The Growth of Conflict Resolution Programs

Conflict Resolution Programs: Growing and Yielding Benefits

Throughout North America, many schools and community groups offer conflict resolution programs for teens. Through these programs, teens are learning about new ways to work through and resolve disputes, reducing the possibility of violence.

Although the movement is less than ten years old, programs are in every state and province. They involve children from kindergarten through high school. Noteworthy, three-fourths of San Francisco's public schools have student managers and in Chicago, all students take a dispute resolution course in ninth or tenth grade.

Advocates are promoting conflict resolution, along with its student mediation component, as "the Fourth R." While growth of this movement is partly a response to the spread of violence among youth, its value can transcend simple crime prevention. Some districts offer only a mediation component, while others start with mediation and then add a conflict resolution curriculum that calls for more active student participation.

Some districts have tied their efforts to a curriculum. One of New York's programs, Resolving Conflict Creatively (RCCP), is a good example of a curriculum-based program. It now involves over 1,000 teachers and 30,000 students in 100 elementary and secondary schools and in special education programs. RCCP research shows students receiving RCCP instruction from their teachers develop more positively than their peers.

RCCP provides:

• Twenty hours of training for each teacher
• Mediator training for interested students, parents, and staff
• Outreach seminars to help all students become aware that a nonviolent approach is available for resolving school conflicts

Program Effectiveness:

Students report they feel better about themselves and safer at schools with conflict resolution and mediation programs in place. Students handle conflicts quickly, sometimes taking only minutes to deal with situations. Many schools report student mediators help solve large numbers of disputes (in New York, they resolve an average of 100 disputes a year at each school in the program) and the disputes remain settled in the vast majority of cases. Often the best student mediators are those who were considered troublemakers.

Teachers report fewer fights and more caring students behavior. Administrators, noticing improved attendance and a dramatic decline in the number of suspensions, find they spend less time on disciplinary matters.

One of the long-term benefits of this new approach is that students, teachers and parents can arrive at a change in attitude toward conflict: they progress from seeing it as either a problem to be swept under the rug or an opening for confrontation (both of which are harmful) to seeing it as a process that defines values and leads to growth.

It is a consensus that conflict resolution programs work best when used as part of a long-range comprehensive plan to improve the learning climate at a school and to teach students alternative to violence.

The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recognizes the need for all students to have access to a conflict-resolution program that is part of a comprehensive developmental school-counseling program. Such programs foster a positive campus climate and promote lifelong skills enabling individuals to resolve conflict in a positive manner.

Most programs teach teens a series of steps to follow in resolving conflicts. Although the exact steps may vary somewhat among programs. Safeyouth.org has provided a good sampling of these steps at their website.

When teens use such an approach to resolve conflicts and disagreements, they often find that conflicts don't have to be avoided, nor do they necessarily lead to violence. Conflict can actually be a positive force in their lives; it can provide teens with an opportunity to take a close look at themselves and their attitudes and beliefs. If resolved positively, conflicts can actually help strengthen relationships and build greater understanding.

The University of Florida has provided a report of their research project on Conflict Resolution and Peer Mediate. This website is the result of a four-year, federally funded research initiative funded by the Office of Special Education Programs, US Department of Education to study use of conflict resolution and peer mediation in middle schools.

The Advantage Press, Inc. creates learning packets that can help students settle disputes by reading about why it is wrong to behave in a manner that spawns conflict. This would include starting arguments that lead to such problems as: fighting and bullying. Discipline Learning Packets help students understand the faulty thinking that precedes conflict. Sample packets are available at their website.