Root Cause Interventions

In “Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine”, Elliot Aronson (2000) was able to easily allow readers to understand the isolation experienced by students who commit violent attacks at school campus. The author also provided understanding around how quick-fix solutions can cause deeper isolation within students who are already marginal to the school’s social structure and root-cause interventions can assist with building empathy amongst students on a school campus.

Type of Blaming

Aronson (2000) explains two types of blaming that occur after mass violence has occurred. The first type of blaming includes the blaming that is” aimed at finding the cause of the disaster so that we might come up with a workable intervention” (p.
Root cause interventions are intended to find, understand and directly address the problems that cause school violence (Aronson, 2000, p. 10, 70). Much of what Aronson describes around root-cause interventions include school-wide activities that increase students’ emotional intelligence, accepting the consequences of one’s behavior, and creating empathy through cooperative activities while in school. Interventions that include these three concepts can assist with helping students deal with decreasing school violence. Aronson discusses the importance of an individual being able to understand, regulate their emotions. In turn, being able to accept the consequences of one’s behavior. Aronson (p. 109) describes how schools can better assist students with further understanding and self-regulating their feelings when students can co-create agreements around acceptable behaviors and the consequences that exist if the agreements are broken. This process can assist with students’ learning that conflict resolution is an important process of developing emotional intelligence and empathy toward their peers. Finally, the cooperative classroom structure, the jigsaw method, was the intervention strategy Aronson discussed at length. The jigsaw activity is a process where research is done by way of group work. There is a heterogeneous group, which serves as the initial group, and there is the homogeneous group of experts.
What I have learned is to review the social climate of the school and context of which the school exists. The goal is to create academic environments where students do not feel alone and lash out due to depression or anger. The goal is to create a social climate where all students in the school feel included.

Description of Initial Evaluative Steps to Address Preventative Measures of School