Peer Mediators
Nov. 26th, 2010 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpageI just realized I forgot to write about this!
On Tuesday I went to a meeting of Peer Mediator "champions" (aka the teachers running the Peer Mediator program.) The person who runs the program at the board level is a social worker, and she's been doing it for a little more than two decades; I've come across her a couple times before, though I've never been the one planning to run the program before.
More interesting than this is the fact that Hamilton's Peer Mediators program has been studied fairly extensively by a psychology team at McMaster, due to the fact that this social worker's husband is a doctor of psychology there and chose it as a study topic. He's written a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on aspects of the program, including designing the test data to see if it was working. He presented the bare bones of his findings at the meeting.
The schools he studied at first were all inner-city schools with a lot of problems. I mean, these are schools where teachers and students are regularly told to fuck off and police in the office is a near-daily event. He stationed his grad students around the playground and set up what they were counting: the percentage of ten-second intervals that contained a physically violent incident. Two of the schools had numbers approaching sixty; that is, sixty percent of ten-second intervals on those playgrounds had at least one violent incident. The third school topped seventy percent.
When the programs had been running for a month or so, he sent his grad students back to count again. Then he checked again a few years later and controlled for some other variables. Some of the results:
1) The incidence of violence on the playground at those three schools after a month diminished by about half - nearly two-thirds for the third school - into the twenties in all three cases.
2) When there were one or two peer mediator teams on the playground, the incidence remained generally around 25%, but when there were four or more teams out there, the incidence was reduced as low as 5%.
3) Teacher did not have a good grasp of what was happening on their playgrounds; they knew there was a difference but were uniformly shocked both at the original numbers and at the success rates.
4) The effects did NOT diminish over time, provided that the level of peer mediator support remained consistent; if it diminished, the incidence of violence rose again, and the teachers were not aware of it - but the kids were.
I asked if any studies had been done to see how far the language of peer mediation permeated the classroom environment; that is, how much were teachers using that language to solve problems in their classrooms? He didn't know, but wrote down the question for possible further study. My theory is that schools where teachers use the language of peer mediation consistently end up maintaining their peer mediation programs more effectively and report fewer instances of bullying than schools where the peer mediation stops at the classroom door.
Anyway. I've found another teacher who will be taking care of the organizational elements that I'm generally horrible at, and supporting me in the interpersonal stuff - meetings and training the kids and troubleshooting. Now the trick is to get it up and running.
On Tuesday I went to a meeting of Peer Mediator "champions" (aka the teachers running the Peer Mediator program.) The person who runs the program at the board level is a social worker, and she's been doing it for a little more than two decades; I've come across her a couple times before, though I've never been the one planning to run the program before.
More interesting than this is the fact that Hamilton's Peer Mediators program has been studied fairly extensively by a psychology team at McMaster, due to the fact that this social worker's husband is a doctor of psychology there and chose it as a study topic. He's written a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on aspects of the program, including designing the test data to see if it was working. He presented the bare bones of his findings at the meeting.
The schools he studied at first were all inner-city schools with a lot of problems. I mean, these are schools where teachers and students are regularly told to fuck off and police in the office is a near-daily event. He stationed his grad students around the playground and set up what they were counting: the percentage of ten-second intervals that contained a physically violent incident. Two of the schools had numbers approaching sixty; that is, sixty percent of ten-second intervals on those playgrounds had at least one violent incident. The third school topped seventy percent.
When the programs had been running for a month or so, he sent his grad students back to count again. Then he checked again a few years later and controlled for some other variables. Some of the results:
1) The incidence of violence on the playground at those three schools after a month diminished by about half - nearly two-thirds for the third school - into the twenties in all three cases.
2) When there were one or two peer mediator teams on the playground, the incidence remained generally around 25%, but when there were four or more teams out there, the incidence was reduced as low as 5%.
3) Teacher did not have a good grasp of what was happening on their playgrounds; they knew there was a difference but were uniformly shocked both at the original numbers and at the success rates.
4) The effects did NOT diminish over time, provided that the level of peer mediator support remained consistent; if it diminished, the incidence of violence rose again, and the teachers were not aware of it - but the kids were.
I asked if any studies had been done to see how far the language of peer mediation permeated the classroom environment; that is, how much were teachers using that language to solve problems in their classrooms? He didn't know, but wrote down the question for possible further study. My theory is that schools where teachers use the language of peer mediation consistently end up maintaining their peer mediation programs more effectively and report fewer instances of bullying than schools where the peer mediation stops at the classroom door.
Anyway. I've found another teacher who will be taking care of the organizational elements that I'm generally horrible at, and supporting me in the interpersonal stuff - meetings and training the kids and troubleshooting. Now the trick is to get it up and running.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-27 12:47 am (UTC)I am surprised that peer mediators are able to make that much of a difference. I would have thought that a drastic increase in teacher:student ratio on the playground would be necessary for that. It certainly sounds like peer mediation is an essential component of safety at any school, although I am skeptical of its ability to help bullying situations where the bully is significantly more popular than the victim. There was peer mediation at my middle school, but I didn't use it--I knew the bullies had a lot more friends than I did and I figured that an opportunity to air grievances at each other would just be an opportunity for bullies to run roughshod over me verbally. In hindsight, I don't know whether it would have been helpful or not. I'm curious about whether any of the research on peer mediation has assessed how much socially rejected and/or ASD kids are helped by it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-27 12:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-27 01:18 am (UTC)