Tools and Tips for Resolving Conflict

Being a faculty member is challenging on many levels. The academic environment, dubbed an "organized anarchy" by some theorists, creates ample opportunities to come into conflict with colleagues, administrators, students, and within oneself over conflict goals and opportunities. In this section of the site we feature various tools or basic tips and reminders to help faculty navigate conflict with as much grace and skill as possible.

Tips Sheets/Articles

The University of Arizona has prepared a set of short but helpful briefs on managing conflict. See "Managing and Resolving Conflict: Tools"

Susan Holton, author of a number of edited volumes on campus conflict issues, puts some of her ideas down in Cracks in the Ivory Tower: Conflict Management in the Classrooom — and Beyond

Santa Barbara City College has developed an interactive web tutorial for faculty on Managing Conflict with Students and Peers. It provides ideas for handling a wide range of quite plausible situations that faculty may run into.

Tom Sebok, Ombudsman at the University of Colorado, has observed countless conflict mediations and negotiations. Based on observations of parties in dispute, he has come up with a list of behaviors often seen in conflict, and their likely result. See Eliciting Resistance vs. Gaining Cooperation for more info.

We all know that teaching can have it's difficult moments, especially if you're willing to grapple with some of life's more complex issues. In Teaching Controversial Issues, Suzanne Cherrin from the University of Delaware explores some strategies for making lemonade out of topical lemons.

Faculty often feel compelled to give advice to people who seem upset or challenged. Communication Skills, Five Ways of Responding (from a good collection of online conflict resolution materials developed by the VA) analyses various ways of responding and explains the practical results of each type. The five response types analyzed include advising and evaluating; analyzing and interpreting; reassuring and supporting; questioning and probing; and understanding and paraphrasing.

Consider these Ten Tips for Managing Conflict, Tension and Anger by Clare Albright, Psy.D.

Facilitation Skills for Interpersonal Transformation is an article by Ron Kraybill. In seeking to enable transformation at the personal and interpersonal level in situations of group conflict, facilitators have many skills and tools at their disposal. This article describes some of these and explores the question:  What makes these communication skills and tools “transformative”? Following the definition of transformation in the first section, three categories of facilitation tools are then reviewed:  skills used in moment-by-moment interaction with parties, techniques for facilitating sustained dialogue, and principles of process design for addressing the larger institutional and structural realities of conflicts. The author concludes that the dual focus of transformation on “empowerment of self” and “relationship-building with others” can be seen to lie at the heart of transformative skills and techniques in all three categories.

Online Tools/Handouts

Perhaps your department or committee meetings could use a bit more structure, but you're still hoping to make decisions by consensus rather than voting. If so, one model that might interest you documented online in the Handbook on Using Formal Consensus Process (alternative to Roberts Rules) by C.T. Butler and Amy Rothstein

Student Group Work Aids

More and more faculty are using student group projects as part of their courses. Students often need some help managing the conflicts that can come up in these settings. An example of a handout to give to your students is Working in Groups - Group Diseases in the Science Classroom:
A Reference Guide to Symptoms and Treatments from Canisius College.

Developing an Excellent Group Process is the first page of a 5-part set of materials designed for students to use as they gather into teams for groups work. The materials were developed by Wendy Sue Harper and her colleagues at Iowa State University.

Another good online resource for faculty managing group projects is known as Teamworks, the Virtual Team Assistant. It is a web site developed to provide support for group communication processes, and especially for design teams in engineering and other practical arts and sciences. Teamworks includes nine informational modules, each of which contains background information, instruments for self-assessment, lessons to develop team work skills, and links to helpful resources.

Some More Philosophical Offerings

Parker Palmer, Quaker philosopher, has pulled together some of his thoughts regarding conflict and the nature of community in modern colleges and universities. See Community, Conflict, and Ways of Knowing: Ways to Deepen our Educational Agenda.