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  3. Try To See It Our Way A It’s playtime at Crown Lane primary school in Streatham, south London, and, as at every school the worl

Try To See It Our Way A It’s playtime at Crown Lane primary school in Streatham, south London, and, as at every school the worl

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问题                         Try To See It Our Way
A  It’s playtime at Crown Lane primary school in Streatham, south London, and, as at every school the world over, playtime is bringing its problems. Over by the fence, Maya and Cora are squaring up for a fight. There are raised voices and some angry pointing: it has the makings of an ugly scene. Then a girl in an orange sweatshirt and a boy in a black sweatshirt move in. A few quiet words are exchanged, and the four move inside the school building to a sunny corridor where they can have some privacy.
B  This is peer mediation for the under-12s, a programme that has its origins in the US and is running in a handful of schools in the UK, many in Lambeth. In the corridor, mediators Tom and Maria are setting out the ground rules. "We won’t gossip, or take sides, or tell you what to do," says Maria. "We ask you not to blame one another, and to speak one at a time. Do you agree?" Maya and Cora nod, and the story unfolds. Cora has new trainers; Maya has appeared unimpressed by their appearance on Cora’s feet; Cora is convinced Maya is jealous; Maya has started spending her playtime with another girl.
C Maria and Tom listen to the story, and reflect back what they have heard: "So you felt Cora was showing off, and when you waited for her at the school gates as usual she didn’t show up, so you went home with someone else?" Tom gets to the nub of it: "What can we do to resolve this problem?"  At first, the girls are silent. Then, tentatively, they offer their thoughts. "Maybe I could say Cora’s trainers are really nice, even though I do think she was showing off." "Maybe I shouldn’t come to school in my trainers, at least for a while."
D  There are twelve peer mediators at Crown Lane. They take it in turns to be on duty, two by two (a boy and a girl), and to wear the distinctive sweatshirts that mark them out. Once a week, they meet for a training session and to discuss with the peer mediation coordinator, Kim Hemans, what they have been doing. When new mediators are needed, adverts are put up around the school, and children are recruited from years 4 and 5, so they have plenty of time to use their training before moving to secondary school. There’s never any shortage of new recruits, says Hemans. Securing support from adults in the school has been an important foundation for success, she says. "Getting adults to trust that the children can do this is one of the hardest things." When they see the training sessions in progress, and watch the children role-playing the way they would mediate in disputes, they are invariably won round.
E   One American study (Johnson and Johnson, 1996) found that pupils who train as peer mediators retain their peacemaking skills, and that there is a reduction in the number of pupil disputes referred to teachers. Whether there are fewer disputes in a school with a mediation scheme isn’t clear, but the issue isn’t whether children argue, but whether they can learn to sort out their arguments before they escalate. Other studies suggest a vital ingredient for the success of peer mediation programmes is an existing culture of cooperation. "Peer mediation requires a shift in the school culture from teacher control to pupil empowerment, and from arbitration to mediation as the dominant form of conflict resolution," says Edward Sellman, who looked at peer mediation for his PhD.
F  Anita Gee, who coordinates Lambeth’s peer mediation programme for the charity Healthy Minds, agrees. She says one of the difficulties for teachers is letting go of old-style discipline. "They’re so used to having control, to telling children off when they’re doing something naughty or having a fight, that they don’t want to take the chance and leave it to them to work things out. What we point out is that mediation is a way of actually solving the problem. When teachers put kids up against the wall, all you’re doing is postponing the dispute, not addressing it at all." Gee says that children often turn out to be better mediators than adults, "What you find is that they stick rigidly to the guidelines, which is what the process requires. When adults mediate, they often start to introduce their own bits and pieces, I’ve been stunned at how good kids are as mediators."
G  The programme recognises that mediators should be drawn from across the gamut of children in a school, and not confined to the more confident, able and responsible pupils. As Anita Gee says, "We’ve found that even children who struggle with learning difficulties can be really good at mediation-and, of course, it makes them feel very valued as they’re making a visible and important contribution to school life. We always try to include some of the more challenging children among our mediators."
H  At Crown Lane, the young mediators are full of enthusiasm for the project. "What I like is that the infants come up to me thinking I’m a teacher," says Ade, who’s in year 5. "They have quite a lot of disputes—usually it’s things like someone pushing someone else, or a person whose friend has gone off with someone else." "Sometimes," adds Chedce, "you can see it’s just too soon for an argument to be mediated. The people have just got to calm down a bit. When they’ve done that, then later they might be ready to talk about it. Sometimes you do get people who say: it’s none of your business. When that happens, I know I’ve got to just walk away." According to Paige, the idea of becoming a mediator was a challenge, but the reality isn’t too bad. "I thought it would be a lot harder. Once you’ve been trained, and if you follow the rules, you find it’s actually quite easy." One of the things the children like is the confidence their classmates have in their ability to help. "You get pupils saying to the adult in the playground that they want to go to a mediator to get something sorted out," says Jake. "Sometimes you get a teacher who doesn’t think we can do it, and I think the adults need to have a bit more faith in us. On the whole, when adults see us actually doing mediation and how we are able to help people solve disputes, I think they’re generally surprised by how well it works."
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