When Andrés is angry, he clenches his teeth and balls his hands into tight fists. The pose is familiar to both his teachers and peers—it means someone is about to get punched. Today, however, Diego grabs him by the elbow. "Use Tuga la Tortuga," he says. Andrés pauses, sits down on the floor, wraps his arms around his knees, and tucks his chin to his chest—a self-control strategy dubbed Tuga the Turtle. He breathes deeply. His rage is so strong that it takes him a minute to calm down. He stands up and returns to his seat. The class resumes.
Andrés and Diego are two 2nd graders with chronic aggression problems in the Aulas en Paz (Classrooms at Peace) program in Bogotá, Colombia. Aulas en Paz (AeP) is a primary school project designed to promote what the National Ministry of Education calls "citizenship competencies"—the basic skills we human beings need to interact constructively, democratically, and peacefully with one another (Chaux, Lleras, & Velásquez, 2004). By combining in-class lessons with workshops for teachers and home visits for parents, the project aims to integrate those skills into every arena of student life.
For 18 months, in 2006 and 2007, I worked with AeP as a Fulbright Fellow, helping to design, observe, and evaluate curriculum; train aspiring teachers; and disseminate the model to other cities in the region. The program is now being implemented in 50 schools in four conflict-torn areas.
In Colombia, the need for this type of program is undeniable. Nearly 50 years of armed conflict among leftist guerrillas, rightist paramilitaries, and drug traffickers has left in its wake a culture of generalized violence (Zuluaga, 2002). Students grow up surrounded by the tragic realities of civil war: massacres, assassinations, and forced displacement. Political and urban-youth violence reinforce each other, perpetuating the cycle of bloodshed (Chaux, 2003). If the armed conflict is ever to end, the new generation must learn to clamor for peace.
But AeP isn't applicable only in Colombia. The problems that the project addresses are universal. In the United States, violence in schools diverts limited resources to security and psychological services, disrupts the learning process, and claims dozens of lives every year. When teenagers are expelled or drop out, many end up in gangs or in jail. If we want to make our cities safe, we have to begin with our schools.
Most schools aren't able to muster the time and money needed to implement a program as intensive as Aulas en Paz, which involves several components: "citizenship competencies" courses for the whole class, workshops for select groups of students, and weekly visits and occasional phone calls to the families of students with the most severe aggression problems. AeP's multicomponent approach differentiates it from many other conflict-resolution programs, but it also tends to make the program time-consuming and expensive.
However, several lessons learned from the Colombian experience don't require any new resources—just a bit of effort and flexibility. Four lessons in particular can help transform the atmosphere of schools.
Lesson 1: Start Early
"My students can't do this," María says. She is a teacher in training in one of the more politically and geographically isolated barrios of Bogotá. In a few months, we will begin implementing one component of the AeP program in her public school. We've asked her and her fellow teachers in training for feedback, and some are decidedly skeptical. "These kids barely know how to read, and you want them to learn conflict-resolution skills?" she asks. "They're just too young."
María's doubts are understandable. Our experience, however, has taught us never to underestimate the capacity of children to grasp concepts and skills they can apply to their daily lives. The story of Andrés and Diego is instructive: Once kids recognize the relevance and effectiveness of conflict-resolution strategies, they typically internalize these strategies and begin to use them to resolve their own disputes. Describing emotions in specific terms ("excited" or "angry" rather than simply "good" or "bad"); using "I" statements; breathing deeply and counting backwards to control anger; showing simple gestures of affection to console a hurt classmate—these are techniques that students can learn as early as 2nd grade.
Research confirms what we have discovered through practice. Richard Tremblay, director of the Montreal Prevention Experiment, has found that children as young as 7 years old are capable of learning control of violent impulses and basic interpersonal skills, the building blocks of more sophisticated conflict-resolution techniques (Tremblay, Masse, Pagani, & Vitaro, 1996). Intervening early is especially essential if we want to curb aggressive behaviors before they become irreversible. According to Leonard Eron (1990), these behaviors "crystallize" by age 8. This finding is alarming, but it offers an important insight for intervention. Many of the teenagers who end up fighting, abusing drugs, and dropping out at age 15 were already hitting, biting, and calling one another names when they were 6 years old. We often wait to intervene until an adolescent gets into serious trouble. But by then it may be too late.
Lesson 2: Create Opportunities to Learn from Peaceful Peers
At a public school in a small suburb of Bogotá, teachers tackled the discipline problem by establishing a "time-out trailer": an unused storage shed adjacent to the playground where teachers send habitual rule-breakers to sit and do homework while they wait for the day to end. This practice follows the same seductive logic behind detention and in-school suspension in U.S. schools. At the expense of a few rough hours for the one unlucky teacher chosen to supervise the trailer, the rest of the faculty enjoys a productive day.
The problem with this system is that aggressive students encourage one another through a process known asbehavior modeling. Grouped together in the same room for hours at a time, aggressive students tend to get more, not less, aggressive. They may even learn some new tricks. Teachers in Bogotá have told me stories of bullies teaching other bullies deviously creative ways to pick on their peers. Time-out trailers, detention, and in-school suspension are perfect set-ups for this negative kind of behavior modeling to occur.
As an alternative, AeP uses a model pioneered by Tremblay in Montreal called heterogeneous groups. Groups of six students—two identified as "aggressive" and the other four as "prosocial"—are picked to participate in after-school workshops. The small size of the workshops permits us to do a wide variety of activities with the kids, from role-playing games to art projects. We hope to achieve the reverse of the behavior modeling taking place in a time-out trailer: The aggressive students observe how their prosocial peers act in the classroom, and with a lot of coaching from the facilitator, they begin to adopt some of those positive behaviors.
The intimacy of the heterogeneous groups also helps the aggressive students build new relationships. This is important for the simple reason that friends usually don't bully friends. At the beginning of the year, we survey all the students who participate in the program, asking them to name their friends. The results are sad but unsurprising: Aggressive students tend to identify only a few of their classmates as friends, and those few are usually other aggressive students.
The effect of the heterogeneous groups is remarkable. Students who reported having only two or three friends at the beginning of the year identify as many as 20 or 30 by Christmas break. These gains are impressive even when compared with a control group.
But how can teachers replicate these successes in a regular classroom, where time and space don't always permit such individualized attention? They can begin by identifying the most aggressive and most prosocial pupils in the class. Most teachers do this instinctively. Those who are unsure can simply ask the students in anonymous surveys which of their classmates most often tease and bully (or help and defend) their peers. Students' answers almost always coincide with the assessments of teachers and school psychologists. The students know.
Teachers can use the answers to these surveys to organize lesson plans. For example, if the teacher notices that some of the most aggressive students in the class are also some of the best athletes, he or she might design lesson plans that help students analyze problems of aggression on the playing field. Or the teacher might intentionally pair an aggressive student with several prosocial students in group projects that demand a lot of communication among group members (analyzing a short story, for instance). Teachers can also use the information they have learned from student surveys to change the layout of the classroom. In the partner work, group projects, and seating arrangements, even a big, busy classroom offers many opportunities for aggressive students to learn from their prosocial peers.
Lesson 3: Give Students Ownership of the Rules
In Melisa's classroom, Miguel is galloping around the room while the rest of the class reads a short case study of a conflict between two friends. Camila notices and says, "Kanorakú!Kanorakú! Kanorakú!" This is a mnemonic for Cartelera de Normas y Acuerdos (Rules and Agreements), the name the group has given to the rules they established for themselves on the first day of class. Miguel finally hears Camila, sees that the other kids are waiting for him, and returns to his seat.
Students are more likely to follow rules they define themselves. Even young children are capable of recognizing and creating rules to curtail behaviors that obstruct learning. The rule-making process begins with a brainstorming session; the students come up with several ideas, discuss them as a group, and pick a handful that will become the official classroom rules.
The rules are generally pretty basic at the start: Ask the teacher for permission to leave the room; clean up after yourself when you're finished with your snack; obey the teacher's hand signal that calls for silence. Rules are added or clarified as needed throughout the semester. For example, the students in one heterogeneous group would groan whenever someone made a point with which they didn't agree. With their teacher, they made a rule against groaning; the students would have to come up with another way of expressing their frustration.
Classroom rules should be specific and tailored to address discipline problems that the kids have observed in school. For example, a better alternative to "Be respectful" would be "Don't snatch things from other students." The kids should also decide on the consequences and punishments associated with breaking the rules. To do this, they must first be able to distinguish between these two concepts. A consequence is the effect of a lack of discipline on the entire class; a punishment is a sanction imposed on a particular student. The class might decide, for example, that students should raise their hands before they speak. They should be able to identify the consequences of breaking the rule—if they don't raise their hands before they speak, they won't be able to hear their classmates' comments—and define an appropriate punishment—the teacher won't call on a student who violates the rule the next time, even if that student knows the answer.
The list of rules hangs on the wall of Melisa's classroom as a visible reminder of the commitments that students made to one another as peers and friends. The students follow the rules because the rules are theirs.
By telling one another to "Kanorakú," students routinely call attention to these rules, thus regulating their own behavior. For many students, this is the first time they've been asked to reflect on the rules that govern their behavior and to decide for themselves whether or not those rules are worthwhile. They learn this process in time, with coaching from the teacher. The teacher consciously refrains from reminding students of the rules so that students will remind one another instead. However, if the kids seem to be usingKanorakú to gang up on a student who has trouble following the rules, the teacher will take control.
One strategy that we have found tremendously effective is giving the rules a catchy name. As in Melisa's classroom, naming the rules helps students appropriate them as their own. It also encourages them to view the class as a special club with its own unique language. At Melisa's school, we have heard students remind one another to "Kanorakú," even on the playground. We hope that students will apply the strategies we teach throughout the day, both inside and outside the classroom.
Lesson 4: Practice Is Key
One of the most basic instincts of teachers everywhere is to suppress conflicts in the classroom. Conflicts interrupt lesson plans, damage relationships, and threaten the physical safety of students and faculty. In the classroom, the need to maintain control can feel urgent, even desperate. Conflicts represent a threat to that control, so we try to smother them before they ignite.
By stifling conflicts, however, we forfeit one of the richest opportunities we have to coach students in the delicate skills of peacemaking. When quarrels arise, students too often defer to an adult who resolves the dispute for them. What the students don't realize is that they are capable of managing their own conflicts. All they need is practice.
This is the single most important principle underlying every AeP activity. Encouraging students to be respectful, tolerant, and well behaved is important, but it isn't enough. Neither is just discussing conflict-resolution techniques in class. Students need opportunities to put those techniques into frequent and conscious practice.
Often, students only get the chance to rehearse conflict-resolution skills when quarrels arise. These are volatile moments when emotions run wild. Students often let their anger, sadness, or embarrassment take over; in response, teachers often force an artificial reconciliation to prevent the dispute from spiraling out of control. Emotional outbursts, improvisation, and the need for a quick if superficial solution cheapen the learning process.
Students can effectively practice conflict-resolution skills during simulated disputes—through role-playing games, for instance. These usually involve conflicts between two or more fictional characters; students have to resolve the conflict themselves or with the help of a mediator. For instance, one role-play might involve two characters, one of whom promised to visit the other but never showed up. One character is angry because he purchased supplies for his friend's visit; however, the friend had a family emergency and was unable to go. The purpose of the game is to get both students to communicate how they're feeling and to understand why the other character acted the way he or she did. This can better equip them to implement those skills to resolve real conflicts.
Lessons for Us All
These simple lessons have proven invaluable to the success of the AeP curriculum. They cost nothing and require no new staff or materials. But they work, judging from the results I saw when using this 8-month program with 2nd graders. The number of observed "aggressive" events in the classroom and on the playground declined to one-fifth of their initial frequency. Prosocial behaviors (such as helping, consoling, and cooperating) increased ninefold. The frequency of interruptions in the classroom decreased threefold. Students who identified few friends at the beginning of the year identified many by the end. Most impressive, the program was implemented in a school located in the most violent neighborhood of Bogotá. By waging peace in schools like that, Colombian teachers can show us how to wage peace everywhere.