The Power of Peer Mediation
By Resilience Coach: Orlando Dobbin
| Pactolus Global School is the kind of school where you immediately feel the warmth and love in the building when you walk through its doors. Whether it is the principal greeting students with dance battles, the welcoming smile of the receptionist—appropriately named Mrs. Morning—helping everyone start the day on a positive note, or the walls decorated with student work, Pactolus is the kind of school that restores your faith in public education and reminds you of the magic that happens in public schools each day. Like any school, however, Pactolus faces challenges in its work to make a reality its vision of ensuring that every single child receives a high-quality and effective education every single day. As the school’s resilience team met to identify priorities and needs for the year, one area of need quickly rose to the top: peer conflict. After reviewing discipline data, the team recognized that student conflicts were among the most frequent reasons for referrals. Rather than responding to conflict only after it occurred with punishment and suspensions, the team wanted to explore proactive, evidence-based strategies the school could use to build students’ skills and abilities to navigate conflict positively and strengthen the school’s climate. Through research and brainstorming, they landed on peer mediation. Peer Mediation Peer mediation is a structured program in which students are trained to help their peers work through conflict in a safe, respectful, and solution-focused way. The process teaches students essential social and emotional skills such as: active listening, perspective-taking, problem-solving, and maintaining confidentiality. Research suggests that peer mediation can reduce disciplinary incidents, improve school climate, and help students build lifelong conflict resolution skills. To bring this vision to life, Pactolus partnered with the Mediation Center of Eastern Carolina to train student mediators. Over the course of eight weeks, students stayed after school twice a week to complete the training requirements. During this time, they learned: how to be active listeners, explored important concepts such as neutrality, confidentiality, and the role of the disputants, and developed leadership skills that would help them serve their peers. Their trainer did an incredible job creating fun and interactive lessons for the students, so much so that they didn’t mind staying after school for another hour after a long day of school. Most importantly, they believe peer mediation is helping make their school a kinder place. The students’ work as peer mediators hasn’t stopped there. They have also begun developing scripts and mini-lessons to proactively teach social skills to younger classrooms and help them prevent conflict before it begins. The first lesson they developed focuses on using kind words, built around the catchphrase: Pause, Choose, Kind words we use. Pactolus Global School’s peer mediation program is equipping students with skills that help them support not only their classmates, but also themselves and their broader communities. We are excited to see how the peer mediation team continues to grow and lead at Pactolus Global School. |
