Physical aggression and intimidation are often
the first responses to such situations. In his study of violence
among middle and high school students, Lockwood (1997) reports three
key findings, concluding that reducing the occurrence of the first
move toward violence appears to be the most promising approach to
preventing it:
---In the largest portion of violent incidents,
the opening move (e.g., unprovoked contact, interference with
another youth’s possession) was a relatively minor affront, but the
conflict escalated from there. Few initiating actions were predatory
in nature.
---Most incidents began in the school or home
with the largest number occurring between youth who knew one
another.
---The most common goal of violent acts was
retribution, and the justifications offered by the youth involved
indicated that their impulses stemmed not from an absence of values
but from a value system in which violence is acceptable.
Other research reinforces the significance of
Lockwood’s findings. In a study conducted by the Search Institute,
41 percent of youth surveyed reported that when provoked, they could
not control anger and would fight (Search Institute, 1997).
The excuses for violence offered by youth support
the contention that youth who observe adults accepting violence as a
solution to problems are apt to emulate that violence. If youth lack
a supportive environment that is disdainful of violence, schools
must develop effective ways to compensate.
Currently, schools rely almost exclusively on
arbitration to resolve disputes between youth. In the arbitration
process, an adult who is not directly involved in the dispute
determines a solution, and the disputing youth are expected to
comply. Students often perceive this process as coercive—someone is
telling them what to do—even if they recognize that the directive
may be in their best interests. Conflict resolution offers an
alternative approach that brings the parties of the dispute
together, provides them with the skills to resolve the dispute, and
expects them to do so. In the conflict resolution process, those
with ownership of the problem participate directly in crafting a
solution.
The report Conflict Resolution Education: A
Guide to Implementing Programs in Schools, Youth-Serving
Organizations, and Community and Juvenile Justice Settings,
which was published by OJJDP and the U.S. Department of Education’s
Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program, identifies four basic approaches
to conflict resolution education: process curriculum, mediation
program, peaceable classroom, and peaceable school (Crawford and Bodine, 1996). Although the lines dividing these approaches can be
difficult to draw in practice, the following descriptions outline
their focus:
·
The process curriculum approach is
used to teach the components of conflict resolution education.
Students receive instruction in a separate course, distinct
curriculum, or daily/weekly lesson plan.
·
The mediation program approach
involves training selected individuals (adults and/or students) to
act as neutral third parties who help disputing youth reach
resolutions.
·
The peaceable classroom approach is
a whole-classroom methodology that incorporates conflict resolution
education into the core subjects of the curriculum and into
classroom management strategies. Peaceable classrooms are the
building blocks of the peaceable school.
·
The peaceable school approach is a
comprehensive whole-school methodology that builds on the peaceable
classroom approach by using conflict resolution as a system of
operation for managing the entire school. In this approach, adults
and youth involved with the school learn and use conflict resolution
principles and processes (case
example).
The authors contend that only the peaceable
school approach, which incorporates the other three approaches, has
the potential to effect long-term change. Whichever approach is
used, however, the authors believe that schools’ ultimate mission is
to prepare their students to participate fully and responsibly in
society.
Components of a
Conflict Resolution Education Program
An authentic conflict resolution education
program—which should be taught to all students, not just those with
disruptive behaviors—incorporates a set of problem-solving
principles, a structured process of problem-solving strategies, and
a set of foundational abilities that youth need to resolve conflicts
effectively (Filner and Zimmer, 1996).
PROBLEM-SOLVING PRINCIPLES
The problem-solving principles—or “principled
negotiation elements” described in Getting To Yes (Fisher, Ury, and
Patton, 1991)—provide the foundation for teaching students and
adults conflict resolution strategies. These principles are
requisite for any conflict resolution program.
Separate the people from the problem
Every conflict involves both a substantive problem and relationship
issues. Unfortunately, the relationship between parties tends to
become involved in the substance of the problem. Relationship issues
fall into three categories:
·
Perceptions.Every
conflict involves differing points of view and, thus, differing
notions
of what is true, what is false, and to what degree
facts are important.
·
Emotions.
Students may be more willing to fight than to work together
cooperatively. In conflict resolution, sharing feelings and emotions
is as important as sharing perceptions.
·
Communication.
Given the diversity of backgrounds and values among individuals,
poor communication is not surprising. Individuals often fail to
communicate what they intended, and what they communicate is
frequently misunderstood or misinterpreted by others.
Focus on interests, not positions
The focus of conflict resolution should be not on what people decide
they want (their positions) but on what led to that decision (their
interests). Interests, not positions, define the problem. In nearly
every conflict, multiple interests must be taken into account. Only
by talking about and acknowledging interests explicitly can people
uncover mutual or compatible interests and resolve conflicting
interests. Every interest usually has several possible satisfactory
solutions, and opposing positions may actually reflect more shared
and compatible interests than conflicts. Thus, focusing on interests
instead of positions makes it possible to develop solutions.
Invent options for mutual gain
Before attempting to reach agreement, disputants should brainstorm
to consider a wide range of options that advance shared interests
and reconcile differing interests. In this process, disputing youth
should strive to avoid four major obstacles: “(1) premature
judgment, (2) searching for the single answer, (3) the assumptions
of a fixed pie, and (4) thinking that ‘solving their problem is
their problem’ ” (Fisher, Ury, and Patton, 1991:57).
Use objective criteria
The agreement should reflect a fair standard instead of the
arbitrary will of either side; that is, it should be based on
objective criteria. Disputing youth should frame each issue as a
mutual search for objective criteria. They should reason and be open
to reason as to which criteria are most suitable and how they should
be applied, recalling which criterion they have used in past
disputes and determining which criterion is more widely applied. In
their negotiations, they should yield only to principle, not
pressure (e.g., bribes, threats, manipulative appeals to trust, or
simple refusal to budge).
|
Behavior Management
Conflict resolution education is an integral
component of an effective behavior management system for a school or
classroom. Much of what is perceived in schools as misbehavior is
actually unresolved conflict. Because the essence of conflict
resolution is planning alternate future behaviors, a noncoercive
behavior management plan would be incomplete without an educational
component that enables youth to resolve conflicts constructively.
Teachers, administrators, and other staff charged
with managing student behavior in schools are all too aware of
interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Schools do manage behavior
arising from conflict, but their methods often do not resolve the
conflict that created the behavior in the first place. Focusing
behavior management efforts on occurrences of physical violence is
merely treating a symptom. Teaching students alternatives to
violence offers hope that those alternatives will become the
students’ behaviors of choice. Such education demands more than
telling youth to “just say no” to violence.
Many of the violence prevention efforts in
schools, particularly measures enacted in response to the spate of
tragic school shootings, are compliance driven, focusing on external
rather than internal methods of behavior control. A compliant
individual chooses to behave in a certain manner in response to
external forces, conditions, or influences; a responsible individual
chooses to behave according to reasonable and acceptable standards
in response to internal needs and concern for self and others.
Responsible behavior—the hallmark of an
emotionally intelligent individual—depends above all else on the
absence of coercion. Coercive management deprives the individual of
innate motivation, self-esteem, and dignity, while cultivating fear
and defensiveness. Teachers need to abandon as counterproductive the
inclination to exercise forceful authority over students, without
abandoning the responsibility to maintain order. Because they remain
ultimately responsible for promoting acceptable and successful
behaviors in students, teachers need to transfer to students
responsibility for choosing behaviors that fit within established
acceptable standards.
Unfortunately, many youth have personal
experiences and models that limit their repertoire for responding to
conflict to the often dysfunctional approaches of “fight or flight.”
For these youth, meeting their own basic needs often involves
choosing behaviors that victimize others. Conflict resolution
education provides these youth with behavioral alternatives to
“fight or flight,” teaching them how to select from their past
experiences those responses that are most appropriate in resolving
new conflicts.
Conflict resolution education strategies provide
students with the “life skills” they need to assimilate perceptions
of an unknown circumstance into a framework of known responses and
to generate socially acceptable behaviors.
|
Structured Process
Conflict resolution is based on a structured
problem-solving process that uses the following steps: (1) set the
stage, (2) gather perspectives, (3) identify interests, (4) create
options, (5) evaluate options, and (6) generate agreement. Each of
the following strategies is amenable to this process:
·
Negotiation
occurs when two disputing parties work together, unassisted, to
resolve their dispute.
·
Mediation
occurs when two disputing parties work together, assisted by a
neutral third party called the mediator, to resolve their dispute.
·
Consensus decisionmaking
is a group problem-solving strategy in which all parties affected by
the conflict collaborate to craft a plan of action, with or without
the assistance of a neutral party.
Foundational Abilities
In conflict resolution, particular attitudes,
understandings, and skills are important. For problem solving in
conflict situations to be effective, these attitudes,
understandings, and skills ultimately must be translated into
behaviors, which together form foundational abilities. Although
considerable overlap exists, foundational abilities involve the
clusters of behavior described below. Because most of these
foundational abilities are also central to learning in general, they
can be developed in schools through various applications and need
not be limited to the context of conflict.
Orientation
Abilities involving orientation encompass values, beliefs,
attitudes, and propensities that can be developed through teaching
activities that promote cooperation and reduce prejudicial behavior.
They include the following:
·
Nonviolence.
·
Compassion and empathy.
·
Fairness.
·
Trust.
·
Justice.
·
Tolerance.
·
Self-respect and respect for
others.
·
Celebration of diversity.
·
Appreciation for controversy, which
helps youth think, learn, and grow.
Perception
Abilities involving perception enable youth to develop
self-awareness, assess the limitations of their own perceptions, and
work to understand each other’s points of view. They include the
following:
·
Empathizing to see the situation as
the other person sees it.
·
Self-evaluating to recognize
personal fears and assumptions.
·
Suspending judgment and blame to
facilitate a free exchange of views.
·
Reframing solutions to help the
other person “save face,” preserving self-respect and self-image.
Emotion
Abilities involving emotion help youth manage anger, frustration,
fear, and other strong feelings. Youth learn to acknowledge that
emotions are present in conflict, understand that emotions sometimes
are not expressed, and understand that emotional responses by one
party may trigger problematic responses from another. These
abilities, which enable youth to gain self-confidence and
self-control, include the following:
·
Learning the words necessary to
identify emotions verbally and developing the courage to make
emotions explicit.
·
Expressing emotions in
nonaggressive, noninflammatory ways.
·
Controlling reactions to the
emotional outbursts of others.
Communication
Abilities involving communication allow youth to listen, speak, and
exchange facts and feelings effectively:
·
Listening to understand.
Having active listening skills allows a youth to attend to another
person and that person’s message, summarize the message, and ask
open-ended, nonleading questions to solicit additional information
that might clarify the conflict.
·
Speaking to be understood.
Rather than speaking to debate or impress, speaking to be understood
involves describing the problem in terms of its personal impact,
speaking with clarity and concision to convey purpose, and speaking
in a style that makes it as easy as possible for the other party to
understand what is being said.
·
Reframing emotionally charged
statements in neutral, less emotional terms.
The skill of reframing, coupled with acknowledging strong emotions,
is highly useful in conflict resolution.
Creative thinking
Abilities involving creative thinking enable youth to be innovative
in defining problems and making decisions:
·
Contemplating the problem from
various perspectives. Disputing youth
can reveal their differing interests by questioning each other to
identify what they want and to understand why they want what they
want.
·
Approaching the problem-solving
task as a mutual pursuit of possibilities.
The skill of problem definition involves describing the problem, and
thus the problem-solving task, as a pursuit of options to satisfy
the interests of each party.
·
Brainstorming to create,
elaborate on, and enhance a variety of options.
Flexibility in responding to situations and in accepting various
choices and potential solutions is an essential skill in
decisionmaking. Brainstorming separates the process of generating
ideas from the act of judging them.
Critical thinking
Abilities involving critical thinking enable youth to analyze,
hypothesize, predict, strategize, compare and contrast, and evaluate
options. In the conflict resolution process, these abilities help
youth to recognize and make explicit existing criteria, establish
objective criteria, apply criteria as the basis for choosing
options, and plan future behaviors.
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Peaceable Schools Tennessee: A Case Example
by Katy Woodworth and Richard J. Bodine
The Peaceable Schools Tennessee (PST) initiative,
which has been under way since 1996, is designed to put into
practice conflict resolution skills in schools, grades K-12,
throughout Tennessee. (1)
Project developers conducted a needs assessment
among selected teachers, counselors, and administrators. Results
indicated that Tennessee schools needed and wanted to address
conflict in a positive way and wanted guidance in doing so. Based on
assessment feedback, available research, and Tennessee Department of
Education expectations, the following goals were set forth:
·
Decrease the number of disciplinary
office referrals.
·
Enhance students’ critical thinking
skills.
·
Provide a safe school environment
that is not authoritarian.
·
Build community/school
partnerships.
The Training Institute
The PST initiative is offered through a 3-day
institute; most of the institute’s trainers are teachers and school
administrators. Teams of school personnel, including teachers, counselors, administrators, and school resource officers, attend to
learn how to teach group problem solving, mediation, and negotiation
skills. Attendees practice conflict resolution skills through
role-playing, learn effective classroom strategies, create action
plans to implement in their schools, (2)
and are provided with a forum for questions and answers. Creating
the Peaceable School: A Comprehensive Program for Teaching Conflict
Resolution (Bodine, Crawford, and Schrumpf, 1994), which
provides a framework for noncoercive discipline and a cooperative
school context, is the primary text for the institute.
After the teams attend the institute,
participating schools receive onsite technical assistance and are
able to attend advanced training institutes. The National Center for
Conflict Resolution Education (NCCRE) provides the advanced
training.
Implementation
PST developers began by constructing a basic
framework for the initiative. They appointed an initiative director
and identified the Tennessee Legal Community Foundation (TLCF) as
the organization that was to provide the training and coordination
services. TLCF conducted a pilot training institute in May 1997, in
which 15 middle school teams of administrators, teachers, and
counselors participated.
In the summer of 1997, PST conducted nine 3-day
institutes. Teams from 92 schools participated and developed action
plans for use in the fall (see table below). PST staff provided
followup technical assistance to all 92 teams. In addition, 45
school teams requested onsite technical assistance in conducting
overview workshops for local staff, training for student peer
mediators, and focus group sessions for students, staff, and parents
to expand the implementation of the peaceable school concepts.
After training and technical assistance were
provided to the first round of schools, the initiative was refined
and PST’s infrastructure was developed. TLCF evaluated data sent in
by participating schools to determine whether program objectives, as
outlined by the teams in their action plans, were being met. The
information provided also was used to modify the institute’s
training agenda. Overall, data showed that the initial training
design was workable.
During the 1997-98 school year, PST trainers
conducted two 3-day institutes for whole school districts. Further,
because PST planned to expand the number of summer institutes it
offered, NCCRE assisted in training additional trainers in June
1998. PST also sent three trainers to NCCRE headquarters to expand
their knowledge of peer mediation programs, group problem solving,
and behavior management principles and to help them use this
knowledge to train other PST trainers.
Schools Participating in PST Institutes
|
Year of Training |
Number of schools |
|
July 1997 to June 1998 |
92 |
|
July 1998 to June 1999 |
125 |
|
July 1999 to June 2000 |
100 |
|
June 2000 to present |
150 |
|
Total |
467 |
Since the 1998-99 school year, PST has offered
advanced peaceable school training to more than 70 school teams.
This advanced training has been provided in partnership with NCCRE.
Initial
Assessments
Since June 1997, nearly 2,000 classroom teachers, staff members, and
administrators, representing 75 percent of the State’s school
districts, have attended PST’s 3-day institutes. Almost all of the
school teams from the 1999 summer institute conducted an inservice
presentation to introduce their colleagues to the concepts they had
learned. Nearly 60 percent of the schools have requested and
received technical assistance.
From 1997 to 2000, Tennessee experienced a
14-percent decrease in suspension rates overall. School districts
that sent representatives from 50 percent or more of their schools
to a PST institute experienced on average a 39-percent decrease in
suspension rates in that same time period. Of the school districts
that received technical assistance and showed a decrease in
suspension rates, more than half experienced at least a 20-percent
decrease in their suspension rates (the highest drop was 83
percent). Information from principals indicates that disciplinary
referrals are down in PST classrooms compared with other classrooms
in the same school.
The PST initiative is beginning to show positive
effects on students. Teachers and counselors who have responded to
recent PST surveys have indicated that students who learn peaceable
skills exhibit improved cooperation and communication. They also
have exhibited improved problem-solving ability and better overall
academic performance as a result of enhanced critical thinking
skills. These gains in social competence and other resilience skills
will serve these students for a lifetime.
|
The Peaceable School
Schools need to pay attention—not reactively, but proactively—to
developing youth’s social and emotional competencies, that is, their
ability to understand, manage, and express the social and emotional
aspects of their lives in ways that enable them to learn, form
relationships, solve everyday problems, and adapt to the complex
demands of growing up.
Creating a future generation of responsible and
compassionate citizens requires a consistent, comprehensive,
sustained effort. That goal will not be realized if students never
or only occasionally participate in conflict resolution education
during their school experience. Although the peaceable classroom is
the vehicle for promoting social-emotional intelligence, all
classrooms must be united in the effort. The peaceable school is a
collective of peaceable classrooms united by a management system
that promotes cooperation and eliminates coercion.
In peaceable schools, students and teachers
approach conflicts, including those conflicts labeled misbehavior,
as an opportunity for growth. In the process of creating the
peaceable school, both educators and students gain life skills that
benefit them not just in the school, but also at home and in the
community. Peaceable schools support and expect intellectual
development—emotional and cognitive (Bodine and Crawford, 1999).
Conclusion
School-based violence prevention programs must begin in early
education to allow young students to internalize a pattern of
peacemaking behaviors prior to becoming adolescents. The best
programs seek to do more than reach the individual child. They
attempt to improve the entire school environment—to create a safe
community whose members embrace nonviolence and multicultural
appreciation (DeJong, 1994).
Peace is often regarded as a goal rather than a
behavior. Thus peace becomes the end and not the means of preventing
violence. Safe, peaceable schools cannot be created without
improving what and how teachers teach, changing how school rules are
administered, and working toward a shared vision. Making schools
safe will not eliminate violence in society, but that should not
deter communities from carrying out the effort (Haberman and
Schreiber Dill, 1995).
Note
