If schools taught conflict resolution the way it's modeled on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, every student would graduate with exactly three moves: flip the table when pressed, deny everything at the reunion, and post a carefully worded Instagram apology that somehow blames the editing.
That is, roughly, where most Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs leave kids.
Dr. Jennifer Chatmon, Director of Curriculum, SEL & JEDI at UCLA Lab School, spent 22 years building something different. She started teaching in East Orange, NJ, and earned a Rutgers doctorate in the sociology of education, focused on teacher-student relationships. At UCLA Lab School, she designed and built a six-stage SEL Momentum Loop where students practice structured conflict resolution starting at age four. The students who've been in it since preschool arrive at middle school with more experience handling conflict than most adults accumulate in a lifetime.
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Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: The 6-stage loop for conflict resolution
Reading Rainbow: Cinema class, AI pens, and the ABCs
From Our Desk: Contract season and case studies
Watch of the Week: Spielberg’s got a lesson plan for you
The 6-stage loop for conflict resolution
Most schools wait for conflict to arrive, hand out a form apology and declare the matter closed. Jennifer Chatmon built UCLA Lab School's SEL program around a different assumption: conflict is coming regardless, so you might as well prepare for it.
Her system has six stages and starts in preschool. These stages, part of the “SEL Momentum Loop,” compound until students are running structured mediations in middle school group chats with vocabulary they built at age four.
Here's how Jennifer runs it:
Build: The whole community (students, teachers, staff and parents) agrees on what the school's core values mean in this specific building. That shared definition becomes the vocabulary everyone pulls from when conflict arrives. "Without that," Jennifer says, "you will continually have miscommunication."
Teach: Regular SEL lessons run on schedule before any conflict happens, led by classroom teachers. Jennifer on why teachers specifically: "We need the teachers there more than ever before for the emotional coaching."
Test: Conflict arrives, as it will. Sand gets dumped. A screenshot makes rounds. The school treats each one as a live practice rep for everything students have been building since Stage 1.
Mediate: Every conflict follows the same protocol: “I-statements,” both sides heard on intent and impact, cultural context named directly rather than sidestepped. Intent and impact both stay on the table, because one doesn't cancel out the other.
Commit: Written agreements close every session. Four-year-olds circle pictures. Older students sign actual contracts.
Carry: Students take the vocabulary into middle school, group chats, and digital spaces where no adult has ever heard of a "cool tool," AKA the structured calming techniques they've been using since age four. The loop resets and grows in complexity.
"We planted the seeds and we've been fertilizing," Jennifer says. "Now they have to learn how to use it in a digital space."
The six stages above are the summary. More on the mediation protocol, what shared vocabulary looks like in practice and why it compounds starting at age four:
Your Movie Night Just Became a Lesson Plan: Edutopia makes the case for teaching students to analyze films the same way they'd analyze a novel: camera angles, visual symbolism, how a director controls what you notice and when. It's the academic justification you've been waiting for to put Citizen Kane on the projector at 8 AM.
Your Leadership Team Is on the Same Page... About Different Books.: Education Week's latest opinion piece identifies three recurring places where highly capable leadership teams still fall apart — starting with the gap between reciting the same strategic goals and actually agreeing on what those goals mean in practice. Shared language gets you in the room, but building real shared understanding is all the work that comes after.
Teachers Already Figured Out AI. They Just Need the Budget.: DonorsChoose data shows teacher requests for AI tools jumped more than 200% since 2022-23, and it has almost nothing to do with lesson-plan generators. Teachers are overwhelmingly crowdfunding AI-powered translation pens that read text aloud in 100+ languages and adaptive tutoring software built specifically for students with disabilities. Meanwhile, some EdTech conferences spent three years debating whether AI belonged in classrooms.
The Alphabet Song Was Doing Real Work This Whole Time: Research says singing helps kids identify sounds in words, build vocabulary and prepare their brains for literacy in ways most formal reading programs don't replicate. Consider this your peer-reviewed permission slip to let the class belt one out.
July is basically EdTech contract season. Before you sign anything, run it through this 5-question scorecard first. Your future self will thank you.
P.S. We’re around if you want to talk through any of it.
ICYMI: Somewhere between the first attempt and the last, something clicked for students at Upland High School. Across 82 courses and nearly 30,000 submissions, median scores went up 30 points. Ironically, that’s what can happen when students actually get the support they need. Watch the full story.
Our pick of the week: Disclosure Day
Why We’re Obsessed: Spielberg's back in alien territory with Disclosure Day, a sci-fi thriller about the moment the entire planet gets undeniable, unspinnable proof it's not alone. It has more in common with a very long ethics exam than a summer blockbuster, and it's made for a generation that grew up watching actual UAP congressional hearings on YouTube.
Recommended lesson integration:
Science: What's Actually Out There? Use the film's premise to introduce the Drake Equation, conditions for habitable planets and the vast, humbling distances between us and anything interesting in the universe. (Don’t worry, the existential spiral that follows counts as critical thinking.)
Media Literacy: How Do We Know What's True? A film about the mass release of paradigm-shifting information is a solid entry point for a unit on evaluating sources, separating signal from noise and why "I saw it online" is still doing way too much work in student citations. They will recognize themselves. It'll be uncomfortable, but hey, that's the point!
ELA/Creative Writing: Speculative Fiction and World-Building: Spielberg's been asking "what if" for 50 years. Have students try it… write the next chapter of this story from the perspective of someone whose entire life gets rewritten by the news. Any genre, any ending, any age group. You don’t need an alien set budget for this one!
Art/Storyboarding: Visual Storytelling Without Dialogue: Spielberg communicates more in a single shot than most scripts manage in 20 pages. Have students pick a wordless scene, then rebuild it (same story, different medium) as a comic strip, illustrated sequence or storyboard. Hans Zimmer soundtrack in the background: optional but strongly encouraged.
Philosophy/Ethics: Who Does the Truth Belong To? The film's tagline is "the truth belongs to eight billion people." That's a strong opener for discussions on whether withholding information can ever be justified, who decides what the public is ready to know and what obligation institutions have toward honesty when honesty is inconvenient. Also very useful for teachers fielding questions about why the syllabus includes difficult material.
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Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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