Teaching to Learn, Part 6: Power Struggles

Wow it's been a while since I posted something.  I've been busy with so many good things!  Writing and performing poetry (yes, for real), designing and building an irrigation system for our school garden, hosting a bi-weekly writing group, AND expanding/re-writing one of my blog pieces for inclusion in a BOOK!  A real book!  Right now I'm in New York for a couple of weeks, catching up with all the most wonderful people in the world who don't live in New Orleans.


This piece is meandering, hastily-edited, and not the most fascinating... but sometimes you just need to move on.  Bear with me, and I promise the next one will be better.


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The fireworks started early this year in Irvington.  In 20-something years of watching the fireworks show over the Hudson River, I've never seen them start early.  This year a lightning storm raged in the upper air above the Tappan Zee bridge, prompting the change in schedule.  Liability is the best timekeeper.

The  storm was probably ten miles away from the park, but from where I was sitting it looked as if the storm clouds had pushed up against the section of the sky reserved for fireworks.  To my left daggers of lighting lit up the sky every few seconds, and to my right the show got underway.

The lightning-fireworks combination made for the best Fourth of July show I'd ever seen.  Nature and artifice traded blows, competing for who would be the best crowd pleaser.  The best moments came when they worked together: lightning lit up a huge swath of sky and cut into the fireworks' airspace just as several rockets exploded.  What a spectacle.

As we left the park my dad saw a woman in a maroon Lincoln Towncar driving the wrong way down a one way street to bypass the crowds leaving the park.  He politely let her know that she was breaking the law, and asked her to please turn around.  She ignored him and kept moving, so like any problem-solving guru he tried telling her again, only this time louder and more forcibly.  She persisted, and as she made her was slowly down the street a small crowd gathered to heckle her on her way.

My dad had a few choices in this situation.  He could have ignored her entirely and left it up to the cops to deal with it or not.  He could have told her it was a one way street then let her decide if she wanted to risk a moving violation.  He could have tried to reason with her, or convince her more gently, but we were in a rush to walk home before the crowds caught up.  Instead he demanded she turn around, creating a power struggle: a situation with a winner and a loser.  She ignored my father and drove away.  Fugitive Lady - 1, Dad - 0.

Even though my sister and I felt a little embarrassed, I don't hold it against my dad for picking the escalation route.  He felt pretty strongly that she should have to wait to leave the park like everyone else.  It's easy to tend towards escalation and power struggles when your strong beliefs have been violated, even in small driving-the-wrong-way ways.

American culture encourages power struggles like that grumpy dad at little league baseball games - the one who just missed making the majors and now deals with his failure by channeling frustration into his child.  He argues every ball and strike, berates the coach if his kid isn't batting third, and generally just robs the atmosphere of fun like a forest fire burns oxygen (and for the record, my dad was never that dad; my dad hated that dad, and was always encouraging even though I was an awful ballplayer).

Maybe this dad doesn't even like being that dad, and he just doesn't know any other way to deal with his frustration.  It's the same with Americans and how we deal with conflict.  I don't think we like power struggles so much as we don't really know how else to resolve things.  It's easier for us to tell kids what to do than to teach them why they should do it; easier to rant and talk at than to listen and talk with; easier to let our emotions do the talking than to channel them first through our minds and hearts.

(I could broaden this point about power struggles to include the American political process, how we approach warfare (see: atomic bomb), or our love of competition in all forms, but I'd rather not today.  It's sunny outside and I'm on vacation, and I don't want to put myself in a bad mood.)

As a teacher I've struggled with how to resolve classroom conflicts: students interrupting, arguing, moping, ignoring me, acting defiant, hitting one another... the list goes on.  I spent most of my first year telling kids how to act, which often involved raising my voice, timeouts, and disapproving stares.  I was initiating power struggles in my classrooms, and I often didn't win.  But even when I would win, I wasn't sure that my kids were actually learning why they should act the way I wanted them to.  It's one thing to show respect, it's another thing to understand its significance.

In May and June I attended weekend-long trainings in Restorative Practices put on by the Center for Restorative Approaches, a division of Neighborhood Housing Services.  Restorative Practices are a thorough and extremely well thought-out set of techniques for relationship building and conflict resolution organized around a few of simple yet brilliant guiding principles, which I'm going to whittle down recklessly for the sake of brevity:

First, that personal relationships form the basis for effective conflict resolution.

Second, that harm done to people creates needs, that those needs must be met in a way that works for everyone involved in order for a conflict to be truly resolved, and that people are the best judges of their own needs.

Third, that non-judgmental communication and active listening are crucial for resolving conflict.  When people hear each others' sides of a story and understand how everyone involved in a conflict was affected, it triggers empathy and opens up the chance for a resolution that's realistic and persistent.

Fourth, restorative practices are voluntary.  If a person does not want to participate in problem solving, then they are subject to whatever forms of punishment, consequences or discipline that are otherwise in place.

In a classroom, that looks like this (highly abridged, but based off of scenarios I've encountered):

Mr. Sam: "Mikey, I noticed that you pushed Chelsea.  Can you tell me what happened?"
Mikey: "She was makin' fun of me so I pushed her!"
Mr. Sam: "And how were you feeling when you pushed her?"
Mikey: "Angry, cuz she was makin' fun of me."
Mr. Sam: "Who did you affect when you pushed Chelsea?"
Mikey: "Her I guess, cuz' she got hurt."
Mr. Sam: "Good.  Was anyone else affected when you pushed Chelsea?"
Mikey: "Maybe the other kids in the class, since they all saw it."
Mr. Sam: "Good.  Chelsea, who did you affect when you teased Mikey?"
Chelsea: "Mikey because he got upset, and you because you have to talk to us now."
Mr. Sam: "Good!  So Chelsea, what do you need to make it right?"
Chelsea: "I want Mikey to pick me a flower from the garden as an apology."
Mr. Sam: "Mikey, does that work for you?"
Mikey: "I guess."
Mr. Sam: "And Mikey, what do you need to make it right?"
Mikey: "I just need Chelsea to know that I get angry when she makes fun of me."
Chelsea: "I'm sorry I made fun of you, I was just teasing and I didn't know it would make you so angry."

Boom.  Done.  No yelling, no punishment, both kids were able to communicate their needs, and both had a way to resolve the conflict in a way that worked for them.  Relationship mended, conflict resolved.  Even better: by saying how their actions affect people the kids are actually learning empathy, a skill that can and should be taught.  Everyone wins, including Mr. Sam.

Using this kind of approach isn't an abdication of responsibility or consequences.  It's a chance for my students to participate in the act of resolving conflicts, rather than just being told how to resolve them.  It's a voluntary process, so if a student refuses to be part of a restorative solution then I revert back to traditional discipline, usually a timeout or a visit with the school disciplinarian.  Usually my students opt to have a say in what happens to them.

Having a process for conflict resolution that also teaches my students empathy is quickly becoming my favorite teaching tool.  It's also really, really hard for me to practice consistently.  In the training our facilitator told us it takes about eight times to learn a habit and about 28 times to unlearn it; I'm up in the 50-something range and I still lose my patience with students constantly.

It's hard to ever really unlearn that kind of behavior for good in a culture that teaches, practices, and even celebrates power struggles.  We make holidays to commemorate the ones we've won and to honor the people that died in the process.  We set off explosions to represent firearms detonating and marvel at their symmetry and sparkle.  Then we go home and make our own explosions using hurt feelings as gunpowder and friends, families, neighbors and strangers as ammunition.

Any time I can keep a student from yelling or crying or fighting it feels like a huge victory.  Long-run I'm hoping my students will have a set of tools to listen, empathize, and work out interpersonal problems.  I'm hoping that someday when their beliefs are violated in some small driving-the-wrong-way way, they'll be able to work through it without creating a power struggle.  Maybe they'll talk it out instead of yelling, since they've learned that yelling can hurt someone's feelings and make it harder for a person to listen.  Or maybe they'll just brush it off since the conflict was small and they'd rather forget about it than risk escalation.  Maybe sometimes they'll still yell or get angry and create situations with winners and losers, but maybe when they calm down and get some space they'll be willing to talk it out.

When we can leave a messy or hurtful situation feeling not only resolved but healed - when everyone can walk away feeling like a winner, or at least not feeling like they've lost - it's like the sky lighting up on the Fourth of July.