Today’s post is a joint effort by Uzay Ashton (@UzayAshton, blog) and Louie Barnett (@louiebarnett123)
In today’s Tech Mentor meeting at UWCSEA, we were asked: “Do our students/peers know how to approach conflict?”. We were forced to answer yes or no (no sitting on the fence, arghhh!) and could use 8-10 words to explain our answer. No pressure! Here are our responses:
| Uzay | Louie |
| No, because they’ve not learned how to negotiate it | No. People struggle to approach conflict and need support to do this |
As you can see, we both had similar viewpoints (phew, no conflict).
We then listened to an awesome podcast about conflict avoiders and conflict seekers, linked here. You can see our written notes about the podcast below:
Some our thoughts whilst listening to the podcast
We then had a 5 minute conversation on what we heard in the podcast. You can find the recording of this here.
This led us, ultimately, to have a few questions that we would love some help in answering!
Dear Louie,
Thank you so much for sharing this. Apologies for being a month too late to join in this class activity.
The most important take-away I have about this conversation is that conflict shouldn't be viewed as a taboo (something to avoid at all costs or merely to allude to vaguely) or even something that should come to a resolution immediately.
Instead, I see it now as a necessary point of growth. It makes me think of times when there is an opposing viewpoint during something as low-risk as a meeting to moderate exams. Surely, listening to someone's perspective should open myself up to more ideas of how to provide feedback for my students. And as such, my providing the alternative shouldn't feel like a form of disloyalty to fellow teachers/friends. Instead, to see that paying "devil's advocate" is also one of the functions of a colleague and friend.
I appreciate this reflection point a lot.
Many thanks,
Vanessa