Education policy increasingly promotes action groups as a key strategy for student and/or staff participation in school improvement and whole-school health promotion. Such groups can coordinate multi-component interventions, increase participation and engagement, and enable local adaptations, but few process evaluations have assessed this. We…

This paper describes the development, implementation and preliminary evaluation of the Reaching Educators and Children (REACH) program, a training and coaching intervention designed to increase the capacity of early childhood teachers to support children's social and emotional development. We evaluated REACH with 139 teachers of toddler and…

Despite recent research suggesting that relationally aggressive behaviors occur frequently and may lead to physically aggressive actions within urban school settings, there has been little prior research to develop and evaluate relational aggression prevention efforts within the urban schools. The current article describes the development and…

This paper summarizes an effort to transpose and sustain the evidence-based Early Risers "Skills for Success" conduct problems prevention program in a real world community service system. The Early Risers program had previously been implemented by a local agency within the context of research-based operations. In the current initiative,…

The collection of articles in this special issue on relational aggression gives a glimpse into the complex social networks, first, of children's relational aggression and, second, of the collaborators who develop and validate children's prevention programs. The programs described in this special section are among the first to address relational…

This article discusses the development, implementation, and effects of a middle school empathy building program that was designed to reduce bullying behavior. Results show that participants in the intervention group reported engaging in significantly less bullying behavior as compared to the control group, and the program was particularly…

Describes how a Reality Adjustment Program involving interactions with prison inmates stresses the consequences of decisions made during adolescence and the program's impact on four highly angry students for whom other interventions had failed. Suggests that by offering a variety of anger-related programs, middle level educators can learn what…