Peaceful School Bus Program – Hazelden Foundation

This video provides a short overview of the Peaceful School Bus Program (hazelden.org/peacefulschoolbus), a bullying prevention program designed to decrease inappropriate behavior on school buses while creating a climate of respect and cooperation.

Help Increase the Peace Program – sample activities

A selection of 10 sample activities from the fourth edition of the Help Increase the Peace Program (HIPP) manual for high school age youth. HIPP is an experiential program for teens developed out of the Alternatives to Violence Project curriculum used in prisons and community settings. A project of the American Friends Service Committee, HIPP is program for building community, trust, conflict resolution skills and reducing violence. The full HIPP manual (1999 version) is available here.

Step Up: A Curriculum for Teens Who Are Violent at Home

The Step-Up curriculum is designed for counselors who facilitate groups with teens who have been violent towards a parent or family member. The curriculum uses a cognitive behavioral approach to help teens stop the use of violent and abusive behaviors and teaches nonviolent, respectful ways of communicating and resolving conflict with family members. The curriculum also includes materials for a parent group. The curriculum is designed to include parents at the beginning of each group session and then separate into a parent group and teen group or stay together for the session to work on learning a skill together.

Help Increase the Peace (HIPP) program

HIPP is an experiential program for teens developed out of the Alternatives to Violence Project curriculum for prisons. It is an engaging program for building community, trust, conflict resolution skills and reducing violence. HIPP and AVP workshops have been done around the world with gang members, prisons and war zone victims. HIPP is a project of the American Friends Service Committee.

Multiple Responses, Promising Results: Evidence-Based, Nonpunitive Alternatives To Zero Tolerance

Research brief by Child Trends that finds that zero tolerance school discipline policies have not been proven effective by research and may have negative effects, making students more likely to drop out and less likely to graduate on time. Instead, the brief recommends the use of nonpunitive disciplinary action, such as behavior interventions, social skills classes, and character education.

2010-2011 Playworks Playbook

Playworks is a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and safe, meaningful play. The Playbook, a 390-page pdf, provides full descriptions of games and activities appropriate for K-5 school children. They are organized in the following categories: Ice Breakers; Readiness Games; Tag Games; Cooperative Games; Core Playground Games and Sports; Core Games Modifications; and Health and Fitness – FitKid Program.

Also included is structured curriculum in Violence Prevention and Peace Promotion. The Violence Prevention materials focus on providing students with a set of foundation skills for preventing violence using a framework called the Five Fingers of Safety. The Peace Promotion materials focus on proactive measures to encourage and foster a healthy community, and can be used with a variety of student groups.

Something is Wrong – Exploring the Roots of Youth Violence

A 382-page pdf curriculum guide addressing violence in the lives of youth. From the introduction:” The Chicago Freedom School, Project NIA and Teachers for Social Justice have partnered along with other volunteers to develop a curriculum guide in order to contribute to the ongoing efforts by young people and their adult allies to analyze the root causes of youth violence and to create local solutions”

The authors “wanted to create a curriculum that would provide a holistic view of violence in the lives of young people across a number of arenas. Through this curriculum, we want to challenge youth to think about a) the roots of violence in their lives; b) the enforcers and victims of violence; c) the effects of violence on both victims and perpetrators; and d) how violence can ultimately be minimized through systemic changes.”

Training Module for Education for a Culture of Peace

This module, released in January 1999, is based on experiences working in Sierra-Leone. It was written to provide some relevant information on practical ideas to enhance women’s traditional conflict resolution and mediating practices since they are also stakeholders in conflict situations but are often left out in conflict resolution initiatives.
The material is divided into 8 units.
Unit 1 – Understanding Gender and distinguishing between Gender and Sex Roles
Unit 2 – Trauma Healing and Counselling
Unit 3 – Conflict Resolution
Unit 4 – Gender Awareness in Conflict Resolution/Reconciliation, Concept of Repentance and Forgiveness
Unit 5 – Mediation and the role of Women in Peace Building within the Family, the Community, the School and the total Social Environment
Unit 6 – Raising Awareness of Gender Issues and Peace Building through the use of Drama
Unit 7 – Understanding Basic Rights and Freedom and their Limitations
Unit 8 – Practices for sustaining Peace after the Resolution of Conflict/Institutionalizing transformation

Peace Education Teacher Training Manual

The INEE Peace Education training program was cooperatively developed, based on generic Peace Education materials developed by UNHCR. A pilot project was developed in the multi-ethnic refugee camps in Kenya. The materials were tested, revised and tested again in an iterative process. In 2001 these materials were introduced for refugee and national populations in six countries. This 94-page Teacher Training Manual was written as an adjunct to the school component of the Peace Education Program. The school program includes a Teacher Activity Book, a Story Book, Role-Play cards and a booklet of resource notes for teachers. These were supported by a public awareness component that included 10 posters and in some locations street theatre.

The Zone – Online Conflict Learning Module for Youth by Aik Saath

An interactive online learning module focusing on conflict and conflict resolution for young people of diverse backgrounds. Topics include the roots, the conflict, the effects and the resolution. Illustrated with animated storyboards and roll-over graphics.

Training of Teachers in Areas of Armed Conflict

This 64-page practice manual was written by Dr. Anica Mikus Kos, a pediatrician and child psychiatrist from Slovenia. It was published as a supplement in the online journal Intervention: International Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counselling in Areas of Armed Conflict, Vol 3 No. 2 ; July 2005

Aik Saath – Supporting CR among Sikh, Hindu and Muslim youth in London

This video profiles Aik Saath, a youth-run project in London that trains young people to be peer educators around conflict resolution. Over one hundred young people have been part of the team, training their peers in conflict resolution and anti-racism skills, since 1998. The team trains over one thousand other young people every year. Learn more about the group on their website or via their brochure (5 MB).

Evaluation of a School-Based, Universal Violence Prevention Program: Low, Medium, & High-Risk

Research article summarizing a violence intervention initiative. The investigation examined the differential effectiveness of PeaceBuilders, a large-scale, universal violence prevention program, on male and female youth identified as low, medium, or high risk for future violence. It included eight urban schools randomly assigned to intensive intervention and wait-list control conditions. The sample included N = 2,380 predominantly minority children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Results indicated differential effectiveness of the intervention, by level of risk; high-risk children reported more decreases in aggression and more increases in social competence in comparison to children at medium and low levels of risk. Findings add to a growing number of promising science-based prevention efforts that seek to reduce aggression and increase social competence; they provide encouraging evidence that relatively low-cost, schoolwide efforts have the potential to save society millions in victim, adjudication, and incarceration costs.

Changing Children’s Trajectories of Development

This research brief describes one of the largest and longest running school-based violence prevention programs in the country–the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP)–and discusses the results of a rigorous evaluation of its effectiveness conducted by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The brief is designed to inform federal, state, and local policymakers and opinion leaders, as well as program developers and managers at the local level, of an effective strategy for directly addressing the problem of violence among children and youth. The evaluation assessed the impact of the RCCP program on children’s developmental trajectories toward violence, providing concrete evidence that early school-based violence prevention initiatives such as the RCCP can work and should be included in communities’ efforts to prevent violence among children and youth.