Preventing School Violence

Preventing School Violence: Guidelines for Teaching Civility and School Harmony, is an amazing resource that reminds the reader of the importance of establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships among the school community: teachers, administrators, students, families, and the community at large. As educators, we are responsible for modeling civility in our schools, by creating significant connections with others. This book provides the reader with profound scenarios, approaches and strategies to promote civility and encourage school harmony, and to explore what dignity for all really means.

In Preventing School Violence, Dr. Schiering invites you to enter her classroom, where the continuity between teaching and learning, between school and home, between character and inspiring knowledge are apparent. In these pages, you will find a road-map to creating a classroom as a safe, caring, and respectful community, and as a foundation for an amiable and healthy society., In this book Dr. Schiering provides clear directions as to how to build a positive classroom community where all students treat each other in a dignified manner and positivism abounds. She emphasizes that the key to achieving this, is the teacher as role-model. In addition, Dr Schiering provides many activities which direct the student toward introspection and self-awareness. While school violence is an issue ever present on our national conscience, its prevention is paramount to safeguarding our children. This book is very timely and teachers will find it most helpful in teaching civility to achieve harmony., Preventing School Violence: Guidelines for Teaching Civility and School Harmony: With passion and insight, Schiering engages the reader immediately and makes you feel like you deserve – and are getting – a warm hug. It is evident that she practices what she preaches with her style of “lifting up” her students and the reader. She invites her audience to develop self-awareness towards the goal of community civility. Her teaching philosophy and message are clear, sustainable, and goal-oriented: classroom community building results in good feelings about self and others. Through stories and interactive activities, Schiering effectively and invitingly draws in the audience to not only recognize the imperative of preventing school violence through teaching civility, but to be an agent of change. I finished the book with a more developed critical lens and intention of reconsidering my teaching strategies feeling energized to change our cultural climate!, Preventing School Violence: Guidelines for Teaching Civility and School Harmony, focuses on the need for these both in the school and home. One thing I really liked was the emphasis on positive thinking and how to incorporate that into class discussions. Through lessons, activities, personal vignettes, conversations and reflections, the reader will have a thorough understanding of what our society is confronting every day, and how we can begin to really address, and solve the problem of anti-social behaviors.When you reach the final chapter of the book, you will have learned how we can bring about social change, while realizing the worth of each individual. As I did, the reader may well come to recognize the importance of supporting schools as the building blocks of character development and civility. Most importantly, I think, as a former teacher and administrator, the reader comes to realize the imperatives for presenting lessons and how we must utilize reflection, interaction, cooperation and collaboration in all our efforts and actions... to ensure success in our endeavors for thwarting school violence by our teaching and modeling what it is to be civil., Dr. Marjorie Schiering’ s Preventing School Violence: Guidelines for Teaching Civility and School Harmony is a “must read” for all educators. She begins with a definition of violence and promises to end with instructional techniques. Dr. Schiering delivers. She provides the necessary background followed by numerous teaching strategies. Dr. Schiering details Project SAVE (Safe Schools Against Violence in Education), the New York State response to the Columbine School shootings in 1999, as well as DASA (Dignity for All Students Act). The big question, however, remains. How do students learn civility? Dr. Schiering provides an abundance of activities. She outlines, for example, a “Meet and Greet” activity, complete with conversation starters (number of family member, sports interests, pets, favorite foods, vacations, what to buy with a winning lottery ticket) and supplies sample dialogues for the reader. I especially loved “Put-downs versus Lift Ups: Hurts on the Heart.” The brief activity will impact students of all ages. Dr. Marjorie Schiering’s Preventing School Violence is a timely and practical addition to your professional library!

Marjorie S. Schiering has devoted her career as an educator to developing teacher’s and learner’s comprehension of self- efficacy through experiential learning, which focuses on conversing “with” self- and others, by addressing her Model for Academic and Social Cognition She continually addresses sharing the Cognitive Collective (Reciprocal Thinking and Feelings) to establish and maintain a viable, safe, positive and congenial classroom community where there is teaching of thinking.