a peer mediation program, one of the most widely used conflict resolution interventions in schools. These programs are popular because of their low cost and reported effectiveness.

Although the current research is scant and mixed (Jones and others, 1997), some leading theorists believe that those who usually benefit from these programs are the peer mediators themselves (Johnson and Johnson, 1996;

Conflict Resolution Education in the Schools 239 Coleman and Deutsch, 2000). Peer mediators appear to enjoy more selfconfidence, greater self-esteem, higher assertiveness, and a more positive attitude toward school. Students who do not receive mediation training may remain relatively unaffected by the program.

Curriculum Level

Frequently, curriculum-level instruction in conflict resolution skills has meant a stand-alone course separated from the mainstream areas of reading, writing, arithmetic, and other such subjects. What message do students receive from this approach? Primarily, they learn that conflict resolution is a separate area of concern, bearing no relation to the basics in education. The reality is that low academic performance and dropping out of school are frequently linked to lack of social emotional competence and the problemsolving skills taught in conflict resolution programs. O n the other hand, social competence and appropriate problem-solving behavior are strong and consistent predictors of academic outcomes, and the social climate of the classroom appears to be a powerful motivator of academic achievement.

Likewise, social and emotional variables predict success in the adult workplace as well as or better than intellectual ability, sensory deficits, or neurological factors (Deutsch, 1993; Gardner, 1993; Goleman, 1998; Gottman, 1997; Horn and Packard, 1985; Jensen, 1998; Shore, 1997).

Core social emotional and conflict resolution skills that children need to develop are self-identity, self-efficacy, self-control, appreciation of diversity and diverse values, empathy, perspective taking, cooperation, communication, creativity, problem solving, and evaluation (Jensen, 1998). Emotional knowledge and empathy skills are extremely important, too. Studies conducted by neuroscientists strongly suggest that emotions provide information in much the same way logic does. Whenever emotions are involved in a learning experience, there is greater recall and accuracy about the information learned (McGaugh, 1995).

Pedagogy

Social emotional learning and conflict resolution skills, as I strongly suggest later in this article, should be taught in regular subject areas. Two effective pedagogical methods for doing this are cooperative learning (Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec, 1993) and academic controversy (Johnson and Johnson, 1996). Using a cooperative-learning approach, teachers help students develop such social skills as listening, affirming, and perspective raking in addition to acquiring knowledge and understanding of the academic

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subject. In academic controversy, teams of students research and present opposing points of view on a controversial topic. Each team listens to the other side’s perspective before reversing roles. After arguing the opposing side’s point of view, both teams strive to reach a collaborative synthesis.

School Culture

A whole systems approach involves teachers, staff, principals, bus drivers, and so on. Teaching constructive conflict resolution and cooperation cannot be compartmentalized into an isolated unit. Like every skill, including cognitive ones, conflict resolution must be practiced over and over and used in every imaginable context (Joyce and Showers, 1983).Two maxims must be remembered: we do not retain learning that goes unused, and students do not internalize and perform behavior unless their peers and role models do it as well. Therefore, teachers-as well as individuals in all other school contexts-must live up to the standards of conduct they teach.

If the teachers and others in the school environment do not practice what they preach, students will not put their learning into practice. Adults need to share the attitudes they are promoting and model the desired behavior they are teaching. Teachers require support in their efforts-from the district administrators and their own principal, as well as from support staff in the school. Motivation to perform affects teachers as well as students. In the rush to have students perform well on standardized tests, an understanding of how social emotional and conflict resolution skills makes the job easier is critical. Schools and districts must be sufficiently motivated to embrace a change initiative, or it will fail.

Home and Community

If what is learned at school is dropped at the door to one’s home, the learning will certainly not be practiced in the neighborhood. The child’s policy becomes, “This is what happens in school, and this is what happens at home and in the community.” Parents, caretakers, local clergy, local police officers, members of the local community organizations, and others should be trained and involved in the overall planning process for children and youths.

Insights from Department of Education Research Symposium When we talk of successful and sustained conflict resolution implementation, we need to think of the school as being an “open system.” A school is part of a school system that is embedded in a larger communal system; all

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component parts must share the same mission if change in a school system is to take place.

In an exploration of what is truly effective in conflict resolution programs, eminent researchers, theorists, and practitioners participated in a two-day research symposium sponsored by CREnet and funded by the federal Department of Education (USDE) Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities (OSDFSC). These participants represented the American Society for Curriculum Development, UNICEF, the National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, the National Center for Conflict Resolution Education, the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution, the National Association for Community Mediation, and the Academy of Family Mediators. Prior to the symposium, educators and practitioners from all over the country identified areas of interest and concern to them. Five topic areas emerged for study and discussion: CRE impact on students, CRE impact on educators, CRE impact on climate, CRE impact on diverse populations, and issues of institutionalization in CRE. Issue papers, each written by a team comprising a researcher, educator, and practitioner, were presented at the symposium. Symposium participants received copies of these topic papers several weeks prior to the conference.

Participants had several opportunities to dialogue concerning their insights on the issue papers during the remainder of the symposium. What resulted was a list of ideas generated from both the papers and in-group discussion by conference participants. Following the symposium, the authors of the issue paper teams revised their chapters to include contributions of the symposium participants, and five well-known CRE practitioners responded to each paper. Thus there was a strong “practitioner” perspective in the publication that resulted from the symposium (Jones and Kmitta, 2000). Admittedly, from this wealth of collective data and analyses, I have selectively chosen what I think are the most salient conclusions in terms of the bestpractice model.

First, research shows positive effects for students, particularly when CRE incorporates the whole school community: children, parents, educators, all levels of school personnel, and the community as well. Many CRE efforts flounder and fail thanks to short-term “fix-it” implementation involving only students. There is a paucity of research following students receiving conflict resolution training for more than two or three years.

Second, there has been little formal research specifying the effects of CRE on educators. General conclusions about the subject come from larger CRE evaluations. The conclusions are usually drawn from the

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number of conflicts or discipline problems that teachers report in their classrooms. The assumption is that educators who learn to teach conflict resolution to children are also developing skills for resolving their own conflicts and modeling this behavior for their students, but there is little supporting evidence one way or the other.

Third, success as defined in most CRE programs is not based upon criteria relating to the needs of diverse populations. Members of disenfranchised groups have conflict needs and priorities unlike those of members of the privileged groups in society (Baker, French, Trujillo, and Wing, 2000).

CRE practitioners from Native American, African American, Latino, and Asian American communities frequently-and to a great extent anecdotally-report making major adaptations to Eurocentric models of mediation.

Fourth, there is moderate to strong research support that CRE has a positive impact on school and classroom climate. However, the studies were criticized as lacking agreement on the definition of school climate, and for needing more on-site observation of behavior as well as longitudinal data.

Fifth, factors inhibiting or enhancing institutionalization of CRE in school systems were analyzed (Jones, Batton, and Carruthers, 2000). In The National Curriculum Integration Project (Jones, Sanford, and Bodtker, 2000), the researchers developed integrated curriculum and infused it in extant curricula in seven middle schools across the nation. The assumption was that CRE must be seen as an integral part of the educational process if it is to be comprehensively institutionalized within the school system.

However, this integration requires commitment, resources, and planning to sufficiently motivate staff and administration to full implementation.

Thus, the best-practice model of conflict resolution is a demanding one that requires more time and commitment from everyone in the school system than most educators currently believe is feasible. Although many educators, administrators, and other school personnel are well aware of the need for total integration of social emotional learning and conflict resolution in the school system, they feel unable to implement the programs in the best-practice sense.

Obstacles to Full Integration of Best-Practice Programs in the School System Even though we study incessantly the condition of students and what’s to be done to achieve better performance, our interest in educators’ performance often appears to focus on how well their classes do on standardized

Conflict Resolution Education in the Schools 243 tests. Unfortunately, doing well usually translates into “doing a good j o b as educators. The well-intentioned national effort to provide a thorough education for all students through requiring them to achieve specific standards in core curriculum content areas has to a certain extent ensured its own failure.

Assessing students through standardized testing is fairly controversial.

Since standardized testing per se is not the point of this article, I will only present an example of the arguments from both sides. Briefly, those favoring the tests feel that schools must be held accountable for what they do, and some objective method of testing is needed to determine which students are ready for work. Those opposing the tests feel that they are an excellent measure of students’ ability to cram a variety of facts into shortterm memory-but they often fail in measuring more important abilities, such as reasoning. This is because these test questions do not allow students to conduct extended analysis or engage in problem solving, two abilities that are the core of higher-order competence (Resnick, 1987).

Students must create meaning, not merely drill for memorization.

Many teachers and principals are gifted educators who agree that students must learn at their own developmental pace and that many of the important things they need to learn are not measured on a standardized test. However, they have little choice in the matter since public officials have imposed standardized testing as the criterion for judging children, teachers, and the schools (Kohn, 2000). Because the zeitgeist in our society is that children must pass the tests, teachers frantically try to cover the material that the children must learn in order to do so.

The response I hear most often from teachers and administrators is that social emotional learning and conflict resolution problem solving are skills all children should have. Following this declaration there is too often a “however”: the problem is that teachers can only be spared for t w o hys’ training to learn these skills. As we all know, it takes a great deal of instruction, practice, and coaching for anyone to become skilled in conflict resolution and comfortable in using these skills. (It may take as long as three to five years for teachers to become really competent in developing these skills in children.) There is also little motivation for teachers to want to take on extra work; their time-consuming jobs depend more upon raising test scores.

The fallacy in public thinking is in separating social emotional learning and CRE from the so-called basic academic courses in the first place.

Developing social emotional learning and conflict resolution skills not only

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empowers students to get along better with others but also gives them the tools they need to reach their full potential in mastering the required subject materials at each grade level, that is, to become well educated. Children learn in the context of important relationships (Jensen, 1998; Shore, 1997).Naturally occurring conflict is an opportunity for children to develop social, emotional, intellectual, and moral skills by working through their disagreements. Prosocial and responsible classroom behavior has been related directly to classroom grades and test scores even when the effects ofacademic behavior, teacher preference among students, IQ, family structure, sex, ethnicity, and days absent from school were taken into account (Wentzel, 1993).

Thus, our goal of infusing social emotional learning and CRE throughout the various curricula of the school is thwarted by lack of commitment to institutionalize these skills. Conflict resolution practitioners are concerned about this impediment to real, meaningful change in the lives of students: the lack of commitment by school systems and teachers already too overburdened with mandated tasks to generate much sustained enthusiasm for also teaching conflict resolution. This is particularly so since positive results in children’s behavior may take more time than anticipated. Conflict serves different learning purposes according to the level of development. During the second and third years, it promotes children’s growing autonomy. Between the ages of three and seven, it helps coordinate play and the forming of relationships with other children. Successful conflict management in middle childhood helps children create and maintain peer friendships, thus promoting a sense of competence and industry.

Conflict management is critical as the adolescent searches for trustworthy friends (trust), learns to make decisions (autonomy), establishes goals in life (initiative), and takes responsibility for personal ambitions and work quality (industry).

What Do Educators Say About Best-Practice Models of Education?

Schools that meet our children’s needs must provide education customized to address individual interests, aptitudes, and ways of learning. To provide such “total quality education,” five systemic remedies must occur to change the school environment: (1) a customer orientation, (2) a method to monitor children’s progress, (3) a customized education for each child,

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(4) greater problem solving capacity throughout the institution, and ( 5 ) high motivation for teachers to teach and for students to learn (Borman and others, 1995).

Another eminent educator, Darling-Hammond (1997) suggests there are nine key features that support meaningful learning:

1. Active in-depth learning (real performance in the field of study)

2. Emphasis on authentic performance (tasks that are meaningful)

3. Attention to development (teaching to children’s developmental dispositions to learn)

4. Appreciation for diversity (respect for different abilities and capacity to learn in different ways)

5. Opportunities for collaborative learning (to enable children to use their individual development in creating insights for others in the group) 6. Collective perspective across the school (teachers share the same sense of mission and common norms of instruction and civility)

7. Structures for caring (students’ and teachers’ reciprocal trust and respect promote the commitment and motivation to undertake challenging tasks in learning)

8. Support for democratic learning (preparing people to participate in social decisions and to live a productive life with other citizens)

9. Connections to family and community (creating a common vision for children at home and in school) “To be effective, a specific educational reform must increase teacher commitment and teacher competence” (Newmann, 1993, p. 7). An individual’s motivation to perform is critical to program success. Children’s development of a mastery orientation-or a helplessness orientation-to tasks is strongly influenced by their implicit motivational theories (Dweck, 1996). Some children believe their intelligence is a fixed entity; others believe that it can be increased by effort. This belief plays a significant role in academic achievement. Children who hold an entity theory perform to win approval for their intelligence and may not persist when faced with failure. Those who adhere to an incremental theory are interested in improving their ability and are likely to persist despite setback or failure. Implicit

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motivational theories influence both social interaction and intellectual tasks; holding prosocial goals and having successful peer relationships are critical factors in promoting interest and achievement in school: In trying to force everyone through academic subjects, we are cheating those who might genuinely care for intellectual work and the world of ideas. Further, it is not only productivity that should concern us.

Teenage pregnancies nearly doubled between 1965 and 1985; the teen suicide rate has doubled in the same period of time; teenage drinking takes a horrible toll in drunk driving accidents and dulled sensibilities; children take guns to school, and homicide is the leading cause of death among minority teens; a disgraceful number of children live in poverty.

And still many school people and public officials insist that the job of the schools is to increase academic rigor. In direct opposition, I will argue that the first job of the schools is to care for our children. We should educate all our children not only for competence but also for caring. Our aim should be to encourage the growth of competent, caring, loving and lovable people. [Noddings, 1992, p. xiv]

We cannot ignore our children-their purposes, anxieties, and relationships-in the service of making them more competent in academics. The latter goal is accomplished by careful attention given to the social relationships and problems-in their minds, the more pressing task at hand is brought on by their developmental issues. If mastery of these issues is not encouraged, the tension of poorly handled development issues undermines attention to and mastery of academic tasks. The turbulent emotions of childhood and adolescence cannot be subsumed under the mandated task of purely cognitive instruction.

Getting There from Here

Getting there is achieving a life that is rich and rewarding for each individual child. It is convincing public policy makers that academic skills and social emotional development are not separable. If this is our goal as conflict resolution educators, practitioners, theorists, and researchers, then the primary question becomes, “How do we do that, given the restraints we have discussed here?�

A large part of the answer lies in researchers and practitioners developing a strong alliance with educators-developing conflict resolution programs that fit into the goals and demands placed upon teachers by

Conflict Resolution Education in the Schools 247 current education standards. There is no reason why the knowledge and skills required to develop constructive conflict management cannot be taught in regular subject courses. For example, these skills can also be acquired during the process of learning to read and write, or language arts. We try to understand the situation (conflict), imagine how the character feels (empathy), find or imagine the reasons for a character‘s behavior (perspective taking and uncovering the real needs of the individuals involved), and discuss the options that are open to the character to achieve plot denouement (conflict resolution and problem solving).

There is also the point of indicating how the skills taught by conflict resolution practitioners and educators actually address many of the state standards. In the curriculum manuals we developed for prekindergarten through grade 12, we created social emotional and conflict resolution skills activities that address various core curriculum content areas. Each content area is clearly marked for teachers. We have begun evaluating this approach in New Jersey. That state’s core curriculum content standards describe what “all students should know and be able to do upon completion of a thirteenyear public education” (New Jersey Department of Education, 200 1). Here are some examples of the standards we include: Standard 1: All students will develop career planning and workplace readiness skills. (Cross-content workplace readiness) Standard 3: All students will use critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving skills. (Cross-content workplace readiness) Standard 4: All students will demonstrate self-management skills.

(Cross-content workplace readiness) Standard 6.5: All students will acquire historical understanding of varying cultures throughout the history of New Jersey, the United States, and the world. (Social studies) Standard 4.1 1: All students will develop an understanding of patterns, relationships, and functions and will use them to represent and explain real-world phenomena. (Mathematics) Standard 5.2: All students will develop problem solving, decisionmaking, and inquiry skills, reflected by formulating usable questions and hypotheses, planning experiments, conducting systematic observations, interpreting and analyzing data, drawing conclusions, and communicating results. (Science) Standard 3.5: All students will view, understand, and use nontextual visual information. (Language and arts literacy)

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This approach will be tested upon middle school teachers in October 2001, and it appears to be generating interest and enthusiasm among teachers who are ordinarily wary of touchy-feely approaches to education.

Hopefully, as conflict resolution educators and practitioners, we can enlarge our pedagogical approach to elicit commitment from teachers who have not seen the interrelationship between the development of our “skills” and the mastery of core curriculum content. In doing this, we will also be shaping a positive relationship between teachers and students.

Social emotional learning, or what some educators call “caring’ (Nodding, 1992), is the foundation of all education. In early childhood, conscience (a sense of right and wrong, not mere internalization of authority) develops as much out of love and attachment as out of fear. Further, the primary fear is not of harm and punishment but of disappointing a loved parent, and (at the worst) of losing that parent’s love. Except in rare cases, relation precedes any engagement with subject matter (Nodding, 1992).

As conflict resolution educators, practitioners, theorists, and researchers, we must keep in the forefront ofour thinking the total school curriculum and structure, the goals and objectives into which we bring our philosophy.

Although we are embarrassed by any thought of being value-laden, some of us do shape our curricula and training sessions on the basis of deeply held values: that the school should be a place that nurtures the fullest development of each individual child and that this development can take place within the context of a peaceful, cooperative school filled with students who are adept at problem solving and building cooperative, positive interpersonal relationships. Informed by theory and research, we can use our philosophical and pedagogical tools to improve children’s interest and performance in academics as well as to give them a sense of belonging and feeling valued in a school that cares about them and their goals as individuals.

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Coleman, P T., and Deutsch, M. “Introducing Cooperation and Conflict Resolution in Schools: A Systems Approach.” In D. Christie, R. V Wagner, and D. Winter (eds.), Peace, ConfEict, and fioknce: Peace Psychohgy for the 2 I s t Century. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000.

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Raider, E. “Conflict Resolution Training in Schools: Translating Theory into Applied Skills.” In B. B. Bunker, J. Z. Rubin, and Associates, Conjict, Cooperation, andJustice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.

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SandraV. Sandy is director of research at the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) and the creator and executive director of the Peaceful Kids ECSEL (Educating Children in Social Emotional Learning) program for children from preschool to twelfth grade.