Positive Peer Culture (PPC) model concentrates on enhancing social skills and fostering strength in youth by advancing a teenager's care and concern for others in a group setting. As opposed to an authority figure demanding obedience, a peer group requires responsibility for actions. This is mostly useful amongst adolescents, and PPC has proven to be an effective method of behavior modification when adults are supporting and nurturing the learners to develop an environment of trust, respect, and responsibility. Gangs are an excellent example of when peer pressure goes out of hand (Hawkins & Weis, 2017). The model uses an approach that all teens are familiar with and leverages it to bolster beliefs, pro-social attitudes, and behaviors in which caring is made fashionable and hurting behavior is not associated.
The higher level goals of PPC models include meeting the needs of every teen to grow, to belong, and to develop autonomy, find and cultivate strengths, improve social competence, and convert self-focus into care and concern for others (Hawkins & Weis, 2017). In many teenage experiences, these young adults are taught that problems are their fault or are defects in their character. PPC takes a different approach in this regard by looking at challenges as opportunities to learn and grow; they are good things. Teenagers are encouraged to acknowledge their problems, to understand that once a problem has been identified, it can be owned and worked through. This process is geared towards building the strengths of the characters and teaches the adolescent not to blame either themselves or others for their behavior problems. When in a peer culture group that is facilitated by adults, teenagers can learn to respect, learn, listen, and watch out for each other. These adults model the behavior they teach, and if they must confront members, they do so in a way that is not threatening and does not overpower the peer connection that is being established by the program.
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Examples of positive peer culture in the school setting include classroom teaching and counseling. Another example of this support system is the anti-bullying curriculum. A favorable school climate exists when all learners feel comfortable. It fosters the feeling of being wanted, valued, accepted, and secure in an environment where they can interact with caring people they trust. A favorable school climate affects everyone associated with the school. This ranges from the students, staff, parents, and to the community. A positive school climate is the belief system or culture that underlies the daily operations of a learning institution. To effectively support this system, some factors come into play, especially when one is talking of cognitive behaviors and holistic approach. This includes the use of student leadership teams ( de Vries, Peter, de Graaf, & Nikken, 2016). This team is essential in the program since by focusing on bringing leadership skills to the lower school student body, they teach the lower grades from a young age the benefit of being there for each other, and protecting each other from factors such as discrimination.
The student leadership team is divided into four components; friend factory, assembly support, learning leadership, and peer mediators. Together, this team focuses on teaching life skills such as empathy, cooperation, respect, responsibility, kindness, friendship, trustworthy, acceptance, problem-solving, and patience. Life skills teaching is considered a cognitive behavior intervention since it focuses on reshaping not only the leadership to address the needs of the entire school community, but by so doing it can bequeath these same skills to other students who use them to influence their interactions with each other. This technique is all-inclusive in the sense that in addition to training the student leadership on how to handle the subjects, the subjects are taught how to treat each other. The student leadership has less to worry about because by cultivating the right mindset into the school population, there are fewer cases such as bullying for it to deal with.
Talking of anti-bullying curriculum as an example of approach into positive peer culture, it is essential for one to show empathy and sympathy for the victims of bullying. Compassion is when a person can try to understand how the other person is feeling. By teaching students to learn to feel the pain victims of bullying feel by putting themselves in their shoes, they are taught the value of sharing the pain. This is essential because no student wants to be or go through bad experiences and by feeling the pain other students feel when subjected to discriminatory and degrading experiences, they become aware of their responsibility in stopping these activities, mainly through speaking up and standing up against bullying.
Sympathy, on the other hand, focuses on sharing and experiencing a person's bad news or feelings by feeling sorry for that person's feelings. In this scenario, it is about feeling bad for a student who goes through bullying. This intervention mainly focuses on the bullies. By being encouraged to take a moment to picture what their subjects go through and try feeling their pain, the bullies begin to feel the magnitude of the pain they put other innocent kids through. Not only does this help in changing the bully's perspective of their harmful acts, but by experiencing the pain other students go through, they most likely resolve to protect them from other forms of bullying by other students because they get to experience the feeling of vulnerability ( Brenick & Romano, 2016). When these two sides (empathy and sympathy) are brought together against bullying, they form a peer culture upon which protection against harassment is offered to more vulnerable students.
This anti-bullying curriculum is essential because it expounds o he characteristics of bullying and how the mentality can be changed and the energy of the bullies channeled into more productive use while at the same time coming up with measures to protect the vulnerable learners. Bullying happens when individuals continue to hurt, either physically, psychologically or, mentally another person on purpose. It involves an imbalance of power where the bully has more power due to age, size, or social status than the bullied parties. By pointing out that bullying occurs where there is an imbalance of power, the support system focuses on channeling this imbalance into the protection of the weaker learners. Here these weak learners are taught that they can rely on their more powerful friends for support and security ( Zych, Farrington, Llorent, & Ttofi, 2017). The culture in this group targets the creation of equal power, where equal power mainly implies approachability and embracing power diversity.
In conclusion, this article focuses on the creation of positive peer culture models that emphasize on protection and the establishment of equal power as one of the main ways to curb bullying across American schools which have been rapidly growing in the recent past despite the establishment of strict rules and penalties for bullying. This paper attributes this to the fact that there have not been stable models at the student levels that is geared towards enlightening the students on the roles they play or could play in changing the course of this sad reality. It is essential, as the paper argues, for schools to develop models of positive peer culture in schools where students are taught the art of standing up for each other, since bullying is more of a mentality issue that cannot be quickly dealt with through school's rules and regulations if this mentality is not adequately addressed.
References
Brenick, A., & Romano, K. (2016). Perceived Peer and Parent Out‐Group Norms, Cultural Identity, and Adolescents’ Reasoning About Peer Intergroup Exclusion. Child development , 87 (5), 1392-1408.
de Vries, D. A., Peter, J., de Graaf, H., & Nikken, P. (2016). Adolescents’ social network site use, peer appearance-related feedback, and body dissatisfaction: Testing a mediation model. Journal of youth and adolescence , 45 (1), 211-224.
Hawkins, J. D., & Weis, J. G. (2017). The social development model: An integrated approach to delinquency prevention. In Developmental and Life-course Criminological Theories (pp. 3-27). Routledge.
Zych, I., Farrington, D. P., Llorent, V. J., & Ttofi, M. M. (2017). Protecting Children Through Anti-Bullying Interventions. In Protecting Children Against Bullying and Its Consequences (pp. 57-68). Springer, Cham.
