Week 5 Blog Assignment: Conflict Situations

My supervisor is a very sweet person, but I feel too passive to be in leadership. The incidents that she allows to take place in the center should not be acceptable. About a month ago, a child went home and told his parent that another child in my classroom hit him, so the next day the parent came to me upset and very disrespectful. After about ten minutes into the conversation, I could see that she did not want to hear what I had to say. The situation was getting out of hand; therefore I felt she needed to address her concerns with the Director. She went to speak with the director and about five minutes later the director came and got me. While meeting with the parent and director, I sense that the director had already taken sides. My director stated, “I should have been watching the kids in the first place and never allowed this incident to happen.” I stood there with disbelief on my face as to what she had just said to me. I already felt that she handles things very inappropriate and this incident was a prime example.

I’m not a confrontational type of person, and when I feel that I have to defend myself from a parent, colleague or any one for that matter; I intervene my director. It is her responsibility to resolve or deescalate a situation from happening or escalating into something bigger. And this particular day, she did not follow the procedure of an effective communicator. I would have allowed the parent to speak and express her feeling and later set up a meeting where we all should have been heard. This would have given the parent time to calm down and maybe rethink, before she spoke. But to come and get me out of my classroom to speak with this parent the same day; that happens to be already angry was not the way to handle this. In other words she escaladed the problem, by having this meeting with her being angry, and to add insult to injury, she made comments in front of this parent to make her feel that she was right and as the teacher, I was wrong. She gave this parent ammunition to believe she had power over the situation and that I was wrong for purposely allowing another child to hit her child. How ridiculous is that? When one person has power over another, that dynamic can cause one or both of the people to handle conflict unproductively (O’Hair & Weimann, pg., 201 2009).

If I was the director, I would have heard both sides individually, and then had a meeting with both parties in hopes of finding the best solution to resolve this issue. Instead she added more fuel to the fire.

Colleagues, how would you have handled this situation?      

  Resource

O’Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2009). Real communication: An introduction. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.