Term Paper on "Anger Management for Urban High School Students"

Term Paper 20 pages (6725 words) Sources: 1+ Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Anger Management

Anger is an emotion that is a natural part of life, but it can become debilitating and lead to antisocial or self-destructive behavior, a well as become a source of additional conflict. One way of addressing this is through Anger Management Therapy, with techniques for controlling anger that can be taught in a group setting. A program for doing just that is described, one lasting eight weeks and geared to changing attitudes and behaviors. The program is designed for changing the behavior of urban high school students and is intended to fit their needs and their schedule, providing the means for evaluating the success of the program by comparing pre-test and post-test survey information to see how attitudes have been changed.

Chapter Three: Application

Introduction

Source for anger among urban high school students are numerous, including various stressors associated with urban living, with school situations, with adolescence itself, and with family dynamics. Any effort to address the problem of anger among these students needs to give the students the tools to control their own responses and to cope with the various stressors they encounter. These young people are old enough to know what sorts of stressors have the greatest effect on them even if they have not been able to avoid the consequences and even if they are allowing their anger to guide them into antisocial behavior or self-destructive behavior. They are likely simply not to have the knowledge or tools that would allow them to take control of their emotions and to turn these emotions more toward positive outlets, more toward the healthy anger cited by Golden (2003).

Thus, the program to be elucidated should provide these tools and should be geared toward enabling the students to recognize what affects them, to be aware of their own responses in a more immediate way, and to be able to change those responses to a more positive form.

As Thomas (2001) notes, psychoeducational interventions such as anger management are not really therapy but a different form of training, one in which the leader serves as teacher and coach and not as therapist. This sort of intervention has a greater potential for behavior change by increasing knowledge, providing a new perspective, and giving students opportunities to learn and practice specific tools and strategies. Such training is typically provided to groups, and it is thought valuable to permit individuals to maintain eye contact with another human while learning to control their breathing and the quaver in their voice when they say they are angry. The students will be better able to learn to express their angry feelings when others are available to support, empathize, provide feedback, and role-play problematic conflicts in encounters. Students in the group experience the safety of the group and so gain greater confidence that they can enact new anger behaviors in real-world situations, which is the goal of this approach. It is also usually recommended that the students use concurrent introspection through an anger journal or log.

Rationale

The specific purpose of an anger management program is to help high-risk students decrease their drug involvement, increase their school performance, and decrease depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. These high-risk students have more negative school experiences, greater drug involvement, more emotion problems, more negative peer pressures, and a greater likelihood of family dysfunction. Students in this category are at an increased risk to perform poorly in school, get suspended or expelled, and have frequent absences.

Schools will also benefit from programs like anger management by increasing student performance and attendance. Students who participate in these programs are more likely to have positive school experiences, have greater self-esteem, and gain a sense of belonging. If students feel good about their school experiences and can take pride in their accomplishments, they are they will perform better in testing situations. This in turn will be reflected with higher scores on mandatory achievement testing required by law and increase the school's ability to meet the No Child Left Behind standards.

The process of anger management should also become a process of self-control and self-direction that the individual student will then carry over into later educational experience and into life, providing for a more balanced and rational emotional life from the time of training forward. The intent of the training is not simply to address existing behavior but to provide the tools so the individual can continue to control his or her anger and to direct that energy into more positive pursuits. The negative consequences of uncontrolled anger have been noted and often lead to behaviors that appear to be distinct from the anger that contributed to them, such as drug abuse or alcoholism. These potential consequences can also be reduced or eliminated because the individual has been given this training and has absorbed the training into his or her personal behaviors in a wide variety of situations.

Use of Anger Management Therapy

Various approaches have been applied to controlling anger, and aspects of these have been incorporated into the specific approach of Anger Management. The cognitive approach is described by Ellis (1971) and Glasser (1975), and more recent techniques have been based on their work through the efforts of Kreigel & Kreigel (1984), McKay, Davis, & Fanning (1981), and others. Cognitive therapies ask the individual to become aware of thoughts, feelings, and actions in various settings; evaluate whether they are irrational or rational; and then execute future behavior based on a view of reality. Cognitive therapy can approach such things as the management of anger, an emotion that has been know to contribute to health impairment both physical and mental. Cognitive approaches may be aimed at interpersonal communication, sports performance, or other forms of stress alleviation, but they tend to have common elements:

1) recognizing thoughts, feelings, and reactions to stressful situations;

2) identifying what the reaction was based on;

3) rehearsing future situations based on rational beliefs and information rather than on irrational fears; and 4) performing cognitively correct behaviors.

Given that stress contributes to the development of anger, many suggest stress reduction as a way of attacking the problem. This is indeed an approach common in the business world. Brott (1994) notes that experts are now suggesting that the way to reduce stress is for managers to focus on the causes of stress rather than on the reactions of employees to stress as in the past -- treat the cause, not the result. If employees are working in a dysfunctional environment, they will burn out no matter how well prepared they may be. The focus therefore should be on the organization. Improved lines of communication seem to have a strong corrective effect. In the late 1980s, companies tried to eliminate some of the layers of communication and found that when employees had frequent, personal contact with superiors and believed that they really made a difference, workplace stress was reduced immediately. Many companies have used this concept in creating an integrated strategy to prevent stress, using cohesive teaks allowing members to share common goals and accountability in a process to serve as a buffer to stress. If the team approach will not work in a given company, the manager should understand that what causes stress are low levels of communication and low levels of participation. Increasing communication and participation will therefore help reduce stress (Brott, 1994, p. 81).

In truth, the state of things in the workplace is related to how people react when in school. Stress often begins long before the worker even becomes a worker, with high levels of stress noted in school and college. The problem for students has not been given as much attention as the issue of stress in the workplace, perhaps because of the cost to business. There is a cost to students and to the educational system when high levels of stress reduce performance or create health or other problems which may continue into later life. An annual survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, this one conducted in 1999, finds a record-breaking 30.2% of freshmen feel "frequently overwhelmed by all I have to do," compared with 29.6% in 1998. This continues an upward trend in freshman stress levels that began in 1985 when only 16% of survey respondents reported feeling stressed. In addition, a record 24.7% of freshmen also report "some" or a "very good" likelihood that they will work full time while in college, which may be a contributor to their high levels of stress. When the figures are broken down by gender, 38.8% of women say they feel frequently overwhelmed and 20% of men. One reason for this gap might be found in other survey results, including one showing 69.6% of women being concerned they might not have enough money to finish college, compared with 57.2% of men. Also, stress levels may reflect how men and women spend their time. The survey shows that women tend to spend more time than men… READ MORE

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