Q. 5 Write notes on the following:
Course: School Leadership
Course Code 8618
Topics
- Shaping Norms and Values
- Conflict Management and the right school culture
i. Shaping Norms and Values
Answer:
This is a very broad question, but
something I’ve been intensely interested in. The most general answer would be,
I think, silently. We tend to think of ourselves as more or less autonomous individuals
making decisions based on abstract or rational grounds that would seem to be clear
to us in posterior analysis. But I feel that if you dig deep enough, you’ll
always find things that escape the basis on which you assume your decisions are
made. Most of this new, obscure level of behavior determinants could be
understood as “values, meanings and norms”. There’s a very dynamic new field of
economic thought called Institutional economics which is concerned with this
very issue:
how much better can we
understand the economy if we take not the individual, but institutions as the
central category?
What fascinates me most about this
approach is it's interdisciplinary. It opens up conventional economics to a
long-needed dialogue with the other human sciences. Sociology is the first one
to come back to the game – institutionalism was born with Torstein Veblen, and
it has always surprised me a little that economics keeps on using notions
like rationality and equilibrium after all that sociologists have written in
the last century. Understanding meaning, in turn, requires coming to terms with
the truly revolutionary philosophical thought in linguistics that follows
Wittgenstein and Saussure. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to bring psychology –particularly psychoanalysis – to the field. The unconscious can be
understood as the place beyond reason and abstraction in which things like
institutions take hold. In the continental tradition, in particular, the Laconia
notion of The Symbolic can be seen as the first step in bringing together individual
behavior and the entire system of meaning in which the individual is formed,
and through which it functions.
ii. Conflict Management and the right school culture
Answer:
Sequel to the variability and
dynamism of individual cherished values, core objectives, and dire needs which
most times do not always go pari – pasu, conflict occurrences in organizations
like schools become aggregately inevitable. Thus, the teacher’s onus as an in
loco-parentis in managing such inevitable conflict becomes grossly unavoidable.
However, for the teacher to possess the disposition to manage such conflicts
effectively in schools, a clear understanding and interpretation of conflict
issues are requisite. Such an understanding is direly needed by the teacher to be able to address the given encumbrances that may be spotted in the
interaction among parties.
Conflict management in schools, as it relates to teachers, pertains to a given condition whereby teachers acquire
programmed and patterned mediums through which they can twig and deal decisively
with conflict as a way of embellishing conditions of conflict in schools at all
times. There are paradigms for elucidating the causes of those conflict
conditions that require effective management in schools, just as there is a cornucopia of avenues available to the teacher through which conflict within
the precinct of schools could be managed. Those paradigms are what we shall
attempt to explore in this paper.
In the classroom and by extension,
school precinct, certain students-defiant behaviors could be
tolerated while some are and will remain insufferable, for example; fighting in
the classroom, answering phone calls in the classroom at the peak of the
lesson, abusing and physically confronting the teacher, stealing, so many to
mention but a few. Although such conflict-causing scenarios could be
considered to be an integral part of every school system, the teacher’s role in
preventing or even ameliorating their occurrences, especially the ones that are
seen to be internecine remains pivotal.
Conflict in school is said to occur
when one party perceives the action of another party as encumbering the
opportunity for the attainment of a goal. Hence, for conflict to actually occur
in schools, two salient prerequisites must be satisfied, viz; perceived goal
incompatibility and perceived opportunity for interference or blocking Conflict
in schools can be objective or subjective, violent or nonviolent, and positive
or negative (Schmidt and Kochan, 1972) in (NUCUP, 2006). But whatever may be
the case, the teacher’s rejoinder to them can either be assertive or cooperative
in nature. Also, such school conflicts may constitute either a prominent
debilitating or enchanting effect on the victims.
The concept of conflict management in
schools is perhaps an admission of the reality that conflict in schools is
inevitable, but that not all conflicts can always be resolved; therefore, what
the teacher can do is to manage and regulate them, thus the teacher’s role as
an in loco-parentis. It is also worthy of note to assert that School conflict
management is inclusive of other discrepant variances of conflict management
models which are in most cases at the disposal of the teacher.
In this instance, when we talk about
conflict management in school and the role of the teacher, we simply mean
those responses that the teacher makes to deal with the conditions
that can encumber the realization of the aggregate objective of the school and
the teacher’s instructional and/or behavioral classroom lesson objective.
The classification of conflict as it
pertains to internal school systems can be between; students and fellow
students, Teachers, non-academic staff and teachers, management and teachers, management,
non-academic staff and management, non-academic staff, students and
non-academic staff and students and management. But for the purpose of this
paper, we shall limit our scope or consideration to conflicts between students,
teachers, students, and teachers.
In this article, we shall commence
with the conceptual and theoretical explication of the key concepts of the
discourse which are; conflict management, conflict, school, and the teacher. We shall
also establish the causes of school conflict, state the reason why we need to
manage conflict in schools, express some of the contributory roles the teacher
could play in the school conflict management process, advance some specific
recommendations, and finally present our concluding remarks.
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