Resources for Educators
Dr. Fitzgibbons and associates have given many conferences to teachers, students, school counselors, school administrators, and parents on understanding and resolving anger in children and adolescents. In 2004 he coauthored in The American School Board Journal an article, Learning to Forgive, for educators on diminishing anger in the classroom with Bob Enright, Professor of Educational Psychology at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Tom O’Brien, Ed.D., Ph.D., a former superintendent of schools of the archdiocese of Philadelphia and now an associate dean at Immaculata University.
Dr. Enright's pioneering work on forgiveness education with elementary school students is presented in the DVD, The Power of Forgiveness, available at www.amazon.com. His research in Belfast empirically demonstrates that teaching children to forgive in the classroom diminishes excessive anger in them.
Conferences are offered for teachers, school psychologists and counselors, school administrators, students and parents groups on understanding and reducing anger in students and in the classroom.
Our clinical experience from treating bully-victims for over two decades is that bullying has increased significantly in our schools and communities. Teachers, regardless of length of service, report not being confident in their ability to deal with bullying and 87 per cent want more training (Boulton 1997). New programs need to be developed to protect children in our schools, to help victims learn how to resolve their strong anger with impulses for revenge, to encourage peers to understand bullies and to support victims, and to provide treatment protocols for the hostility in bullies.
Dr. Fitzgibbons' chapter on treating anger in children from Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope has assisted educators in teaching their students how the virtue of forgiveness can resolve their anger thereby strengthening their character.