ABSTRACT
A majority of school-based violence prevention programs have focused on improving individual children's problem-solving skills, social and emotional competence, and capacity to resist bullying. These programs are typically centered in classroom curricula and are delivered by teachers, occasionally supported by mental health professionals (see reviews in Miller, Brehm, & Whitehouse, 1998 and in this volume). While many of these programs show promising results for individual children's competencies, their effects on children's behaviors in unstructured and less supervised settings outside of the classroom—including halls, playgrounds, routes to and from school—are less well studied. In this chapter, we suggest that the reach and effectiveness of these individual-focused programs could be extended by greater emphasis on creating school and classroom contexts that actively support nonviolent solutions to peer conflicts.
