'Happy Children' was launched as part of the Friendship Cards initiative. FC is an educational tool that was developed by Relationships are Forever Foundation (RAFF), in collaboration with various professionals coming from the field of education and counselling. This study examines the effects of the use of FC interactive tool on children's…

Research talks about the importance of the family in the development of social and emotional competencies of children. In this paper, we wanted to explore whether the Friendship cards (FC) (a theoretically derived preventive educational game) helped to improve the relationship between the participants and their children and whether it helped in…

Twenty-four early childhood educators in an urban city in the United States completed a social-emotional learning course as part of an intervention to explore how teachers learn to value and practice positive guidance principles. Affection between 124 teacher-child dyads was tracked weekly to measure change in teacher-child relationships.…

This study offers a look inside one school community. The school implemented Let Grow Play Club and a recently expanded 40-minute recess period. Data are from observations of children's play periods, child interviews, and teacher interviews. We argue that play has significant cognitive, emotional, and social benefits for elementary school…

This study examined the impact of Conscious Discipline® on Michigan elementary teachers' perceptions of their self-efficacy and burnout levels. Teachers completed a survey of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and Maslach's Burnout Inventory (MBI) and were observed using a fidelity instrument (Rain, 2014) by the researcher five months…

We present a youth development intervention program and its evaluation. Deriving from the theories of agentic self and positive youth development, we adopted a holistic perspective that focused on social agency with growth mindset and self-efficacy conceptualized as its motivators. The intervention consisted of 14 weekly sessions with 508 sixth…

Introduction: In recent years many schools have introduced peer mediation as a method to improve coexistence. However, little has been done in the way of empirical evaluation of school mediation services. The aim of this research, therefore, was to understand the benefits of mediation from an educational and transformational perspective, by…

The concepts of 'leadership' and 'inclusion' continue to attract much attention in educational discourses; however, not many studies have explored their connection in schools serving conflict-affected communities where displacement and fragmentation of families risks the access, participation and achievement of many young people in education. This…

This report examines the effect of a primary component of restorative justice (RJ) programming in one community-based organization (CBO) on students' behavioral and disciplinary outcomes in four Chicago high schools from 2014 to 2016. It looks at the effect of students' use of RJ programs offered in the CBO's "Peace Room" (PR) on rates…

Schools across the country are changing how they discipline students by implementing research- and evidence-based disciplinary practices that have yielded positive results for schools and students. These disciplinary practices--known as Restorative Justice, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and social and emotional learning--largely…

While social-emotional learning programmes in schools often have positive outcomes, many such initiatives are not well implemented and maintained. This paper reports on teacher reflections on the process of planning and implementing a whole school social-emotional learning (SEL) programme with a conflict resolution focus, called "Enhancing…

This study examines the effectiveness of the Lions Quest Program: Skills for Growing by employing a quasi-experimental design with a control group. The experimental and control group each comprises two primary schools--one public, one private. One classroom at each grade level, 1 through 4, in each school was selected by random sampling for a…

Safe and healthy recess promotes a Culture of Health in schools by providing students time to develop socially, emotionally, physically, and academically. The Issue: This brief describes elementary schools' experiences implementing a safe and healthy recess with the Playworks TeamUp program. Key Findings: (1) Playworks' TeamUp program can help…

This paper describes the development, implementation and preliminary evaluation of the Reaching Educators and Children (REACH) program, a training and coaching intervention designed to increase the capacity of early childhood teachers to support children's social and emotional development. We evaluated REACH with 139 teachers of toddler and…

This interpretive research was at the intersection of language acquisition, literacy development, and social education. The multisite study of literacy instruction that addressed compassion as a conflict response involved qualitative analyses of data gathered from lesson artifacts, observations, interviews of the participating teachers, and survey…