Customer Reviews

Creative Conflict Resolution

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Are you sick of settling arguments among your students? If you teach elementary school this is the book for you. I inherited the class that teachers dread. Constant bickering and temper tantrums inhibited learning for all the students and sent me home frustrated each evening. I was getting desperate when I found Kreidler's book. I have worked through many of the activities, using them for Social Studies (community), LA (there are many writing activities), Health (social and emotional well-being) Art, and Physical Education. The improvement has been dramatic! Young children love to learn words like de-escalate, negotiate, compromise amd mediate. Once they have the vocabulary and some practise, they know how to settle their differences before fists start to fly. There are some forms in the appendix, the most useful being a fight form. The fight form disects the fight and makes the children involved consider the alternative actions they could have taken. One copy goes home and one remains on file as a record of who fights and why. Very few students care to take a second fight form home. There is also a section for teachers dealing with difficult adults, whether it be administration, other teachers or parents. This book has helped bring peace and harmony to my classroom. I can't reccomend it highly enough

As a future teacher, I really found this book to be very useful. The book is very practical, not only will I be able to apply it when I begin teaching, but I am already using it in my own life. Children, especially must be taught to resolve conflict. When I begin teaching I want not only be able to teach my students conflict resolution, but I want to example it in my own life. This book gave me many great ideas, lessons, and tools on how to incorporate and encourage conflict resolution on a continual basis.

Creative Conflict Resolution and Elementary Perspectives 1 are activity based resource books for teachers to teach their students how to solve problems peacefully. Students learn that conflict can be productive and healthy. Kreidler discusses 20 conflict resolution techniques, and provides hundreds of activities and cooperative games for Elementary School age children. Many of the activities can be adapted for older students.

This book took me a while to get into. I'm a young teacher looking for creative, thoughtful, reflective ways to solve problems with my students. While there are parts of this book I found very helpful, they were buried in a lot writing that went on and on about obvious aspects of conflicts. There is a giant list of problem-solving activities that takes up about 3/4 of the book, but I feel many of them are intuitive and not as "creative" as I would have liked. I have to fish through to find the really good ones and kind of lost patience. I think this is more of a field book to use as needed than a "read through and take notes" book. When I have a specific conflict in my classroom that I'm having trouble resolving on my own, I look up the section in the book that addresses it to get ideas. I don't usually follow them exactly. I'm a much bigger fan of The First Six Weeks of School and the Responsive Classroom literature. It's more condensed, which I appreciate being a busy teacher.