What They Don't Teach You During Teacher Training: Part 4 - Bullying

• Part 1: Time Management

• Part 2: Parents

• Part 3: Vulnerable Children 

• Part 4: Bullying 

• Part 5: Colleagues 

• Part 6: Motivation

This series of blog posts covers areas that I feel are often missing from the PGCE year and teacher training in general. That's not a criticism - there simply isn't time to cover everything but I have been using my extra pandemic time with the university library and the World Wide Web at my finger tips to search for answers to questions that have been perplexing me for some time. It turns out that many people have thought about these things a lot more than me so I'm excited to be sharing the insights that resonated the most.

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Bullying, or 'bullismo' as we know it here in Italy, is a funny term. It is very hard to define and means different things to different people in different places around the world. For some it is groups of students ganging up on an individual and and being physically aggressive, for others it's more than that and can include the spreading of rumours, exclusion, harassment, extortion and intimidation and even simply an individual abusing their power. Whatever it means to you, it can be hard to deal with as a teacher as much of it may happen outside of the classroom. The following statistics and information were taken from Understanding School Bullying, its Nature and Prevention Strategies by P.K. Smith which gives a very comprehensive and complex overview of bullying in schools around the world.

Bullying varies with age. Younger children tend to be more physically aggressive, while older children tend to be more verbally aggressive. 

The more children are online the more cyberbullying can be a problem. Cyberbullying can be especially perplexing for a teacher as it mostly happens outside of school hours. About half of cyberbullying victims do not know who the bully is but since, more often than not, cyberbullying involves individuals from the same school parents may ask teachers to intervene. Some schools and teachers in this circumstance choose to get involved and others will not.

Mythbusting - Who bullies and gets bullied?

12-15 years of age is the time when children are most likely to bully with students increasingly less sympathetic to victims up until the age of 14 or 15. This means that middle schools are particular hot spots for bullying, with September of the first year being a flash point as a class pecking order has yet to emerge. At Primary School younger children will attack others indiscriminately before finding out which victims make the most rewarding targets (the ones least able to cope).

Sexist bullying is the most common type of bullying but many young people also view homophobic bullying as more acceptable than, for example, racist bullying. Children with special needs are the most likely to be bullied with students with ADHD being up to 8x more likely to be victims as well as 3x more likely to bully. Since bullying is quite a complex social phenomenon it is interesting to note that autistic students may often be victims but that they often find it hard to know when something is bullying or not.

Locations where bullying is most likely to happen are in the least supervised places with the playground, followed by corridors, toilets and the canteen. These days, perhaps due to greater awareness of bullying in schools and better supervision, bullying rates are dropping for traditional bullying but are rising for cyberbullying.

So far perhaps not so surprising. I was most interested in the book's look at the psychological profiles of bullies, victims and defenders. Bullies are often portrayed as not very bright thugs or bully-victims unconsciously acting out their own pain but in reality many bullies are socially intelligent and manipulative although they often have callous and unemotional traits. They may recognise others emotions ('cognitively empathetic' Smith calls it) but do not share and feel other's emotions (affective empathy). Bullies frequently disengage morally from their behaviour, saying things like "I didn't start it," "He deserved it," and "It was just for fun." Bullying for most bullies is a way of increasing social status and power. And it works, children tend to perceive bullies as popular even if they are not well liked by their peers. 

Victims may be less socially literate, with lower levels of emotional stability and lower self-esteem. Often victims can have over protective, or especially critical and distant parents but children with bullying siblings are also more likely to be bullied at school. Children and young people who experience bullying are particularly at risk of severe depression if bullied, often because bullying can become a vicious cycle. Bullied girls and victims who bully are most at risk of committing suicide. 

Children who are prepared to intervene and stand up for victims of bullying tend to be popular and emotionally stable. Something to bear in mind perhaps, if you are trying to help a victim make new friends!

In one study cited in the book of cases when bullying stopped, 25% of victims said it was because they got help from school, 23% transitioned from one school onto the next level and 11% changed class or school. 20% of students said that changing their coping strategies was the thing that stopped the bullying, like learning new skills, making new friends and trying assertive non aggressive strategies. 

It is really important to know that the victim and aggressor roles are not fixed. Especially in the case of girls, bullies can become victims and vice versa over time. The good news for victims of cyberbullying is that it cyberbullying usually lasts for less than a month.

So what can we as individual teachers do about bullying?

• Be visible. Make an effort to patrol areas of the playground and school at break time which are harder to supervise. A particularly effective colleague of mine with a difficult class dynamic used to pop up at break time unexpectedly, even if she wasn't on duty, to check that nobody was getting excluded from games.
• Be watchful for small acts of bullying like eye rolling, back turning, laughing cruelly and sarcasm amongst groups of students. Bullying isn't always obvious so it's important that you get to know your students really well.
• Encourage parents and children to communicate and talk about bullying at school and especially cyberbullying where they must take the lead. Good communication with parents has been shown to be a protective factor for children.
• Signal that bullying is unacceptable very clearly and that there are consequences for students who bully. 
• Create a sense of community. Choose pairs and working groups yourself and break up cliques. After lunch the aforementioned colleague asks pupils who they played with at break time and praises those who played with someone they didn't normally play with. 
• Keep chats with bullies and victims private and individual. 
• Respond quickly to incidents of bullying.
• Avoid "one off" anti-bullying lessons which may only underline the fact that other pupils may wish to choose to support the bully. 
• Teach everyone in the class what to do if they witness bullying. Students should know that they should not join in or laugh and should walk away and tell an adult (especially if the bully is violent!) or tell the bully to stop and encourage others to do the same.

Verywellfamily.com has a helpful article on this called 15 Ways to Prevent Bullying in Your Classroom.

The Support Group Method

Below is an intriguing method also known as the Seven Steps method which, according to Smith, has been shown to be immediately effective in 80% of cases of bullying and 76% of the time stops the bullying. It is controversial because the bully is not made to admit guilt or acknowledge the suffering that they have caused, but is perhaps effective precisely because of this very feature.

1. The Facilitator talks to the victim privately who shares some account of their suffering (at this point many teachers would get parents involved in order to explain the method they intend to use).
2. A group meeting of 6-8 students is set up without the victim. This group is a mix of bullies and friends of the victim, some of whom will be nominated by the victim. 
3. The Facilitator explains to the group that the victim is having a difficult time but does not discuss the bullying incident/s.
4. The Facilitator explains that they are not looking to blame or punish anyone but expects everyone to take some responsibility for improving the victims safety and wellbeing. 
5. Each group member thinks how they can make the victims feel happier or safer...
6. ...and shares their ideas with the group.
7. Facilitator ends the meeting giving the group responsibility for following through with their ideas and tells the group that they will follow up with everyone and the victim with individual meetings a week later. At this point the facilitator may also contact the victim's parents to tell them how the meeting has gone.

I think that this method is very interesting for older students especially and it would have been interesting to have tried it with a particular middle school class that I had. When confronting teenagers over bullying behaviour the response that I had was that it was everyone's fault but theirs or to deny events.  This method puts the focus exactly where I would have liked it: on making things better and moving forwards without stigmatising the victim. I think the strength of this method is also that if it doesn't work you still have the traditional approaches of consequences and sanctions to fall back on.

Would you give it a go?