"

April, 2003.
The high-pitched shriek of the gym teachers whistle stopped
everyone cold. Thirty-four third-grade bodies let playground balls drop
and abandoned their games of tournament-style foursquare. Thirty-four
pairs of eyes turned expectantly to Mrs. KC. Her face was redder that
usual, and she twisted the cord of her whistle lanyard rapidly around
her wrist, holding every member in the Hillcrest Elementary School
gymnasium in suspense.
Now boys and girls, Divyas going to show you how to not
play this game!
My face went pale. Mrs. KCs muscular hands demanded that I
step forward in front of her. Her index finger stood alone, bent and
beckoning. I was the skinniest girl in the third grade; now she made me
feel even smaller.
Mrs. KC. Please, noIm trying. Im sorry. I I heard my
voice crack. I pretended to adjust my glasses so that no one knew that I
was crying. The gym floor cleared in front of me. Mrs. KC lowered to a
squat, bouncing the playground ball menacingly in her palms. I
stumbled forward, shaking too much to walk straight.
Get down! Pass it to me, Mrs. KC growled.
The ball flew at me in a streak of blue. I missed. I stumbled.
The whistle screamed loudly in my ears, as if calling every student to
witness my mistake.
#
This is how to do it wrong! I could hear the echoes in the
gym, could hear the whispers.
I picked up the ball again and tried to pass it to my gym teacher.
I focused only on her tennis shoes, white and clean, because I could not
meet her accusing eyes. Muscles pulsed in her sunburned shins. The
ball fell from my hands and rolled under the wooden bleachers. I
covered my face and bent my head until my chin touched my
collarbone, preparing for the blowor at least the whistle cord-induced
rug burnthat I expected.
Mrs. KC grabbed my too-long blouse sleeve and pulled me to a
standing position. You are useless, she said. You will always fail.

I ran out of the gym, into the empty playground and pressed my
head against the metal fence by the bleachers. I felt the diamond pattern
that left its mark on my forehead.
I am useless. Mrs. KC says so, I whispered. I believed it.

April, 2014
Now, walking down 16
th
Street to G.W. Childs School eleven
years later, I was a college student that Mrs. KC never imagined
coming to observe the implementation of a Childrens Hospital of
Philadelphia anti-bullying program in South Philadelphia. I followed
the laughter and the clicking sound that a metal playground fence
makes when too many kids are shaking it.
$
Come on, that was my shot! You took it from me.
Break it up! Get him out from under there!
I attached the first chorus of voices to five boys playing a game
of basketball and the second high-pitched plea to a lunch aideI
thinktrying to stop of an argument near the other corner of the
playground by the fence. Some distance from the basketball courts, I
noticed two girls sitting together and talking in low voices at one of the
picnic tables. At another picnic table, a girl sat with her head down on a
red backpack, not too far from a half-eaten sandwich.
I pressed my face to the fence, looking at everything through
little, diamond-shaped windows. It felt like dj vu, except that I wasnt
crying. I thought of Mrs. KC, of the humiliation, and for a second, as I
watched all the students on that playground, I felt as though I were one
of them. These were elementary and middle school students out here,
after all. I felt as though I were celebrating some sort of April
anniversary of painful memories. Now, as the sophomore college
student with Mrs. KC as a frightening figure in my distant past, I felt as
though my writing project on anti-bullying initiatives that began as a
creative writing project about exceptional learning in Philadelphia were
promising some sort of justice: 11-years-in the making.
As I walked around the perimeter of the school and circled
twice around the playground, I thought about why I was thereto
observe a few sessions of a now two-year-old anti-bullying initiative,
Preventing Relational Aggression in Schools Everyday (PRAISE). The
%
program emerged out of the research on relational aggression and
school climates done by Dr. Steven Leff and his colleagues at the
Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). It began in its inchoate
days seeking advice on structure from playground focus groups
composed of schoolchildren in the elementary age demographic that it
sought to target. Today, PRAISEs administrative side is a close-knit
group of 30 program coordinators, facilitators, researchers and research
assistants with their longest-standing partnership being at G.W. Childs
School.
I remember my visit with Dr. Leff to talk about the PRAISE
program. At first, I was nervous to meet this person who, according to
all the articles that I had encountered, was a vanguard and leader in the
field of relational aggression. From our chat, I learned that after
studying general psychology, Dr. Leff had taken a special interest in
relational aggression and behavioral issues in children.
Yet, with his soft voice, medium stature, and brown eyes that
revealed smile lines and seemed to escape to the blackboard of his
mind whenever he told stories of PRAISE or of his experiences, he was
nothing like the hard eyed, blonde, fighter jet-ready male counterpart to
Mrs. KC that I had, for some frightening reason, imagined.
The leader of the anti-bullying program is the antithesis of my
biggest bull I bit my tongue. Something nagged me about
classifying a teacher as such.
Excuse me?
&
Nothing, I said. Dr. Leff told a story of his experience on a
playground. Maybe I should have told him mine, but I didnt have the
courage.
I remember just seeing this group waiting for the slide. That
group on the swings. But, when I asked a girl from our focus group to
narrate what she saw to me, she told me about how that girl on the
swings was lonely, how this girl waiting for the slide was popular and
bullying the girl in front of her. It was like watching playground
dynamics as narrated and created by the kids. Theres so much as the
adult that I didnt know or see.
Perhaps this is the experience that led Dr. Leff to structure
PRAISE in such a way that the children were the narrators of their own
experiences, thinking up their own solutionsbecause, as veteran
adults, or even college students as onlookers on the blacktop, theres so
much that we may not be able to read.

At Childs, as I watched the basketball groups congregate around
a hoop and the picnic table group migrate to another part of the fence, I
wondered how much I didnt see. How much would this scene be
different if that girl with the half-eaten sandwich were telling me about
it? What about if that boy walking away from the basketball hoop just
then were narrating? I watched him as he directed his head forward,
holding down his blue shirt with both fists, as though he were going to
'
have a fistfight with the fabric. He looked back at the group only once,
and then he continued walking away.
Above my head, broad columns of ceramic murals stood in
relief against the brick front of the schoolone for every continent,
advocating diversity, unity, and community. Within moments, I met
Christine Waanders, one of the two program coordinators; she and the
days team flagged me down, made quick introductions, and ushered
me insidewhere I saw more murals of flowers coming together and
drawings of children smiling. I liked Christine; she reminded me of my
best friend in third gradethe one who had come and gotten me from
that empty playground after gym class that day eleven years ago.
Christine felt down-to-earth; she smiled often and had this quick way
of walking that made me feel as though she were used to tight
schedules and keeping people organizedgood characteristics for a
program coordinator, I thought.
The art teacher is amazing here, said Christine, as she waved
to a student that she knew. Shes been here for years and works with
the children to make these great projects. They love her.
I thought of the paintings that I remembered seeing in my own
elementary school. I walked with Christine to my first PRAISE class
observation in Mrs. Raymods
1
3
rd
grade classroom. It seems too

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perfect and pretty to have a bullying problem, I thought. I saw a gym
teachers whistle attached one of the teachers lanyards.

The goal of PRAISE is to give children who are bullies, victims
or bystanders agency, awareness, and options. They achieve this by
teaching a vocabulary of acronyms that the students adopt and even
enjoy using. As one the facilitators told me, our program focuses on
social-cognitive intent. What does it feel like on the inside and the
outside to have a strong feeling? We focus on separating the emotion
from the person. We are positive adults and want to set the tone that
sharing feelings and being vulnerable is important. We reward that.
As I sat in the back of Mrs. Raymonds* classroom and read the
days PRAISE syllabus on cyberbullying, I looked at the PRAISE
corner of the board with its growing list of pink cards listing the
PRAISE rules that the class had learned so far:
We will keep our hands to ourselves.
We will include everyone in our activities.
My weeks PRAISE rule: we will notice when we are angry
and try to stay calm.
My sister was bugging me, so I counted to ten and used CIA
and self-talk to feel better. One of the boys near the center of the room
had stood up. He was small, and the only loud thing about him seemed
to be his neon-yellow shirt, but he had a sort of confidence in that
A
classroom space that caused most of his classmates to turn and listen
attentively. The facilitators positive response to the boy for sharing
his thoughts caused him to glow. Following his lead other students
began to volunteer My brother, my sistermy momI used CIA
when...
CIA in the PRAISE vernacular is not a government agency, but
rather an acronym for Cool It Before Action. Its part of a whole
language of acronyms and terms that the PRAISE program seeks to get
into these students bloodstreams through workbooks, activities, role
playing games and discussion.
Every student in the PRAISE program is given a booklet that is
gender-matched and filled with scenarios and activities that are real to
the students: a girl being pushed by her locker, a boy being ignored at
the playground. In the 20 biweekly sessions for which PRAISE comes
to the classroom, program facilitators work through these activity
books with teachers and students using these scenarios as anchors for
discussion. Together students and staff brainstorm possible solutions.
As many facilitators told me, prior to PRAISE, students at the
school often have a have a hostile attribution bias; theyre prone, in
other words, to react aggressively when they are hurteven when the
injury was an accident. PRAISE anticipates this situation and teaches
students to assume an accident when necessary.
However, there are other words in the PRAISE language that
the program teaches. It teaches children to pay attention to facial cues
B
(F), and body cues (B) to gain information (I) about themselves (FBI-
self) and others (FBI-other). How I am feeling? What does my face
look like when I am sad? What does this other persons body do when
she is angry? Students identify their friendship problems, a more
positive term than bullying, and are friendship leaders or friendship
detectivesFBI friendship agents, perhapsas they try find solutions
to their problems using AAA, CIA or other strategies. The children
enjoy using this PRAISE language and often get excited to volunteer
more when they hit upon the right acronym to describe their actions.
On the day that I observed the classroom, the new PRAISE idea
for the day was Give others the benefit of the doubt. The facilitators
introduced the phrase, reviewed Assume An Accident or AAA, and
told the students that using AAA and giving the benefit of the doubt is
often helpful with many friendship problems.
A hand went up in the back of the class. A boy in a blue shirt
spoke up. It took me a second to realize that I recognized that shirt,
that face, those fists. I was playing outside today and [a friend] um
hurt me, and it was an accident. I walked away. So AAA.
So, that would have been the story that I would have heard had
I asked the boy walking away from the basketball courts that morning.
I thought. The facilitator smiled with encouragement.
Martin* has used a lot of the PRAISE strategies this week, and
I am trying to get the girls to practice, Mrs. Raymond then
volunteered. Her face broke into a smile. She was proud of her kids.
"C
I think that Mrs. Raymond shows something very important:
that PRAISE works because teachers are involved, not just spectators.
As a New York Times opinion piece about social-emotional learning
programs in schools notes, these programs wont work if adults are
not modeling the skills.
2
As such, PRAISE works because teachers
learn the strategies and implement them in their classroom through
PRAISE homework and other methods when the facilitators arent
present.
Mrs. Raymond herself aids the conversation by being
relentlessly positivelearning to call out her student on something
good that he had done about his feelings. Teachers are shown the
positive example set by the facilitators who reward such discussion,
combating negative reactions with, we love being here or thats a
very nice thing to do.
Most of the funding for PRAISE comes from a grant from Pew
Philadelphia. Some money also comes from funds within the CHOP
Violence Prevention Program. Dr. Leffs previous research about
playground violence and student-teacher support systems has even been
funded by NIH grants. According to Christine, as the Pew grant is more
concerned with delivering the intervention than numerically testing the
programs effectiveness, PRAISE has more of an opportunity that the

2
Bouffard, Suzanne. "Teach the Teachers Well." Opinionator Teach
the Teachers Well Comments. New York Times, 30 Apr. 2014. Web. 1
May 2014. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com>
""
teams other programs to anecdotally see success in the present while
simultaneously collecting numerical data points the future.
Anecdotally, success and learning are something that the
facilitators, program coordinators, teachers, Dr. Leff, and students see.
A facilitator shared a story with me about a very tall boy in one of the
classrooms who was often teased. The students wanted to see him get
into a fight, although he wasnt the fighting type. Every day, he would
come to the facilitators and say, Im just going to pay no mind. Just
pay no mind. Saying that seemed to calm him. It was his strategy, his
version of CIA. Through PRAISE, hed perhaps learned the FBI-other
skills that he needed to understand that his peers were trying to get a
rise out of him. Instead of retaliating, he took control of his emotions
and actions and brought them to the safe forum of the PRAISE
classroom for discussion and positive validation.
Dr. Leff shared a story of learning in a different classroom. He
referenced a PRAISE perspective-taking task that places a vase on the
table and seats two people around it. One side of the vase is blue. The
other side is red. The two people seated on both sides of the vase argue
as to the color of the vase before switching places and seeing that there
are two perspectives to the same situation. When it came time to
extrapolate the task out to their own issues, Dr. Leff remembers being
struck by a student who volunteered to sort out a problem with a
teacher using the vase. The teacher had, in a moment of anger at the
students not submitting homework, taken the students lunch money.
"#
With the vase between them, the two were able to reach a mutual
understanding, to assume an accident, use AAA, and realize that the
outburst that afternoon had two vantage points. The emotional charge
on both sides went down.
As I walked home from Childs that day, I walked around the
playground fence again. The blacktop was empty. The playground balls
were put away. Ignoring the car horns and the loud screaming in
Spanish that I heard about parking spaces in the distance, this could
have been my elementary schools playground. Maybe. I hadnt seen
the gym teacher that day, but I wondered if she looked like Mrs. KC.
Looking at the PRAISE booklets, the characters, and the
friendship problems, it is clear that PRAISE is for the urban school, the
majority African American school, and at the moment, the Philadelphia
school. Still, I wondered, could it transfer to the majority Caucasian,
majority Christian, elementary school in the middle of Ohioan
suburbia?
Id like to hope for that, because, if can find a red-blue vase,
and sit down with Mrs. KC on those wooden bleachers in the Hillcrest
gym, maybe Id finally have the couragethe words, the skillsto tell
her how she hurt me that day. Maybe wed understand each others
perspectives, and I will know why she was so angry. Maybe Id get my
justice. Maybe shell apologize after 11 years. Maybe, just maybe, Ill
even get to rescue that blue playground ball from beneath the bleachers.