By Jonathan Paul Loomis

Psychology of Education

Dr. Fox

April 4, 1999

After two years of work at a Washington, DC elementary school I have concluded that one of a teacher's greatest problems is how to deal with personal problems between students. Most of this concern developed from observing the students as they played on the playground, but I have also noticed that conflict between students carry over into the classroom where the environment is much more controlled. In some cases, inter-student conflicts originate in the classroom in spite of the close contact students have with teachers and other authority figures inside the building. These observations presented me with a question. What can a teacher do to help the students resolve these conflicts themselves?

However, upon further reflection I concluded that this particular question was too narrow. Because conflict resolution is an up and coming element in the curriculum of most school systems across North America, I felt that it would be wise to define the subject of my research in a wider, but also more specific sense. I have therefore divided the focus of my work into three fields, first, what conflict resolution programs already have been tried, second, what is involved when a school implements these programs, and finally, what makes a successful, and in the reverse, an unsuccessful conflict resolution program. These three questions were originally designed to only pertain to the elementary grades, but many of the programs that have been implemented are designed to cross all of the grades, and have indeed been tested as such with varying degrees of success or failure. Therefore, I broadened the scope of my research to include all grades, kindergarten through twelfth.

The first element of the research is basic. It involved identifying the various programs that already exist, what grades and typed of students they have been used with, and what makes them unique. The second element of my research focused on how conflict resolution programs have been implemented, and the social ramifications of initiating such a program, what effect it had on the students, the teachers, and the community. The final element of my research was dedicated to the success and failure of the various approaches, what could be found in common in the implementation, and what trends could be found that would indicate the potential success or failure of a particular program.

Banks, Reginald, Hogue, Aaron, Timberlake, Terri, and Liddle, Howard. "An Afrocentric approach to group social skills training with inner-city African American adolescents" The Journal of Negro Education 65 (1996): 414-423

Bickmore, Kathy. "Integrated Elementary Curriculum about Conflict Resolution: Can Children Handle Global Politics?" American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting April 13-17, 1998, San Diego.

Bodine, Richard J, and Crowford, Donna K. "Research Findings on What Works" The Handbook of Conflict Resolution Education, A Guide to Building Quality Programs in Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. 103-114.

Garibaldi, Antoine, Blanchard, Loren, and Brooks, Steven. "Conflict resolution training, teacher effectiveness, and student suspension: The impact of a health and safety initiative in the New Orleans public schools" The Journal of Negro Education 65 (1996) 408-413.

Johnson, David, and Johnson, Roger. "Teaching All Students How to Manage Conflicts Constructively: The Peacemakers Program" Journal of Negro Education Summer 1996. 436-449.

Lacey, Patrice LeBlanc Candace H, and Mulder, Robert Jr. "Conflict Resolution." Journal for a Just and Caring Education Apr. 1998: 224-244.

Miller, Suzanne. "Middle-schoolers 'do justice' by their classmates" The Education Digest 59 (1993): 13.

Pereira, Carolyn, and Rodriguez, Ken. "Linking violence prevention and good social studies" Social Education 61 (1997) 282-287.

The particular order that I have selected to review the research I uncovered is simple, although has no particular affinity to the nature of the research outcomes themselves. In general, I have chosen to begin with those programs tested on the youngest aged children first, and work toward the research done on high school students. I have elected to cover those programs designed for any grade last, as they represent the most comprehensive and well-respected research done in the field of conflict resolution education. The author's last name and the title of the article precede each study.

The first study I have selected to cover was designed to test the effectiveness of a conflict resolution program that proposed to lower student violence by increasing student affinity with social and governmental organizations. The program was aimed at fifth graders and tested in both the metropolitan Chicago and Los Angeles areas. The study was aimed at students who were deemed at-risk due to the particularly high crime rates of their neighborhoods, or the high dropout rates of the high schools to which their elementary schools feed. Many of the students in the test schools were recent immigrants with little knowledge of English or familiarity with mainstream American culture.

The designers of the program believed that the students would be less inclined toward violence as they grew up if they understood the social structures that surrounded them. The program was therefore broken into two halves. The first was intended to teach the students about the law structures in the United States. This was accomplished by integrating lessons about law and government into the already existing curriculum. Instruction on law was also accomplished by using law related examples in both science and math, as well as the use of book the dealt with the law in reading, and English. The second half of the program involved teaching specific conflict resolution skills, principally that mediation could produce a win/win situation and that third parties, such as government, do not and should not always be the resolver of conflicts. The implication here is that the high Hispanic population of these schools should become more autonomous and less reliant on government.

The impact on the students was important in two ways. First, it significantly increased their understanding of American social institutions, and as an added unexpected side effect, it significantly increased the students' writing and reading skills. At the end of the program students indicated that they were more likely to use nonviolent means of addressing conflicts, and that although their attempts at mediation were often unsuccessful they used them before resorting to violence. As the designers of the program had hoped, the majority of the teachers adapted it to their own personal teaching styles.

The assessment of this program was written only one year after it was conducted and the authors themselves indicated that the results were incomplete, but the preliminary results indicate that the program is working. Naturally its effectiveness will not fully be known until the student involved graduate from high school, which was the final test of their ability to maintain an interest in education and to avoid violent behavior.

The second study that dealt with fifth grade students was conducted by a solo teacher in only one classroom and proposed that elementary aged students should be given real life conflicts as practice for solving conflicts that pertain specifically to themselves. Her study is inherently critical of much of the conflict resolution work that is being done that tries to teach conflict management in terms of conflicts the students experience on a daily basis. Her first assumption was that fifth graders would understand world events that are occurring far away. Her second assumption was that they would be able to make a connection between these events and their daily lives.

Her students studied such international conflicts as the Hutu-Tutsi refugee problem in eastern Africa, water rights use in the United States, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. To aid students in making the connection between these complicated and distant problems and situations that are more relevant the students also practiced dealing with problems such as bullies.

This study presents an intriguing proposal, which should receive further study. It proposes that fifth graders are capable of handling complicated material usually reserved for high school. Educationally this is worth study unto itself, but as a means by which conflict resolution can be taught, it is also an interesting approach. However, the study was not comprehensive enough to warrant conclusive results as to the approach's effectiveness.

This particular study was done to asses the effectiveness of a program done in the New Orleans Public Schools in an effort to lower suspension and detention rates in elementary and middle schools. In this case the administration of the schools was particularly worried that educational time was being frittered away because teachers needed to spend too much time dealing with student problems. The concept was to teach students how to solve their own interpersonal conflicts before they became important enough that teachers would be forced to take disciplinary measures. The program further taught teachers how to identify particular problems and deal with them in their preliminary stages as to avoid larger altercations at a later time.

The results of the study were all in the form of teacher interviews and surveys, in which they indicated that their own training helped them reduce the number of times they needed to stop class for disciplinary measures. They further indicated that students had begun dealing with problems on their own and this too had lead to a decline in classroom disruptions. However many of the teachers noted that the neighborhoods from which the students came reinforced violence as a means of conflict resolution and that they could do little to influence parents who taught their children to fight back.

This study proposed the interesting idea that conflict resolution education could be enhanced by making it ethnocentric to the students, in this case African Americans. The article began by indicating that although there is a large body of research dedicated to conflict resolution little of it has been directed toward African American students, and therefore may be fundamentally flawed when applied to these populations.

The study was conducted on sixty-four middle school aged students raging in age from ten to fourteen that attended majority African American urban schools. Two sets of conflict resolution curriculum were created one, which was relevant to the students' lives, but not ethnocentric to any particular group, and one, which was dominantly Afrocentric. In this program conflict resolution was approached by way of the Nguzo Saba, the seven moralities of the Swahili culture as adopted by many African Americans.

The conclusions of the study are not flawed, but do not support entirely the hypothesis of the study's creators. On one hand the students who received the Afrocentric program were able to name the seven moralities and indicate how they might be used in conflict resolution. However, the control group was equally able to resolve hypothetical conflicts. The authors of the study indicated that they felt the Afrocentric curriculum they had written might have been based too heavily on curriculum aimed at older students and that its effectiveness might have been diminished because it was too difficult for the students to digest. However, it is just as likely that children are equally able to learn from ethnically neutral sources as from ethnocentric ones.

Miller's article is a synopsis of her observations as a middle school vice principal of a conflict resolution program that she helped to implement. Although there was no formal study involved in the project, her personal observations point out a number of key points that make her entry here important.

The author was selected to implement a conflict resolution program during her tenure as a vice principal at a middle school in Racine, Wisconsin. Based on her experiences on the West Coast she elected to use the pear mediator method, in which students are trained to help diffuse problems. Twenty-one students were selected out of fifty that applied to become mediators, and in subsequent years the program grew so that over five hundred students had been trained. The author notes that as such a program continues it becomes more established and training all of the mediators individually becomes too much work. To compensate for this particular problem teachers were trained to teach new mediators, and so on so that the program eventually encompassed a large segment of the school's population.

Of further interest were the author's observations of the reactions of the school and community to the program. Not only did she notice a marked decrease in the number of conflicts which manifested themselves at the school, but she became aware of the fact that individuals within the community had gotten to know who the mediators were and called upon them to help resolve conflicts outside of, and totally unrelated to the school.

This is the first of three examples of studies done regarding conflict resolution education with high school aged students. The study addressed the specific question of the teacher's impact on the students, based on his or her use of conflict resolution in the classroom. In other words, to what extent did the teacher's modeling impact the student's use of conflict resolution. The study was conducted in a ninth grade classroom and comprised of sixteen students and their teacher. Although the specific conflict resolution curriculum put forward for the study was new to both the students and the teacher, and was based on proven national programs, the study showed that the student rejected the new concepts as unfeasible.

The study concluded that this was likely due to the fact that the students and the teacher had a poor working environment, the students did not respect the teacher, and the teacher did not model the curriculum in the classroom. This study sets forward an important lesson in the implementation of conflict resolution education. It is necessary for the students and teachers to have a strong, at least not antagonistic, relationship in order for the students to take hold of the material.

This piece is the summation of a body of research done in the field of conflict resolution, most of which is based on the work of the brothers David and Roger Johnson. The piece is a chapter of a book entitled The Handbook of Conflict Resolution Education, A Guide to Building Quality Programs in Schools, and the proposals put forward by the book represent the most common and successful programs in recent years. The work of the Johnsons is centered on the world of the student. They begin by trying to find the most common problems the students face, and then try to teach conflict resolution based on these problems. Their work takes into account, student attitudes, and the program's affect on academic achievement. Their program is centered on teaching students to be mediators and is done in every grade.

The studies summarized in the chapter point out a few specific victories for the program. Students in Ohio increased their understanding of non-violent options to conflict resolution. An elementary school in Nevada noted that out of 163 conflicts mediated by students, 138 of them were resolved without adult help. A study at a Chicago high school showed that mediation was an effective alternative to traditional discipline, and a study in New York indicated that conflict resolution education helped to increase the students' awareness and respect for one another.

This article was published by the Johnson brothers themselves and is a further culmination of their studies. Their research indicates that the mediation method is the most successful way of resolving conflicts between students. They further assert that their research shows conflict resolution education can improve student achievement, increase the use of high level cognitive reasoning, clarify the moral identity of the students, release anger which otherwise might be physically harmful, strengthen relationships.

It would seem that the work of the Johnson brothers demonstrates the infallibility of their program, but it comes with a significant number of appendages. It requires a previously established healthy working environment. It also requires long hours of time taken only to teach conflict resolution. Whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs is a question for each individual school.

I believe that the research I was able to uncover nearly sufficiently answers the questions I put forward at the beginning of my work. What approaches are there to conflict resolution education? How are they implemented and what are their effects? What indicates the success or failure of such programs?

I was amazed to uncover such a variety of approaches to teaching conflict resolution. In large African American communities an Afrocentric program was tried, although it did not show any particular advantage over an ethnically neutral program. It is my view that teaching students an ethnocentric curriculum when an ethnically neutral one will be just as effective is doing them a disservice. Students should be exposed to as many different points of view and cultures as possible, why limit them unless it achieves some goal?

One fifth grade project put forward the concept that having students work on real life conflicts would enhance their ability to resolve them on their own. This is a challenging new concept, but was not adequately tested in the field. I personally believe that it is a good idea, so long specific conflict resolution skills are noted throughout the project and summarized at the end. Making use of modern conflicts is probably a good idea, but teachers should be careful to scaffold their students between the abstract and the concrete, especially at the elementary level.

Another proposal was that students would be less likely to become involved in conflicts or to see situations as conflicting if they had an understanding of the social institutions around them. This view was tested in Chicago and Los Angeles in schools where large segments of the population were recent immigrants and had poor English skills. The initial results of the study indicate success, but its utility in helping solve inter-student conflicts is somewhat in doubt.

By far the most popular program is one in which students are trained to be mediators or conflict. This program has been extensively tested and studied and although it requires a large time commitment from the school, its repercussions can be seen in academic achievement, student behavior, classroom management, as well as within the community.

The implementation of all of these programs is difficult. The most universal feature is that they are all integrated into the curriculum. Most of them are centered in the social studies field, but can also be found within the literature the students read, the subjects they write about, and the math and science questions they are asked to solve. Most often a program is started by the administration of the school and after it has proven to be successful it is handed over to the teachers. The teachers themselves are a crucial part of the implementation strategy. It was shown that a teacher who does not model the strategies put forward by the program, or who does not have a positive relationship with the students, will not be successful in implementing the program.

Conflict resolution programs affect a broad range of fields. In the research I uncovered, although not in each case, conflict resolution programs were proven to decrease high school dropout rates, improve academic achievement, decrease the number of time teachers needed to discipline students, improve student interpersonal relationships, and foster good community relations.

Although it was difficult to uncover specific predispositions to success, I was able to identify two specific elements that might jeprodize the success of a conflict resolution program. The first is the student teacher situation. If the classroom atmosphere is already in poor condition, the interjection of a conflict resolution program will likely do no good and will instead only turn the students off to further conflict resolution education. Secondly, if students come from neighborhoods where violence is reinforced as a viable means of resolving conflict, there is often little teachers and schools can do to overcome this influence. Although a conflict resolution program would teach the students options, they were not often used.

I personally believe that conflict resolution should be an important element of any modern curriculum. Conflicts surround students and are growing ever more violent. Students should be taught how to handle such conflicts in a positive manner, even though such education detracts from time spent on other more traditional subjects. There is more to today's students than the Three R's, and part of what makes them unique is that they deal with potentially violent conflicts daily which would have been unheard of twenty years ago. Schools have a social responsibility to provide for these students. The benefits are obvious, and sufficient resource and research material exists for those who wish to implement such a program.