Corner CAFE #6: Resolving and Managing Everyday Conflict

Nikevia Thomas:

Thank you for joining our Corner CAFE Community of Practice for Maryland and Pennsylvania practitioners. Thank you for joining us. Today’s session is on resolving and managing conflict. We are glad you are here with us today. We’re going to get started.

So, we’d like to take some time to get to know you all. My name is Nikevia Thomas. I am a Senior Specialist here at MAEC and I work on the CAFE team. And please, I invite you to do two things. First, type in the chat, your name, the state you are representing, the entity or organization that you’re a part of, and the role that you serve in that organization. And then we will share the access to our Padlet that we have for our Community of Practice. And you will find a host of resources there for this session and then previous sessions that we’ve had. You can access those there. To access the Padlet, the password is all one word: mochalatte. And then we’ll get started on some coffee trivia for our Corner CAFE Community of Practice.

Thank you Jessica, placing that into the chat. And please keep that link to the Padlet open. Hold on, let’s get started. So as I said, I am Nikevia Thomas. I am one of the facilitators for today. I’m a senior specialist here at MAEC, and then my esteemed colleague is joining me. Her name is Jessica Webster and she’s a Senior Family Engagement Specialist with CAFE.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Great to be here with you all today. Thanks for joining us.

Nikevia Thomas:

So MAEC, we are champions of innovation, collaboration, and equity. And here is our agenda for today. We are having welcome and introductions and then we’ll dive deep into resolving and managing everyday conflict. We’ll learn about Parent Support Teams and then there’s question section and then we’ll have a closing.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

All right, so just a few reminders for Zoom etiquette. Please make sure that you use the chat box to engage with other participants. You can click on the chat icon at the bottom toolbar on your screen. Please do not use the raised hand function. We will keep track of any questions that come through the chat and we’ll do a question and answer at the end so that any questions that you have can be answered. Next slide please.

If you are in need or would like to use the live captions, there is a button at the bottom of your screen or the top, depending on where your directions are, that says CC. And you can click on that to show the captions. And if you’d like to turn them off, if they’re on, you can turn them off by doing the same thing. Hit the CC button at the bottom and hit close captions to hide your subtitles. Next slide please.

Nikevia Thomas:

So, thank you Jessica. So I’m going to share a little bit of background about MAEC so that you can get a sense of who we are. So MAEC was founded in 1992 as an education nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to high quality education across culturally diverse, linguistically and economically diverse learners. MAEC envisions a day when all students have equitable opportunities to learn and achieve at high levels. And our mission is to promote excellence and equity and social justice. So now to hear a little bit more about CAFE. So CAFE, which stands for the Collaborative Action for Family Engagement, is a project of MAEC. And we are the statewide Family Engagement Center for Maryland and Pennsylvania. We like to say and are proud to say that we are, I think one of the only statewide family engagement centers that serves two states. We help build sustainable infrastructure to support healthy families, student community engagement and CAFE serves all educators from state agencies to school districts, excuse me. To school districts, to school staff and early- childcare providers and families to promote high impact, culturally responsive family engagement.

Here’s a little bit about the purpose of our Corner CAFE. So the purpose of our Corner CAFE Community of Practice is to create cross-state collaborations, really leveraging the fact that we are a statewide family engagement center that serves two states. We also see this as a networking opportunity to share resources and strategies amongst practitioners and across states. This is a community of practice that was developed for practitioners, by practitioners. Our leadership team is comprised of leadership and professionals at every level. And then we also emphasize on systemic, integrated and comprehensive family engagement priorities from the Maryland State Department of Education and the Pennsylvania State Department of Education with a focus on equity and inclusion.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

So with that, let’s dive into our topic for today, which I think is an important one for all of us, no matter what your role is in education or in the community. So we are honored to have Chris Wolfel back with us today. He is the executive director of the CIU20, which is the Colonial Intermediate Unit in Pennsylvania. He was one of our panelists in March. And this time he’ll be joining us to discuss managing and resolving conflict and to talk about a really wonderful parent advocacy and advisory group that he has at the IU. So without further ado, Chris, I’m going to turn the screen over to you and let you get started.

Christopher Wolfel:

All right, thanks. Thank you very much. And it’s good to see everybody here on a Monday afternoon. I’m getting ready to go on vacation, so I’m just counting the hours and days down here and getting ready to take off. So really excited, but let me get going here. Let me share my screen, make sure this works correctly. Let’s see here. You would think after all these years of virtual meetings, I’d be able to navigate this stuff really, really good. All right. So I’m hoping everybody sees that. So we’re going to talk about resolving and managing everyday conflict.

So just a little background about me. I come from a family that has pretty much taught me pretty strong values of respecting others. I think many of us, as we grew up through our experiences, respect is a really important word. And then my faith drives me to help others by one, listening, teaching, supporting, and also coaching. I’m married to my wonderful best friend and wife, Beth, who we’ve been together for more than 20 years and we have four amazing children, Noah, Jack, Grace, and Maya. And I’ve spent about 25 years here at Colonial Intermediate Unit 20 and started off as a bus monitor, believe it or not, and worked my way all the way up to becoming executive director, but have a lot of experience working with a lot of children with disabilities, specifically children with autism, and got my doctorate from Delaware Valley University. I did a little bit of side work consulting for leading with optimism and a master trainer in crisis intervention and prevention.

And I’m going to talk a little bit about that with managing everyday conflict, some of the lessons that we teach through crisis prevention and intervention to avoid that conflict or to de-escalate the conflict. And I’ll be sharing that as we go through today. So you might say what qualifies you to be an expert in conflict resolution? Well, I deal with a lot of conflict on a day-to-day basis through all my different various roles. So one, being the executive director of an organization with 1500 employees, over 8,000 students. There are a lot of opportunities for conflict on a daily basis. Also, I serve as the co-director of the Pennsylvania Equity Inclusion Belonging State Taskforce. As I said before, I’m a trainer in crisis prevention and intervention. I’m actually the vice president of a youth hockey organization. So if any of you have ever been involved in youth sports, I think you might experience a lot of conflict from time to time or see a lot of conflict with families and their kids and playing sports and those type of things.

And then also being a husband and father and married for 20 years. Marriage comes with conflict at times. So you have to work through things. And I don’t want to say negotiate or give in, but relationships are give and take, right? We know that. So when we think about conflict, just the word conflict, and if you look it up in the dictionary, it’s a pretty scary word. Up there in bold, fight, battle, war, competitive, opposing actions, antagonistic, divergent struggle, opposing forces, drama. See those words I have highlighted there? That word conflict really can push people back a lot of steps or it could actually beef people up to get ready for that battle and that fight. And that’s certainly is something we don’t want to do when there’s conflict.

So who’s ever been in conflict? So in the chat, if you could, just talk a little bit about, maybe put in some feeling words about how does conflict make you feel? And I’m just going to stop sharing and look at the chat real quick and see what I see. So how does conflict make you feel? Okay, anxious, frustrated, angry. Stressed, confused. Not being heard, not being valued. Uneasy. Yeah. So sounds like a lot of the words that you’re putting in here, the feelings that you’re putting in here are not feelings that are really real, feel good feelings, and that’s not a good thing. So I’m hoping by the end of this presentation that maybe you’ll see that conflict might make you have different feelings, maybe even a little bit more positive.

Let me go back to the PowerPoint here. Hopefully this works. All right, perfect. We’re right back in there. Okay, so a lot of you put in there feelings that are not good feeling words, right? Make you feel uncomfortable. So how about where do you see conflict? So in the chat, just describe to me where are the different settings, environments, type of situations that you’re seeing conflict on a day-to-day basis.

All right, we got schools, everywhere. Social media, homework with your children, community groups. Marriage. Okay. School board administrators. Yep. Family. Yeah, at work. So I think Jackie said everywhere. That’s where I’ve been seeing it lately, is everywhere. So in the homes, in the workplace, in the community, social media, I’ve seen it. Student versus student, when you’re in a school school setting, you see kids in conflict with one another. At times you see employees in conflict with one another. Teachers in conflict with students, brothers versus sisters. I see that, I have two boys and two girls. Brother and sisters sometimes don’t get along. The employee versus the employer. Family versus family, friend versus friend, spouse versus spouse. It’s everywhere. And it’s often, and I don’t know about you, but the feeling I get is like it has just escalated and increased over the last year and a half.

It’s really horrifying Sometimes when you go out into the community and just as simple as at a grocery store and you’re seeing people yelling at one another over something that’s very minor, it’s a little worrisome when you see that type of conflict. And certainly, in work situations and sometimes in our community meetings, people with different opinions on certain things, you see this extreme conflict and it’s a little scary at times.

So everyday conflict, you can’t avoid it. I pulled some workplace statistics. So if you look at some of these statistics, employees in the United States, companies spend about 2.8 hours each week involved in conflict and conflict costs a lot of money. So they’re saying that amounts to about 359 billion in hours paid that are filled and focused on conflict instead of on positive productivity. That’s two and a half weeks of productivity each year. And some of the polls that were put out there and is pretty staggering statistics that 85% of employees experience some kind of conflict. 29% of employees nearly constantly experience conflict. So that’s more than one in four people. 34% of workplace conflict happens among employees on the frontline. 49% of conflict happens as a result of personality clashes and egos. 34% workplace conflicts are a result of workplace stress. 33% due to heavy workloads. 27% of employees have seen personal attacks arise from conflict, and 25% of employees have witnessed abstinence or sickness due to conflict. 9% of employees have seen projects fail just simply because of conflict.

So in a book that I had, Getting to Yes, which I think is a really important book that I picked up off the bookshelf years ago, and this was from the Harvard Negotiation Project. So years ago I had an interest in law before I became a teacher. That was many, many years ago. But this is a pretty important book that really talks about how to work through conflict. And there’s a story in there that talks about a dispute between farmers and a national oil company in Iraq and displaced farmers in South Iraq banded together and they leased land from the government and used it as their last savings and borrowings to plant crops. And then a few months later, the farmers received a letter calling for them to vacate the land immediately because oil had been discovered under it.

So the oil company said to the farmers, “You need to get off our land.” And the farmers replied, “It’s our land. We’re not leaving, we’re leasing this land.” And the oil company threatened to call the police. And the farmers said, “Well, you can call the police, but there’s more of us than there are police.” And then the oil company said, “Well, we’re going to bring in the army.” And the farmers said, “Well, you could bring in the army, but we have guns too and we’re not leaving.” So you can imagine the tensions of this situation, and what happens next? What happens if this oil company and these farmers don’t resolve their conflict? They’re willing to go to war over this thing. They’re willing to bring out guns and violence to solve this conflict. That is not a good thing.

So whether you like… I’m not Republican, Democrat, I’m not pushing any of that here today. But one thing that I always heard about President Ronald Reagan was that he was very, very strong about creating agreement, especially when working with other nations. And Ronald Reagan said, “Peace is not absence of conflict, it’s the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” So we’re never going to get away from conflict. There is going to be conflict in everything that we do. The question is, how do we handle the conflict and resolve it and come to some type of agreement?

So if you think about everyday conflict, it’s not all bad. Yes, there are negative outcomes like mental health concerns, decrease in productivity, employee turnover, conflict escalation and violence. But there’s also positive outcomes to conflict. It can inspire creativity to solve problems. It’s an opportunity to share and respect others’ opinions. It’s an opportunity for collaboration and learning and actually to make better outcomes. Which is one thing that at the end of this presentation, when I talk about the IU20 parent team, the IU20 parent team, and what was created, came out of conflict. It came out of a parent and me in a conflict situation. And we had to work through that. And as we work through that, we have developed now a very beautiful partnership and opportunity for other families to move things forward and a better educational environment for our children.

So let’s not talk about conflict. Let’s talk about resolution, right? Let’s resolve things. Okay. So you see these words highlighted here for resolve, successfully clear up, find an answer, make things clear and understandable, reach a decision, find some type of resolution. When there’s conflict, we want to resolve it, we want to move it forward, and we want to clear things up and come to a decision and a resolution. So how do you do that?

Well, the first thing you have to do is you got to think about how are people feeling when they get into conflict? And many of you put in the chat things like anxious, angry, frustrated. Those are really strong feelings and important feelings to recognize. So when we teach crisis intervention and prevention through therapeutic aggression control techniques and therapeutic behavior management, and the author of that program is Dr. Steve Parese. One of the things that Steve Parese used, to help us understand why people get in conflict is from Dr. Nicholas Long, his conflict cycle. And Dr. Nicholas Long says, “Emotional crisis can be defined as an impulsive reaction to overwhelming stress or misperceptions.” And this conflict cycle illustrates how small issues trigger these avalanche feelings but can spiral it out of control into a crisis.

So if unmanaged, these overwhelming emotions can lead to impulsive behaviors that quickly escalate into a real crisis, especially when peers or adults aggravate the situation. So this is the conflict cycle. So when there is a lot of background stress in the background, including low self-esteem. So if you’ve been through a situation where you have not been successful over and over and over again, it becomes very, very frustrating. And I think sometimes for our families and in conversations with families, families have shared with me that sometimes they go into a meeting with school employees to find a resolution and they walk out, there’s no resolution, they get no answers, and they make no progress. And that happens over and over again. Well with that, on top of the stress that you’re dealing with in that certain moment. And we know some of our families are under an enormous amount of stress.

So all that stress is there in the background and that low self-esteem. And then something happens, a triggering incident. So maybe that triggering incident is a discipline referral on their child and they’re told their child has engaged in a behavior and they’re going to be suspended from school. Well, with that, all of a sudden now, all that stress builds up into these overwhelming feelings, whether it’s frustration, anger, anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen. And because of those overwhelming feelings, all of a sudden, somebody acts out. You make an impulsive behavior. You might yell at the school leader about this referral, right? Because you’re just so frustrated in the moment you’re not thinking. And with that comes a negative reaction. So now that person gives you a negative reaction and that just creates another triggering incident, which just increases the stress, increases the impulsive behavior to be worse, and these negative reactions keep happening over and over.

And I think we could all respect the idea of engaging in impulsive behavior. I know sometimes when I’m under a lot of stress, you just want to stay away from Chris at that time. I just tell people, “Give me a second.” I might go home from a rough day at work and I’m just like, right down to my basement. I need 15 minutes to maybe run at a high rate on my treadmill to burn off some stress because anything else that comes that might trigger me, is going to be an impulsive behavior and it’s probably going to be a bad behavior. You don’t want to see it come your way. So I think we could all understand and have empathy for when we’ve acted out impulsively and we haven’t been our best selves at times.

So like Dr. Nicholas Long and his conflicts cycle, stress fuels conflict, triggers small issues of disagreement, those feelings, they trigger powerful feelings. And then when you’re not unable to manage them, you act them out in that impulsive behavior and then others react negatively to acting out behavior. And the situation escalates very quickly. And I think many of you would probably know if I asked you right now, if I said when there is a conflict and there’s a disagreement and somebody yells, what does the other person do? You could just throw in a chat or call it out if you want to. One person yells at somebody, what does the next person do?

Speaker 1:

Yell back.

Christopher Wolfel:

They yell back. Do they yell louder or softer?

Speaker 1:

Probably louder.

Christopher Wolfel:

Louder, right? Okay. What happens with their body language, right? The finger pointing. The moving in, right? Do they move back or do they move forward and beef up their chest?

Speaker 1:

Forward.

Christopher Wolfel:

Yeah, they move forward and they beef up their chest, right? It never looks good, right? Those negative reactions and that escalates. That never feels good for anybody. So what we got to do is as adults at times, is we have to try to find a way to stop this conflict cycle. Okay? Stop it in their tracks. When you sense some of those feelings and that behavior comes out, instead of responding with a negative reaction, let’s respond with more of a counseling action and let’s try to help that person understand and bring them down a little bit of a level so that way we can get to the answers.

So one of the things that we try to practice here and we try to get all of our administration to understand this, is by taking the LEAP. And this is called Listen, Empathize, Agree, and Partner. Now, there is a program out there called LEAP that does formalized training. We learned this from a gentleman named Dr. Steve Simms, and he was from the Philadelphia Child and Family Therapy Center. And this technique is empirically supported technique for building common ground when people are at odds and it strategically side steps escalating to changes that lead to that gridlock and that conflict. Okay? Dr. Sims worked for the Philadelphia Child and Family Therapy Center. And a lot of times, when the doctors were sharing with the families about their children, it wasn’t usually good news. It was usually something like, “Hey, your child has this type of disability or this type of disease.” And that was really difficult for families to comprehend and understand and they would become angry.

So in that moment, Dr. Simms would come in and try to work with the family, try to counsel them and try to find ways that they can partner with the doctors so that they were working together for the child. And this was unbelievable when we saw this the first time at IE20, we said, “This would be perfect for us, for our teachers, our administrators, to really understand this.” Because many times our families are told news that their child might have a disability. There’s going to be difficulty, there’s going to be a lot of barriers, there’s going to be a lot of challenges, and that increases those feelings of anxiety and they’re nervous. They might be a little bit upset or depressed. So we want to help families try to work with them. We don’t want those feelings to turn into anger and then pointed at us that we can’t work together. We have to partner together to help our children move forward. Oops. Let me go back one. Oh-oh, what happened? Oh-oh what did I do. All right, give me a second. I might have just messed up the whole thing.

What happened? All right, hold on. I hit a button by accident. All right, here we go. Okay, we’re back. So sorry about that. So the first step is, to just listen. It’s to be quiet, don’t react, listen and listen enough to actually listen. Dr. Simms used to tell us, most people listen to respond. So listening to the person that leaves them that feeling, their point of view is being respected. And then reflect back to the person what you heard, because that allows the person to be more open to what you have to say. So listening is listening. Zip it and listen. And I think many of us know, I know, it is really difficult to truly, truly listen. And you could ask my wife, some days when I get home, I am not a good listener. I have things that if I said I was the perfect listener and you asked my wife, she would call me out on it.

So listening takes a lot of work, it’s a lot of practice, and it’s really something that you have to work on. But there’s three levels of listening, and we talk about this when we do crisis intervention and prevention with Dr. Steve Parese. There’s attending, decoding and reflecting. So attending is good listening is more than just waiting to talk your turn. It’s by communicating your concern and your willingness to help as much by what you do as by what you say. So attending is those doing things and what you’re saying to the person and truly show them that you’re listening. So if we go through this list here, right, interrupting constantly, certainly that’s not a good trait. Making eye contact is a good trait. Nodding at the right times, good trait. Quickly checking your phone, not good at all. Put the phone away, turn it off.

Rolling your eyes. Work really, really hard not to show that body language when someone’s telling you a concern that they have, okay, put the pencil away. Don’t tap a pencil while someone’s talking. But what you want to do is lean in, right? Lean into the person. Don’t check your watch and look for that time. Things we say. Things like, tell me more about what happened, is a really good thing to say to someone to make sure that you show that you’re very interested in what they’re talking about. Saying things like, “That’s nothing, you think that is bad. Let me tell you my story.” That’s totally inappropriate. We don’t want to do that. Acknowledging that something might be upsetting, that must have been upsetting. That’s a good trait. “Here’s what you should have done.” That’s not good. We don’t want to tell people what they should have done. They’re not ready for that problem solving mode at that point. They just want somebody to listen.

Saying things like, “You really need to get over it. That’s not a good trait at all.” What about her point of view? Right? That’s not good. We don’t want to know about the other person’s point of view at that time. We want to know about the person that’s talking to us. Looks like you had a hard day. I see what you mean. Those are two good things to say. So I could have went through here and said, what’s good, what’s bad? But I think you guys can see from this list what the good ones are, what the bad ones are.

The second level of listening is decoding. So, much of a speaker’s real meaning is communicated non-verbally or para-verbally. But good listeners learn to read between the lines and interpret what’s not being said. So this is a really interesting statistic here, that facial expressions and body language show us 55% of someone’s meaning. So we really want to be in tune to looking at the person that’s talking, that we’re listening to and really looking at their facial expressions and body language that’s going to tell us the most about how they truly feel. The tone and voice and inflection is the next highest level of meaning. So we want to listen to what is the tone of their voice. Is it soft tone? Is it an angry tone? Is it a sarcastic tone? We want to listen to those type of things.

And then the last thing is actually the words chosen. Their actual words have the least amount of meaning at times. So the best way for me to present this is, when I do something at home that makes my spouse upset, so this happens often with me and Beth, I’ll do something because I’m not thinking, and Beth will be upset and I’ll say to Beth, “Beth, what did I do wrong? It looks like you’re angry with me.” And she’ll say, “Oh, Chris, I’m not angry,” in a very sarcastic tone. And I’m like, “Well, Beth, you say you’re not angry, but I’m picking up from your tone that it sounds there’s a little bit of anger or frustration in there with me.” And then she’ll say, but her body language would be rolling her eyes, shaking her head back and forth saying, “Oh Chris, it’s fine. I’m not mad at you, okay?” And then I pick up on that body language and I say to Beth, say, “Listen, you’re saying you’re good and your tone sounds a little bit better, but your body’s telling me a different story.”

So we want to pick up again, really focus in on facial expressions and body language. That’s why it’s so important at times to meet with people face to face. The telephone sometimes doesn’t tell us the true story, emails and letters. We need to bring people together and talk to people when there’s conflict so we could really make an effort to resolve and really understand because we’re really attending to people because we’re decoding these type of things.

The last thing is reflecting. We want to paraphrase what we hear, right? By matching up what they’re saying with their feelings. And reflecting is really critical because when we reflect, we’re actually validating one, that we heard the person, but we’re actually validating that we’ve made a connection that we’re saying, “Yep, this is what we heard and this is true.” So we’re building up information so that we know truly, why the person feels the way they do and what is leading to those feelings. So it’s a simple formula of just saying, “It sounds like you feel…” Right, whatever the emotion is, because this happened. It sounds like you’re angry because we suspended your child from school. It sounds like you’re frustrated because your child isn’t making progress on their IEP goal. It sounds like you’re scared because your child’s having a difficult time and you’re not sure what’s going to happen next. We’re just reflecting back to the person. So we’re building up all the information that we know we can move forward and help them.

The second step is empathize. We want to try to put yourself in their shoes. So if you want the person to consider your point of view, you need them to feel you’ve seriously considered theirs. Okay? I’m a parent of four children. I’ve never walked in the shoes of any of my families that I work with here at the IU. Every situation that they’ve gone through is different than my situation or another family’s situation. So I want to truly try to listen and understand their point of view. I want to try to feel what they’re feeling and see it from their eyes. And that goes from not just working with families, but that might be working with another employee that might be having a conversation or counseling with another child, really trying to understand from their point of view what’s going on.

So this is just a little something that I found that I think puts that idea of perception. So you have a tenant and you have an owner. So the tenant’s perception is that the rent is already too high, but the owner’s perception is, the rent has not been increased in years. The tenant’s perception is with cost going up, I can’t afford to pay more on my housing, but the owner’s perception is, the costs are going up all over the place to pay for different types of things that I need to pay for as the owner of the building. The tenant says the apartment needs painting. The owner says, “Well, you’ve been giving it heavy wear and tear.” The tenant says, “I know people pay less for similar apartments.” The owner says, “Well, I know people who pay more for a comparative apartment.” Tenant says, “Young people like me can’t afford to pay the high rent.” The owner’s perception is, “Older people like me are on a fixed income.”

So you could see there that the tenant and the owner all have very valid perceptions, but they’re very, very different. And those type of perceptions can lead to conflict unless we truly try to understand where that person’s coming from.

The third step is to agree. We want to look for common ground. And when we find the common ground, even in the most extreme opposing views, we want to find that little piece and we want to identify those facts upon which we can both agree. And you got to ask questions to find those common areas. You have to keep the dialogue going. If you don’t have that conversation and you don’t keep it going, and two people walk out of the room, you’re never going to find that piece of agreement. So I’ve been in many, many situations, whether it was working with families, working with two employees at odds with one another, in contract negotiations, where there’s a lot of conflict and there’s a lot of opposing views.

But if we stay in the room and we keep the conversation going and we’re respectful for one another, we try to understand each other’s points of view, you’re going to find something. There’s always something that two people can agree on. And when you find it, you find it and you build from that point. You don’t have to agree on anything. And even if I had Caterina Campbell or Nikki Huggan, the two families that run our IU parent support team, they’ll tell you that, “Chris, Nikki and Kat don’t always agree with one another. We are in conflict that times, but we always keep the conversation going and we find things to partner on and build from there.” But you got to keep the conversation going. You got to keep asking questions.

And then the last thing you do is when you find that agreement, partner, okay? Partnership and collaborate on ways to accomplish the common goals. And when you do that and you start to have success with one another, that relationship builds. You build trust and it’s just a beautiful thing and you can start moving forward on working towards agreement.

So William Ury says, “Maybe the greatest power we have in negotiation is the power not to react.” And that’s the truth. It is hard sometimes to not react negatively to certain situations and conflict. It’s really, really difficult, but you can do it. Okay?

So what are good tactics when people argue? Well, one is lower your tone. We talked about this before. When people are at conflict, usually the tone goes up and the tone goes up higher and the tone goes up even higher from the two sides. If we lower our tone, we have a better opportunity to bring that situation down. We have to check our body language. We have to watch our expressions on our face. We have to sometimes maybe take a step back, maybe uncross the arms and have your arms open. We need to refocus on the issue. So many times people get in arguments and they totally forgot what they were arguing about in the first place. So we have to make sure that when there’s an issue and there’s conflict, let’s stay focused on resolving that issue, not create 10 more.

Sometimes, you have to let others assist. So sometimes you have to bring other people into the situation. For families, sometimes they need to bring in an advocate to help. Sometimes from the school side, we need to bring in other experts that are in the field to help with clarifying different things. Sometimes, families have to bring in their lawyer, and sometimes, I have to bring in my lawyer. Sometimes we have to bring others in to assist to try to find that resolution or help to work towards that resolution and allow others sometimes to have the last word. It’s okay if somebody has the last word. We don’t have to always be the one upper. And even if we end the situation and it doesn’t end exactly the way we wanted it, let’s just celebrate what we did agree upon and move forward.

So in Getting to Yes, one of the strategies they talk about is, separate the people from the problem and they say be soft on the people, hard on the problem. They talk about focus on interests, not positions. So explore the interests and avoid having a bottom line. Talk about invent options for mutual gain. So work together to find creative and fair options, develop mutual options to choose from and decide later. And then insist on using objective criteria. So try to reach a result based on the ability to make decisions and choices and act on them. So let’s go back to that really scary conflict we had earlier, right? With the farmers and the oil company. So they utilized LEAP, they utilized some of the strategies from Getting to Yes, okay? So here was what is next between this dispute?

So a question came up and the question came up because they hired somebody to come in and resolve this conflict. They needed somebody to help them resolve the conflict. So here was the first question they asked, how long will it be before you expect to produce oil on this land? That was the question to the oil company. The response was probably three years. The next question was, what do you plan to do over the next several months? And the oil company said, “We need to map and we need to survey.” So the next question is, what is the problem with the farmers leaving now? And do you understand that the farmers will have their harvest in the next six weeks and that represents everything that they own? So can you still do the survey and the mapping while they harvest their product? And the oil company said, “Yeah, we can harvest our crop and it’s not going to impede on the oil company’s prep activities.” And then the oil company said, “We hope to hire many of the farmers to work the derricks and produce the oil.”

And oh, by the way, if your farmers are producing the derricks, all that land in between the derricks is still going to be fertile land for crops. And you could plant your crops between those oil derricks and collect those crops. So not only were the farmers going to make money as now having jobs for the oil company, but they’re also still going to be able to harvest their crops with no extra payment. So it was a win-win for everybody, but it took somebody to come in and ask some of those questions so people understood and they could find that agreement.

So Nelson Mandela says, “All conflicts, no matter how intractable are capable of peaceful resolution.” And that’s the truth. No matter how difficult the conflict is, and in that moment you think it’s dire and it’s not going to find a resolution, we can do it, right? We can find a resolution to these conflicts.

So let me talk a little bit about where conflict got us into the IU parent support team. And Nikki and Kat and I have done presentations one hour, two hour just on how we came together as an IU parent team, how this came together with hundreds now of families that are part of this support group, which is fantastic. So this support group helps families connect. They connect through social media, they connect through breakfasts that we do together. They connect through professional development activities that we partner with the family group and our IU staff does some of these presentations. They connect through activities that are in the community now, like going to a local, our Phantoms Youth Hockey and going to a game together with their families and connecting with one another and talking. So there’s a lot of opportunities to connect. They support one another on a day-to-day basis. They learn and share knowledge with one another about what they’ve learned, whether it’s how to navigate through a challenging situation, how to get services and supports, who’s the right person to call at the intermediate unit depending on what issue you’re dealing with.

They’ve helped to find their voice in advocating for their children. These families come out to our school board meetings and they talk to the board of Education about their concerns. When we were going through COVID-19 and we had many of our children that had to receive services virtually, they were coming to the board meetings and advocating for their child about how we can get the kids back in person, about how can we support and get more resources. In the teacher shortage, they come to the board meetings and they’re offering suggestions and strategies to the board about how we can fix this issue in the commonwealth. They build positive relationships with our IU leaders.

So how do we do that? We do it through workshops, trainings, conferences. Our families will come out to our state and local task force meetings. As I said, they’ll come to our IU board meetings. We have IU20 family engagement events, whether that’s the breakfast trainings, our prom, our graduation, and they just contribute overall to the community. I put the website link there if you ever wanted to check it out on the website, there’s some additional resources. And there’s some really nice videos about what the IU parent team does.

So one of the things that we work through in this comes from Steven Covey and Steven Covey wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And we look at, here at the IU, we’ve done some training with Covey and we did a training on what’s called the speed of trust. And this is just a really cool quote that we found here is, “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” So we work really hard to build trust with our families, and that’s not an easy thing to do sometimes, but these are the things that we’ve worked on through the speed of trust. So things like talking straight, you got to talk straight to one another. Just throw it out. I say that all the time, just tell me how you feel. It’s okay. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. Just be blunt and straight with me because that leads to open and honest discussions.

Demonstrating respect, just showing kindness, love and being civil. So many times I go to meetings where I see people in conflict. I’m like, “Oh my goodness, just be civil with one another. Be respectful.” Creating transparency. When you’re transparent, it conveys trust quickly. Whether we make a mistake or something bad happens, it’s always important to be transparent. Using the right words creates restitution and conveys humility. Showing loyalty builds character, delivering the results, it restores the trust and build confidence. So if you’re going to say you’re going to do something, you better deliver on it. And we’ve had situations where we’ve had some of our administrators go into a meeting and they’ve said, “Hey, we’re going to do this.” And they didn’t follow through on time. And that disintegrates the trust. You got to deliver. If you’re going to say you’re going to do it, you got to do it.

We got to get better. So we’re always learning from one another. We learn from the families, the families learn from us, and we’re getting better because they’re learning. We’re growing, we’re renewing our programs. We confront reality which allows for open interactions leading to solutions. We clarify our expectations, which leads to our shared vision and agreement. We practice accountability, that establishes values of the work and actions. I ask the families to hold me accountable, and it’s really, really important. If we’re not doing it and we’re not meeting our standards, you need to let us know and hold us accountable. We listen first, which brings understanding and empathy, keep commitments which reinforces trust. And then we extend trust. We’re creating trust in others. So because there’s relationships with families, right, already established, those relationships then extend trust to other families. It extends trust to other staff here at the IU that maybe had an unfortunate situation and maybe it wasn’t positive and we’re saying, you got to trust us. We can work this out. That extends the trust.

And I don’t know how much time I have. Let me see real quick here. I’m just rambling on here. So it’s two o’clock.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

You are great on time.

Christopher Wolfel:

How much time do I have? Do I have-

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

You’re great on time. We have a half hour until we are done.

Christopher Wolfel:

Okay. Well, let me see if this video queues up. I just want to play this video from our IU parent support team. Sometimes it works on Zoom, sometimes it doesn’t. So let me just share this and then I’ll end and you guys could ask questions and whatever you need to do. Let me go back and try this. All right, if you hear everything and you see it just like… Somebody put your screen on and… Jessica, can you put your screen on if you hear it and see it, can you give me a thumbs up?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Absolutely.

Christopher Wolfel:

All right. So I’m going to click it right now.

Caterina Campbell:

Hi, my name is Caterina Campbell and I started the Colonial IU20 parent support team. I started the support group so IU families can connect and get to know each other and support each other. During the 2018/19 school year, we partnered with the IU20. They come to our breakfast and we gain knowledge straight from IU leaders.

Kim Wisher:

I think that it’s fantastic that Dr. Wolfel and representatives from the IU come and I truly believe that they actually just don’t mouth service us. They give us feedback. They are working towards resolutions in some of the items.

Amy Sefcik:

I was pleasantly surprised that Mr. Wolfel was actually willing to come…

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Oh, we lost the sound there, I think.

Amy Sefcik:

On how the parents feel and what our concerns were.

Kim Wisher:

They are good at expressing and helping us to understand that it’s not always the IU that I think is a…

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

I think we lost the sound again, Chris. Hey Chris, I think you have to unmute yourself.

Speaker 2:

Our relationship with families, leading to positive programmatic changes, which will improve student learning and growth.

Caterina Campbell:

I think parents finally feel like they’re being heard and that things are going to be better for their children.

Christopher Wolfel:

All right, sorry about that. I didn’t know if maybe you told me to mute because you were getting background feedback or something from me. I looked a lot younger then, I don’t know what happened, the last three years. Holy cow.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

The pandemic does that to [inaudible 00:57:13].

Christopher Wolfel:

All right. So I’m here if anyone has any questions, I’m happy to answer any questions. I hope that was helpful and useful.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Anybody feel free to put comments in the chat. Go ahead and you can also unmute yourself and share out if you have a question or a comment.

Christopher Wolfel:

I might have put everybody to sleep.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

So it just says, “Very, very helpful. Thank you for the LEAP and the cycle of conflict model. Grateful that you brought some of the best practices from the book, Speed of Trust by Steven and Mark Covey and how to utilize some of these easy practice.” And someone mentioned this sounds a lot like The Power of Positive No to Yes to The Person, Not to The Problem. Getting to Yes is another really great resource from in the chat.

All right, well, if we don’t have any questions, we would really quickly, before we do our next little piece, Nikevia, can you bring up the PowerPoint? We do have a survey that we’d like you to take, and then we’ll move on to our next piece. But Chris, thank you so much for joining us and sharing that experience with us. I think it’s powerful, the work that you’re doing with your parents in your IU in order to really build capacity and make sure that parents are really… You’re really practicing that whole idea of parents as partners in the work. And so we really appreciate you sharing that with us.

Christopher Wolfel:

Yeah. You’re welcome. And I’m very lucky and fortunate to have such great families in this region that we were all willing to take the leap together and work together. And it’s just growing and the positivity is growing. We’re not perfect and we’re still learning. And there are times that sometimes emotions do get high and there’s difficult situations. And I’m not going to say we’re always perfect here in the region, but I think we’re willing to hold one another accountable and I’m willing to hold my staff accountable. I won’t put up with it. So that’s important. But yeah, we learn a lot. We’ve learned a lot about our programs and enhanced our programs from the families telling us this is where you need to improve and that’s great. That’s information. Look, it’s not a negative. That’s gold. That’s how we’re going to make ourselves better.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Right? And I think one interesting thing about that work is that once you have that organizationally set up, it’s not waiting for an issue to arise and then addressing issue. It really allows you to be proactive and work together and identify ways to continuously improve, which we should all be striving for in a way that doesn’t have to be a complaint based model where you’re waiting for somebody to say, “We’ll keep going until somebody says we’re not doing okay.” It really gives you a chance to surface those ways to continuously improve in a positive way as well.

Christopher Wolfel:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

And I think we do have a question. Jessica Reid, one of our Pittsburgh…

Jessica Reid:

Hi.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Pittsburgh powered person.

Jessica Reid:

Yes. Another Pittsburgh person.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Go ahead Jess.

Jessica Reid:

So I have a question from the parent perspective. This was great and really a lot of helpful advice, but I have a question. If we’re dealing from the parent perspective with administration and a school board who views every question as a criticism, every attempt at engagement as an attack, any pointing out of anything for accountability as conflict, like our administration and our school board currently see conflict everywhere. That isn’t necessarily what we’re coming at as parents, but it has absolutely turned into that. And from the parent point of view in our community, it’s been really, really difficult to get help. We’ve had state agencies tell us, “Oh, this is too toxic of an environment now we can’t even help you,” and nobody can help. And as the parents, we’re not in a position of power. Parents are leaving. Do you have any advice on what the heck we can do?

Christopher Wolfel:

Yeah. So Jessica, I think the best thing to do is, my opinion is one, reach out, if you haven’t already, to try to reach out to the superintendent. And sometimes-

Jessica Reid:

The superintendent is the one who is creating the atmosphere.

Christopher Wolfel:

Ah, okay. All right. Geez, that’s tough. Yeah. Sometimes, a one-on-one is better than meeting at a board meeting. I have a parent coming tonight to meet with me tonight who has a lot of questions about what we do at the IU, and it’s from our local community and questioning the things about some of the work that we do around equity, inclusion, belonging, and we’re having a one-on-one just to sit and have a conversation. We’re taking away the audience and all the other people, and hopefully, that opportunity just in more of an intimate atmosphere, having a cup of coffee and just sitting down and talking. We’re hoping that we find some areas of agreement or even just to clarify maybe where there’s some confusion or disagreement. So, I even know sometimes when I work with our legislators, sometimes it’s better instead of going out to the Capitol and protesting or making a public display that it’s just, “Hey, let’s have a cup of coffee and sit down and have a conversation.”

Jessica Reid:

Yeah. So that is my preferred actual first approach. And when what you’re told privately is not what happens publicly, eventually, you have to get to the public situation. Okay.

Christopher Wolfel:

Yeah. And Jessica, I’ve had some schools in our region, and I don’t know if this is the exact tactic of that administration, but when people were coming out to board meetings and they were coming out with concerns in the school district in front of the board, what the leadership did at the school was they created a parent forum once a month to allow those opportunities to come in that forum versus the board meeting.

Jessica Reid:

Yeah. We used to have those and those have been eliminated.

Christopher Wolfel:

Oh, geez.

Jessica Reid:

So I guess my question is there a mediating body that parents could go to and say, “Hey, come help us.” Do a IUs do that? I don’t know. Is there anything?

Christopher Wolfel:

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if your IU would be willing to help with the conflict of a community and a school district, but certainly, I think an IU would be maybe open to creating a similar family group like we have in IU20 where parents can come together to partner and talk with one another about how to help each other out. But yeah, it’s difficult if the person at the top is struggling to have that opportunity to listen and really take the opportunity to try to understand what the concerns are, then it’s hard to move things forward.

I think all you could do is just keep doing the best you can to go to those meetings and be respectful and keep your concerns that are very objective and focused on why it’s not helping the children learn. That’s something that we all can agree on, is our goal is we want our children to learn and grow. And when there’s something that’s preventing that, well, then that’s something that needs to be spoken and people need to listen, but we got to keep it focused on those type of things. I wish you the best of luck. That’s tough.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Thank you for that question, Jess, and thank you so much, Chris, for having that conversation. It is tough when we feel like we can’t get that time to make that common ground, but I agree with the keep trying piece. Any other good questions? All right, well with that, let’s pull up. We do have a survey. It’s really important that you guys take a minute to take our survey for us because it really does inform the future work that we do. We have have one more evaluation or one more opportunity for this cycle of community of practice, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But we will be continuing these, hopefully into next year. And so the feedback that we get from you is really important. So you’ll see that the survey is in the chat for you.

And then we want to make sure that you mark your calendars. We’ll be doing a makeup session for one that we missed in May called “Teen to Tweens: Partnerships with Families to Support Secondary Transitions,” and that will be on July 6th, which is a Thursday, at 1:00 PM and Allegra’s still planning to put the registration for that. If you haven’t registered already, the registration for that is in the chat as well.

So we’ll take a minute so that you guys have a chance to do the survey, and then we are going to break out into small groups for a little bit today. We’ll do about 15 minutes in small group, and we really want you to spend some time in your small group thinking about an example of these conflicts and how you can use the LEAP model to solve those conflicts. And so, it’s a good time for you to connect with some of your colleagues between Maryland and Pennsylvania or other states and have that conversation. Welcome back.

Nikevia Thomas:

Okay, everybody should be back now. There are some people in the waiting room, but everybody should be back now. Is there anyone that would like to share some highlights from your conversation?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

We had a quiet group today, huh? Okay. Did you enjoy the time to be able to talk with each other? Yes, Jackie, I see your hand up. Go ahead. Thank you.

Jackie:

Yes. Actually, I was in the room with Jessica who had asked the question previously of Chris and I was sharing because she’s in Pennsylvania-

Nikevia Thomas:

Oh, you can come off mute.

Jackie:

That one of the things that Patton is doing around family engagement is offering systemic, like your school team can come in and ask for supports. And we have an effective team training series around family engagement where we promote the idea that you can’t just have a school team, you have to have school with parents participating on that team and you do a needs assessment. And we have found that a good, I don’t know if it’s like 85 to 95% of the time, the school will be like, “Oh yeah, we’re really welcoming and we have communication down. We think we need to focus on X.” And then they do the needs assessment to the community and the parents and they’re like, “Ooh, yeah, maybe we aren’t as welcoming. Or maybe we don’t have communication completely figured out.” And the nice thing is, is instead of saying, “Too bad, that’s how we are always doing it.” They go, “Oh wait, how can we improve this? And how can we meet parents where they’re at and start the authentic part of collaborating and working together.”

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Yeah. Jackie, thank you so much for sharing that. So anyone in Pennsylvania would have access to that information? I know I’ve seen it on your website, but now I don’t know if I can find it. Oh, here we go. It under Family Information, huh?

Jackie:

It’s probably under Supports. Family Information is like the direct family supports, whereas under the Supports tab, I think it’s teal. If you drop down, there’s Family Engagement in there.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Awesome. All right. I’ll see if I can locate that and put that in the chat for anybody who’s in Pennsylvania. I love it because I think that’s exactly right in that oftentimes as a former administrator, we do think we’re doing a great job and in some ways we are, right? But it’s that idea of being good at pushing out information versus making sure that we’re finding out what our families really want to know about and be part of, and also that decision making part and how do we make sure that families are part of some of the decision making that they can be a part of in our school system. So thank you so much for sharing that out with the group. Anybody else?

Cynthia-Grace:

I wanted to share that I had the joy of meeting Ms. Clarissa Rosero and what the beauty of it is, we’re so used to texting each other and you’re like texting at each other and sending emails at each other, but we got to have open dialogue. We found out we had so much in common, it was an opportunity. And so that’s the whole point, is building these genuine and authentic relationships. And so we were going to connect because she’s with PDE and I used to be on SPEC. It was just a wonderful opportunity. I thank you. It was beautiful.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Excellent. Thank you Cynthia-Grace. We’re really glad about that. And you’re right, sometimes it’s not always about waiting until there was an issue to connect with people, but making sure that we have those opportunities to network with each other just for the sake of networking and getting to know each other. So thank you for that. That’s wonderful. All right, so with that, any other last thoughts before we say thank you and bid you adieu and see you again in July? Okay. Please make sure if you haven’t done so already, that you take a moment to fill out our survey. And once you have done that, we’ll gift you back four minutes of your time for the afternoon. And we hope everyone has a wonderful rest of June and happy July 4th and we’ll see you in July. Thank you so much. And thank you so much, Chris, for your expertise and conversation.