In a recent episode of At the Table, I sat down with Brooke Carroll, Ph.D. , former head of school, seasoned board member, and founder of AC Strategies, to discuss something that’s been on every school leader’s mind lately: conflict. Not just the everyday disagreements that come with school life, but the deeper, more persistent tensions that can either strengthen or fracture our communities.
Brooke and I met nearly two years ago during a summer cohort for Lead Team Partners, and we’ve been collaborating on conflict resolution work ever since. What struck me about our conversation was her clarity around something many of us feel but struggle to articulate: conflict in schools feels urgent right now, but unlike so many other challenges we face, this one actually has solutions we can implement.
As Brooke put it during our conversation, “There are many of our challenges in our schools that just feel so complicated, and this one, I just feel like there are solutions. We have strategies for managing conflict, and it’s, yes, it’s complicated, but we can do this.”
She’s right. And more importantly, we need to start doing it now.
Why Conflict Resolution Feels So Urgent Right Now
The reality is that conflict is everywhere in our current moment: in our politics, in our communities, and absolutely in our schools. But what makes this particularly challenging for school leaders is that we’re seeing both a lack of addressing conflict and, perhaps even more concerning, the mismanagement of it.
Brooke has witnessed this firsthand in her consulting work with schools across the country. “I’ve seen some really rotten things happen at schools because of either a lack of addressing it or actually mismanagement of conflict,” she shared. “There’s some where it’s just like, I don’t know what to do, but there’s also I’m doing something and it’s like, whoa, stop doing that.”
This dual challenge speaks to a fundamental gap in how we’ve prepared school leaders. We’ve equipped administrators with strategies for curriculum development, financial planning, and enrollment management, but we’ve often left them to resolve conflicts on their own. The result? Leaders either avoid difficult conversations altogether or handle them in ways that make things worse.
Shifting Our Mindset: Conflict as Opportunity
One of the most important reframes Brooke and I discussed was moving away from seeing conflict as something to avoid and toward understanding it as a potential opportunity. This isn’t just optimistic thinking; it’s grounded in research.
“There’s research that shows that when we have a diversity of perspective, a diversity of thought in our communities and in our decision making, we have better outcomes,” Brooke explained. “In all levels, programmatically, financially, in terms of culture and climate and feelings and all that kind of thing.”
Here’s the thing: when you have diverse perspectives, which we all want and need, you naturally have people coming at issues from different angles. As I like to say, sometimes your six is my nine, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The question isn’t whether we’ll have conflict, it’s what we do when your six is my nine.
The models we see in broader society right now often suggest retreating to our corners and shouting louder. But that’s not how healthy communities work, and it’s certainly not how effective schools operate.
Instead, we need to normalize conflict as a natural part of community life. As Brooke emphasized, “Conflict is a natural and normal part of our everyday lives. It’s in our communities, it’s in our faith communities, it’s in our schools. And just say it out loud: we’re gonna have conflict. What do we do about that?”
Starting at the Top: Leadership and Governance
When we talk about building a conflict-resilient culture, it has to start with leadership and governance. This isn’t about finger-pointing; it’s about recognizing that the tone gets set from the top, and boards and administrative teams need to model the behavior they want to see throughout the school.
“Boards need to be having this conversation about how we are in this boardroom, lifting up diversity of thought,” Brooke noted. This means creating structures where dissenting opinions aren’t just tolerated but actively sought out and valued.
During our conversation, Brooke described working with boards that have established norms around healthy conflict. These boards don’t just check a box that says “we value diverse perspectives.” They’ve done the harder work of examining their own dynamics, identifying where groupthink might be creeping in, and creating intentional processes for productive disagreement.
The same applies to administrative teams. When senior leaders demonstrate that they can disagree respectfully, work through tensions, and emerge with stronger solutions, they’re modeling what’s possible for the entire community. When they avoid conflict or handle it poorly, that behavior cascades down through every level of the school.
Creating Structures for Healthy Conflict
One of the practical takeaways from our conversation was the importance of having clear structures and processes in place before conflict arises. Waiting until you’re in the middle of a crisis to figure out how you’ll handle disagreement is like trying to write your emergency procedures during a fire drill.
Brooke works with schools to establish these frameworks proactively. This includes:
Clear Communication Pathways
Schools need explicit processes for how concerns get raised, who’s responsible for addressing them, and what timelines people can expect. Too often, conflicts escalate not because the initial concern was insurmountable, but because people didn’t know where to go or felt their concerns disappeared into a black hole.
Defined Decision-Making Protocols
When stakeholders understand how decisions get made, who has input, and what factors will be considered, there’s less room for suspicion and more opportunity for productive engagement, even when people disagree with the outcome.
Regular Reflection Practices
This is something Brooke and I both emphasized: schools need to build in time to reflect on how they’ve handled conflicts after they occur. What went according to plan? What needs to be tweaked? How did people feel during the process? Did they feel supported? Did they have the necessary tools?
As Brooke said, “We need to weave those practices into our schools much more as well. The reflection piece; How can we do better?” This commitment to continuous improvement in how we handle conflict is what builds resilience over time.
The Role of Student Life Professionals
For those of us in student life, conflict resolution is core to our work. We’re often the first point of contact when tensions arise between students, between students and teachers, or among families. But building a truly conflict-resilient culture means our expertise can’t stay siloed in our offices.
During the episode, Brooke and I touched on how student life professionals need to be at the table when schools are developing their broader approaches to conflict. We understand the developmental realities of how young people process disagreement. We know the patterns that tend to emerge in community dynamics. And we often have training in restorative practices and conflict resolution that can inform schoolwide approaches.
The question is whether school leaders are tapping into that expertise beyond individual student situations. Are we involving student life professionals in conversations about parent communication strategies? Are we bringing them into discussions about how the administrative team handles internal tensions? Are we leveraging their skills when working with the board?
Moving from Theory to Practice
One of the things I appreciate most about Brooke’s approach is her insistence that this work is doable. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it requires intention and commitment. But schools don’t need to reinvent the wheel; they need to implement what we already know works.
This starts with leadership acknowledging that building a conflict-resilient culture is a priority worthy of time, resources, and attention. It continues with creating the structures and norms that make healthy conflict possible. And it sustains itself through regular practice and reflection.
As Brooke emphasized when describing her work with schools, whether through leadership coaching, governance consultation, or strategic planning, the goal is always to help schools become more resilient in their ability to manage the whole community. That resilience doesn’t mean avoiding conflict; it means developing the capacity to move through it productively.
What This Means for Your School
If you’re reading this and thinking about your own school community, here are some questions worth asking:
Does your school have explicit norms and processes for addressing conflict at the governance level? At the administrative level? At the classroom level?
When was the last time your leadership team reflected on how well you’ve handled a difficult situation? What did you learn? What would you do differently?
Are there places where conflict is being avoided because leaders don’t know what to do? Are there places where it’s being mismanaged in ways that are making things worse?
Who in your community has expertise in conflict resolution and restorative practices? Are you leveraging that expertise across all levels of the school, not just in student discipline situations?
What would it look like for your school to normalize conflict as a natural part of community life rather than something shameful or dangerous?
The Path Forward
At the end of our conversation, I found myself reflecting on something Brooke said early on: “We can do this.” In a time when so many educational challenges feel overwhelming and intractable, there’s something hopeful about focusing on an area where we have proven strategies and frameworks.
Building a conflict-resilient school culture won’t solve every problem your school faces. But it creates the conditions for you to work through those problems together, with trust and respect intact. It helps diverse communities not just coexist but truly collaborate. And it models for students what healthy conflict looks like in a world that desperately needs those examples.
The work starts by acknowledging that conflict is inevitable and by choosing to prepare for it intentionally rather than react defensively. It continues with leadership modeling the behavior we want to see and creating structures that support healthy disagreement. And it sustains itself through a commitment to continuous reflection and improvement.
As school leaders, we can’t control all the sources of conflict that will emerge in our communities. But we can absolutely control how we prepare for it, respond to it, and use it as an opportunity to build stronger, more resilient schools. The question isn’t whether we’ll face conflict. The question is whether we’ll be ready for it when it comes.
