Finding Your Way Through Conflict: Strategies for Early Childhood Educators

Learn how to engage in and resolve conflict productively to improve work relationships and create a more equitable community for children.

Conflicts are inevitable, often hard to navigate, and can quickly multiply and become unmanageable. And resolving conflict requires self-reflection, understanding, and vulnerability. But knowing how to tackle difficult conversations will strengthen relationships, create a more equitable community, and improve the impact educators have on the young children they work with.

The first of its kind, Finding Your Way Through Conflict specifically focuses on conflict in early childhood education settings and gives concrete steps and strategies to help manage and resolve it productively.

Authors Chris Amirault, Ph.D., and Christine M. Snyder, M.A., have decades of experience in early childhood education programs and conflict resolution. Built on their expertise and their own experiences, the book's conflict scenarios are engaging and authentic, empowering educators to get in and out of conflict in a variety of personal, organization, and cultural contexts.

Some of these scenarios include:

• The Discombobulated Team: The children's artwork you posted in the classroom yesterday is gone. Who took it down--and why?
• The Intent/Impact Disagreement: You were only trying to help So why is that parent offended?
• The Unexpected Disaster: Your team planned every aspect of that difficult parent meeting for days. So why was it such a catastrophe?

A free PLC/Book Study Guide is available at freespirit.com/plc.


Author: Chris Amirault, Christine M. Snyder
Publisher: Free Spirit Publishing
Published: 10/07/2020
Pages: 168
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.20h x 7.20w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781631984945

About the Author
Chris Amirault, Ph.D., is the school director of Tulsa Educare MacArthur in Oklahoma, and for more than three decades has dedicated himself to high-quality education, teaching courses and facilitating workshops on early childhood education, conflict, assessment and instruction, ethics and professionalism, challenging behavior, family engagement, anti-bias education, and equity. Prior to his arrival in Tulsa, he lived in Mexico, working as a consultant focusing on organizational culture, change management, and QRIS system design in Oregon, Rhode Island, and California.

For thirteen years prior to that, he served as executive director of the Brown/Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center affiliated with Brown University in Rhode Island. During that time, he also taught early childhood education and development courses for area colleges and universities and served as a mentor and coach for providers throughout the community.

Chris also has an active volunteer life at the local, state, and national level. He served as the president of the Rhode Island Association for the Education of Young Children for several years, served as the chair of the Council for NAEYC Accreditation, and was a founding facilitator of NAEYC's Diversity & Equity Interest Forum. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Christine M. Snyder, M.A., has worked in the early childhood education field since 1999 as a teacher, center director, author, and trainer/coach. She holds a master's degree in early childhood education and a bachelor's degree in child development. She is currently director of the University of Michigan Health System Children's Center and assistant professor in the college of education at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan.

Previously, she was an early childhood specialist at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she focused on developing professional learning for teachers and curriculum for preschoolers and infants/toddlers. She facilitates training throughout the United States, internationally, and online, and has published several books, articles, training DVDs, and other classroom resources for teachers. She lives in Michigan.