<img src="https://www.operationcompany-innovation.com/800962.png" style="display:none;"> Why the Four-Year-Olds at UCLA Lab School Are Better at Conflict Than Most Adults
SEL · Conflict Resolution · Early Childhood

Why the Four-Year-Olds at UCLA Lab School Are Better at Conflict Than Most Adults

How Dr. Jennifer Chatmon built an SEL program that compounds from age four to middle school.

The Subject Team · Subject
9 min read
K–12 · SEL · Conflict Resolution
Stage 1Build — Establish shared vocabulary
Stage 2Teach — Weekly lessons by classroom teachers
Stage 3Test — Conflict arrives on schedule
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Stage 4Mediate — Run the structured protocol
Stage 5Commit — Make the agreement official
Stage 6Carry — Skills leave the building
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OutcomeNine years of compound interest in conflict resolution
Key takeaways Why SEL programs don't stick The SEL momentum loop The six stages When the loop goes digital FAQs
Key takeaways

Schools that teach conflict resolution proactively (before conflict happens) produce students who handle disagreements more effectively than those relying on reactive, apology-based discipline models.

Shared vocabulary and core values must be established as a prerequisite for any SEL program to function effectively.

Well-implemented SEL is linked to an 11-percentile-point increase in academic performance over peers who don't participate, per CASEL research.

01

Why SEL programs don't stick

The lesson that lands and the lesson that needed to land aren't the same lesson.

By the time a student leaves high school, they will have spent roughly 15,000 hours in formal education. They'll learn the quadratic formula. Some of them will dissect a frog. Almost none of that time will be spent formally learning what to do when another person makes the whole day feel like it collapsed.

That's a strange gap to leave open for 13 years, but here we are.

Dr. Jennifer Chatmon has been closing that gap, one school year at a time, since her first classroom in East Orange, New Jersey. She's now Director of Curriculum, SEL and JEDI (Justice, Education, Diversity and Inclusion) at UCLA Lab School, with a Rutgers doctorate in the sociology of education and 22 years in public schools behind everything she built. Her research focused specifically on teacher-student relationships and what actually motivates students to engage.

The question driving all of it is one most schools have unintentionally overlooked for decades: If conflict is inevitable, why are we treating conflict resolution like a fire drill instead of a curriculum?

Why SEL programs don't stick

Roughly 83% of school principals reported using a SEL curriculum in 2023-24 (up from 76% two years earlier), according to a 2024 RAND study. That number sounds like progress, but what it doesn't capture is what "using a SEL curriculum" actually means in most buildings.

The default model is reactive. Something goes wrong, an apology gets issued and everyone moves on. The lesson that lands: don't let adults see you doing that.

The lesson that needed to land: your actions have real costs to real people, including costs you never intended. Those aren't the same lesson, and a new curriculum purchase doesn't change which one gets taught.

Jennifer identified this gap as a classroom teacher in East Orange long before she could put research language to it. Students behaved differently in her room than they did elsewhere, and she spent years at Rutgers and in classrooms trying to understand why. The variable was shared expectations built on shared vocabulary — language that made every adult-student interaction point in the same direction.

02

The SEL momentum loop

A flywheel is harder to spin up at first and harder to stop once it's moving.

A flywheel is harder to spin up at first and harder to stop once it's moving. That's a fair description of the SEL Momentum Loop Jennifer built at UCLA Lab School. The front-end investment is definitely there, but students who have been running the loop since age four arrive at middle school with more practice in structured conflict resolution than most adults ever accumulate — and they do it automatically.

Jennifer's loop runs in six stages. Each one feeds the next, and skipping any stage stalls the whole system.

Here's how the loop works:

03

The six stages

Each one feeds the next. Skipping any stage stalls the whole system.

Stage 1
Build
Establish shared vocabulary

This is the stage that tends to get skipped first when the calendar gets tight — and understandably so. August arrives, the curriculum is ready, training is scheduled and building shared vocabulary feels like one more thing on a list that's already too long.

The good news is this stage only requires a conversation with teachers, staff, students and parents about what the school's core values mean in this place and for their community.

UCLA Lab School landed on around ten values through that process, and the output is concrete: a shared vocabulary document every adult can reference when a student's behavior comes up.

"Develop common language around social emotional learning. Everyone needs to be speaking the same language. Without that, you will continually have miscommunication."

— Dr. Jennifer Chatmon

When every adult in the building (support staff and administrators included) can name the core values and explain what they look like in practice, whatever curriculum comes next has something real to land on.

Stage 2
Teach
Weekly lessons by classroom teachers

Once the vocabulary exists, it needs regular practice before conflict arrives. Jennifer built weekly proactive SEL lessons into the standard school schedule and made a deliberate call about who delivers them: Teachers.

"We need the teachers there more than ever before for the emotional coaching."

— Dr. Jennifer Chatmon

This is where UCLA Lab School's 16 "cool tools" do their work. Each "cool tool" translates a core community value into a behavior students can physically practice.

The bubble of space, for example, teaches self-awareness by making it tangible: students learn to notice when someone crosses into their personal space and, just as importantly, when they've entered someone else's.

Abstract values become things students can name and point to in real time. Weekly repetition is the deposit. The compounding starts here, not when conflict arrives.

Stage 3
Test
Conflict arrives on schedule

A student dumps sand on a classmate's head. Someone shares a screenshot in a group chat. Two kids going at it in the hallway. Any educator or administrator reading this knows the scene. The instinct to resolve it quickly, restore order and move on makes complete sense given everything else that has to happen that day.

What Jennifer found is that schools with the strongest long-term outcomes resist that instinct just long enough to run the process. The conflict isn't a detour from the school day, but the exact moment the investment in Stages 1 and 2 pays off. Staff who know the loop don't need to slow down the entire day, but they do need a consistent protocol to follow, which is exactly what Stage 4 provides.

Stage 4
Mediate
Run the structured protocol

Every conflict, regardless of severity, gets the same two-step process.

  • The first student gives an I-statement: what they did, what they intended and what they assumed would happen.
  • The second student gives one: what they experienced and what it actually cost them, including anything shaped by their identity, culture, or personal history.

That last piece is what Jennifer is most careful about. "When you're talking about intent and impact, you need to break down how they show up in their specific conflict," she explains.

"'I dumped the sand over your head because I thought it would be funny' is the intent. 'But you dumped that sand over some little black girl's hair. And her mother is going to be mad' is the impact."

— Dr. Jennifer Chatmon. Both things are true at the same time, and a mediation that holds both does something a quick resolution can't: it teaches the student who caused harm what harm actually looked like to the person who received it.

The consistency of the protocol matters as much as its content. Students who have been through it since kindergarten know what to expect, which makes it easier for everyone to participate honestly when the stakes feel high.

Stage 5
Commit
Make the agreement official

Every mediation closes with a written agreement. For four-year-olds, that's a card with pictures they can circle. For older students, it's a written contract that is specific, behavioral and signed by both people.

"It really is like signing a contract. The soft skills needed to be a positively contributing member of democratic society."

— Dr. Jennifer Chatmon, citing the benefit of the mediation.

Two things happen when a mediation closes this way.

  • First, accountability becomes concrete. There's a record of what both students committed to, unlike how a verbal promise sometimes doesn't even survive until lunch.
  • Second, it treats students as people who are capable of making and keeping real commitments. Starting that practice at four, with age-appropriate tools, means students arrive at middle school already comfortable with being held to their word.

Sure, some might consider the written agreement a small thing, but the habit it builds over nine years is not.

Stage 6
Carry
Skills leave the building

The loop's final stage is the one that tells you whether everything else worked. Students who have been in it since age four carry the vocabulary with them when they walk into a new school or open their phones.

They do it not because it was drilled into them, but because it's been practiced consistently enough to become part of how they process situations, the same way a strong reader reaches for a book without being told to.

"We planted the seeds, and we've been fertilizing. Now they have to learn how to use it in a digital space or in middle school when they leave us."

— Dr. Jennifer Chatmon. That means explicitly coaching students to apply their values vocabulary in environments that don't share it — in peer groups that have never heard of a cool tool, in group chats where nobody is running I-statements, in new schools where the community conversations haven't happened yet.

The loop returns to Stage 2 each year at greater complexity. What started as "be kind" at age four becomes "I understand why that comment hurt you specifically" at age twelve.

That's nine years of compound interest.

04

When the loop goes digital

Students are learning how to interact in digital spaces before they have the emotional vocabulary to do it responsibly.

Jennifer's concern about where schools are headed is right on the money. Students are learning how to interact in digital spaces before they have the emotional vocabulary to do it responsibly.

"We have lacked intention in how we've interacted with the technology. Without intentional conversations about how we move through the digital space, it's hurtful to families and to children."

— Dr. Jennifer Chatmon

Technology scales content delivery in ways that people can't. Jennifer is clear about that. But scaling delivery and building emotional skills are two separate jobs, and schools that treat them as one end up with students who can access more content and manage less conflict. The teacher's role doesn't get smaller when technology handles more. It actually gets more specific: emotional coaching is the part that technology can't replicate.

A meta-analysis published in October 2025, covering 40 studies and more than 33,700 students across 12 countries, confirmed that students in SEL programs consistently outperform peers in both literacy and math.

That data keeps getting stronger. The window to build the underlying infrastructure is the same window it has always been: early childhood.

The students sitting in preschool classrooms right now will be navigating digital relationships, multicultural workplaces, and civic life in 2040. Whether they handle any of that well depends, in part, on whether a trusted adult started building their vocabulary at age four.

So, plant the seeds early. The compounding is immediate.

05

FAQs

Common questions about SEL and conflict resolution in K–12 schools

What is the SEL Momentum Loop?
The SEL Momentum Loop is a six-stage conflict resolution framework developed by Dr. Jennifer Chatmon at UCLA Lab School. The six stages — Build, Teach, Test, Mediate, Commit, and Carry — work sequentially, with each stage reinforcing the next. Students begin practicing the framework in preschool, so by middle school, structured conflict resolution is a skill they apply automatically rather than a process adults have to introduce at the moment something goes wrong.
How does structured mediation work in K–12 schools?
In Dr. Chatmon's model, every conflict follows the same protocol regardless of severity: each student gives an I-statement that separates intent from impact, and cultural context is named explicitly rather than set aside. Mediations close with a written agreement: pictures for four-year-olds or signed contracts for older students, for example. Consistency of the protocol is what makes it transferable: students who have been through it repeatedly know what to expect, which lowers the barrier to honest participation when stakes are high.
Why does SEL instruction need to start in early childhood?
Skills introduced in preschool compound over the years that follow. A student who starts building conflict resolution vocabulary at age four arrives at middle school with roughly nine years of structured practice — more than most adults ever accumulate. Early introduction also means the vocabulary becomes part of how students process situations naturally, rather than a set of rules they have to consciously apply.