Preliminary Notes - ideas to explore/research/throw away

So this research project is aiming to develop an effective syllabus and course to teach high and middle school students about conflict resolution strategies and peer mediation. The idea is to educate all students. Hopefully this will work as an anti-bullying, peer mediation, anti-suicide, open communication increasing exercise. The ideal end product will be an effective course packet that can be used by counselors, teachers, and students to both learn and teach CR skills and hopefully increase effective communication in all sectors. The packet should be a complete DIY kit on understanding and enacting some basic, core CR skills.

Some questions that I have had concern program evaluations - how can we test/see if our concepts are effective teaching/training? Also, are we crossing any lines with IRB?

Also, after we are done our own 'field work' teaching, should we create a web site, a video clip, something easy for people to access and use? There is a possibility of extending the project into the summer - that might be awesome to polish up a finished product and to perhaps incorporate more technology?

The main creation idea is to collate research and then create a participant booklet with a trainer's guide (a kind of "teacher's edition") to allow self-teaching of the principles so that whatever good comes out of this exercise becomes much more accessible to a wider range of people, both geographically and socioeconomically.


My role in this is to work with the technological aspects, help collate, and to really focus on developing activities/teaching methods to really facilitate and understanding and good use of the CR principles...