WITS is a program created by educators for educators to help children prevent victimization, such as bullying, discrimination and lateral violence. The WITS program gives children aged 5 to 11 the tools to manage conflicts and empowers them to make safe, positive choices within their community.
WITS provides students, their teachers, parents and caregivers, and community leaders with a common language to discuss conflict & peer victimization. Children across Canada proudly exclaim “I use my WITS” as they engage in positive, pro-social behaviours. WITS is an acronym based on these four strategies:
Walk away
Ignore
Talk it out
Seek help
Proven to be effective and flexible to implement, WITS can easily be incorporated into a curriculum. The program is literacy-based using stories that align with SEL themes. WITS has a unique school assembly, engages families, and provides several methods of reminding students to use strategies to manage conflict and victimization. The WITS Modules provide vetted books, lesson plans with each book (designed to foster more in-depth exploration while meeting provincial learning objectives) implementation guidelines and a host of other educational materials.
New WITS Programs consist of three parts: a subscription, Classroom Modules for every classroom, and a Core Module for each school. The subscription provides access to all online resources including self-paced educator and community leader training, lesson plans, videos and the WITS store. Schools already using the WITS Programs now subscribe in order to access these resources.
WITS has been started in over 1500 schools worldwide. Subscribe your school to deliver WITS, or to learn more, see How WITS works or contact info@witsprogram.ca.
Educators have told us
“Kids reach all these outcomes, not just social responsibility outcomes. Because it’s literature-based they’re addressing all these other outcomes as well.”
“It’s not a huge undertaking; not an addition to what we already have to do when we feel overwhelmed and have to do all this curriculum stuff… it fits right in.”
“I think that the teachers buy in to it, in that we really like the common language so that everybody knows what the question is: “Have you used your WITS?” The kids all know what that means. The teachers know what that means. The parents even have quoted to me, “Well, he used his WITS today” and so on.”
One school’s experience CBC News story In 2012, this school in Little Pine First Nation, Saskatchewan was having concerns, so turned to WITS.
What students say about WITS… see ‘What kids say about WITS‘ , a 4 minute video featuring kids in public, middle and high schools.
It’s a very natural fit for me to incorporate WITS into other things we are doing. It’s very useful to use daily in our classroom.
