Program Profile: Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers

This is a school-based, conflict resolution program designed to teach students how to manage conflicts constructively. The program is rated Promising. Participants showed a statistically significant greater likelihood of using constructive strategies, such as negotiating, and lower likelihood of using detrimental strategies, compared with the control group. There were no statistically significant effects on the use of smoothing or withdrawing as conflict resolution strategies.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes either 1) one study conducted in multiple sites; or 2) two or three studies, each conducted at a different site. Learn about how we make the multisite determination.

Program Goals

Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers is a school-based conflict resolution program aimed at teaching students to manage their conflicts through negotiation and mediation, the core skills taught in the program. In an effort to teach students constructive ways to resolve their conflicts, the program seeks to reduce the occurrence of violence in schools, enhance academic achievement, and promote the importance of mutual understanding and agreement among one another.

Program Theory

Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers is based on the conflict resolution theory, which recognizes that conflicts are an essential and natural part of society. Conflicts aid in both social and cognitive development; however, there are effective and ineffective ways in which conflicts can be managed. For an individual to resolve a conflict, he or she must be able to take into account their own interests, as well as the interests of others. The individual must learn to negotiate with others so that a collective agreement between all parties involved can be reached. Understanding the importance of conflict resolution and the steps necessary to resolve conflict, Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers seeks to teach these conflict resolution skills to elementary, middle, and high school students. 

Program Components

Given its preventative aim, the Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers program concentrates on teaching students how to value constructive conflict, engage in problem-solving and integrative negotiations, and mediate classmates’ conflicts. Mediation is defined as the process by which an outside party assists the conflicting parties in negotiating an integrative resolution, whereas negotiation is known as the process by which conflicting parties want to work together to reach an agreement.

The program teaches students conflict resolution through mediation and negotiation in three parts. The first part of the training teaches students about conflicts, emphasizing that conflicts are inevitable, and if handled appropriately can aid in personal development and have desirable outcomes. The second part of the training teaches students how to negotiate, while the third part of the training teaches students how to mediate. The negotiation portion of the training consists of six steps:

1. Jointly describing what you want
2. Jointly describing how you feel
3. Expressing the reasons for these wants and feelings
4. Reversing perspectives and communicating your understanding of the other person’s wants and feelings
5. Developing at least three optional mutual agreements
6. Reaching an integrative agreement

The mediation portion of the training consists of four steps in which students can help their classmates mediate conflicts:

1. Ending hostilities
2. Ensuring all parties are committed to the mediation
3. Aiding in the negotiation process
4. Formalizing an agreement

Following the conflict resolution training, the peer mediation portion of the program is implemented. It is during this portion of the program that students are given the ability to serve as mediators.

Each day the teacher selects two different students to function as the class mediator. The mediator role is rotated throughout the class so that each student has the ability to serve as a mediator. The mediators use the conflict resolution skills they were taught during the three-step process. The mediators are recognizable as they wear mediator T-shirts, and seek to mediate all conflicts that occur in both the classroom and throughout the school grounds (i.e., the lunchroom and playground).

The initial conflict resolution training usually requires 10–20 hours of training and is typically spread across several weeks of classroom instruction. The conflict resolution training is revisited throughout the school year to continue enhancing the students’ conflict resolutions skills as they function as class mediators.

Study 1

Johnson and colleagues (1995) conducted a quasi-experimental study to examine the effects of the Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers training on the type of conflict resolution strategies used by elementary and middle school-aged students in a middle-class, Midwestern, suburban school. Six classes were randomly selected as the treatment group from a pool of 22 teachers interested in implementing the program. The treatment group contained a total of 144 students from the second through fifth grades. Three classrooms that did not receive the training served as the control group. The control group contained 83 students from the third through fifth grades. There were no demographic characteristics of the student participants provided in the study except for gender (49 percent of the experimental group was male compared to 46 percent of the control group).

Data was collected weekly between December 1991 and May 1992 using a “conflict reporting form,” which was disseminated and collected by classroom teachers. Students were asked weekly to remember a conflict they were involved in and complete the form, which asked questions on who was involved in the conflict, what the conflict was about, what strategies were used to try to resolve the conflict, and the solution to the conflict.

Study outcomes included types of conflict, strategies used to resolve conflict, the resulting solutions, and the conflict settings. Strategies used to resolve conflict were categorized by the conflict strategies theory (Johnson and Johnson 1991; Johnson and Johnson 1994) which assumes that participants in a conflict are concerned with achieving their goal and maintaining a good relationship with the other person. The strategies were placed on a continuum of 0 to 12, from most destructive (such as physical and verbal aggression) to most constructive (such as proposing alternatives and negotiating). No subgroup analyses were conducted.

Study 2

Stevahn and colleagues (2000) conducted a randomized control study to evaluate the effects of the Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers training on willingness and ability to apply negotiation procedures, as well as the willingness and ability to help others use integrative negotiation to conflict situations in school. The study sample included 80 kindergartners from four classes in a suburban public elementary school in Edina, Minn. Students were randomly assigned to either the treatment group (n = 39), which received the Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers training as an integrated component of a 4-week curriculum unit on friendship, or the control group (n = 41), which received the same 4-week curriculum unit on friendship without the integrated training component. There were no demographic characteristics of the student participants provided in the study except for gender (51 percent of the experimental group was male compared to 68 percent of the control group).

The students were interviewed before and after the 4-week study period which began in February 1997. Willingness and ability to apply negotiation procedures was assessed using the Negotiation Conflict Scenario interview. During the Negotiation Conflict Scenario interview, each student was read a brief scenario about the child wanting to use a classroom computer but being blocked from doing so by a classmate, and then was asked to explain what he or she would do to resolve the conflict. Responses were categorized with the Conflict Management Scale, the Conflict Strategies Theory Scale, and scores for the presence of the six steps of the integrative negotiation procedure. Willingness and ability to help others use integrative negotiation was assessed using the Mediation Conflict Scenario interview. During the Mediation Conflict Scenario interview, each student was read a brief scenario about watching two students in line for the bus argue over their place in line (one student thought the other cut in front), and then was asked to explain what he or she would do to help the two students solve their conflict. Responses were categorized with the Mediation Constructiveness Scale (adapted from the Conflict Management Scale), the Mediation Conflict Strategies Theory Scale (adapted from the Conflict Strategies Theory Scale), and scores for the presence of the steps in the mediation process of the training.

Data was analyzed using unpaired t-tests to examine the differences between the experimental (trained) and control (untrained) conditions. No subgroup analyses were conducted.

Study 3

Stevahn and colleagues (2002) also conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effects of the Teaching Students to Be Peacemakers program on conflict resolution and peer mediation skills. The study included 92 ninth-grade students in four World Civilization social studies classes in a suburban high school in California. Two of the four classes were randomly assigned to the experimental condition (n = 47), which received the conflict resolution and peer mediation training, and the other two classes were randomly assigned to the control condition (n = 45), which did not receive the training. There were no demographic characteristics of the student participants provided in the study except for gender (51 percent of the experimental group was male compared to 40 percent of the control group).

The study was conducted in the spring of 1996. Posttest measures were collected from students 3 weeks after the program had ended and again the following school year, 7 months after the program had ended. There were a number of measures collected from students. The learning of the negotiation procedure was evaluated by asking students to write out step-by-step how they would resolve a conflict that involved gaining access to a computer. Responses were scored for the presence of the six negotiation steps (1 point per step). The ability to apply the negotiation procedure was evaluated by asking students to read brief scenarios about unresolved conflicts and describing what they would do in those situations. Responses were classified using the Strategy Constructiveness Scale and the Conflict Strategies Theory Scale. The ability to apply the peer mediation procedure was evaluated by asking students how they would resolve situations that involved a conflict between two students over one’s cutting in line in front of the other. The responses were categorized using the Intervention Constructiveness Scale and the Mediation Strategies Theory Scale.

Data was analyzed using unpaired t-tests to examine the differences between the experimental (trained) and control (untrained) conditions. No subgroup analyses were conducted.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

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Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

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Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

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