The Principal’s Guide to Conflict Management

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader.

[00:17]

Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:19] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program, Dr. Jen Schwanke. Jen is a longtime educator, teaching and leading at all levels. She is the author of four books with ASCD, including the just released Principal's Guide to Conflict Management, which we're here to talk about today. And she's written and presented for multiple state and local education organizations and has provided professional development to various districts in the areas of school climate, personnel, and instructional leadership. an instructor in educational administration at Miami University of Ohio.

[00:48]

Dr. Schwanke currently serves as a deputy superintendent in Ohio, and you can find her online at jenschwanke.com.

[00:55] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:57] SPEAKER_01:

Jen, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[01:00] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much. It's great to be back. We were reminiscing offline. It's been about eight years, right? That's when we first met.

[01:07] SPEAKER_01:

You've been busy since then, and listeners can find our previous interview on our website, and we'll link to that. But I'm excited to talk with you today about the new book on conflict management. I mean, I kind of know the answer to this, but why is this book so needed for school leaders?

[01:24] SPEAKER_00:

Well, you know, this will come to a surprise to no one, but I just, especially around the time of COVID and just watching so much fracture happen, between our society and community and the way they looked at schools, watching the way teachers felt under attack, but weren't necessarily helping their own cause. It was a time, and I think remains a time, of what I call culture of outrage. Like everybody's just mad, right? And so I just started thinking about some of the common conflicts that principals face. And it really is the same version of about four or five different stories over and over and over with different details. So I thought about how many principals are out there thinking, I'm alone in this.

[02:10]

I'm the only principal that has these parents coming at me or teachers who can't get along or students with repeated behaviors over and over and over. And so I decided let's get some scenarios and some anecdotes and some strategies down on paper so that all these principals aren't out there feeling like they're the only ones with conflict.

[02:32] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I don't think it would have been possible to truly anticipate before becoming a principal how much of the job is just that, dealing with everything that's out there and dealing with being the target of people for various reasons. So set the stage for us a little bit. What do you see as the school leader's responsibility when it comes to conflict? Because certainly teachers get hit with it. We see conflict spring up among students, among staff, but certainly from the public, from parents.

[03:03]

What do you see as the role that school leaders play?

[03:06] SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's the essential question right there. And I would answer it differently depending on which group of people you're talking about. So, for example, if you said to me, what's the principal's responsibility with student conflict? I would say the principal's responsibility is to make sure that teachers are running point, that the teachers have the support and the tools they need to to be the ones who manage it all the way up to where it's unmanageable. And of course, that point is different for every teacher, right? So I would answer the student conflict that way.

[03:39]

In terms of parent-teacher conflict, I would give a very similar answer. When parents are mad at a teacher and they go nuclear and they go right at the principal, many principals are like, I want to fix this. I'll fix it. I'll make it go away. I'll protect the teacher. Whereas I think it's much more productive and efficient and effective to, again, tool up that teacher to manage that parent right up to the point where it becomes unmanageable.

[04:03]

Now, it gets a little bit trickier with teacher conflicts. I've had many principals say to me, and I know you do a lot of PD out in the world, Justin, so do I. And I hear principals say to me all the time, I spend so much time on adult problems, teachers that tattle on each other, teachers that can't get along. And, you know, usually these are about personality differences or territory issues or competition issues, whatever it is. And the principal sometimes doesn't have a deeper understanding of the emotional or historical bias that's leading to this conflict. So I think I would answer that question differently still.

[04:39]

And I would say it depends. The responsibility, I've been telling people, I feel like the responsibility is either an overseer of conflict, a mediator of conflict, or a facilitator of conflict. Sometimes it has to be, hey, this is what we're going to do. So we all get along. A, B, C. Sometimes it's, you guys need to talk.

[05:00]

I'm not going to be in the room. You need to talk and figure this out. So it depends. There's my answer.

[05:07] SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate that because it would have been easy to assume that you're going to say, oh yes, it's all our responsibility. The buck stops here. But the reality is a lot of conflict that we come across is not ours. You know, it's kind of like the old, you know, monkey on the back when somebody brings you a problem. Sometimes they need to keep that monkey on their back and make sure that it leaves with them instead of leaving it with us, as Todd Whitaker says. So let's talk a little bit more about conflict that we can't own.

[05:33]

I saw a discussion online among some administrators who were discussing a particular conflict. I don't know if it was between parents or between students, but like people who do not work at the school and the conflict had nothing to do with the school. They just happened to both have a child at the school. And that was why they thought the principal should be the one to handle it. And certainly we're there. We're an easy target.

[05:52]

Maybe we have the skills. Why do we have to sometimes say, you guys go, you guys go and deal with this. It's not my baby. It's not my monkey. I'm not your person.

[06:02] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I could not agree with you more. So many times principals say, well, since they brought me this conflict, it must be mine. And that is a hard no for me. The most obvious example is when two parents whose children aren't getting along want the principal to mediate. I mean, I cannot get the word no out of my mouth fast enough when people ask me about that. I'm like, do not get involved in neighborhood disputes.

[06:23]

Do not get involved. Do not try and mediate two parents. parents who are going to stick up for their child no matter what. You are going to lose. You are not going to be able to facilitate. And in a lot of ways, trying to facilitate other people's conflict is, in my opinion, not to understate the word abuse, but it's like being in an abusive relationship.

[06:44]

You think... This time it'll be different. I can figure it out. I will say the right words.

[06:49]

I will get these two people to get along. No, you're not going to. So I think there's conflicts that we say, no, that is not in my sandbox. I am not going to intervene. And I really believe sometimes the best action is no action at all. It is, thank you for sharing, that is not what we do.

[07:08]

Thank you for sharing, we are not going to get involved. Whatever way you say no and push it back on them. What's ironic to me, Justin, is especially at the elementary level, we do this really well with kids. Kids will run up to a teacher and tattle. And the teacher says, okay, what could you say to your friend? How could you fix this?

[07:28]

How can you do something differently? And the child runs off and fixes it, right? We do this easily with students. But many times with adults, the anxiety and the fear are like, oh, maybe I do have to fix it, comes in and makes it a lot more complicated.

[07:42] SPEAKER_01:

And I was surprised at how many people in that discussion said, yeah, I tried that once and the parents just had a fistfight with each other in my office and I will never do that again. We don't need to go there.

[07:51] SPEAKER_00:

But many people feel like they should because they believe in themselves as negotiators and facilitators. And they've done it successfully, perhaps with students or with their own family members or whatever. So they think I will be able to get these people to see the same thing I see. No, you're not going to.

[08:07] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the mindset skills. In the book, you talk about the mindset skills that we can bring to conflict management. What are some of those and how did you come up with those?

[08:19] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Sure. I feel like many of the stumbling blocks to being an administrator comes with having the wrong mindset. I would say one of the wrong mindsets is I'm the principal, so I have to fix everything. That is not an accurate mindset, I don't think. So I talk about several mindsets to work on.

[08:39]

And one of them, for example, is patience. So many times principals think everything's an emergency, everything's urgent. I have to fix this and I have to fix it now. Having patients being able to press pause, being able to say, hey, this is not an emergency, buys us time. And, you know, Justin, how many times has something felt incredibly urgent and the next day you're like, oh, it's not. You're certainly thinking that 10 days later or 100 days later.

[09:06]

You don't even remember a lot of the things that felt like emergency. you know, a bursting flame of fire. You don't even remember it. So patience is a mindset. If we can just remind ourselves, I have time. There are very few emergencies in education.

[09:21]

I need to pause. I need to get my mind right. Will help. Another one is curiosity. This is a big one for me. I used to, when conflicts would arise and as a principal, I would look at it as another problem.

[09:34]

I have to figure this out. It was a weight on me. It felt heavy and it felt like I had to do an investigation and get all the facts and get it right. When I shifted my mindset to curiosity where, huh, I really wonder what happened. I wonder what that person was thinking. I wonder what this other person was thinking.

[09:51]

I wonder who's being honest and who maybe is withholding information. When I started to approach it that way, It didn't make it so much of an arduous task as a journey I was on to try and figure it out. And then the one I, you know how sometimes we're encouraged at the beginning of the year to choose a word of the year. I have for about 12 years running picked equanimity because I'm still working on it. But this is one that you approach. problems and crises or perceived crises with calm, with confidence, with belief that it's going to be okay.

[10:26]

That is certainly something I'm still working on because like many principals, I always feel like I'm auditioning with a problem to get it right. And if I approach it as, it's going to be okay, I got this, it really does calm me both physically and mentally so that I am more clear-headed when I ask the questions, when I dig into the problem, and when I propose solutions.

[10:50] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jen, with those mindsets in mind, take us into the three-step process that you have for mediating conflicts.

[10:58] SPEAKER_00:

Right. So this is so incredibly basic that many listeners will probably think, oh, come on. But really, this works. And this is a process or a cycle or a series of steps. Anticipate, analyze and act. And this is whenever you have a conflict or a problem, you can pick up on this three part cycle at any point.

[11:23]

Or you can start at the beginning, the first being anticipate. So many conflicts that come to us in retrospect, we're like, oh, should have seen that one coming. And so we need to be more mindful of anticipating when there's going to be a conflict. And again, with students, we do this all the time. We will perhaps place students in a class because we know those two kids should not be together. Or in the past, there was conflict.

[11:48]

So we're not going to repeat that. That scenario that's anticipating it. Um, another one is if you hire a new teacher and they're not provided with any mentorship and then they make some missteps and everybody's mad about it. Well, that's, that should have been anticipated, right? The second part of this is analyzing, and this is where I think we don't spend enough time. That is, Hey, we need to gather all the information.

[12:12]

We need to see why the conflict is there. We need to see what the emotions are versus what the facts are. To delineate that facts versus feelings quandary. And it's to analyze what your response needs to be. And so in that analyzation part, I think we think about, we should think about tiers of response. And as we said earlier, I think do nothing is a response.

[12:37]

You might want to orchestrate a conversation between two people. You might want to oversee a conversation between two people. Or you might need to facilitate a conversation or action between those two people. And that's all part of the analyze portion. And then finally, there's act. This is where you say, okay, this is what we're going to do.

[12:57]

These are the systems we're going to put in place. These are the expectations we're going to re-outline. I'm sure you've heard this before, Justin, but it was a light bulb moment for me when I realized that every failed relationship, whether you're five years old or 105 years old, is due to some sort of unmet expectation. Somebody expected something that didn't happen. And so the action there might be just re-outlining expectations, right? maybe for students, for teachers, for parents.

[13:24]

This is what I thought the relationship would give me, and this is what it's really giving me, and now I need to get to a place where we're both getting what we need. So that's the action part of it. And again, I know I've said this now three times, sometimes no action is the action, and that's okay too.

[13:39] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jen, I wonder if we could apply that three-step process to something that we're probably all dealing with quite a bit, which is conflict between students, particularly online conflict between students. And now even in elementary schools, there is, you know, all hours texting between students who, you know, maybe taking their phones to their rooms with them at night. And we have all this online interaction, you know, group texts and social media and all these different places where students can interact. And often that comes back to us as school leaders, right? We hear there's a conflict between students, often it gets presented to us as bullying. And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

[14:15]

But often online student to student conflict that happens outside of schools is brought to us as something that we need to deal with, something that we need to deal with. Help us think about how to approach that.

[14:26] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I have strong feelings and there are a lot of folks out there that would argue with me. So that's I just want to say that right up front. I think too many of us principals, teachers get involved in that conflict that happens on social media that doesn't have anything to do with school. If we remember what kids are, they're unfinished beings, right? They're learning, they're experimenting with drama, they're stirring up drama, they're experimenting with bullying. I mean, that's just a human, it's a thing that humans do.

[14:56]

They're working through the hierarchy and the pecking order and who they can treat a certain way. So many times parents who are genuinely at a loss for how to handle some of this stuff, bring it to the schools. This is a great example of what we started talking about, Justin, is here's a conflict principle. Please fix this for me. Now, it's worth noting that the Supreme Court has weighed in on this, right? With the, I always say the district wrong, Mahanoy Area School District versus BL.

[15:25]

The Supreme Court said, schools, you may not discipline a student for something that they put online after hours. I think, I haven't done the research, but I think that that decision split administrators with what they believed, whether that was a wise move or not. And some administrators said, no, we want that control. We want to be able to discipline kids for what they do online. It doesn't matter what you want. The Supreme Court has ruled on that.

[15:52]

We can't. Therefore, we can use that as a tool to say, listen, what you do on your phone on a Saturday afternoon, on a Wednesday night at midnight, that is not something we're going to investigate. Now, it gets muddy when it really does come in and disrupt the school. But I think as districts, as schools, we need to get better at putting up some barriers and putting up some boundaries there and saying we're not going to look into things we cannot control. We're not going to try to control things we can't. So I know that sounds a little bit vague, but my encouragement to principals is if it's not your problem, don't take it on.

[16:28]

My goodness. And parents often want us to because they don't know what to do.

[16:33] SPEAKER_01:

I was thinking about how one of the strange things about childhood and adolescence now is just how many of these discussions students are having electronically rather than in person, right? In person, if you have a disagreement with someone, they might pout, they might cross their arms, they might go play with someone else. But online, it can turn into something very different. So yeah, I think we just have a whole different set of issues that we're dealing with now. And yeah, us managing all of them for parents and students is probably not the solution.

[17:03] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think the thing that's so appalling, sometimes I see what's online and they're horrifying in how mean they are. Words are so much more painful received when they're that horrible and hateful. But the person sending them out in the universe was probably just trying to really, you know, really hurt someone. And like you said, in person, you pout, you complain, you cry, maybe you punch somebody. I don't know. But online, these interactions can just escalate to such hate.

[17:37]

And I think that's what's so alarming to adults when they read that out of context. And they think this is horrifying. And as we all know, it can have disastrous, devastating, tragic results. So we're scared to ever say, okay, that's just dumb. Delete it. Right.

[17:52]

Because it might have caused irreparable harm. So it's tricky. I don't profess to have any of the answers, but I do think we have to begin to kind of take back the control we do have. And the control we do have is, you know, seven to four at school and, or in extracurriculars, that's when we do have influence. So, you know, kind of a non-answer there, Justin, because I, like everyone else, I'm trying to figure it out.

[18:18] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit more about staff, because I think this is often where we cannot avoid the issues because they do happen on our turf and people, you know, If people are having conflict and we are their supervisor, then we may not be able to wash our hands of that. We may have to wade into the details and try to figure out how to help people get along. So take us into some of the dimensions of conflict between coworkers, whether those are coworkers who work together closely or just people who don't necessarily work together, but in the same building. Take us into some of the dimensions of conflict between staff.

[18:53] SPEAKER_00:

So I, again, only from my, whatever it is, 26 years of watching, I think that common conflicts with staff are disparities in workload, disparities in work ethic. And I use that word very carefully because sometimes there's disagreement on how hard someone should be working, but we don't really know how hard they're working outside of school, or we don't know what kind of things are going on in their lives. So disparities in workload, work ethic, and disparities in personality, right? And teachers tend to come to their work with passion and wanting to do good work. Very few teachers wake up and say, boy, I really want to do a lousy job today, right? But you have teachers who might have an authoritative approach or a competitive approach.

[19:39]

They may be defensive. They may be a blamer. They may be in a constant suffering contest with colleagues. Like I have it worse than you do. They may be an anxious teacher, an angry teacher. There's also huge generational differences.

[19:52]

I think we're going to have to start talking about this. I always say, you know, I remember 20 years ago, I interviewed a teacher who had tattoos on his arm and I was like, oh my gosh, I was kind of shocked. Well, now... If I didn't interview teachers with tattoos, I wouldn't have anybody to interview.

[20:11]

It's okay. Things are different now. I say all that because I think a lot of times the root of conflicts between teachers are not what it seems to be. It seems to be about, you know, somebody who ate the container of yogurt out of the fridge or somebody who won't fill the paper in the coffee machine or somebody who's always late to pick up their kids from related arts. Those things tend to cloak things. the real issue.

[20:34]

And a lot of times the real issue is again, expectations. I didn't know that that was important to you colleague, or why are you so sensitive about this colleague? Those kinds of things need to be worked through. Justin, I kid you not. I once worked in a school where there were probably 15 teachers who borderline hated another teacher because she would come to school every day and she'd make a microwave baked potato with spinach and it stunk up the whole wing. Nobody had ever said to her, this is bothersome.

[21:02]

They were just all mad and they wouldn't, it was the most bizarre case of you haven't communicated your anger directly to this person. This person doesn't know she's just following her, whatever diet she was following. And there was true discord. And I wisely refused to sit down this teacher and say, maybe you shouldn't make your baked potato. I said to the group, you have something to tell her. She doesn't even know.

[21:27]

So I kind of tell that story as tongue in cheek because a lot of times the story, it is a lot deeper. It is frustration and hurt feelings and misconstrued information. But that's really the derivative to me. Those basic why's. And then I think as a principal, again, you have to really analyze before you act. You have to think, is this something where I do nothing, where I say you are a grownup, You need to go and talk to your colleague.

[21:56]

You've got this. Maybe it's orchestrating a conversation, like I said, where you have to kind of talk to one side or talk to the other and then bring them together, oversee it, or even facilitate it. And sometimes there has to be, people don't like it when I say zero tolerance, but sometimes there has to be, hey, we're not doing this anymore. We're better than this. This is not who our school is. You're going to speak to each other respectfully.

[22:17]

Or a principal may do something like move a teacher's grade level or move a classroom or something to dissipate the conflict.

[22:24] SPEAKER_01:

It's interesting. I feel like one of the strange features of being a teacher is that you have these colleagues with whom, you know, you feel like you work very closely. But at the same time, sometimes they're only for a few minutes a day. Right. So the idea of spending some of those few minutes a day that you get with your colleagues saying, hey, your baked potato with spinach is stinky. Like it's tempting to try to pass that off to the principal and say, why don't you handle this?

[22:47]

And I think we would kind of all rather do that, right? We would all rather have someone else handle our conflict for us and find somebody else to do that dirty work for us. Help us look in the mirror a little bit, because you have a chapter on when the conflict is you. And certainly in any conflict where we are personally involved, we have a piece that we own to some extent. Take us into some of the dimensions of that.

[23:11] SPEAKER_00:

Right, exactly. This is the hardest work, right? To look inside ourselves, honestly. And I think it's hard because many of us actually want to do so well. That we're sometimes a little too hard on ourselves. We take way too much blame for other people's conflicts.

[23:29]

So I want to be very clear and say that first. However, I always say if you have been in, say, maybe four or five different jobs and in every single job, nobody trusts you. Nobody believes that you tell the truth. Nobody...

[23:45]

listens when you stand up in front of the staff meeting you talk well then it might be you if you're the common denominator to problems there might be something you need to shift and so this is again the hardest work of being a principal is if you look in the mirror and you see everywhere i go it's the same problems to do that inner work and think okay what can i change there so As an example, for me, one of my biggest weaknesses is when a problem comes to me, I do two things. One is I think I have to solve it. Two, I tend to get a physical reaction, an anxious, insecure reaction that comes off as defensiveness. So I tend to jump quickly to, well, yeah, but well, that wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Well, no one communicated that.

[24:35]

I tend to want to put blame somewhere else. And I have over time been able to work on that. And that does not mean, Justin, that I instantly say, oh, it must be my fault. I take full responsibility. People see through all that inauthenticity, right? It is that I need to say this likely is not something I need to be defensive about.

[24:55]

If I can't control my tone and the look on my face, I need to pause, be patient and say, let me think a little bit about this. I'm going to get back to you first thing tomorrow morning and give myself the time to put that defensiveness aside. So that's just an example of how I've worked on myself in what my weakness was. And so I think if the conflict is you, if you are constantly finding yourself in the same conflicts and people are not trusting you, or they don't think you're being authentic or honest or straightforward, they might be right. And so you've got to kind of find the people that can walk you through that and coach you through that. If you, if it's something you want to work on.

[25:36] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jen, tell us a little bit more about how we might begin one of these conversations, you know, regardless of what the situation is. And, you know, if we've decided to take it on, how do we get started in that conversation?

[25:49] SPEAKER_00:

I'm so glad you asked me that, Justin. I answer this question. Principals will ask me, tell me about how to have a really difficult conversation. And here's the story I tell. My dad once called me and he said, let's ride bikes together from Columbus to his farm. Justin, it was 88 miles.

[26:06]

And I was like, I don't ride 88 miles. I don't ride one mile. No, I can't do it. And he's like, come on, come on. It'll be great. It'll be fun.

[26:11]

Okay, fine. So I bought the fancy biking shorts to preserve my rear end and I rode 88 miles. But here's the thing. I did not ever go into it with that mindset. I rode one mile 88 times. This is what I tell principals.

[26:26]

When you have a hard conversation, all you have to do is ride the first mile. You just have to say the first thing. And that first thing might be this. It might be, teacher, student, parent, this is going to be a really difficult conversation for me to start. Once you've said that first word, ridden that first mile, you're in. What are you going to do?

[26:44]

Are you going to say, oh, wait, nevermind. I changed my mind. I want to do it tomorrow. No, you are in because you have said the first thing. And then you say the next hard thing. And then you say the next hard thing and you listen and you respond and you react, but you don't have to script out an entire conversation and assume it's going to go a certain way.

[27:01]

You just have to ride the first mile. Start with that first sentence because that's the hardest one. After that, you will get through it. Your instincts, your training, your compassion, your empathy for humans, all of that will take over and you will be able to do it. And this is the other thing. Whenever you talk to, um, that is perhaps going a little sideways or is embroiled in conflict.

[27:23]

If you have the hard conversation, if nothing else, even if it's a train wreck, everyone out there will hear that you have the hard conversation and then they will know you are someone that will do it. You build such silent but internal imperative respect from people if you're someone who will go in and say the hard things. If you're a leader who just doesn't, who avoids them, who will let a problem fester, you're going to lose respect. So you've got to ride the stupid 88 mile route. You know, you got to do it.

[27:53] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The Principal's Guide to Conflict Management. Jen, if people want to follow you online or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go?

[28:03] SPEAKER_00:

Yep. All they have to do is look at JenSchwanke.com. That's J-E-N-S-C-H-W-A-N-K-E. They can find all my information about all my books and consulting opportunities and all that jazz right there. And they can email me, whatever.

[28:16]

That's where I am.

[28:16] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jen, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[28:19] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for having me. And I'm so glad we're back in touch again after all these years.

[28:25] Announcer:

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