Harnessing The Power of Conflict: Grade-Level Coordinators’ Experiences

Abstract

With the fast pace of educational change, schools are becoming too complex for principals to be the sole providers of leadership. Middle leaders, teachers appointed to a formal position of authority, are essential to ensuring collaboration in teacher teams. For teams to function effectively, middle leaders need to productively embrace conflict. However, little is known about conflicts in teacher teams and how middle leaders manage them. To gather insights into their experiences, semi-structured interviews were carried out in this study, following an exploratory qualitative single-case design. Results reveal that for middle leaders, the most difficult conflicts to manage are inadequate personal interactions and interpersonal differences, and most are solved with integrative strategies. In addition, a differentiation of integrative approaches is proposed by the researcher, namely proactive and reactive, which serve distinct purposes when managing conflicts. The findings point to a need to increase proactive strategies to generate collaboration in team meetings whilst keeping reactive strategies in mind to manage conflict when it arises.