Lions-Quest Working Toward Peace

Lions-Quest developed the Working Toward Peace (WTP) curriculum for classroom teachers to teach anger management and conflict resolution skills to students ages 10-14. Lions Quest programs are school-based, comprehensive, positive youth development and prevention programs that unite the home, school and community, to cultivate capable and healthy young people of strong character, through life skills, character education, SEL, civic values, drug prevention, and service-learning education. WTP contains both primary and secondary prevention strategies to decrease violence and promote positive social behaviors. Based primarily on social learning theory, the WTP curriculum teaches students to a) manage their own anger, b) understand conflict, c) manage conflict appropriately, and d) use problem-solving techniques to resolve conflicts peacefully. The curriculum concentrates on five key components: a classroom curriculum, a guide to safe schools for teachers and administrators, family involvement, community involvement, and professional development for implementers.

The goal of the Lions Quest Working Toward Peace program is to teach anger management and conflict resolution skills to adolescents.

The WTP program was evaluated with an untreated control-group quasi-experimental design, with pretest and posttest measures. The evaluation findings suggest that students who participated in the WTP program demonstrated the highest increase in knowledge about anger resolution and conflict management. Violent activities decreased among WTP students and remained low for 4-5 months after the intervention, while control group students doubled their violent events. Cases of classroom misconduct among WTP students decreased by 50 percent, and prosocial interaction occurred at twice the rate when compared with control group students. Truancy was more prevalent among non-WTP students. The grade point average of WTP students increased in all subject areas, while the grades of control group students showed no appreciable change.