School leaders have a responsibility to help students and teachers understand the challenges of post-pandemic learning and, more importantly, the solutions to these problems.
Post-pandemic children who entered middle school experienced half of their school years in total social isolation. This inhibited the natural development that occurs in typical social situations. From walking the school hallways with their peers to eating lunch together and playing semi-organized games at recess, children missed out on moments that help them learn to resolve typical day-to-day conflicts. This has perpetuated an escalation in the conflict beyond the ordinary. Tensions rise as children struggle to know how to interact with each other on a daily basis, without the benefit of learning this earlier in school.
It was inevitable that the conflict would present a post-pandemic challenge in the absence of instrumental social interactions. School communities are busy trying to get back to the “normal” business at hand. We spend the day teaching children, meeting assessment and performance milestones, running to the sound of bells, responding to curricular demands, and preparing students for the rigors of the day. Parents are also looking forward to getting their children back into the school routine. However, we must realize that these children require a different type and level of care.
Normal conflict is resolved between individuals in hundreds of interactions throughout a day. However, schools have seen an increase in typical conflicts spiraling in unusual and accelerated ways. Viewers demand harsh discipline for unresolved conflicts. While discipline is necessary for accountability, it is not the solution, at least not on its own. Teaching children to learn through conflict is a valuable lifelong skill with focus for the future.
Find effective and practical solutions
Discipline focuses on the past. As school leaders, we must ensure that children move forward in these situations to minimize behavioral overreactions, and not regress into regressive actions.
Post-pandemic kids need more. We cannot effectively support them until we stop blaming schools, leaders, teachers, and parents and start treating students in ways that allow them to return to healthy well-being and success. consider this video (opens in a new tab) from a director who resigned frustrated by this problem. We must stop demonizing each other and work together to find solutions.
There are practical ways of doing this available and we must be vigilant about sensitive evidence. Incorporating effective approaches to help post-pandemic children recover from the absence of social interactions is a refreshing response. These are evidence-based classroom practices for teaching conflict resolution, with a focus on recognizing that blame cannot enable progress, but solutions can and will.
Approaches to help post-pandemic students learn to resolve conflict constructively
1. Move children away from primal reactions and into deep-focus logic.
The main causes of the escalation of student conflicts have been simultaneous social isolation and overexposure to negative social networks. In recent years, children have spent too much time online and physically alone. I have written about reverse digital disruption for students (opens in a new tab) previously.
To help children regain social skill sets for managing conflict, steer them away from primary thought processes, often triggered by negative social media, and allow students to focus and have deep logic. This can be achieved by use tools and resources within classroom contexts (opens in a new tab). This serves the dual purpose of teaching children higher levels of cognition and empowering teachers to harness this mindset to help them achieve better results.
2. Find wins and accept failure
It’s human nature to crave a sense of accomplishment, which can provide deep satisfaction. Equipping students with the necessary tools to experience the satisfaction of their successes allows them to get inspired by small victories (opens in a new tab). By encouraging opportunities to recognize micro-wins, students can visualize their progress and be more motivated to pursue further success. This also helps resilience, an additional skill that is lacking in the context of social isolation.
Students can benefit from learning that successful people actually fail more often than unsuccessful people. The difference is that successful people refuse to give up and eventually stumble upon their successes. Unsuccessful people throw their hands in the air and stop at the first or first signs of a struggle. Working through failure can ultimately spur creativity and innovation. (opens in a new tab).
3. Induce empathy and civility practices
When we empathy engineer, the frontal lobe of the brain lights up, activating a higher state of mind. That’s good news because this part of the brain is the most highly evolved. We sift and classify problems, spark creativity, and you guessed it, resolve conflict effectively. Within this critical thinking area of our brain, we engage in higher order thinking and learning. That’s a win-win for the students.
Civility makes us smarter. As Porath explains, “Lack of civility robs cognitive resources, hijacks performance and creativity, so even if you want to perform at your best, you can’t.” Test: Those exposed to words associated with rudeness do not 17 percent worse on an information retrieval test and missed 43 percent more math errors. Soon, being rude, as in overreacting to conflict makes us less intelligent (opens in a new tab). A lot less.
By implementing practices that promote resilience, empowering small victories, and in-class practices such as using technology tools to sharpen the mind, students can overcome their challenges. That’s a huge victory for post-pandemic children who suffered from social exclusion for far too long. Here’s how we can speed up their recovery and help them succeed.
