October was National Bullying Prevention month. Throughout our nation’s schools, students attended pep rallies, signed petitions, wore t-shirts with anti-bully messages, and participated in anti-bully marches. Anti-bullying Facebook pages, some with extraordinary amounts of helpful resources and information, were created. It was all a wonderful display of anti-bully sentiment which ensured that everyone was thinking about bullying behavior and its consequence, at least for awhile. So what happens in November? Now that anti-bullying month has ended, what is occurring today in your child’s lunchroom or on the playground? Were the October messages enough to reduce bullying? What really works to help reduce bullying?
There is a huge amount of literature on the best methods and curriculums to defeat bullying. Yet some of it is contradictory. One strategy from one anti-bullying expert is deemed misguided by another. To add clarity to this discussion, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has defined 10 best practices for bullying prevention. Those 10 strategies are:
1. Focus on the social environment of the school
2. Assess bullying at your school
3. Garner staff and parent support for bullying prevention
4. Form a group to coordinate the school’s bullying prevention activities
5. Train your staff in bullying prevention
6. Establish and enforce school rules and policies related to bullying
7. Increase adult supervision in hot spots where bullying occurs
8. Intervene consistently and appropriately in bullying situations
9. Focus some class time on bullying prevention.
10. Continue these efforts over time.
No one is shortsighted enough to think one month’s anti-bullying campaign is enough to put the kibosh on bullying. Yet October’s bullying prevention month is a very real step in changing the social environment (best practice #1) at a school. To have students declare that bullying is “uncool” can only help to make kids more mindful of bullying behavior, hopefully be repelled by it, and ultimately understand its hurtfulness.
If modifying the school environment is effective, one strategy that some researchers argue doesn’t work is punishing the bully. Swearer et al
argue that zero tolerance policies, expulsions, and suspensions have done nothing to improve the bullying climate in our schools. Rather than isolate and punish bullies for their poor relationship skills, we need to be helping them to develop those skills. And we need to be able to listen to them to understand why they are engaging in this behavior. According to educator Christopher Lehman of the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project at Columbia University, one way to help develop relationship skills is to encourage personal reflection and thoughtful reading. A systematic classroom approach to self-reflection (see best practices 9 and 10) can help teach empathy, kindness, and respect for diversity. Mr. Lehman bristles at a statement made last April by David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core Curriculum, who said, perhaps somewhat facetiously, “No one gives a shit about what you think or what you feel.” Mr. Lehman argues that our lives are worth writing about. We all should be recording our fears, hurts, and hopes on paper to help us understand each other and build community. Mr. Lehman in particular cites the book “Bullying Hurts: Teaching Kindness through Read Alouds and Guided Conversation,” which, as the title suggests, targets bullying behavior through thoughtful reading and writing. The authors of the book, incidentally, perhaps in an effort to keep the book in the classroom, argue that their methodology, which teaches critical thinking skills and demands lucid argument, is very much in line with Common Core Standards.
We can all agree that bullying is a huge problem in our nation’s schools, and it has been previously discussed on this blog. The numbers of bullying incidents are increasing, children continue to be tormented, sometimes with tragic results, and school staff and parents are diligently looking to find solutions. Solving this problem is going to take a lot of time and effort on the part of all stakeholders, including the students. In line with the government’s best practices guidelines, anti-bullying efforts will need to be tackled directly in the classroom by teachers who, by virtue of the time spent with their students, are in a unique position to guide their students. Hopefully we can empower students to stand up against bullying and understand the consequences of not acting when they see bullying. As Martin Luther King, Jr is paraphrased in the book, Bullying Hurts, “In the end, we remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
