Peer Mediation For Conflict Resolution

Resolving conflicts with others may be life's greatest social emotional skill. Avoiding conflict, seeking conflict, mishandling conflict is tough for many an adult (raises hand). It's especially hard for kids who are also mastering a long list of other social emotional skills like self-regulation, managing strong feelings, and problem solving. Because of this, I've avoided peer mediation. Also, because I'm lazy because here's the thing - peer mediation is hard. It's not easier than handling it yourself. But it is valuable. It empowers your mediators as leaders but it also empowers the students resolving conflict to seek help from peers and to handle this tough thing.

As always, I've tried to include everything you need here to get you started. If you're interested in purchasing the materials ready made, you can find them on my TpT store all nicely organized for you.

Counseling Lessons on Conflict Resolution

Always start with core! We want our peer mediators to be wonderful conflict resolution leaders but that will work best if all students have the skills. In this series, we'll teach 2 classroom lessons on handling emotions and resolving conflict. 

Lesson 1

• Intro feelings - feelings can be big or small. Give students a list of feelings and ask them to rank in order of intensity. For example: bummed, disappointed, mad, angry, furious
• Domino Effect - show a cool video of dominos. Explain the concept of "domino effect" - it can seem inevitable, but remove one domino and the whole thing stops. This can happen with emotions too! 
• Cause and Effect - we each have actions that are related to emotions. For example, you are angry, you might shout; you are sad, you might cry, you are annoyed, you might roll your eyes. Some actions are healthy and some are unhealthy. We might need to use strategies to stop the dominos when we have unhealthy actions related to behavior. 
• Brainstorm Strategies - ask students to write strategies they use for managing emotions. Collect all post-its. Place posters around the room with different emotions and redistribute (appropriate) post-its to groups of students. Ask them to connect strategies to the feelings that would be the best fit. For example, deep breaths for angry or talk it out for nervous. 
• Role Play - if you have time, consider a role play to practice different strategies!

Lesson 2

• In this lesson, I wanted to concentrate on the steps for problem solving that we will use for peer mediation. 
• Intro: Describe conflict and understand that friends can have conflict and remain friends. Classmates can have conflict and still work together again. 
• Conflict Resolution: We used these steps for conflict resolution - 1) cool off 2) share & listen 3) brainstorm solutions 4) choose a solution 5) affirm, thank, or forgive
• Walk through each step using an example conflict and practice, practice, practice!
• Intro peer mediation and ask students to apply if interested

Peer Mediation

Let the fun begin! When peer mediators are selected, they participate in 3 small group lessons to practice their mediation skills and learn what it means to be a peer mediator. The entire peer mediation process will vary greatly from school to school based on logistics, so I've tried to include some ideas to help you think it through. 

Peer Mediation Practice 1
The first practice lesson includes an inclusion activity and introductions. At this time, we establish norms and really work on working as a team. We spend time thinking about the importance of reputation of peer mediators:

• What does reputation mean?
• Why is reputation important?
• What characteristics make a good mediator?
• What does confidentiality mean?
• Is condifentiality important for peer mediators? Why?

As a culminating activity, we make posters advertising peer mediation to hang when we're ready to start accepting "clients."

Peer Mediation Practice 2
Time to practice! Using the steps of conflict resolution from Lesson 2, we practice peer mediation in groups of three. One person is the role play peer mediator and two people play participants. Each group will have the same scenario for each of three rounds. I created "Let's Resolve our Conflict" table tents to support the process. Following each round, prompt students to give feedback on the role play with sentence starters:

• It was really helpful when you __________________.
• I was confused when __________________.
• An idea to make our session even better is ________________.

In scenario 3, I tried to create a tough situation where the peer mediator may need to seek help from an adult. Some groups won't reach that conclusion but most of the time, at least one group will need help. This is a reason to celebrate! They will need help sometimes and that's OK. 

Peer Mediation Practice 3
We're ready for nuts and bolts. For practice 3, we go over the process and expectation for peer mediation. The process for peer mediation is very unique to your setting. Here are some prompts to consider when introducing process to your students:

• How will students self-refer to peer mediation?
• Can staff members refer students to peer mediation? can administrators choose peer mediation as a result of a discipline referral if both students agree to it?
• When will peer mediation take place?
• How will you document which students participate and the outcome of their participation?
• How long will each peer mediation last?
• What is the schedule for peer mediators? Will multiple sessions occur at once or will mediators rotate through one at a time?
• Do you plan to use conflict resolution notes (taken by mediators during the session), agreement cards (participants write their agreement as a reminder), post-resolution surveys?

​Finally, we spend some more time practicing with mediators thinking up their own scenarios. If you feel like your mediators aren't ready, add more practice sessions until they are!

The Goal of Peer Mediation

I think it's important to consider the goal of peer mediation when reflecting on its success. For a long time, I thought it was supposed to be a time saver for me - that students working with other students would help me to get more conflicts resolved with less time. Yeah, that is definitely not the case. Most of the time, it's the same amount of work but, this time, students are getting more out of it because the goal is really learning to resolve conflicts independently. It's actually not about me, go figure. 

As always, I've tried to include everything you need here to get you started. If you're interested in purchasing the materials ready made, you can find them on my TpT store all nicely organized for you.