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One glance at internet offerings on how to address bullying in your classroom is enough to establish that bullying is big business. Countless books, programs, and experts offer their advice, and buying pre-packaged programs makes us feel as though we have ‘committed’ to addressing the issue in our schools.
The most important way to support a ‘bully-free’ classroom is to create a pro-active environment, one that continually reinforces norms of civility and tolerance. Many anti-bullying books outline exercises to promote these values, but lack a “back-up plan.” Like most parenting manuals, there is an assumption that the good advice contained in them will not fall flat, let alone be considered namby-pamby by students.
Let’s assume that your school has not only signed on for a whole-school anti-bullying initiative, but that you or your principal has given “the Talk” about bullying. Someone has assumed this first-day responsibility—even though “bullying” has become a buzzword that has students rolling their eyes and sighing. This is enough to signal that whatever initiative your school has decided upon will need reinforcement and support. In addition to Spelling Out the (nuanced) behaviors that you will not tolerate in your classroom (and the consequences for engaging in them), these FIVE strategies and techniques may support your efforts to incorporate anti-bullying initiatives.
- Crumple a piece of paper in front of your class. Explain that this is how people feel when they are bullied—they withdraw and collapse in on themselves, and think of themselves as trash that others want to throw out. Un-crumple and smooth out the paper, then ask students if the paper is the same as when it started. Bullying can do permanent damage, even if it is ‘retracted.’
In the future, when you see or suspect bullying in your classroom, pause in your teaching and crumple a piece of paper… - Incorporate ‘perception’ into your teaching routine. Discuss various ways to understand history, a world event, a local news-story, a painting, a book, a scientific finding, or the relevance of “statistics” (math) to back up “social facts.” Optical illusions drive this point home to elementary school children. Understanding that there are a variety of ways from which to understand events or artifacts lays a framework for tolerance of difference (there are many perspectives orienting behavior in the hallways and cafeterias...)
- Identify one social skill that you will focus on with your class—for example, empathy. Model it, weave it into class activities, and give your students positive feedback when you see them employing it.
- Identify the lonely and disconnected kids in your classroom and continue to make every effort to draw them into group work, to rearrange seating, or creatively include them in lesson plans. When test scores are the only consideration in our classrooms, we privilege norms that readily shame too many of our students. Look, instead, to educate through creating opportunities for pride.
- Create a bullying “emergency-kit” action-plan. As an exercise, require students to think through how they would respond to bullying. Talk past the eyerolls and snide posturing with prompts like: “do you know how to take a screenshot on snap chat— anonymously? or “identify your body’s reaction to being publicly shamed, and think about how you might counter it (before you do something that will make matters worse)” or “who is someone you could trust if there was really really a problem?”
Whatever larger initiatives schools take must be reinforced by the routine incorporation of underlying anti-bullying values and orientations. Even if young people show signs of boredom and resist participation, what we establish as normative ‘gets in sideways,’ and the more often we repeat it, the more extensively it embeds itself in the culture of a school.
As educators, we must concern ourselves with process. How we—and our students—both set and achieve goals must come to concern us as deeply as the multiple outcomes that may belie success and failure.
