CRE Teachers & Trainers

The Mixitup 2008-2009 planner/calendar from Teaching Tolerance is a great tool for teachers, counselors and administrators to use to help children in schools improve interactions within groups in their classrooms. The activities in the planner provide concrete ideas and formats to help students reduce social boundaries in schools, help students to understand each others cultures and customs and help teachers to promote an inclusive learning environment for all students.

The planner presents activities that support content standards and character education. The planner can be used on a special designated day or all year round. The Table of Contents provides an overview of ideas and lesson plans that can be organized for a lunch time activity or an entire class period. The planner highlights important dates in history, quotes from inspirational figures and also includes extension activities and guidelines as a follow-up to original activities.

If you have a great idea on how to Mixitup at your school, a Grants section at the end of the planner lists information about types of Grants funded, along with application information, conditions and funding limitations for your use. For additional activity ideas, online polls and essay prompts, please visit http://www.tolerance.org/mix-it-up/get-started

This instructional website from the University of Illinois Extension is available for teachers in English, Spanish and Arabic. The site and the materials can be used for second through fourth grade students. Second grade students may need a little more hands on assistance. The site includes a teacher’s guide and activities that can be used in school and at home. It is possible that benchmark outcomes can be used in your curriculum to meet standards for learning in third through fifth grade in Social Sciences, Language Arts and in Expression Arts. The teacher’s guide provides excellent background information on Conflict Resolution Theory. Younger children, teachers and parents can use the interactive portion of the website together during daily activities.

The site is comprehensive and could be used for training staff members and youth new to your school’s Conflict Resolution Program. One of the best tools this site offers students is the interactive portion where students can receive feedback instantly about conflict resolution issues occurring in their daily lives. The students can reference the website and enhance their retention while transferring their new skills to everyday life. Here’s a link to the website: http://www.urbanext.illinois.edu/conflict/index.html

The site How Stuff Works has been posting short segments of conflict resolution instructional videos. While you may have to look at an ad or two, there is a pretty substantial collection developing there. Here’s a link to a widget I created that shows recently added items.

Feed of Videos on Conflict Resolution from How Stuff Works website.

The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office has released a student peer mediation manual (34 page pdf) and a program coordinator’s manual (183 page pdf) supporting their SCORE (Student Conflict Resolution Experts) program. The coordinators manual “provides an overview of the program, and instructs coordinators on the steps to setting up the program from start to finish, and the methods and expectations for training their mediators. The manual also provides an extensive lesson plan for training, as well as sample exercises and role-play scenarios.” You can find both items via the CREducation.net catalog.

The Student Conflict Resolution Experts (SCORE) program is a student mediation-oriented violence prevention program, created and funded by the Office of the Attorney General in collaboration with local community mediation programs and school communities. Since 1989, more than 5,000 students have trained as peer mediators; these young people have mediated over 25,000 conflicts in schools across Massachusetts, with a reported 97% success rate.