For more than ten years peer mediation programs have been springing up in schools. Although they are begun with the highest hopes and best intentions, many programs falter in their second or third year, then disappear. What makes a program effective enough to endure year after year and become part of a school's culture?
Peer Mediation is the story of how one successful program started in an urban elementary school-how it was designed, implemented, and maintained. Teacher and mediator Judith Ferrara explains mediation, what it means to start up a program, watch it grow, change, and endure. At the heart of this book are the voices of the students who volunteered to become peer mediators, learned to understand the mediation process, and worked to help shape the program. Their thoughts and reactions to the peer mediation program, their tenacity, and, above all, their ethic of caring will leave a strong impression. Peer Mediation demonstrates the need to listen to students, observe their responses to the program, and work with them to revise it in order to maintain it.
Peer Mediation includes:
- strategies that may be used to implement and maintain a peer mediation program;
- vignettes in each chapter selected and interpreted to demonstrate what it can mean to adults and students who are part of a peer mediation program;
- suggestions for handling the problems that arise and changes that occur when peer mediation programs "start up";
- forms, checklists, and standards for preparing and assessing peer mediation programs;
- an annotated bibliography of mediation theory and practice, conflict resolution curriculum, and program materials.
Because Peer Mediation follows one program from implementation through its third year, it will be a useful resource for guidance counselors, teachers, and administrators who wish to start up a program, or gain insight into how to maintain an existing one.
