At his 65th birthday in December of 1970, Dr. Semi J. Begun, Joe, my husband of many years, retired as Vice President of Gould, Inc. He was well prepared to start immediately a new career, to build his own consulting company which he called "Auctor Associates, Inc." His idea was that he and his partners in cooperation with technical experts from local universities would assist and empower striving entrepreneurs to grow and develop new technical companies and also find ways to reverse the fate of failing companies by improving their products and management. Auctor indeed achieved many of its objectives.
To my great surprise, my husband had a second goal. Shortly after his company was established, he announced that the two of us will found and nurture a charitable Foundation to promote research and implementation to counteract and hopefully prevent societal violence and create more tolerance in the world. This suggestion came as a great surprise to me, and I never found out if this idea was a consequence of experiencing the pre-Hitler years in Germany, his great foresight for events to come, or if he was motivated by his deep interest in human relationships. I believe that all three reasons might have influenced his decision.
After discussing this idea with numerous universities, we decided to locate the Foundation at John Carroll University in 1974 and use the University as the charitable umbrella for the "Begun Institute for Studies of Violence and Aggression." The goal of the Begun Institute was to study the various manifestations of violence, and what had been suggested and was successful to prevent such occurrences. For this reason, the Begun Institute sponsored symposia and lectures for students and others, which gave Joe and me a chance to learn extensively about the research in the area of violence that had been done up to that time. To learn even more, we attended many national and international professional meetings that dealt exclusively with the topic of violence. In fact, in one of such meetings, that took place in Mexico City, I believe in 1982, we listened to Dr. Arnold P. Goldstein, a professor in the Psychology Department of the Syracuse University in New York, who gave a lecture on Skill Streaming.
This lecture convinced us that ready-to-use lessons of Social Skills taught to children of all grades and in all schools in a structured manner would educate children to react to each other more politely, and their behavior would become less violent and unruly. These children, by continuing to use these social skills when relating to others, will become well-adjusted and peaceful grown-ups. Therefore, societies worldwide, when employing these skills, are likely to become less violent in times to come. For this reason we immediately started to invent and compose social skills lessons in a structured format, as is indicated in the Figure 1 below.
~ CLICK HERE for an explanation of the eight steps in Figure 1.
These structured lessons are completely finished lessons. They are entirely ready to be used by teachers as written, with hardly any preparations needed. Some of these lessons were available in the spring of 1983. It turned out that the then Superintendent of the Cleveland Public Schools was greatly interested in having his teachers use the lessons immediately in some of the classrooms in the district. He shared fully our belief that social skills training can calm down unruly and violent behavior. In fact, many others must also have been strongly convinced of the beneficial effects that social skills training can have on children, since it took only a few years for the market to be over-saturated with competitive social skills programs. However, as far as I know, none of the programs except our own Social Skills Program, which indeed was the first program with lessons already available in 1983, provides complete lessons that are entirely ready to be used by teachers in the classroom and by parents at home.
The very positive reaction of teachers and principals to our social skills training of children in schools gave us the motivation to found in 1983 a not-for-profit Foundation, which we named "Society for Prevention of Violence" (SPV)* and with it we merged the Begun Institute. In the beginning, the SPV focused its efforts on preparing social skills lessons for many different needed skills and for children of all ages from PreK to grade 12. Teachers were engaged to assist in writing some of these lessons. At one time the Education Department of John Carroll University was under contract to assist a number of teachers to write these social skills lessons. Hundreds of schools used these lessons. They were and are taught in the City schools of Cleveland, in schools of most Cleveland suburbs, in schools outside of Cleveland and all through Ohio, in schools all over the United States, in schools around the globe, and even in schools of the United States Army in Germany.
In order to evaluate to some degree the effectiveness of SPV's Social Skills Methodology in an objective manner, I designed a simple "multiple choice" test to be answered by the children. We ask the teachers to do a pre-test before any of our social skills lessons are taught and a post-test in order to receive answers to the same questions after the very last social skills lesson for the year has been completed. Each of the sixteen questions in this kind of Proficiency Test, see Figure 2, asks the children to choose among three answers and state honestly how they would react to the conditions described in the questions. A higher response in the "Almost Always" column of the post-test than in that of the pre-test means that there is in fact an improvement in the children's appropriate behavior. Therefore the amount of this increase shows how effective the teaching of SPV's Social Skills Methodology is, and how much the children need to learn social skills in order to know instantly how to apply them properly.
From 1983 to 1995, SPV's Social Skills Methodology** lessons, collected in book form by grade, were duplicated by simply copying the pages and binding them according to grades. In 1993, a vice-president in charge of the educational book division at Simon & Schuster showed great interest in having his publishing company print and sell the lessons in book form. Simon & Schuster released the first printed book of four books in 1995. The four books differ by grades. The grades are PreK to K, 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and 7 to 12. The book title of SPV's Social Skills Methodology** is "Ready-to-Use Social Skills Lessons & Activities." Changing from copying to printing and having a well known publisher to assist gave SPV and me a great opportunity to improve the text and to add materials such as pictures, activities, and others. The books are now printed and sold by John Wiley and Sons and are still considered best sellers with sales between 200,000 and 300,000 since 1995, when the first printed book was released. The last of the four books was released in 1996. Today, many social skills training programs compete with SPV's Social Skills Methodology, but as far as I know, none of the programs provides ready-to-use lessons that the teachers can use without effort and time for preparation and the Family Book for parents to teach their children.
After SPV's Social Skills Methodology was completed and had become a best seller, it occurred to me that in order to provide an effective violence prevention program, something was still missing and needed to be added. Using the present material, children were learning the skills to interact and communicate with others and each other in a socially acceptable manner, but they were not acquiring the skills to handle explosive and violent real-life situations. Therefore, I decided that lessons and activities had to be written and communicated to children which present a number of violence prevention skills and describe simulated real-life situations that are violent or threatening, so that children can learn to select and practice the skills they need to instantly deal with such events and to resolve them peacefully
I thought it would be best to write those lessons and activities by using the same structured learning format, employing as before only positive comments, making use of role plays that simulate real-life events of violence threatening situations, and by letting the children follow again their own inclination for deciding which skills to select. The publisher was delighted to print and sell what I suggested under the same contract conditions. Finally, we decided to collect the violence prevention skills lessons and activities in two separate books for elementary and for secondary students.
The second Skills Methodology is SPV's Violence Prevention Skills Methodology.*** It is sold under the title "Ready-to-Use Violence Prevention Skills Lessons & Activities" for Elementary Students and separately for Secondary Students. One book was released in 1998 and the second one in 1999. Both SPV's Methodologies together represent SPV's Social Skills Program. The SPV staff and I suggest that the two Methodologies be taught in tandem, using the Social Skills Methodology first, followed by lessons from the Violence Prevention Skills Methodology. All lessons require that the children invent and perform their own role-plays to learn and practice the skills that they need to resolve the simulated real-life situations. After the teacher models an example of such a role-play, children of all ages learn to do it and seem to enjoy this type of proactive learning experience.
According to the teachers, the classroom climate becomes less explosive and violence-prone as a consequence of teaching SPV's Social Skills Program. This empowers the teachers to concentrate more effectively on academic subjects. In addition to promoting and instructing SPV's Social Skills Program in PreK-12 schools, SPV offers more than twenty different workshops for graduate credit to anyone interested. These workshops teach, among other topics related to the prevention of violence, SPV's Social Skills and Violence Prevention Methodologies in two separate courses.
There are many other reasons why the teaching of SPV's Social Skills Program is important and has been successful with children of all ages and adults. The following randomly chosen comments made by teachers and students illustrate some of those reasons, and also the healthy impact that SPV's Social Skills Program did have on students' behavior, and how it is perceived by the teachers and children.
Teachers: Grade 2
"The lessons are easy to incorporate with our Health and Literacy
curriculum as well as the Math curriculum. Students need to learn how
to solve conflicts and share their feelings. They need to have
examples of solving problems in a socially correct way. The lessons
in the social skills books give the students these examples. They are
truly on target."
Grade
4
"It is important to teach these skills because many children are
coming to us without any social skills. These skills used to be
taught at home. Children are not seeing good examples of social
skills because of broken family units, being left alone, living in
rough neighborhoods, and too much violence in music and on T.V.
Children need to feel comfortable in the environment in order to
learn. They also need a sense of some power. We need to make them
feel they have the power to solve conflicts without the use of
violence. Teaching lessons from the social skills book will help to
improve how students deal with violence and conflict."
Grade
5
"I think the curriculum is excellent. It has a lot of good
lessons. It's a valuable guide for every teachers' collection. The
wonderful thing about the guides is that you have everything you need
all in one book."
"Why we should teach social skills in the classroom? Too many children come to us with anger and hostility. They do not know how to express themselves, unless it is in a negative way. By teaching them how to deal with angry feelings in a positive way, they can learn how to express themselves. They need to learn that fighting and hitting back is not OK. Many of our children do not know how to work cooperatively in groups. They need to learn how to work with others without avoiding some confrontation. Modeling correct behavior and responses by doing the social skills lessons will provide them with the examples they need to follow."
Middle
School
"It's important to teach social skills in school because many
kids don't have any of these techniques in their background. They are
taught violence at home and in their neighborhoods and that's all
they know. We need to model good positive skills and teach kids
different ways of dealing with problems."
High
School
"Teaching social skills is necessary because students often have no
other source but school to learn them. The skills are integral to job
acquisition, maintenance, and promotion. As a life skill, the skills
contribute to family values and unity which transfer to life in
general."
Students: Grade 5
"I like it when we act out things and that it teaches us to walk
away when someone wants to fight, even though it's hard to. We also
learned how to say nice things to people even though you don't like
them. Then they like you better."
Grade
9
"It teaches me different ways to act and to choose the best way I
can act; how to accept myself and deal with other people. Social
skills are important because if more kids learned this stuff, there
wouldn't be as many accidents and fights. I think the world would be
a better place and more kids would get along and learn to accept
others better."
"It helps me learn more about myself. I understand my emotions more clearly. I learn to deal and cope with stress. Social skills are important because a lot of people have stress and don't know how to deal with emotions. They teach kids a lot about themselves and how to accept themselves."
Grade
11
"I am really interested in learning how people work with each
other. I like how social skills classes can relate to my life (drugs,
alcohol, relationships). These topics are interesting because they
are things that you can't just learn in a textbook, but you have to
discuss."
The above comments verify that school principals, teachers, and children accept enthusiastically the style and format of SPV's Social Skills Program. The teachers tell SPV staff that the children need this type of education badly, and that the teaching of Social Skills substantially improves the classroom climate. This fact is very essential since it makes it possible for children and teachers to focus on academic and social skills learning.
As far as I know, no other social or life skills program includes the teaching of Violence Prevention Skills and gives instructions on how to use these Violence Prevention Skills together with Social Skills appropriately and proactively to face and prevent violence when confronted with situations that are or can become violent. Therefore, SPV's Social Skills Program is unique and has proven to be most effective.