Pedagogical leadership in Italian Early Childhood Education settings: Managing conflicts while facilitating participative decision-making

This chapter discusses conflict management in contexts of pedagogical planning. Conflicts and their management represent a challenge for pedagogical leadership. Collegial models of management that favour participative decision-making processes are particularly exposed to the risk of conflicts. Pedagogical leaders have the difficult responsibility of managing conflicts that arise in pedagogical planning in ways that do not contradict principles of participative decision-making.
This is the case for the two Italian Early Childhood Education (ECE) settings where the observation of pedagogical planning meetings was undertaken. Conflicts were observed in the organisation’s review of learning activities and this chapter discusses the main forms of their management. The following section clarifies the chapter’s theoretical approach to pedagogical planning and conflict management and what it means to study these processes as interactions. The third section introduces the methodology and the contexts of the research, whilst the fourth and the fifth sections are dedicated to the results of the research, illustrating the two main forms of conflict management emerging from the analysis of data: hierarchy-centred management and participation-centred management.