Six skills to resolve conflicts with teachers and parents while protecting relationships

Six skills to resolve conflicts with teachers and parents while protecting relationships
   
It’s only human who try to avoid conflicts, but unfortunately, few problems just quietly slink away.

Conflicts have a way of turning into crises.  A researchers adapted the skills specifically for principals and other educational leaders who often must manage conflict with both teachers and parents over classroom performance issues.

“The challenge for leaders is how to address the conflict in ways that minimize the relational harm in doing so,”

Skill 1–Express yourself and describe your position. An optimal solution integrates the legitimate interests of both parties.  For this to happen, you must fully express your point of view and you must listen carefully to what the teacher or parent is saying. Take the time to describe and explain your perspective.   Give relevant reasons, examples, or evidence to help the parent or teacher understand why you have the point of view you do.

“One of the differences between the problem-solving of expert and typical principals is that experts are more likely to clearly disclose their own interpretation of a problem and provide supporting reasons,”

Skill 2– Listen for deep understanding.  Careful listening in response to complaints restores trust. Your curiosity in the discussion signals a deep respect for the other person’s ideas and concerns and helps build a working affiliation. You should listen both to fact-find and to understand how the facts have been interpreted. You must understand the emotional content of situation as well as the factual details.  There is a long-term payoff, as well. Listening gives you the information you need to prevent or resolve similar situations in the future.

Skill 3–Check your understanding.  Make sure that you have correctly understood what the parent or teacher has communicated and that your reactions are not based on faulty inferences and attributions. “Interactions that are emotionally laden and conflict-prone provide considerable opportunity for mutual misunderstanding,” the authors write. Checking your understanding disrupts your assumptions so that you can more effectively resolve the situation.

Skills 4 and 5–Re-examine your point of view and  help the other person re-examine theirs. Research shows that people selectively hear information that confirms their existing beliefs.  Keep an open mind to improve the outcome. When people are not so certain about their initial positions, they are more tentative and flexible in searching for a solution.
“The doubt triggers more inquiry into alternatives, and this, in turn, encourages the other person to take a more flexible stances

If one person begins to doubt his or her position, this modeling sets up a reciprocal dynamic.

The ability to engage the other party in a reconsideration of their perspective is a high-level skill requiring that you both challenge and respect the other’s point of view. This is where good listening pays off. The teacher or parent is more likely to follow your lead in re-examining your perspective if they feel you have really listened to them.

Skill 6–Agree with the principal and parent/teacher on what to do next. Expert principals genuinely try to find solutions that satisfy the legitimate interests of all parties. Even after taking all of the steps above, the best solution may not be obvious to you. You must also work with stakeholders to craft the optimal solution.

“Typically, principals were more skilled in advocating their own position than in deeply inquiring into and checking their understanding of the views of the parent or teacher,”

There are some more findings of the study:

Principals displayed limited (low-to-modest) effectiveness in handling the two interactions with parents and teachers

They behaved consistently across the two scenarios.
They were more skillfull when seeking to understand the teacher’s point of view than the parent’s.
Their weakest skill, as a group, was in checking understanding of the parent or teacher’s view.
Principals were more likely to try to help the teacher than the parent consider an alternate point of view.
Possible explanations for why principals did not do better at checking for understanding are that they feared it. would confirm the existence of disagreement or that they were preoccupied about what to say next,

One of the Response that we received to “6 skills to resolve conflicts with teachers and parents while protecting relationships”

Understandably, principals would be better at explaining their own point of view than hearing the teacher’s views. Principals are easily outnumbered when pressure comes from parents, or from students whose parents serve on school boards supported by a higher level authority

Principals may be more effective advocates if they taught new teachers the politics of their school environments. While the higher paid administrators and assistant administrators act the warm, inviting hosts, they also can be conveniently too busy to respond to or assist educators.

In this era, it’s common knowledge that the students have the rights, not the teachers. Instead, educators carry the mother load of responsibilities–to teach, inspire, guide, counsel, develop character and future citizens, provide a nurturing and stimulating environment, understand teaching pedagogy and school law, apply conflict resolution, crisis intervention, and establish connections with students, parents, and administrators while responding to daily changing priorities set by students and administrators.

I understand that students were once victims of the zero tolerance policy, a repressive, impersonal bureaucratic system of discipline. But now, I believe the teachers will end up the victims, where there can be little or no support from the school bureaucracy or a union.