How To End Classroom Bullying and Empower Your Students
By Kristin J. Cook
Wholeschool Co-Founder and Curriculum Developer
How to End Classroom Bullying and Empower Your Students
Classroom bullying is insidious and sly… and everywhere.
You glance out over your 5th, 6th, 7th grade class and make eye contact with … Sarah. You catch a quick, unguarded look of pain. Further back in the row, you see a couple kids from that “in” group – kids you’ve seen with Sarah just yesterday – smirking at her and at you, a little defensive posturing and bravado. You realize you just missed the paper wad thrown or the note passed or the text sent, but you see the arrow has reached its mark.
And you know a few more things: Sarah is today’s dejected outsider; her friends will spend the afternoon shifting alliances to protect themselves from being ostracized and, some of them, switching gears back to defend her; perhaps the whole thing will escalate overnight on Facebook. And you … at this point, you will likely continue teaching math/ history/ English as if none of it has happened.
What are your options? Pull Sarah aside and try to help, you make her smaller. Pull the other girls aside, you also make Sarah smaller. Plus, this goes on every day in some corner of the classroom, starring the full cast of characters from one moment to the next, and you have a curriculum to get through.
So now what? How can we remove the pain from what psychologist Carl Pickhardt calls “the most developmentally insecure time of childhood?” Pickhardt, author of “Why Good Kids Act Cruel,” maintains that students will resort to extreme measures to garner a sense of social security during the ages of 9 to 13.
Think back on your own upper elementary and middle school years. Would you take a million dollars to do it all over again? I wouldn’t! I remember awkward experiences at school dances, terror over belonging to various groups of “in” kids, painful moments when kids teased me publicly over some minor social transgression. These are the experiences that stand out. However, at the same time I was, on the surface, a happy kid who got good grades and was involved in sports and cheerleading. How do those two extreme views come together?
Developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Erik Erickson have long held that the years from 9 to 13 are awash with change for young minds:
1. Our thought processes become more complex: we move from purely concrete thinking into an ability to understand abstract concepts.
2. Our emotions become far more complex, as adolescence and hormonal changes turn everyday events into life-or-death scenarios. Pre-teens and tweens can seem overly dramatic -- “OMG, the world will now end; never mind, it’s the best day EVER!” – as they roller-coaster through life’s seemingly small ups and downs. Tweens spend an inordinate amount of time wrapped up in the Fight-or-Flight cycle.
3. Our sense of self changes dramatically. Pre-teens begin to shift their views of themselves to be based upon their perception of what their peers think of them. So a tween’s center of gravity can shift radically over the course of a day where people react in different ways. And herein lies the key to unlocking the bully cycle.
The problem is this: while we teach our children all about reading, writing, math, science, and history, we spend very little time teaching them about three simple words: “Who am I?” And the time to begin is during these upper elementary years.
So while students use their thought processes to learn our list of important subjects, we don’t teach them about their thoughts. While we tell students to control their emotions in the classroom, we don’t teach them about their emotions and what is happening inside them. While we teach them all these important subjects to help them find their career “when I grow up,” we don’t teach them about who they are as people. It’s like teaching someone a skill without ever explaining the tools.
When children learn what is happening inside their bodies and minds, two huge shifts take place:
1. They are more comfortable in their own skins. They act more than they react. And when they DO react, they regain control more rapidly, as they understand what’s happening to them.
2. They are more comfortable with and empathetic towards others. They understand more clearly what’s happening with other people. They see another person as more like them than not like them. The walls come down.
So … how to bring this into your classroom? As I mentioned earlier, the time to do this is NOT as a result of a conflict in the classroom. It has to take place completely separately. And it has to draw students in.
Consider an hour, twice a week, where your students can connect with students across the country and the world, in real-time, through a guided webcast event. They make new friends, do exciting activities in the classroom, and share their experiences with kids thousands of miles away. They learn about what it is to be human and share this experience with their classmates and up to 10 other groups of kids they’ve never met. Learn more about Wholeschool’s YETI Club program (Youth Education To Inspire) here.
What happens? I can tell you this – they will discover themselves. And they won’t feel alone anymore.
In the meantime, please sign up for our weekly newsletter, with weekly tips and pointers to bring inspiration into your classroom. Next, we’ll begin a series on 15-minute classroom activities to end bullying and empower your students.
