In a blog post a couple weeks ago, I talked about the first lesson I teach each year on sportsmanship. If you missed it, there was a free lesson plan as well, so here is the link in case you are interested. For truly understanding the meaning of sportsmanship, I have a mantra that I want the lower elementary students to memorize. It goes, “Be fun to play with, be fun to play against.” If there is a problem in PE with sportsmanship, I can use the mantra to make abstract notions more concrete for better understanding. “Are you being fun to play against if you always have to take a break before getting tagged?” “Are you being fun to play with if you are not passing the ball to all your teammates?” By incorporating the mantra as a question of their actions, I can quickly get the students to understand if they are being fair or not.
For the middle school students, we still use the idea of being fun to play with and against, but now we emphasize the importance of time into the equation. The mantra for the middle schoolers is, “Don’t sacrifice long-term goals for short-term goals.” In a sports context, we are talking about a championship versus a game. Doing something to win a game that puts a championship in jeopardy is not worth it. We could use simple examples like cheating to win a game, which could result in forfeiture or disqualification. We could use examples of positive and negative interactions on a team. For example, a positive word can enhance team unity, while harsh criticism may leave players dejected and not performing their best (possibly for the remainder of the season). We can take this idea out into the real world with topics like business, work ethic, education, relationships, investments, etc. Especially as our students are getting ready for the transition from middle school to high school, they are in a right phase of development to hear this message.
This leaves the upper elementary students, the middle children of the elementary program. They are more sophisticated than the lower elementary, but they are not middle school students either. What do we do with them? These students are simultaneously more independent than they have ever been in their life, but they are also latching on to friend and social groups more than ever before as well. These students need a message that helps them understand personal accountability in a more nuanced way than the lower elementary students. While I still use the lower elementary mantra with the upper elementary, I have been slowly finding a new mantra as the main question I ask when there is a conflict between students.
What was the intended outcome?
This one question accomplishes several things:
· It makes the motivation of the student(s) apparent
· It allows the exploration of consequences of one’s actions, especially using “if then” statements
· It gets all parties to practice empathy through a logical conversation of the incident
By asking the students this question, we get to really see why the students did what they did. Sometimes I have to simplify the question by asking, “What did you want to happen?” This reveals the intention to the action as well as the source, whether it was a misunderstanding, revenge, disappointment, etc. A common example is a student who criticizes another student for poor performance. After I ask them what did they want to happen, their answer is that they wanted the other student to do better, which would improve the performance of the team. However, criticism almost always leads to shut down of the dejected player. They either want to stop, or they perform even worse than before. As you can plainly see, this is the opposite of what the criticizer wanted, but that is what commonly happens. After making that apparent to the criticizer, we expound on ideas that criticism may not be the best course of action anymore. It didn’t get what that student wanted, and it hurt the feelings of their classmate. We can now explore alternate solutions because we know criticism in this scenario not only didn’t work, it made the situation worse. Additionally, the criticized student may be negative feelings centered on the criticizer, which may last longer than that day. This could lead to poor performance in the future. Hopefully you see how this bridges into the middle school topic of valuing long term over short term.
Let’s look at another example. After a game, student A told student B that student C (student A’s friend) said that student B was being a ball hog. It may take a second to fully process this scenario, and I apologize for the convolution. However, I bet many of you have had this exact experience of people interjecting themselves into other peoples business. When I asked student A what was the intended outcome of telling student B that, he said he was sticking up for his friend (student C). I started with the fact that he told him this after the game, so it was too late to change the behavior of student B. I also reminded student A that he did not personally see any of this. He was preoccupied with his own game, so he doesn’t know for sure what the truth is. I tell student A that it is still possible to be a good friend just by listening and being a soundboard. If student C really thought student B was being a ball hog, then student C needs to address student B (which he hadn’t). I asked student A what was the intention of telling student B that information if he knew he couldn’t affect the game since it was already over, and as student A fumbled with his reasoning, it became more obvious that the original intention was to anger student B. We were able to get through the surface level explanation and get to the root cause that this wasn’t just a friend trying to help a friend, but this was actually revenge from an earlier conflict from recess earlier that day. The true intention was to get under the skin, to hurt the feelings of Student B. This revelation made it obvious that their behavior was going to need to change if they are going to coexist in the class together.
To be fair, I use this line of questioning in the moment only half of the time, and the other half I use it during a peace talk or mediation session. If there truly is a heated conflict happening, the most important thing is to stop it, and to get the parties involved away from each other. Many times that involves having those students sit out of the game, as well as away from each other. Depending on the severity of what happened, as well as how involved I need to be with the game at hand, I either address the students independently to better understand what happened as soon as possible, or I go back to managing the game and those students just have to miss the remainder of PE if I am too busy. If I am not able to meet with them during the PE session itself, then I make sure the classroom teacher knows there was a conflict, and that a time will need to be scheduled for conflict resolution. Usually it’s the next day when tempers are not so hot, and we can fully utilize the power of, “What was your intention,” to force the students to examine the ramifications of their actions.
I hope that you found this to be a useful tip next time you are working with your students through conflict resolution, especially the upper elementary students. They have responded very well to the pragmatism of the question, and it has helped diffuse several incidents this school year already for me.