She offers the following phrases to her students as options when confronting a bully:. But above all else, Hur stresses the importance of confronting bullies with a level head.
As you explore various ways to prioritize bullying prevention in your own classroom, it can be helpful to consider the guidance of seasoned education professionals. I understand that my consent is not required to attend University of Massachusetts Global. Privacy Policy. Education How to prevent bullying in the classroom: 4 Proactive tips for teachers. July 29, by University of Massachusetts Global.
Education Teaching Bullying. Have questions about enrollment, degree programs, financial aid, or next steps? Request Info. Further your education with a few questions. Zip Code Please enter your zip code to proceed.
Please enter a valid zip code to proceed. Is this an international zip code? Programs Select Program Please select a program type. Are you a registered nurse? Please select one option. Brandman nursing programs are for licensed nurses only.
Studies also indicate that teaching students to speak up when they witness bullying behavior, and to take a stand against it, can reduce future bullying situations by more than 50 percent. In the classroom, start by creating a safe place for students to express themselves and feel heard. Outside of the classroom, facilitate opportunities for positive reinforcement by helping students get involved in afterschool activities that align with their hobbies and interests.
Researchers have found that small behaviors can often signal the beginning patterns of bullying. As an educator, here are some of the key behaviors you should take notice of:. While these behaviors may not be classified as bullying, putting interventions in place now could mitigate the likelihood of them growing into something more problematic.
The arts can be a powerful tool for helping young people see situations from different perspectives. Using drama, literature, and the visual arts as a vehicle for conversation, educators can help students understand the negative impact of bullying.
Erika Dawes , early childhood literacy professor at Lesley, does this using the storybook Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson. This means students are left with conflicting emotions. And this ambiguity is perfect place to enter into conversation. After reading to students, Dawes holds an open circle conversation.
Drawing attention to issues raised in the story, she creates a safe and open atmosphere for students to talk about bullying. And when teachers feel bullied by colleagues, their students can also become negatively impacted.
In order to stop the spread of bullying from the leadership level down to students, start by looking within your own classroom. After a bad day or tense interaction with a colleague, try not to bring negativity into your teaching. Focus your energy on cultivating a learning environment built on positivity, openness, and support.
Theorizing about how to prevent and respond to bullying in schools is one thing. Witnessing it for the first time is entirely another. In the mixed reality lab, pre-service teachers are bystanders in a bullying scenario. The model for victimization was the same, except that the indirect path was not significant.
Teachers are in an influential position as educators and agents of socialization, helping to promote healthy relationships among students and to prevent negative interactions Smith et al. Teachers are often present when an episode of bullying occurs, and they are often the first adults that students contact Wachs et al. Teachers could react in a number of ways after a bullying episode, including intervening, observing the situation, not intervening, ignoring and trivializing the bullying Rigby, Students expect teachers to actively intervene when bullying occurs Crothers et al.
Very few studies examine how teachers intervene in bullying situations, and even less analyze the impact of those interventions James et al. The success of teacher intervention has important implications in terms of how students should be effectively supported, and how their confidence and sense of security might increase.
Seidel and Oertel specifically distinguished three different strategies used by the teachers. First, they list authoritarian-punitive strategies i. However, they have only a minimal effect on successful interventions with students, because no positive model for social behavior modification is proposed. Another strategy used by teachers is individual assistance directed to the victims and the bullies, supporting them emotionally, and increasing empathy toward students who have been victimized Bowes et al.
They may simply be unware of the bullying phenomenon Smith and Shu, ; Fekkes et al. Some teachers consider bullying to be a normative behavior that may help children to acquire social norms Kochenderfer-Ladd and Pelletier, and find it unnecessary to intervene. In other cases, they do not intervene because they do not feel sympathy for the victim Yoon and Kerber, Besides, teachers are unlikely to intervene in bullying situations when they feel they could not obtain any results Dedousis-Wallace et al.
The students who have been victimized can be discouraged from reporting bullying incidents in the future, and the students who observed the bullying can feel less motivated to intervene or ask for help Huesmann et al.
When teachers intervene and make an end to the situation of bullying, they communicate that bullying is not acceptable, and consequently students are less inclined to justify this type of behavior Campaert et al. Also, by intervening personally, the teacher communicates that no justifications are acceptable in school Veenstra et al.
Literature showed that teachers with higher self-efficacy are more likely to intervene both for direct and indirect forms of bullying Fischer and Bilz, Several studies affirm that if teachers think that they are able to contribute to bullying decrease, they will intervene more often Bradshaw et al. Some of them reported a significant and positive association between these two variables Dedousis-Wallace et al. More attention should be paid to the domain-specific or general nature of self-efficacy construct.
Teachers with a high level of self-efficacy are more likely to manage certain situations and to promote interpersonal networks that consolidate and support their job satisfaction Caprara et al. The sense of perceived competence is a primary resource for intrinsic motivation and satisfaction. In the case of teachers, job satisfaction is related to self-efficacy both with respect to the profession itself and to the environment in which they work.
The research carried out indicates that although teachers are generally satisfied with aspects of their professional life related to teaching, they tend to be dissatisfied with the aspects concerning the performance of their work. As a consequence, higher levels of satisfaction correspond to greater commitment and better performance.
Literature highlights how teachers who have specifically dealt with the issues of bullying and who actively participate in prevention projects are perceived to be more effective and confident in handling victimization problems have more supportive attitudes toward victims and feel safer in working with families on these problems. These aspects are positively correlated to a decrease in the phenomenon Alsaker, According to this view, Veenstra et al.
We hypothesized that teachers who feel competent will be more able to actively deal with the bullying issue in their school, than those who feel incompetent or indifferent, who could be more passive observers of students dynamics. According to a social-cognitive model, we hypothesize that if teachers feel themselves as more competent in addressing bullying, more satisfied with their work, and more self-efficacious, they would intervene more frequently and with better results and therefore students would report lower levels of bullying and victimization at school.
On the contrary, when teachers feel less competent, less satisfied with their work, and less self-effective, there is a higher probability of teachers not intervening, and this in turn can be related to higher levels of bullying and victimization Figure 1.
Participants to this study included students and their teachers enrolled in the NoTrap! In particular, the current study considered the first data collected in pre-intervention. The sample consisted in teachers and their students enrolled in grades 7 through 9 in Tuscany Provinces of Lucca, Florence and Pistoia. The study was conducted with teachers The project considered the involvement of referent teachers for each school.
A total of 56 teachers in the province of Florence, 31 teachers in the province of Lucca, and 33 teachers in the province of Pistoia participated in the training.
The number of teachers per school ranged from 3 to this variability can be explained considering the number of classes involved in the project in each school, the number of students per school, and finally the number of teachers already trained in each school. All the teachers were invited to participate in two training sessions held by the staff of the University of Florence.
During the first meeting, a questionnaire was administered to the teachers. The research was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Italian Association of Psychology. The research project was approved by the school committees and the heads of the school based on school standards. Parents and students were informed about the confidentiality and anonymity of their responses, that their participation was entirely voluntary, and that they could withdraw at any time.
The informed consent procedure consisted of the preliminary approval by the school principal and the class council. Once the school gave its permission, a letter was sent to all the students and their parents, informing them of the project and asking them to complete and turn in the permission slip to participate.
Ninety-six percent of the target sample received active consent from parents to participate in the project and intervention. A short version of the Italian version Borgogni et al. The FBVSs consist of 20 items, investigating the frequency with which adolescents have perpetrated or have experienced bullying in the two previous months.
The reliability coefficients showed good values: for bullying we had a Cronbach alpha of 0. The data were analyzed starting from the teacher data. The school level of bullying and victimization was defined calculating the school-level means reported by the students. Two path analysis models were used to test the proposed direct and indirect models, one for bullying and the other for victimization.
All the analyses were conducted via Mplus 4. All models estimated direct and indirect paths. Table 1 reported bivariate correlations, means, and standard deviations for the variables considered.
As we can see, the perception of competence on bullying, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction are all intercorrelated, in particular self-efficacy and job satisfaction.
No significant path has been found for nonintervention Figure 2 ; Table 2. Figure 2. For the model predicting victimization, findings are quite similar, except for the indirect effect which is now not significant. Figure 3. If the teachers feel themselves as competent about bullying, they intervene more frequently with positive strategies and this is consequently associated to decrease of class bullying. The same model resulted for predicting the level of victimization, except for the non-significance of the indirect effect.
Teachers who perceived themselves as more competent in the bullying phenomenon are more prone to intervene in cases of bullying and victimization.
Competence can be fostered through specific trainings aimed to define the phenomenon, to underline the dynamics of the problem, and to present the best intervention strategies. This finding supports previous literature Alsaker, , where teachers who have more extensive knowledge of the phenomenon are more effective in managing problems, they have more supportive attitudes toward the victims, and are perceived to be more effective and confident in handling episodes of bullying.
Two main explanations can be considered for this result. In the literature we find that a task specific construct of self-efficacy is associated to bullying and not a general construct of professional self-efficacy as the one we tested in our study Bradshaw et al. The role of job satisfaction is important for class bullying reduction. Job satisfaction includes different aspects such as the class climate, satisfaction for the work done, and the quality of relations with the other teachers.
This can enhance a more positive classroom climate, better interpersonal relationships, and greater collaboration between students and teachers, and finally, it can directly influence the level of both bullying and victimization within the class.
In disagreement with the literature Campaert et al. The result could probably be due to the different evaluation sources used in this study compared to the studies carried out by Campaert et al. In addition, we used a model testing the intervention and not the nonintervention. Further studies could compare both perspectives, i. Current findings have relevant implications in terms of designing interventions for bullying prevention involving teachers.
Raising awareness on this phenomenon is the first step, along with promoting knowledge about bullying and victimization.
0コメント