Conflict?

There is no school anywhere in which students don’t have conflicts. Any place where children are gathered the same themes emerge: sharing is hard, agreeing on what game you are playing is sometimes difficult and figuring out who goes first in a game is next to impossible. But with conflict there is also opportunity.

Our students learn how to deal with conflict in a way that allows both parties the opportunity to discuss an issue and come out with a solution. This is not a skill learned overnight but one that we continue to teach, reinforce, and practice all year.

This week we had an assembly that taught our students the skills needed to handle any problem. Our teachers pretended to be students having conflicts and then showed the students ways to solve them. We often call this, “giving an I-message,” or finding a “win-win solution.”

Sometimes parents assume that because we encourage our students to first talk out problems at recess that this means a duty or teacher never intervenes. This is absolutely not the case. We teach kids that there is a difference between small problems (like who goes first in a game) and big problems that need a big person (aka a teacher or duty person) to solve it.

In the younger grades teachers or duty people are involved with every problem. Teachers either act as facilitators, guiding the students’ discussion about small problems in a calm and collected way, or they solve the conflict because it is more than the typical recess dispute and needs a larger intervention.

Once students reach 3rd grade an amazing transformation starts to unfold. Anyone who has observed our 3rd/4th grade recess can testify that yes, students still experience conflict but the difference is that they no longer need a teacher to solve the “small” problems. You see students having a discussion, voicing their opinions, and agreeing on a solution. It may take a while to teach students the skills needed to address conflicts, but in the end what was once a conflict is now an opportunity to learn and grow.