Managing Conflict for Teachers and Educational Support Personnel

Hours: 24 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

This course will prepare teachers and educational support personnel to better manage conflicts in the school environment, with a focus on student interactions.  You will learn what causes conflict, effective ways to respond to conflict, how to manage conflicts with your coworkers, and how to de-escalate angry parents and students.  Finally, you will learn about restorative practices and how they improve relationships in the educational setting.   The purpose of the course is to improve relationships, increase job satisfaction, reduce negative interactions, and equip school personnel with skills to resolve conflicts in ways that are mutually beneficial.

Students will:

• Develop an understanding of personal conflicts.
• Develop an understanding of how diversity affects conflict.
• Explore typical responses to conflict.
• Develop an understanding of your style of conflict resolution.
• Recognize the challenges to developing trust among education professionals in the school.
• Identify effective ways to respond to conflicts between principals, teachers, and support personnel.
• Observe ways to de-escalate an angry student.
• Prepare a positive discipline plan to deal with angry or disruptive students.
• Identify ways to deal with an angry or upset parent.
• Identify restorative practices that can be used in a school environment.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1:  Understanding the Nature of Conflict

In Lesson 1, you will develop an understanding of why and how conflicts occur based on human nature, needs, wants, and emotions.  You will identify some of the most common causes of conflict, and how people usually deal with it.  By understanding the nature of conflict, you can begin to recognize and prepare for potential conflicts in the school environment. 

Lesson 2:  Responding to Conflict

In Lesson 2, you will learn the typical ways that people respond to conflict, both good and bad.  You will then explore more effective and positive ways to handle conflicts that often occur in a typical workplace.

Lesson 3:  Managing Conflicts Among Educators

In Lesson 3, you will explore conflicts  among educators.  The school setting can be a challenging place with interactions occurring constantly throughout the day.  Many of these interactions happen quickly and require you to think on your feet.  This lesson will help you to become more proactive with the day-to-day conflicts that are sure to occur among teachers and other school personnel. 

Lesson 4:  Managing Conflicts with Students

In Lesson 4, you will learn ways to respond to typical student conflicts that can occur anywhere in the school, and especially in the classroom.  You will observe ways to de-escalate an angry student to prevent a simple problem from becoming a punitive or violent one.  As part of this lesson, you will develop a plan to create non-confrontational interactions with students. 

Lesson 5:  Managing Conflicts with Parents

In Lesson 5, you will observe ways in which parents approach school personnel when they are upset or angry, and explore effective ways to handle these types of situations.  The outcome of many parent conflicts can be determined by how you handle them from the start.  This requires mental preparation and awareness, both of which will be studied in this lesson.

Lesson 6:  Restorative Practices in Schools

In Lesson 6, you will explore ways to integrate restorative practices that can improve the climate and culture of your school .  Creating this culture requires cooperation between educators, students, parents, and members of the community.  You will observe schools that use restorative practices and the positive impact of those practices in their schools.

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.