Conflict is certain to show up in any school, so how do you as the leader know how to respond or when to intervene? Disagreements, friction, and even outright hostility are a common and unavoidable result of people working together, and not all conflict is necessarily bad; it can also provide an opportunity to learn and grow. Whether the situation…

For years, Marjorie Hass, now the president of Rhodes College, was approached by women in higher education looking for advice and support as they took on leadership roles and navigated challenging career paths. Eventually, she began offering online seminars so she could meet in small groups to answer questions and encourage women to develop…

While educational institutions and industry share some common elements of the administrative decision-making process, a major point of divergence is the treatment of conflict. In higher education, conflict is seen as destructive and should be avoided, but it can be handled positively. Types, common elements, and styles of conflict are reviewed.…

High performance teams allow conflict to surface and then work toward understanding and resolution. Often when teams are in conflict, they appear to be in chaos. What may be occurring is that the conflict has allowed the team to access new information, and what appears to be chaos is actually reorganization around a new perspective. Capitalizing…

Instrumental to successful democratic leadership is the use of committees to solve management problems. In democratic leadership, a leader encourages participation and uses a guidance approach to direct a group toward consensus. This document offers leaders guidelines in effective democratic management of meetings. The authors first discuss the…

Discusses leadership styles in two distinct situations--cooperative and counteractive. Effective leadership in cooperative situations depends on productivity, satisfaction, and cohesion in problem solving. Counteractive situations demand a political leadership style at home with coalitions, bargaining, persuasion, and coercion. Dynamic leadership…

Constructive tension can be healthy for an organization. Although win-lose solutions based on adversarial strategies are common, the management of conflicts in schools should focus on win-win problem solving, which requires creativity. Identifies collaboration as the most desirable conflict resolution strategy, and discusses conflict management…

This guidebook uses a question and answer format to recommend ways by which principals can manage 48 "conflict points" that often occur in a school setting. A preface describes conflicts as being natural and pervasive in the secondary school context. Although the principal is regarded as the responsible agent to reduce dissonance, the challenge…

Conflict is a phenomenon of human relationships that occurs when an individual's needs are not being satisfied. This paper explains why it is crucial to recognize and deal with conflict on different levels of education. Chapter 1 discusses coping with conflict. It describes several management styles (competition; collaboration; avoidance;…

This guide presents suggestions to committee chairpersons for making meetings more effective. The three broad sections of this guide address: (1) preparation of the agenda and physical arrangements for the meeting; (2) management of meetings to avoid negative outcomes; and (3) methods to overcome blocks in conflict resolution and decision making.…

Joint rural school-community projects are best sustained when developed by a collaborative group. The two basic dimensions of working collaboratively are team building and team planning. Critical elements of the collaborative process are: 1) community readiness--an assessment of community readiness should be performed, taking into consideration…

Managing a crisis and providing leadership in a crisis are not the same activity. Crisis leadership principally deals with how leaders handle the human response to a crisis, including their own. This book, in discussing crisis leadership, focuses on three questions: (1) Will the leader address the crisis head-on, take action to fix it, and, if…

Proposes a four-step plan for a child care center director to defuse a parent's anger: listen carefully; make sure the problem is well understood; acknowledge the parent's feelings; and explain the plan of action. Suggests that directors should let teachers and parents work together to correct and prevent problems. (AA)

Guidelines for improving educators' leadership styles in interacting and communicating with difficult people are described in this paper. Part 1, an introduction, discusses general conflict management techniques for teachers and administrators, some of which include problem prevention, listening, and understanding verbal/nonverbal messages.…

The product of nearly 20 years experience in the early childhood field, this book gives current and intending practitioners a better understanding of the nature of leadership in the early childhood profession and its effect on the professionalization of the field. It explores who is or can become a leader and why early childhood leaders are in a…