One of the well-established ways of resolving conflict among schoolchildren has been to contact the School Reconciliation Service. Such services — it is a team of adults and children who have undergone special training. They were created in many educational institutions of the capital and are connected to work in when misunderstandings or conflicts occur between participants in the educational process: students, teachers, parents.
About how to help the parties the conflict to come to common understanding, saidthe curator of the reconciliation service of the school № 625 Maria Koroleva.
It is important to discuss the feelings experienced
If there is a conflict in the & nbsp; school, they resolve it like this: representatives of the & nbsp; & mdash; mediator (neutral mediator) and school volunteers — invite the parties to the conflict to the negotiating table to discuss their feelings, find ways to resolve the dispute and agree on how to proceed. The ability to express their point of view and to hear each other — the most important in any dispute or discussion. Give each party the opportunity to calmly express their idea of what happened, their emotions — so they can develop the skill of empathy, feelings of empathy.
The participants in the conflict can also be asked to describe each other's feelings: how, for example, in the opinion of the main bully of the class, does the person who is offended feel? Would would he like treat himself?
Calm space for dialogue
In during conflicts with people — both adults and children — emotions take over, they become unrestrained, speak in raised tones, interrupt each other. In such an atmosphere, it is difficult to come to a balanced and conscious decision. In the school reconciliation service, a meeting of the participants is scheduled some time after the conflict, at a separate, convenient time for everyone, in order to be able to calmly sort out the situation. To avoid the tension of the situation, the mediator — neutral agent — controls the conversation, does not allow to interrupt each other, move on to insults, screams and other outbursts of emotions. Thus, the participants form an understanding that any issue can be resolved without hysterics, with a "cold" head and respect for all sides of the process.
Seeking a compromise
For a long time it was believed that the solution of children's disputes — the prerogative of exclusively adults, because only they, from the height of their experience, can decide who is right and who is wrong. Over the course of the reconciliation services, curators noticed that children are often much more willing to share their experiences with each other, with their peers — with they feel “on equal”, while while the figure of an adult is perceived as as a"judge", who deals exclusively with moralizing. This suggests that the searching for a compromise in dispute should involve not only adults — parents and teachers, but and peers who can assess the situation with their, "children" points of view.
The school reconciliation service practices a restorative approach, the idea of which is that, instead of the traditional punishment of the offender, children seek to build a dialogue themselves and find a solution to the conflict, and not shift responsibility for ;this is for adults.
To learn more about school reconciliation services and the restorative approach, visit the website of the City Psychological and Pedagogical Center of the Metropolitan Department of Education and Science.