Love It
What Students Say
"Peer Resources makes me want to come to school because the class is fun, people are cool, and activities keeps you active...it's the best class in the school." Student – Balboa High School
“This class has gotten me over my fear of speaking out loud. I even talk more in my other classes—one of my teachers even praised me for speaking out more!” Student – Lowell High School
“As a senior and one of the few African-American males in this school,
this is the first time I have really gotten to know and talked with
students who are not African-American and they got to know me, too.”
12th grade Student –
Lowell High School
“Make a Change is a program where we make change. We have fun and play games. To me, Make a Change is a great program to inspire students about problems we have.” 7th grade student – Marina Middle School After-school
“It’s fun to cook dishes. It’s fun to be a man. It’s cool to be in the kitchen and cooking.” 6th grade student in Young Men Can Cook – Marina Middle School After-school
“I think Peer Resources was helpful and fun. Peer Resources helped me be more outgoing. It was very fun going to the Peer Resources meetings and getting to do some workshops. I liked helping kids with their problems. I liked getting to help on a lot of things that went on at this school. I liked Peer Resources because I got to try to make the school a better, safe place to be. Peer Resources is awesome!" 7th grade student – Horace Man Middle School
“I liked mediating because it was fun and I got to help people solve their problems. I really enjoyed Peer Resources!” 7th grade student – Horace Mann Middle School
“This year, Peer Resources was a new experience for me, but it was very beneficial. It was fun and I learned things that I could use in the future to better myself.” Peer Mentee - Phillip & Sala Burton High School
“Peer Resources is a place where I feel safe. I also feel like I’m doing something good by helping my peers. I’m happy that this is a place where I can trust everyone.” 7th grade student – Marina Middle School
“Peer Resources means a lot to me. Because of it, I come to school
a lot more than
I did before. And I have fun doing things for my peers.” 8th
grade student – Marina Middle School
“Peer Resources means a place to talk about serious issues and make a change. It’s a fun environment! I feel more active in school because of this class and I hope it will be here next year to help more people.” 7th grade student – Marina Middle School
“Peer Resources gave me responsibility. It made me grow up…even if I don’t show it all the time.” 8th grade student - Francisco Middle School
“Peer Resources is a place where you could always talk to somebody. Peer Resources, and my middle school, made me a better person and taught me a lot – especially from my mistakes! Peer Resources is a fun place to stay.” 8th grade student-Francisco Middle
“Peer Resources is so much fun and I’ve learned a lot too, especially about how to deal with bad stuff that happens. I am super proud to be a part of Peer Resources.” 6th grade student – Roosevelt Middle School
Example Peer Resources Activities
Freedom Writers - Aptos Middle School
“At Aptos Middle School we focused on reducing the violence at our school
by deepening the sense of community within the school. Our theory of
change was that students who are connected to each other are less likely
to commit acts of violence against their peers. A group of 7th Grade
Peer Leaders developed a Freedom Writer program. The Freedom Writer
program at Aptos focused on having students write and share stories
about their lives with the goal of deepening community within the school.
Over the course of the academic year, the Aptos Peer Leaders collected
over 350 journal entries for the Aptos Freedom Writer Journal.
A Culture of Bullying - Francisco Middle School
“Our ‘Make A Change’ work at Francisco focused on addressing the school’s
bullying problem and violence on school grounds. Our 7th grade Peer
Leaders decided on this issue because they thought bullying was a serious
problem faced by them and their peers at Francisco. To aid us in designing
our intervention, students researched the issue of bullying, learned
about root causes and different roles people play in the bullying process,
what other schools were doing to address the issue, and what programs
were in place that they could use to address the problem at Francisco
(i.e. ‘Stop Bullying Now’).
With this information we implemented a workshop called ‘You, Me, and Bullies’ that focused on identifying the three roles of bullying (bully, victim, and bystander) and provided positive strategies to respond to bullying for someone in any of the three roles. The workshop was presented several times as part of several campus-wide ‘peace week’ events where we also did activities to get students to sit with students different from those they normally sit with. Additionally, a group of 8th grade boys decided to contribute to the bullying discussion by creating a video presentation featuring a skit about bullying. Finally, we used our research on the topic of bullying to build a conflict mediation program. Many of the conflicts we mediated either started from or quickly became bullying incidents. Our conflict mediation program focused on helping students alternatively settle disputes before they escalated into something worse.”
Student and Teachers as Partners in Improving Teaching - John
O’Connell Technical High
“At John O’Connell our students wanted to know (1) How do O’Connell
students learn best? (2) How can we create a classroom in which students
are engaged, learning, and having fun? To answer these questions the
students conducted a school-wide survey of teachers and students. Our
results revealed a tremendous gap between teachers and students on what
students need to be successful in high school and beyond. We followed
our survey up with a series of professional development opportunities
between teachers and students that focused on developing strategies
for better bridging the gap between teacher and student perceptions.
Out of these conversations we developed a Best Practices Club in which students and volunteer teachers work together to identify teaching practices that strengthen student learning. The purpose of developing the club is to help improve the teaching practices of all our committed staff by providing cultural observations and feedback from some of our most unheard and yet most essential voices: our students. We are collaborating with the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools (SF-CESS) and UC Berkeley School of Public Health in this particular project. Throughout the 2008-2009 school year, a cohort of student leaders will be trained in two key areas: (1) effective pedagogical strategies and curriculum and (2) the art of conducting classroom observations and providing effective feedback. As these students develop their skills and knowledge base, they will engage with a first round of teacher volunteers with whom they will do classroom observations and provide feedback based on those observations. Following these observations, they will provide continued professional development to our entire staff about what they have learned.”
Serving Severely Impaired Students - James Denman Middle School
“Our support for disenfranchised students focused on having 8th grade
students work with severely impaired youth. This mostly took the form
of providing mentoring for those youth. Our goal was to provide the
severely impaired students an opportunity to work and communicate with
their peers since they spend the majority of their day interacting with
adults. At the end of each session the Peer Leaders would share about
their experience and their fears and learnings about working with severely
impaired students. A particular highlight was having one of my students
(Johan) who is a struggling reader spend time reading to another student
in the severely impaired class. Over the course of the year Johan’s
confidence as a reader continued to grow as he read to his mentee.”
Developing Support Groups - Marina Middle School
“In the Marina After-school program we focused on providing support
to students who were struggling academically and behaviorally during
the school day. Our belief was that if these students could have an
additional, Peer-based support system then they would have a community
to whom they could turn before they got into trouble. At Marina we simply
found gender-based groups were easier to manage than co-ed groups, so
we developed differentiated support groups that sought to provide students
a level of support that would meet their needs. Our Girls and Boys support
groups focused on creating communities of support, self-care, stress
relief, teamwork, and leadership. These groups also integrated science,
art, and photography because our communities are spaces of support and
learning. We created an additional group called ‘Young Men Can Cook’
that expressly focused on integrating cooking, reflection, and nutrition
into tools for stress relief. In this class students wrote and shared
on a journal topic, participated in team-building activities, and, of
course, cooked a healthy meal to share as a community.”