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 Assistant Dean, College of Graduate Studies 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 their excessive anger.
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. In these seminars one of the major sources of anger in young people is presented which is selfishness. Selfish students can be highly disruptive and draining to educators. The chapter on the selfish-angry child on this website can be helpful in understanding the problem of narcissism in the young, its origins primarily in permissive parenting, and the virtues which can diminish these serious difficulties.
Our clinical experience from treating bully-victims for over two decades is that bullying has increased significantly in our schools and communities, in part because of growing problem of narcissism in young people. 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 and narcissism in bullies.