The Positive Side of Conflict

By Cindy Reitzi

December 2003

One summer when I was teaching language arts for a science program, I searched for a first-day ice-breaker. Stuck, I dreamed up one of those metaphorical clichés: if you were _____ what would you be? I settled on ice cream. So, I asked my students to draw themselves as ice cream, as in, if you were a flavor or flavors of ice cream what would you be? On the surface, it was benign enough, but what this exercise really revealed was diverse learning styles and opposing world views on product and process.

I laid out the markers and let them go at it.

One young man took out his pencil and approached the task delicately. As though creating a future Rembrandt, he lightly sketched the ice cream into a beveled banana split dish, then carefully blotted any smudges with a gum eraser. He lovingly shaded in the drawing, clearly savoring the process as though it were real ice cream.

Another student had a completely different approach: no pencil, full-frontal marker assault. He unsheathed his Sharpie like a weapon and slashed at the paper like Zorro on a good day. Within five minutes he was done with his fast-food metaphor. Voila! The product. In the meantime, my perfectionist was still conceptualizing in pencil, luxuriating with his thoughts like sipping a fine wine. Only after meticulous preliminaries did he even uncap a marker to color in his drawing.

As luck would have it, this summer program was organized around cooperative learning, and these alter-egos were in the same group.

Initially, I thought they’d kill each other.

“Rembrandt’s” jaw tightened with the other’s McDonald’s, slam-it-on-the-plate approach to scientific method. “Zorro” huffed impatiently with his opposite’s French five-course-meal plodding perfectionism. The perfectionist’s let’s-do-it-right-or-not-do-it-at-all clashed with the doer’s let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road-I-don’t-want-to-be-here-all-day world view. The conflict was as raw and palpable as a steaming carcass; the combatants, two salivating scavengers circling the same prey, ready to engage muzzle to muzzle. (And, not so ironically, both belonged to the “Animal Behavior” research group).

Just as the staff was laying Vegas odds on an alpha male chest-ramming contest and despairing whether “Animal Behavior” would get anything done, a funny thing happened on the way to the zoo. Left to their own devices and without adult interference, the kids figured it out. A seismic shift from seething conflict to diverse strengths occurred.

“Zorro” became the lead task-master of the group, keeping members productive and on track. “Rembrandt” brought up the rear detail work by crossing the i’s, dotting the t’s and ensuring intellectual accuracy. As it turned out, not only did “Animal Behavior” become an extremely productive group, but it wrote and presented the best paper.

Part of the requirement of the program was for students to conduct their own research and then write a scientific research paper with distinct sections like an abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. Part of the introduction included a literature review of past research connected to their subject. Pulling together sources and then writing them up in a flowing, intelligible manner is a difficult skill to get right, let alone in six weeks.

“Animal Behavior” incorporated more varied sources in a skillful way than any other group. With pride, we dubbed them “street kids make good.”

Unlike other groups, “Animal Behavior’s” conflicts were out in the open and eventually faced off at high noon. In the meantime, the initial “golden group” – smug, sophisticated intellectuals, who prided themselves as savvy in complex math and science projects – nosedived on repressed, behind-the-back internal conflicts that were never resolved. This cocky group slapped together a substandard paper with virtually no literature review and hustled to get it cobbled together in time.

The “Animal Behavior” group taught me a valuable lesson about conflict.

Among the vagaries of human nature and behavior, most of us abhor conflict. We avoid confrontation in favor of agreement and harmony. We just want to teach.

But sometimes we must have confrontation so that, on the other side of conflict, we can teach, and learn from our disagreements.

In the end, there’s something to be said about butting horns to clear the air. Better for clashes to bubble to the surface where they can be seen and dealt with. It’s the underground rumblings that rot from within.

Posted November 24, 2003