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Author: Mary
Wiemann
Communication
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
-William Ellery Channing
Managing Conflict with Students and Peers
Introduction
Imagine: You have conducted a wonderful class. Your
carefully prepared lecture, discussion and activities have engaged
your students. You feel confident that the assignment you've just
given them for the next class will reinforce the day's lesson
and challenge them to extend the concepts in their daily lives.
You're feeling good.
As you return to your office, a colleague catches
up to you and points out that the lab teaching assistant you supervise
is unhappy with the workload, and it's up to you to handle this
quickly. In your office, there are two voice mails from students
who missed class (that brilliant class you just taught); they
want to know if you did anything important today. You have an
E-mail from your dean who wants that faculty evaluation packet
in yesterday.
Your good feeling dissipates. Your level of exhaustion
and frustration is understandable. In addition to preparing lessons,
teaching and grading, you have many other responsibilities. Welcome
to the life of a typical community college instructor. It is full
of successes and trying situations. What can you do to handle
it all?
First, you will not handle it all. Conflicts among
colleagues, students and administrators are understandable aspects
of complex relationships. But, remember, they are relationships,
which means that other people besides you share in the responsibility
for maintaining the relationships and working out the conflicts.
By yourself, you won't be able to resolve all the conflicts. Nonetheless,
you can handle the conflicts in a way that will increase your
own satisfaction with the outcome and manage the relationships
you have with all the people in your professional (not to mention
your personal) life.
You will read about handling the LTA in Lesson 1.
Your returned calls to the absent students will
focus o your need not to have to repeat material for each of your
200 students and yet attend to the choice they made not to attend
class that day.
Your return e-mail to your dean will request collusion
on setting up a reasonable deadline for the submission of that
faculty evaluation packet given the new set of circumstances since
the request went out two months ago.
This lesson provides guidelines for approaching,
managing and (in some instances) resolving conflict. We will apply
a "Stop, Look, Listen, Respond" method to our study.
- Stop.
Rather than just reacting to a situation, it is useful to
step back and reassess the situation. When we deal with conflict,
we often have anger, or one of the parties involved has anger.
When people express anger without reassessing the situation,
they almost always make things worse. So, stop, count to ten,
take a deep breath, take a "time out" - anything
that helps you think about what just happened rather than
rushing in to make everything right.
- Look.
A conflict situation will involve facial expressions, tone
of voice, pitch, timing, body tension. Look at all the nonverbal
behaviors in the people involved in the conflict situation
- including yourself! At times, you should also look at your
surroundings for anything that might be contributing to the
conflict situation. The number of people, the temperature,
the lighting, the time of day (or night) might all contribute
to the conflict situation.
- Listen.
Hear the other person out. Often this is the best mode of
discovery. Think of all the times in your own life when you
just wanted to be listened to. Others are like that, too.
A colleague, a student, a friend - often you can help them
and yourself just by listening.
- Respond. After
you Stop, Look and Listen, you can then make a considered
response. Note that this is the fourth step, not the first.
Responses can be verbal or nonverbal. We'll discover how to
choose the best response, not just any response. Your responses
will also help the other person save face. Conflict participants
often feel backed into a corner; considered responses will
give them a way out that doesn't involve fighting their way
out by having to retrieve a damaged self-image.
Learning Objectives
Lesson Goal
Learn about ways to manage and resolve conflicts.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson on conflict you should
be able to:
- Approach conflict with a positive attitude.
- Describe the perception of incompatible goals among the conflicting
parties;
- Define the unmet needs (scarce resources) the parties perceive.
- Clearly describe the struggle for yourself.
- Facilitate the description of struggle for the conflicting
parties.
- Employ teaching methods that reduce potential conflicts between
you and your students.
- Utilize effective and appropriate language to reduce defensiveness
in the conflicting parties.
- Cope with the criticism associated with defensiveness in
conflict situations.
- Employ problem-solving techniques to create satisfying outcomes.
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