GREAT Program

A WORK SHOP FOR TEACHERS ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A GANG PREVENTION PROGRAM

Ramsey, Rust and Sobel (2003) report that of the many gang prevention programs that have been developed and tested over the years, one of the most effective is the Gang Resistance and Training (GREAT) program which was originally developed in 1991 solely for middle school students but has now expanded to include K-12 students. The goal of GREAT is to teach young people to set goals, resist peer pressure, resolve conflicts and learn about how gangs can negatively affect the general quality of their lives. As the authors note, the effectiveness of this program has been outstanding and there is a real need for school teachers, counselors, and administrators to be aware of what this program can do to help prevent gang violence in their schools. Informing school faculty and administration about the program and inspiring them to implement it is a practice that holds a great deal of promise in the area of gang prevention. The purpose of this project is to design a workshop that makes teachers, counselors, and administrators aware of the GREAT program.

As noted by Ramsey, Rust and Sobel (2003), the GREAT program has a long history of success in terms of gang prevention. Following their original development and implementation of the program, Esbensen and Osgood (1999) found that in their sample of almost 6,000 students at 11 schools, youth who completed the

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to motivate them to consider implementing the program in their schools. A questionnaire will be developed by the team to determine whether these goals were met. The questionnaire will contain items assessing the workshop audience's knowledge about the GREAT program and items related to how motivated they feel about implementing GREAT at their school. All members of the audience will be asked to complete this questionnaire at the end of the workshop. To boost the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, its first draft will be submitted to a panel of experts who will be asked to review it and suggest changes for improving its psychometric soundness, a method of improving questionnaires often used in educational research (Borg, Gall & Gall, 2002). Contact Information and Costs of Speakers All parties interested in the workshop will be given information about who to contact regarding the workshop on the fliers provided to administrators and faculty. An attempt will be made to provide speakers who have implemented GREAT in their schools so that they can discuss the implementation process as well as any barriers to the implementation. Since the GREAT program involves the use of uniformed police officers as instructors, police

Category: Psychology - G