Resource Reviews

The BBC has a large collection of educational video clips, and some of them are of special interest to readers of this blog. A video presenting peer mediation to 5th grade students was clipped to create a few shortened learning videos that might be used in teaching. You can see all three of them via this link.

Here’s the details and links to each one:

What is a peer mediator? – Duration: 02:45
What is a peer mediator? A class of Year Five children explore conflict and how best to deal with it.

What makes a good peer mediator? – Duration: 03:57
Explores what makes a good peer mediator, skills include understanding feelings, not taking sides, knowing how to help and how to listen.

Seeing both sides of a story – Duration: 01:37
Children learn how to support their peers in the playground to find resolutions to conflict.

As a new school year begins, teachers and students renew relationships after the long summer break, see new faces, and establish their routines for the year. The activities in this nice packet from the Morningside Center are designed to help you get the year off to a good start by engaging you and your students in getting to know each other, practicing listening skills, and discussing the values that will shape your classroom community.

There are separate sets of activities for grades Pre-K to 2, grades 3 to 5, and grades 6 to 12. They are adapted from exercises in the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program and the 4Rs Program (Reading, Writing, Respect & Resolution) developed by the Morningside Center.

Readers may be interested to know that the informative current issue of “Better: Evidence-based Education” magazine from Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Center for Research and Reform in Education carries a theme about Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Looking ahead this year, the magazine focuses on what works in education concerning Implementing an SEL program (nationally and school-wide) and how to imbed solutions for SEL into school cultures. The magazine also provides articles about how societal trends can alter SEL from a broader prospective. You’ll enjoy reading the magazine which also provides a series of short article updates on latest research reports and how to access them. You can view the magazine here: http://snipurl.com/evidencelearning

Interested in promoting the development of Peace Building in your curriculum? This online version of a book of story-based activities is now available in our CRE Resource catalog. The stories help to spark childrens imaginations to write creatively about their own understanding of peace and how they might create their own representation of having an active part in conflict resolution and the peace process. The activities in the book encourage the development, writing and sharing of stories highlighting many peace building elements such as: happy endings, win-win situations, challenges resisting stereotyping, peace within the environment and many more elements. You can view the book in our online resource collection: http://snipurl.com/peacestorytelling

Teachers in the U.K. have a rich resource of videos and other support materials provided by teachers.tv which currently celebrating their 5th Anniversary. This video on Anger Management provides a look at the challenges faced by two teaching assistants who work to manage the anger and accompanying misbehavior of some students in their school. (Note: video downloads only work if your are based in the U.K.)

Readers may not be aware of the wealth of resources made available by The Open University in the United Kingdom. OpenLearn, built on the open source learning platform known as Moodle, provides lots of course materials at no cost. It is definitely worth a visit. One that might interest CREducation.org folks is a course known as Teaching for Good Behaviour. As the introduction explains,

The quality of our teaching inevitably has an impact on the behaviour of our students. This unit considers some of the factors that can contribute to misbehaviour in the classroom and some of the steps that we can take as teachers to re-engage students with the learning process. This unit considers the format of lessons, how lessons are delivered, how to present lesson content in an interesting and creative way, and the development of “engaging lessons”.

Here’s the outline of topics covered:
Introduction
1. Teaching and behaviour
2. Lesson format
3. Lesson delivery
4. Lesson content
5. Developing ‘engaging’ lessons
References and Acknowledgements