Shared Solutions – A Guide to Preventing and Resolving Conflicts (in Special Ed)

The Ontario Ministry of Education encourages the use of approaches and strategies that lead to higher achievement for all students in Ontario’s publicly funded education system. This Shared Solutions resource guide is intended to help parents, educators, and students with special education needs work together to prevent conflicts, resolve them quickly, and allow students to develop their full potential and succeed in school. The approaches outlined build on techniques and strategies for conflict prevention and resolution that are already in place in many school boards.

Exploring Humanitarian Law Curriculum Package

Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL) is an adaptable toolkit that gives educators easy-to-use materials to expose students to issues of international humanitarian law, the rules that ensure respect for life and human dignity in war. The toolkit offers educators primary source materials and strategies that reinforce and enrich existing curricula and educational programs. The full curriculum is available for download as a 360+ page pdf.

Humanitarian law is a body of international law that aims to protect human dignity during armed conflict and to prevent or reduce the suffering and destruction that results from war. All nations are party to the Geneva Conventions, and therefore have a legal obligation to encourage the study of humanitarian law as widely as possible. These laws, together with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, should be viewed as an integral part of today’s basic education.

Aligned with social studies requirements around the country, Exploring Humanitarian Law offers educators activities that can be used as a whole or mixed and matched into current lessons. High-quality materials, including news accounts, photos, letters, videos, case studies and interactive projects bring real events and people to life, helping teachers connect lessons of the past with events of today.

Preparing for special education mediation and resolution sessions: A guide for families & advocates

28-page PDF document created, “to contribute to better outcomes for children with special needs. Through a collection of articles, this guide seeks to provide families and advocates with an array of information that will equip them to make the most of the new and expanded dispute resolution options offered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As the nation’s special education law has evolved, Congress has consistently sought to provide new ways to encourage informal and speedy resolution of problems … This guide provides a comprehensive article on preparing for special education mediation and resolution sessions, including tips for both families and advocates. A flowchart of mediation and resolution session supports the understanding of how these two processes work and intersect. For additional insight, it provides both an interview with a seasoned special education mediator and a summary of a study that sought to identify the factors that contribute to parent-school conflict. Finally, it offers communication tips for building strong partnerships and additional resources for locating further information.”

Institutional and Program/Practitioner Guidelines For Conflict Management in Higher Education

Document (30-page pdf) provides a set of guidelines designed to support the development of comprehensive, educational, integrated and conflict-friendly approaches to managing conflict and disputes in institutions of higher education. The target audience includes key decision makers such as senior administrators, deans and department heads, ombudspersons, anti-harassment officers, housing and security administrators, faculty, student affairs professionals, and various frontline conflict services staff. The consensus document was developed by a national working group including the full spectrum of campus conflict resolvers. Presents a set of nine core principles that are elaborated on reflecting best practices in the higher education ADR field. Includes appendix with resource links.

Intake hints

Pdf article from Conflict Management in Higher Education Report, Volume 2, Number 2, (Feb 2002), which examines intake procedures and scheduling issues for community mediation, based on work done by “Neighborhood Dispute Settlement Program of Dauphin County (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), … a community mediation program which receives referrals from criminal justice entities.”

Conflict coaching

Pdf article from Conflict Management in Higher Education Report, Volume 2, Number 2, (Feb 2002), which introduces the idea of “Conflict coaching is a relatively innovative and distinctive form of coaching, it involves working one-on-one with those involved in interpersonal conflicts.” Includes bibliography.

Emergence of campus mediation systems, The: History in the making

Pdf article from Conflict Management in Higher Education Report, Volume 2, Number 1, (Oct 2001), which “explore[s] historical changes in the campus context as it relates to mediation and conflict resolution, and make[s] note of apparent trends in the writing and research on campus conflicts and conflict resolution.” Includes bibliography

Current trends in graduate ADR programs: Preliminary findings

Pdf article from Conflict Management in Higher Education Report, Volume 1, Number 2, (March/April 2000), which “presents a few preliminary findings from a two-year study of all graduate ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) and CR (Conflict Resolution) programs in the United States, the study concentrates on 45 areas of inquiry utilizing semi-structured interviews of program directors and coordinators concerning issues such as the growth and direction of their programs.”

Alternative dispute resolution in the law schools

Pdf article reprinted from the February/March 1995 Issue (Vol 55) of The Fourth R, The Newsletter of the National Association for Mediation in Education which discusses the development of alternative dispute resolution education in law schools.