Teachers and children against violence

At the base of the project that includes joint teacher-student-parent co-operation, stands a system of values, rules and consequences established by the group themselves. Each class establishes rules of behavior between students that also defines how certain behavior is to be addressed. Students undergo a process of elaborating potential conflict situations based on their own experience and set compensatory responses thus participating fully in establishing their own social rules.


Ms Gabrijela Kramaric is the school’s pedagogies and in charge of the project’s coordination. Although the school’s incident percentage is below the Croatian average, in the previous year a few peer violence incidents at the school prompted her and her colleagues to join the project. “After approaching the MDGF sponsored project we were immediately assigned a mentor who has been working through a 7-step-program with the schools 46 teachers”, she stated and added that “ the school's staff were delighted to learn how to tackle the issue, but there was also some resistance to additional work to be done”. “Teachers were somewhat reluctant to add more paperwork to their schedules but by now they have learned to appreciate the improvements this program has brought to their every-day work and relations with the children and their parents”, she concluded.