Managing Conflict at School: Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management in the United States
Jennifer Batton
With the number of physical confrontations increasing across Ohio's school districts, serious discipline problems in the classrooms, and escalating violence-related costs, educators are taking it upon themselves to address these issues by creating comprehensive school conflict management programs. As a result, Ohio now leads the United States in creating effective responses.
A fifteen-year-old boy relates: "When my brother and sister were fighting I broke it up. Then I started using my ground rules. I told them to stop and I told them what I knew about mediation. Then they shook hands at the end and worked out the problem." An eight-year-old girl shares this story: "My sister was mad at her boyfriend because she said he went out all the time and did not invite her. Her boyfriend said the same thing, that his girlfriend (the older sister) did things with friends and didn't invite him or make time to spend with him. After I mediated, they agreed to go out once a week."
Like hundreds of others in Ohio, these students learned their peacemaking and mediation skills through a school-based conflict management program. Between 1990 and 2003, the number of the 612 Ohio school districts with some form of conflict management program grew from 30 to more than 400. While in 1993 there were a mere 208 schools actively addressing the problem, by 2004 more than 1,700 schools had established peer mediation and conflict management programs.
Moreover, Ohio's educators are moving beyond traditional peer mediation, which focuses primarily on student-student conflicts, to a more holistic model that provides dispute resolution methods and skills not just within the school building but for the entire school community. Effective institutionalization requires a sustained capacity for program development in each school, and participating schools should be committed to four levels of intervention: school culture, pedagogy, curriculum integration, and student programming.
School culture looks at policies and procedures, shared goals, structures, and systems. Administrators should support the modeling of conflict management skills and utilization of these skills in the schools' daily operations. One example would be in how conflicts are resolved by students, such as through the development of a peer mediation program.
Pedagogy addresses the art of teaching including strategies such as cooperative learning, multicultural teaching methods, positive discipline, and social and emotional learning strategies. Curriculum integration includes integration of conflict resolution topics across subject areas. English, social studies, and history courses offer numerous opportunities to talk about conflict and positive and negative approaches to disputes. English lessons can integrate discussions of dispute resolution by including biographies and historical novels. Social studies can consider community or civil disputes over land, historical preservation, discrimination, etc. History, of course, offers countless opportunities for discussing disputes and alternatives to violence and war.
Student programming includes implementing programs such as peer mediation, peer mentoring programs, or a student conduct plan using conflict management strategies and philosophies as a premise.
For schools to see significant positive changes, it is vital to train all adults who interact with students, including parents, administrators, classroom educators, bus drivers, playground assistants, school secretaries, and cafeteria workers. This ensures that these skills are modeled and reinforced from the time the student boards the school bus or walks onto school property, to the end of the school day-and continue at home.
A ten-year-old fifth-grade boy illustrates the importance of this transfer of conflict resolution skills from school to home and community: "When I walk, run, or ride my bike I listen for arguments around the neighborhood. Once, I saw my cousin arguing with his neighbor. I ran to see what was happening. They were going to fight so I stopped them."
In the following boxes there are two examples of school districts in the state, one rural and one urban, representing different cultural populations, both of which are experiencing success as they develop their comprehensive school conflict management programs.
