FACS Spotlight:

Can Our Teens Handle Conflict?

Tennessee teacher Debbie Dunn had just earned her Masters of Arts in Elementary Education with a specialization in Storytelling in 1989 when she was hired by that state's Anderson County Schools to teach Conflict Resolution and Public Speaking to middle school students.

"I was to teach an extracurricular class called Communication Skills," Debbie explains. For the next five years, she taught five, 30-student classes of sixth, seventh, or eighth graders every day, in nine-week sessions. "The school's population was 750 students and I taught more than 500 of them each year," she says. "As it turned out, about half of them were very street-wise."

The worldly nature of Debbie's students posed a challenge. Although the class material was appropriate for some of the less emotionally mature sixth graders, the older students were another story. "The majority of the seventh and eighth graders rolled their eyes at the material I presented, so I spent that first year continually honing and modifying it," she admits. Throughout the years that Debbie taught the class, the students continued to teach her what did and did not work.

Classroom Solutions spoke with Debbie about the challenges inherent in teaching conflict resolution in today's environment and the strategies that seem to produce the best results.

Q: Are young people's conflict resolution skills getting stronger or not? What can we be doing to advance this effort?

A: I think there is a real lack of conflict resolution skills and it has become more of a problem as the years go on. Certainly there are messages in the media wherein teens encourage their peers to exhibit more abrasive behavior, especially aimed at the adults in their lives. This leaves students ill-prepared to deal with parents, teachers, and employers in a tactful and diplomatic way. Students need to be taught that gaining good grades and recommendations for jobs, raises, and promotions requires adopting a controlled and positive approach, and "big picture" point of view.

Q: How did the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 affect the atmosphere in your classroom?

A: "I think that event galvanized everyone in the educational community. It was definitely a catalyst for me to try even harder to improve the effectiveness of our program. At that point, I had already learned from hard experience that my middle school students did not respond well to subtle stories about how two brothers finally resolved to split an orange so that one could make orange muffins and one could make orange juice," she says. "My students needed overt, in-your-face, hard-hitting stories and role-plays that would not only address the required topics but would potentially motivate them to modify their behavior."

A Lesson in Relevance

The post-Columbine environment gave Debbie the leverage she needed to take her program further. Wielding a tape recorder, she visited with more than 150 students at her school and offered them an opportunity to discuss their real problems in a safe environment. She guaranteed confidentiality in exchange for honesty. She also freed the students from fear of repercussion, with the caveat that she would be legally obligated to report issues relating to the use of weapons and other threats to safety. The students cooperated, and the results of the taped interviews enabled Debbie to revamp her entire program.

Q: How did you translate your students' interviews into lessons?

A: I began crafting stories based upon some of my students' anecdotes, then encouraged them to act out these stories in role-play form. Following each role playing activity, I would lead a class discussion using Bloom's Taxonomy framework as a guide. (See box below for an example of this method.) Together the class would discuss how the conflict could have been resolved in a positive manner. The focus was to discover an outcome in which both parties could feel as if they had won.

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Everyday Opportunities

Debbie acknowledges that teaching conflict resolution skills to teens is a unique challenge. "For younger students, teachers can use positive feedback to reinforce certain behaviors because these students are motivated by the high opinion of their teachers, but older students are much more concerned with turf-building and peer status," she says. Dealing with teens, she says, all about helping them save face. "Teachers have to be straightforward, respectful, and always leave these students an 'out' so that everyone can feel acknowledged." Debbie stresses that this strategy can be practiced in any classroom.

Q: What simple and straightforward messages can teachers send to reinforce conflict resolution skills in their students?

A: Every classroom situation offers the opportunity to use self-responsible "I" statements as opposed to more accusing "you" statements. Teachers can post "I Statement Sentence Starters" such as:

• I think...
• I feel...
• I wish...
• I expect...
• I understood you to say...
• I would appreciate it if...

Give students chances to use these "I" statements in role-play or actual situations, such as being late to class, misunderstanding a homework assignment, having a disagreement with a classmate, etc. Students need opportunities to practice this positive approach to their interpersonal communications in safe environments so they can react quickly to diffuse potentially lethal or troubling conflicts in other environments.

Q: What bottom-line tips do you have for teachers who seek to strengthen their students' conflict resolution skills on a daily basis?

A: Isaac Newton's third law of motion states, "For every action, there is an equal opposite reaction." With teens, it only takes a simple trigger, such as being snubbed, being called a name, or hearing a false rumor about them, to spark a strong, negative reaction. This is usually followed by another negative, "re-reaction." So in those few seconds between the provoking action and the reflexive action, encourage students to seize that moment to try out a positive strategy. Talk to students about the three possible responses to conflict: passive, aggressive, and assertive. Then pounce upon every opportunity to demonstrate and have them practice the assertive option.

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