National Curriculum Integration Project

NATIONAL CURRICULUM INTEGRATION PROJECT

National Curriculum Integration Project

Report on Year One (1998-1999)

Submitted to

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation

By the

Colorado School Mediation Project

July 5, 2000

Research Conducted and Report Prepared By

Tricia S. Jones, Ph.D.

Rebecca Sanford, MA

Andrea Bodtker, MA

Dept. of Communication Sciences

Temple University

Philadelphia, PA 19122

Tel/fax: 215-204-7261/5954

e-mail:

Executive Summary

The National Curriculum Integration Project (NCIP) provides teachers with a process for infusing the critical life skills inherent in conflict resolution education into formal and informal curriculum. The project, begun in 1996 as a planning collaborative, implemented curriculum infusion and integration into seven middle schools around the nation in the 1998-1999 academic year.

This report summarizes findings from research that examined: (1) the best practices for developing and implementing curriculum infusion and integration processes, (2) the impact of the NCIP conflict resolution education on students’ conflict orientations, and (3) the impact of the NCIP conflict resolution education on classroom climate.

Best Practices for Developing and Implementing Curriculum Infusion and Integration Programs

An intensive process evaluation was conducted to identify the best practices for developing and implementing curriculum infusion and integration programs as well as factors that inhibited successful program development.

Data were collected from observation of a Master teacher gathering in June 1999, interviews with all site coordinators, interviews with teachers, mid-year summary reports from site coordinators, and document analyses. The following insights were gained:

School Selection: Program success depends on having the school be capable of sustaining and committing to the effort. Schools should:

Be sufficiently resourced to devote necessary time and money to teachers involved
Be academically stable; experience suggests that schools in academic trouble cannot concentrate on program innovation efforts like NCIP
Have a relatively cohesive staff willing to work together
Have a collaborative leadership style
Have an emphasis on on-going staff development
Have basic conflict resolution education programming already in place, or at least have basic training already provided
Be willing to commit to a long-term process

Teacher Selection: Several factors are key to teachers being successful at this process:

Being willing to volunteer for the program
Having good basic teaching skills; no obvious skill deficits
Being willing to change and take risk
Being committed to student-centered learning
Having a fundamental belief in their students’ abilities
Being open to working in a team process
Having basic background and training in conflict resolution education

Orientation Processes: It is essential that administration, staff and teachers are effectively oriented to the nature of the program. Some guidelines for each population are as follows:

Administrative orientation should be a prolonged process
Teacher orientation should provide more information about the larger goals and purposes of the project, the “big” picture. There should also be a very clear discussion about the amount of time and effort it will take so that teachers can decide up front whether this is possible for them.
Staff orientation, or orientation for the teachers who are not directly involved in the curriculum infusion and integration project, should involve full staff and should present an overview of the program and the ways it may connect with other efforts at the school.

Planning and Goal Setting: It is essential for teachers and administrators to be more involved in the planning and goal setting processes for their school. They should:

be taught basic planning processes
engage in planning and goal setting meetings to clarify what they want their program to achieve
be encouraged through this discussion to identify markers of success, “ways they will know” when the success has occurred, when the goal has been accomplished.

Training: For maximally effective training:

Do an assessment of teachers’ knowledge of conflict resolution and basic skills levels prior to training to tailor training to the specific group of teachers involved
Involve as much experiential learning as possible
Have longer initial training sessions (perhaps 4-5 days) so teachers can really work on skill development and begin to bond with their peers.
Have a better use of the training manual.
Have role-playing with colleagues in the training.

Target the training and lesson development to specific disciplines first.
Ongoing training should receive much more attention, with emphasis on time available for in-class co-teaching of lessons where trainers can model lessons for teachers.

Team Process: Assuming that resources are forthcoming, there are several keys to making the team process effective:

Provide the team with training on team development.
Provide teachers with communication infrastructures.
Provide an ongoing team check-up so teachers can evaluate their progress as a team, their own ability to “build community” within the teaching team.
Make new member orientation a high priority for team process.
Use the team as a self-learning tool as well as an administrative/coordinating tool.

Impact on Students’ Conflict Orientations

A primary goal of conflict resolution education is to help students develop collaborative and constructive ways of handling conflicts. This research suggests that the NCIP experience was quite beneficial for students in terms of promoting constructive conflict orientations.

Three conflict management questions were administered to students as pre-tests and post-tests. Each of the questionnaires was open-ended, which enabled collection of detailed responses from students. The first questionnaire, “How Do You Manage Conflict”, asked students to indicate their general ways of dealing with conflict. The second questionnaire, “How Would You Solve This Conflict,” asked students how they would deal with a specific hypothetical conflict if they were disputants. The third questionnaire, “How Would You Help Solve This Conflict,” asked students how they would intervene in a dispute between two friends.

As a Disputant: The results from the first two questionnaires indicate that students significantly changed their conflict orientations after being in NCIP classes in terms of the following:

They were more likely to facilitate communication with the other party
They were more likely to use Constructive Conflict Management behaviors (like emotional management and negotiation problem-solving)
They were less likely to use verbal aggression against the other party

There were also some differences between boys and girls conflict orientations. Specifically, the results indicated that:

Girls are more likely to seek help from others (both peers and authority figures)
Girls are more likely to use Constructive Conflict Management behaviors
(including facilitating communication, emotional management, and negotiation
and problem-solving)
Girls are more likely to use general Withdrawal behaviors
Boys are more likely to use Aggression behaviors (physical and verbal)
Boys are more likely to us pro-social or strategic withdrawal behaviors

As a Third Party: When students were asked to be a third party in a conflict between friends, the results indicated that after NCIP classes, students were more likely to use constructive behaviors in their third party role. Specifically:

Students were more likely to use Constructive Conflict Management Behaviors (facilitating communication, emotional management, and negotiation and problem-solving)

There were also gender differences in the ways students would participate as third parties:

Girls were more likely to use Constructive Conflict Management behaviors, especially when they were friends with the disputants
Boys were more likely to “stay out of it” in general, although girls tried to “stay out of it” when the disputants were clearly strangers to third party.

Impact on Classroom Climate

A major goal of conflict resolution education and cooperative learning programs has been to improve classroom climate so children have a more supportive learning environment. The NCIP project planners shared this goal. To determine whether NCIP positively effected classroom climate, pre-test and post-tests of the Classroom Life Survey (a revised version of the Classroom Life Measure) were collected. The results showed that NCIP classes did improve their climate and that there were general differences in the ways boys and girls perceived classroom climate.

There were significant differences between the pre-tests and post-tests in the following ways:

Students perceived greater use of Constructive Conflict Management
Students perceived more Student Support for other students
Students perceived less Teacher Support for students (This may be due to the perception that teachers needed to provide less support for students because their peers were providing them the needed support)

There were significant differences between perceptions of boys and girls in the following ways:

Girls perceived Overall Climate more positively than boys
Girls perceived more Constructive Conflict Management
Girls perceived more Cooperation
Girls perceived more Interdependence
Girls perceived more Student Support
Girls perceived more Teacher Support

There were also differences related to class subject. However, given the small sample size, it is difficult to say whether the influence was due to the class subject (e.g., English versus Art), or whether the difference was due to the teacher who was teaching that class subject.