All the planning in the world can never fully prepare each project for the classroom. Once you add the students and a project goes live, things can change and a teacher adapts. I usually try and balance individual projects with group projects throughout the year. This year in 12th grade Government, we started the year with a group project focusing on different countries' constitutions. I spent the first day of the project preemptively troubleshooting issues that might come up, and then each group created their own group rubrics. They decided what good group work looks like to them. Some of the requirements they settled on were light and silly. For example, one group decided that each day there would be a mandatory group hug in addition to balancing the work, communicating over google docs and maintaining positive attitudes throughout the project. All groups had serious components as well. Spirits seemed high. A couple days into the project, the task for the groups was to decide the method in which they would present their work to the class after researching their different countries' constitutions. Groups seemed to offer a variety of methods. We brainstormed as a class and generated a list including everything from the basic powerpoint presentation to interpretative dances. When the groups had time to decide on their method of presentation, everything seemed to be going really well. Around the time I started to pat myself on the back, I noticed Jon put his head down on the desk. I observed his group, and they all seemed on task. Once I got to Jon's group, they had settled on creating a powerpoint. I walked over to Jon and put my hand on his back and asked him what was going on. He looked up and somewhat rudely responded that he was just going to work on it at home. He pushed me on why they needed to work on it in school if they were getting individual grades. I pried a little more, and eventually it came out that Jon wanted to do a puppet show as their final performance, and the group shot the idea down as being too much work. At that point, Jon had checked out. My original thought for showcasing student voice in my classroom was going to be using student developed rubrics to engage students. After my brief conversation with Jon, I decided to shift my focus to student conflict resolution within groups.
After two tunings of this idea, both times I had a similar response by students. They asked immediately after the explanation of teaching conflict resolution to students, why don't I just be more vigilant as a teacher during group work? Both of the students who asked this question were 12th grade students at other High Tech High schools. The answer is simple. Students need the tools to be able to resolve conflicts on their own as they will spend the rest of their lives working in groups in some respect. I could intervene in groups as I start to notice conflicts arising. This might soothe the groups momentarily or even provide a bandaid solution until the end of the project. However, this does not give students the ability to resolve these problems on their own. One of these students asked somewhat rhetorically, aren't your seniors able to work in groups on their own. Before I could speak, the student I had brought to the tuning responded on my behalf. He shared that 12th graders may brush over the problems more easily or keep them hidden from a teacher. However, he felt unprepared to be able to resolve an issue on his own especially as he is going to be put in a new situation in college in which he would often be working with students he didn't know. I felt validated by his response, but at the same time, unsure of where to go from that point.
On our campus, we have a GSE intern, Geoff Roehm, who is a secret trove of resources. My hazy ideas of what the next steps might be became clearer as I discussed everything with Geoff. He suggested that most problems arise from students' needs not being met within a group. Taking the issue of Jon specifically, he explained that Jon had a need for creativity within their final presentation. The other group members had a need for a less challenging project presentation in regards to preparation time. They all took their positions based on their needs without recognizing the needs of everyone. These students did not have the vocabulary or training to reframe the dilemma and so they made a decision which left one student out, but the group still moving.
Geoff and I decided to put together a group of students to do a little informal research on the types of conflicts that arise in group work. It seemed that selecting the right students was a difficult task. I put together a seemingly random group of 6 students from my classes. I tried to use what I knew of the students to find a variety of different group personalities I have seen come up among students in the past. One student is a very driven and self-admitted perfectionist. She tends to dominate in groups and do more work than her share so that she can be sure it gets done the way she wants. Another is a student who tends to think outside the box and can get very easily off task in his group. He is well liked by his peers, but can get himself and his group off task very quickly. A third personality tries to soothe over problems within a group and keep everyone pleased. She will often do more than her share of the work in an effort to please her peers. Another student is a natural group leader and seems comfortable confronting his peers in order to get work done if necessary. A fifth student was brought in because he is extremely confident without being overbearing in a group. He admitted that he has only recently grown in his confidence. My final student is Jon. I haven't seen him yet work as a member of a different group.
We met during the school day, and the students seemed somewhat confused as to why Geoff and I pulled them out of their College Prep class. After I explained what I was working on, the room still did not feel entirely comfortable. Our first meeting was to gather personal narratives from the students. I asked them to remember a time when they were a member of a group or a partnership in which a conflict arose. We explained that it wasn't important if the issue was actually resolved, but to recall the conflict with as much detail as they could. No one spoke right away. After a minute of thought, one student offered his story. After this, the students took turns speaking for the next 30 minutes telling their stories of conflict. Geoff kept notes on the conflicts and we both asked follow-up questions to get a full view of the conflicts. After the meeting, we took the conflicts, and condensed them into 4 scenarios as some of them had overlapping issues.
One of the conflicts write-ups follows below. This is the edited version of what Jon shared with the group:
You are working in a group of five students (you and four others). You have been
given a project description that has some “minimum guidelines,” but leaves much
leeway for students to decide what they wish to produce. You begin brainstorming
ideas with your group about what to create, but two of the group members keep
asking why everyone doesn’t just do what’s on the “minimum guidelines” handout.
The other three members of the group clearly want to be more creative and go
beyond the minimum. The two students who only want to do what is on the
handout refuse to do any “extra” work.
With these scenarios, I plan to meet with the same students again and ask them to discuss the scenarios with another person and come up with a realistic way to solve the conflicts. I want to do this first without any explanation or training of different methods to resolve conflicts. The rationale behind this is to have a pre-training assessment of how students approach conflicts at this point in their student careers.
From this point, Geoff and I are going to work with these 6 students to go over a different approach to conflicts that arise in groups. Our goal is to develop this group of students so that we could give them the same four scenarios, and they would be able to look at them from a different perspective using the method of reframing the conflicts. The majority of this information is adapted from a book entitled Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton (1991). We will be using the guiding principles that: conflict is a part of life and it is usually uncomfortable. Additionally, there are both destructive and constructive ways to manage conflict. 4 of the approaches to conflict that have some component of destructive methods are: avoidance, competition, compromise and accommodation. There are different amounts of negativity in each of these approaches. However, we hope to train the students that collaboration is the ultimate goal for all group work. Collaboration involves both individuals attempting to work together to find a solution that fully satisfies the concerns of both people. It involves a commitment from both students digging into an issue to identify the underlying concerns of both people or the group and finding an alternative that meets both sets of concern. This could be approached by exploring the disagreement to learn from each other's insights. This approach would move the students away from competing for resources or confronting each other, and instead, trying to find a creative solution to a problem.
The foundation for getting to this point lies in understanding the framing factors of the entire conflict. The first factor is to identify the different positions. What are the stances taken and demands made. Next the students will identify the varying needs. This is the underlying reasons for the position taken. These could be tangible reasons or psychological reasons. The next step is to reframe the conflict from one of two different positions to recognizing the different needs. Once this reframe takes place, the students can work together to find alternatives based on the reframing. After training these students, I would like to revisit the original 4 scenarios and ask them to resolve them a second time using this new approach. However, after they do this, I would also like to ask them how comfortable or realistic they thing this approach would be. My speculation is that students will need an entire class trained in this method of conflict resolution in order to make it effective.
This leads us to our unsettled areas of this Put It To Practice. What are the next steps? Both Geoff and I have thrown some ideas around as to where we go from this group of 6 to expand. I am not sure if this conflict resolution training should be treated independently as a stand alone training or if it something that gets spread out in pieces over the year. My leaning is that it should be the independent focus of my classes for a while before our next big project launches. The advantage of this is that the focus will give weight to the issue. The disadvantage is that it takes up a large amount of class time (possibly 1-2 weeks) during the year when we I feel we should be deep into other Government content issues. When Geoff and I originally discussed this, we also considered taking some of the seniors out into the lower grade levels to give them exposure to this new way of looking at group work. We also discussed that this could be important for other staff members to be trained as well so that we could have a common vocabulary at our school.
In my second tuning of this PITP one of the other teachers told a story from last year when he was observing a meeting at a Junior's internship. The student was interning at an architecture firm. This architecture staff was meeting about conflicts that had arisen among a few of the members in which the work was unbalanced. The issue had become serious enough that the firm felt the need to call the entire staff together to discuss the problem. It struck this teacher that these were professional adults dealing with same issues that students deal with yearly when working in a project-based learning environment. We operate in groups throughout school, but it doesn't end when students graduate from high school. I feel that this first four weeks thinking about conflict resolution has just started something that could be really big.
After two tunings of this idea, both times I had a similar response by students. They asked immediately after the explanation of teaching conflict resolution to students, why don't I just be more vigilant as a teacher during group work? Both of the students who asked this question were 12th grade students at other High Tech High schools. The answer is simple. Students need the tools to be able to resolve conflicts on their own as they will spend the rest of their lives working in groups in some respect. I could intervene in groups as I start to notice conflicts arising. This might soothe the groups momentarily or even provide a bandaid solution until the end of the project. However, this does not give students the ability to resolve these problems on their own. One of these students asked somewhat rhetorically, aren't your seniors able to work in groups on their own. Before I could speak, the student I had brought to the tuning responded on my behalf. He shared that 12th graders may brush over the problems more easily or keep them hidden from a teacher. However, he felt unprepared to be able to resolve an issue on his own especially as he is going to be put in a new situation in college in which he would often be working with students he didn't know. I felt validated by his response, but at the same time, unsure of where to go from that point.
On our campus, we have a GSE intern, Geoff Roehm, who is a secret trove of resources. My hazy ideas of what the next steps might be became clearer as I discussed everything with Geoff. He suggested that most problems arise from students' needs not being met within a group. Taking the issue of Jon specifically, he explained that Jon had a need for creativity within their final presentation. The other group members had a need for a less challenging project presentation in regards to preparation time. They all took their positions based on their needs without recognizing the needs of everyone. These students did not have the vocabulary or training to reframe the dilemma and so they made a decision which left one student out, but the group still moving.
Geoff and I decided to put together a group of students to do a little informal research on the types of conflicts that arise in group work. It seemed that selecting the right students was a difficult task. I put together a seemingly random group of 6 students from my classes. I tried to use what I knew of the students to find a variety of different group personalities I have seen come up among students in the past. One student is a very driven and self-admitted perfectionist. She tends to dominate in groups and do more work than her share so that she can be sure it gets done the way she wants. Another is a student who tends to think outside the box and can get very easily off task in his group. He is well liked by his peers, but can get himself and his group off task very quickly. A third personality tries to soothe over problems within a group and keep everyone pleased. She will often do more than her share of the work in an effort to please her peers. Another student is a natural group leader and seems comfortable confronting his peers in order to get work done if necessary. A fifth student was brought in because he is extremely confident without being overbearing in a group. He admitted that he has only recently grown in his confidence. My final student is Jon. I haven't seen him yet work as a member of a different group.
We met during the school day, and the students seemed somewhat confused as to why Geoff and I pulled them out of their College Prep class. After I explained what I was working on, the room still did not feel entirely comfortable. Our first meeting was to gather personal narratives from the students. I asked them to remember a time when they were a member of a group or a partnership in which a conflict arose. We explained that it wasn't important if the issue was actually resolved, but to recall the conflict with as much detail as they could. No one spoke right away. After a minute of thought, one student offered his story. After this, the students took turns speaking for the next 30 minutes telling their stories of conflict. Geoff kept notes on the conflicts and we both asked follow-up questions to get a full view of the conflicts. After the meeting, we took the conflicts, and condensed them into 4 scenarios as some of them had overlapping issues.
One of the conflicts write-ups follows below. This is the edited version of what Jon shared with the group:
You are working in a group of five students (you and four others). You have been
given a project description that has some “minimum guidelines,” but leaves much
leeway for students to decide what they wish to produce. You begin brainstorming
ideas with your group about what to create, but two of the group members keep
asking why everyone doesn’t just do what’s on the “minimum guidelines” handout.
The other three members of the group clearly want to be more creative and go
beyond the minimum. The two students who only want to do what is on the
handout refuse to do any “extra” work.
With these scenarios, I plan to meet with the same students again and ask them to discuss the scenarios with another person and come up with a realistic way to solve the conflicts. I want to do this first without any explanation or training of different methods to resolve conflicts. The rationale behind this is to have a pre-training assessment of how students approach conflicts at this point in their student careers.
From this point, Geoff and I are going to work with these 6 students to go over a different approach to conflicts that arise in groups. Our goal is to develop this group of students so that we could give them the same four scenarios, and they would be able to look at them from a different perspective using the method of reframing the conflicts. The majority of this information is adapted from a book entitled Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton (1991). We will be using the guiding principles that: conflict is a part of life and it is usually uncomfortable. Additionally, there are both destructive and constructive ways to manage conflict. 4 of the approaches to conflict that have some component of destructive methods are: avoidance, competition, compromise and accommodation. There are different amounts of negativity in each of these approaches. However, we hope to train the students that collaboration is the ultimate goal for all group work. Collaboration involves both individuals attempting to work together to find a solution that fully satisfies the concerns of both people. It involves a commitment from both students digging into an issue to identify the underlying concerns of both people or the group and finding an alternative that meets both sets of concern. This could be approached by exploring the disagreement to learn from each other's insights. This approach would move the students away from competing for resources or confronting each other, and instead, trying to find a creative solution to a problem.
The foundation for getting to this point lies in understanding the framing factors of the entire conflict. The first factor is to identify the different positions. What are the stances taken and demands made. Next the students will identify the varying needs. This is the underlying reasons for the position taken. These could be tangible reasons or psychological reasons. The next step is to reframe the conflict from one of two different positions to recognizing the different needs. Once this reframe takes place, the students can work together to find alternatives based on the reframing. After training these students, I would like to revisit the original 4 scenarios and ask them to resolve them a second time using this new approach. However, after they do this, I would also like to ask them how comfortable or realistic they thing this approach would be. My speculation is that students will need an entire class trained in this method of conflict resolution in order to make it effective.
This leads us to our unsettled areas of this Put It To Practice. What are the next steps? Both Geoff and I have thrown some ideas around as to where we go from this group of 6 to expand. I am not sure if this conflict resolution training should be treated independently as a stand alone training or if it something that gets spread out in pieces over the year. My leaning is that it should be the independent focus of my classes for a while before our next big project launches. The advantage of this is that the focus will give weight to the issue. The disadvantage is that it takes up a large amount of class time (possibly 1-2 weeks) during the year when we I feel we should be deep into other Government content issues. When Geoff and I originally discussed this, we also considered taking some of the seniors out into the lower grade levels to give them exposure to this new way of looking at group work. We also discussed that this could be important for other staff members to be trained as well so that we could have a common vocabulary at our school.
In my second tuning of this PITP one of the other teachers told a story from last year when he was observing a meeting at a Junior's internship. The student was interning at an architecture firm. This architecture staff was meeting about conflicts that had arisen among a few of the members in which the work was unbalanced. The issue had become serious enough that the firm felt the need to call the entire staff together to discuss the problem. It struck this teacher that these were professional adults dealing with same issues that students deal with yearly when working in a project-based learning environment. We operate in groups throughout school, but it doesn't end when students graduate from high school. I feel that this first four weeks thinking about conflict resolution has just started something that could be really big.