Identifying Conflict

At the end of yet another interesting week at my school, I stumbled across Elena Aguilar’s blog focused on the necessity of addressing healthy and unhealthy conflict in a school leadership team. Blatant conflict doesn’t really occur at my school, especially on the leadership team; however, covert conflict runs rampant. If an individual doesn’t like an answer he or she gets to a question or request then, oftentimes, that individual will seek out someone who will provide an answer or response that the individual wants. This occurs regardless of the respondent’s ‘rank’ or area of responsibility. I was on the receiving end of such an occurrence this week; a department chair asked a question about AP exam logistics and when my answer did not fit within her parameters, she went to two other people until she got the answer she was looking for and I was directed to do what she wanted, essentially.

This wasn’t the first time this has happened to me, and it definitely wasn’t the first time that I’ve witnessed something like it occur. Sadly, these types of actions seem to be a large part of the school’s culture, and they are only serving to perpetuate the toxic nature of our culture. The first time I was involved in this sort of conflict, I was informed by one of my leaders that “well, that’s just how _____ is.” This sort of dismissive reaction has left me with the following questions (both of which are mostly rhetorical in nature):

• Who’s really in charge here - the teachers, the students, the parents, or the school administrators?
• How do we make decisions as to our courses of action - do we do everything we do in order to raise student achievement?

I’m not saying that adults in the building should be literally or figuratively duking it out; however, when we don’t acknowledge and address issues they can become a cancer within the building. In my school, since our students perform well on their own, we, again, have this idea that perception is reality & that everything is going well. Aguilar, in her post, emphasizes the need for a leader to identify and address conflicts. I especially like her suggestion that a leader define what healthy conflict looks like:

• We wrestle with ideas.
• We ask questions to probe for deeper understanding.
• We change our minds.
• We demonstrate curiosity.
• We hold student needs at the center of our work.

When conflicts aren’t addressed, it perpetuates the status quo, and, especially in education, the status quo is something we should seek to avoid.