Mediation and Resilient Students - Term Paper Example

?Mediation and Resilient [ID Modern life is filled with stress. Managing work, school, paying bills, obligations to friends and family, deadlines... these cause worry and concern. To manage these factors, it's essential to be resilient. Resiliency is an intersection between the environment and the innate behavior of the students, dialectically determined (Thomsen, 2002, p. x). Mediation is a technique that can be used to not only teach students more resilience but to manage the level of conflict and tension in a learning environment. Resiliency is an innate quality of students. Students are different in terms of their ability to manage stress, keep focus, manage their emotions and their emotional presentations, maintain their self-esteem even in the face of difficulties, etc. The trait of resilience can be determined by a number of factors: Feeling obligated to succeed or maintain one's composure due to one's duties towards family, friends or community; high self-esteem; good stress management techniques; etc. But resilience is also a consequence of someone's environments and social networks. Anyone can snap in an environment that is high-tension, high-conflict and stress-inducing; certainly, it will tax their resources no matter how vast. Conversely, even people with very low stress tolerance can flourish in an environment that controls stress extremely well. Further, even the toughest people are likely to become depressed or stressed out if they don't have a social network to vent to and use for relaxation. This means that educators in their quest to create resilient students have two goals. They have to teach students how to manage stress, but they also have to control the environments that students are in so that they don't have too much stress to manage in the first place. These two are obviously somewhat at odds with each other: Teaching students how to manage stress requires a slight bit of stress in the first place, as an inoculation. Teaching children to manage deadlines, for example, requires giving them deadlines, which can be stressful. There is also clearly a dialectical relationship between these factors. Better stress management can help people build larger networks of friends and relationships which can help with stress management, for example. Someone's innate characteristics help to influence the environment, and someone's environment can help hone, challenge or tax their innate characteristics. Mediation fits into all of this in several ways. “Peer mediation is a wonderful and effective strategy for helping students maintain their emotional balance... [E]ducators must set the stage for conflict resolution by setting clear expectations... Teaching students the skills for managing anger... comes next... Students need to know that anger is a normal emotion” (Thomsen, 2002, p. 114). Preparing for mediation, just like mediation itself, involves teaching skills such as really listening, anger management (learning to hold one's tongue long enough to get through a stressful meeting or process that can let someone get what they want), and so forth. Thomsen recommends “allow[ing] students who are experiencing a conflict to cool off” before attempting peer mediation (Thomsen, 2002, p. 114). “Remember, the brain and body are in an aroused state, and the rational mind is waiting in the wings”. Students going through the preparation process learn that preparing for mediation, negotiation and conflict resolution is just as important as the process itself. Further, mediation and the process of preparation for it helps students get in touch with their emotions. “Learning the intrapersonal skill of introspection will serve students long after graduation” (Thomsen, 2002, p. 114). Many adults don't have proper introspection skills, unable to deeply reflect on their thoughts, motivations and beliefs. This drives conflict: It is very hard for someone to avoid making others angry if they don't know their own behavior; similarly, someone trying to appease someone else is going to struggle if the other person doesn't know their own motivations, needs, desires and interests or is mistaken about them. When students get into mediation, they are forced to think, constructively, about what they want. Oftentimes, schools focus only on managing anger: Timeouts, detention, etc. But many times, anger is caused by depression, hurt, or other emotions (Thomsen, 2002, pp. 114-115). Just punishing angry behavior might give children a disincentive to be angry, but it might also get them angrier and escalate the problem. And even if it does, what does that teach children? It teaches them to stay angry, but just not to show it in any way that can be punished. There is no way to monitor all the ways that people can destructively express anger: Mean-spirited pranks, anonymous character assassination, gossip, emotional blackmail, insults, etc. Teachers and administrators don't have the time to watch for every single way students can express anger. Getting to the bottom of anger instead of just punishing students teaches them to be constructive rather than obstructive. And if we find that depression, hurt feelings or serious grievances underlie the problem, then we can solve those issues. This teaches children that, while anger is still not okay, finding a constructive solution to what makes you angry is. Further, some children have long-term behavioral issues caused by abuse, neglect or serious problems at home or elsewhere. A rule of thumb Thomsen provides is to be patient for one month per each year of serious trouble the student has endured (Thomsen, 2002, p. 115). Children frequently learn that, while adults claim to care, they don't do the follow-up work or show the patience necessary. Doing this not only teaches troubled children that people do care and do have patience, but also teaches them the value of this patience as well as showing their classmates the difficulties of monitoring and helping people who have had serious problems, all major life skills. Mediation can be done in two ways: Peer or teacher mediation. Thomsen recommends peer mediation (Thomsen, 2002, p. 114; 163; 92; 21). But both are clearly techniques that can be used. In teacher or administrator mediation, an adult or authority figure monitors the discussion and acts as a go-between. What distinguishes this from the normal, disciplinary model of conflict resolution is that the adult does not tell students what they want or what they should do but lets the students work it out, only there to keep violence from happening and to keep negotiations on track, to help the students formulate what they want. Peer mediation, on the other hand, has students, either a nominated mediator or a group, serve the same function. Mediation, like other techniques such as peer pressure refusal skills and crisis counseling, are about teaching emotional management skills (Thomsen, 2002, p. 92). “If we accept that the role of education is to prepare young people for life... then it would be safe to say that education ought to consider the emotional side of learning” (Thomsen, 2002, p. 92). And even if we only consider education as a way to prepare children for tests and exams, which no one does in theory but it seems many educators do in practice, emotional management is still necessary. Anyone who has struggled over a test and then was baffled at how they forgot all that information knows that test taking is at least as much about managing stress and emotions, preparing for the test taking as much as for the content of the test, and making sure that one can answer the questions one knows in a less stressful setting. The idea is preventative. When students only see disciplinary action, all they are learning is that conflict resolution should be resolved by adults or by force. This is obviously grossly inappropriate in the long term. Students are seeing the after-the-fact punishment of conflict rather than its prevention. On the other hand, teaching children mediation techniques helps them learn how to manage conflict and prevent it from ever exploding. Mediation processes teach a variety of valuable skills. They teach children to listen to other people, even if it's only to understand their position. They teach children to negotiate, to give up some things to get things they value. They teach children that, oftentimes, the other person involved has a legitimate grievance too. Too often in adult life as well as on the playground, one party assumes they are obviously in the right and proceeds by that assumption, even when they have done things that are problematic too. Sometimes, one person really is in the right, but students in mediation processes begin to learn that there are many different perspectives, different memories of an issue, etc., and that the other person may have been proceeding totally reasonably. Students taught to use mediation to solve their problems learn that they are the authors of their own destiny. Instead of always needing someone to step in and stop a conflict from escalating, they can do it themselves. It is empowering: They can not only learn how to get what they want from others, but also how to intervene when they see a conflict and act to restore order and harmony. These are immensely valuable skills and produce resilient students with skills to manage their life. Works Cited Thomson, Kate. Building resilient students: integrating resiliency into what you already know and do, Corwin Press, 2002. Read More