ESU Invites Educators from 16 Schools to Hear Expert on Teaching Students to Manage Conflict

East Stroudsburg University is bringing a noted author and child development expert to campus on April 26 to present a workshop for educators from more than a dozen area public schools on how to teach children to manage conflict.

Dr. Dan Gartrell, professor emeritus in early childhood education at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minn., is the author of five books on children and education, including most recently: “Guidance for Every Child: Teaching Young Children to Manage Conflict.”

ESU’s College of Education is bringing Gartrell to speak and has invited local teachers who act as liaisons to the university’s student teacher program and mentor other ESU students doing field work. The university provided copies of Gartrell’s book to each teacher to prepare for discussions at the workshop. Teachers will be coming from five districts – Stroudsburg, East Stroudsburg, Pleasant Valley, Nazareth and Bethlehem.

In an age when empowering kids to solve their own problems and settle disputes peacefully is as much a part of school as math and reading, the workshop topic is a welcome one for some local educators.

Stacey Leon, a 1996 ESU grad who teaches fifth grade at Governor Wolf Elementary School in Bethlehem Area School District, said she is looking forward to the discussions and Gartrell’s insight into how to give children the tools they need to cope with difficult situations at home and school.

“More and more we are going beyond the curriculum in our day-to-day lessons and we are incorporating character development and conflict resolution,” Leon said.

Some children experience trauma at home with a death or serious illness in the family, parents going through divorce or grappling with addiction, abuse or incarceration. Such struggles can affect the student’s behavior in school and their ability to learn.

“To think that every kid is coming with a stress-free childhood experience like they try to make it look like in commercials is rare,” Leon said. “It’s something kids bring with them every day. They are still learning how to manage, and it’s our job to help them with that.”

Tiffany Maronpot, who teaches fourth grade at Chipperfield Elementary School in Stroudsburg School District, is also excited for the workshop and has already delved into Gartrell’s book.

The author writes about how empowering it is for children when you give them the tools to work through their problems themselves, Maronpot said.

“It’s a huge part of elementary school,” she says. “It pretty much comes up 10-15 times a day, whether it’s hurt feelings of not being chosen for something or they feel someone didn’t sit next to them at lunch.”

Both Maronpot and Leon work with ESU students from the university’s Professional Development School, which places education majors into 16 schools in the region. ESU’s future teachers start observing and working in classrooms early on, doing increasing field work so that by the time they start student teaching in their senior year they have already spent more than 500 hours in classrooms.

Workshops with educational experts are one way ESU seeks to give back to the school districts and the educators who mentor the future teachers. Each liaison teacher is invited to bring the school’s principal or another teacher to the workshop.

Shawn Watkins, Ed.D., associate professor and chair of the ESU Reading Department, said Gartrell talks about the need to balance children’s developmental needs with the expectations of administrators and academic state standards.

“He’s written about best practices for teaching children emotional and social behaviors and skills,” she said. “There are different strategies to teaching children to empower them on how to solve their own problems and how to manage their own conflicts.”

Brooke Langan, ESU director of field experiences and partnerships, said Gartrell’s insights should be helpful for practicing teachers.

“His book is on managing childhood behaviors that relate to trauma, poverty, and a lot of different issues that influence how children behave,” Langan said. “I was in the classroom for 20 years and those were things we weren’t taught.

To give ESU’s future teachers a better understanding of the day-to-day lives of pupils who live in poverty, Langan and Watkins have brought the Pocono Alliance’s Bridges out of Poverty program to campus to run poverty simulations for the college students.

“We want our students to be better prepared when they go out in the field,” Langan said. The simulation provides a small taste of “what people who are at or below the poverty line go through when it comes to raising children, paying bills, going to school, dealing with social services.”

“Hopefully through this professional development we can teach our future teachers how to be proactive and how to look for those signs and symptoms in their students and be more open to what might be happening in their lives and what to do about it,” Watkins said.

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