If you were a teacher

What you care about

You spend your day with 30 or 40 children. You care about how they treat each other: pushing in the queue, grabbing pencils, name-calling, fights at break time. You also know that children watch you all day. Your own tone, your reactions to misbehaviour and the way you settle disputes are models too.

What worries you about the original study

• It is far from the classroom. One child, alone with an adult, in a strange building, playing with a toy built to be hit. Your classroom has peers, rules, friendships and rivalries.
• The model was a stranger. In school, the most important models are classmates, older pupils and teachers, people the children see every day.
• It lasted 20 minutes. You need to know what builds up or fades over a term.
• It measured only aggression. You are equally interested in sharing, helping and calming down.

Your redesign

1. Run it in real classrooms. Choose several nursery or primary classes. Randomly assign classes, not individual children, to conditions. This is a cluster randomised design.
2. Use real models. In some classes, teachers are trained to model calm conflict resolution aloud ("I feel cross, so I'm going to take a breath and ask nicely"). In others, teaching continues as usual.
3. Measure peer behaviour over weeks. Trained observers who do not know the class's condition record aggression and kindness between children at regular times, before and for several weeks after the change.
4. Include the teacher's own discipline. Record whether teachers shout, threaten or use physical punishment, since these are models too.
5. Involve teachers in interpreting results. They know which behaviours are play-fighting and which are hurtful.

Why

A teacher's question is about everyday behaviour, so the study needs ecological validity: results that apply to real settings. A field experiment keeps random assignment, so it can still show causes, but it measures behaviour that matters to schools.

The teacher's own behaviour is especially important in India, where a government study found that 65% of school-going children reported corporal punishment at school. If children learn from adult models, a teacher who hits is teaching that hitting solves problems. Indian law and child-rights guidance now ban such punishment in schools, using exactly this social learning argument (see the India page). Note that this redesign is a prevention study rather than a replication: it tests whether calm modelling by teachers reduces aggression, not whether aggressive models increase it.

What your redesign gives up

• Less control. Classrooms differ in many ways, so differences between classes may come from things other than the teacher's modelling. Randomising many classes helps, but needs a large study.
• Teachers know their condition. A teacher trained to model calm behaviour may also change in other ways, such as giving more attention, so the cause is less precise.
• No clear test of copying. Without unusual, countable acts like the Bobo model's, it is harder to show that children are copying a specific model rather than responding to a calmer classroom in general.