How Can Educators and School Staff Address Bullying?

PREVNet has co-created several training resources in partnership with educators and school staff, to support you to address bullying in your school, including:

1. Identity-Based Bullying Online Training for Educators
   • Students who trust educators in their school to effectively address identity-based bullying are more likely to report this kind of bullying when it occurs
   • PREVNet offers free, interactive online modules on identity-based bullying for educators to help you:
     1. Recognize bullying:
        • This includes building an understanding of power, privilege, and oppression, and how these shape interactions between students
     2. Learn about your biases:
        • This can help prevent harmful beliefs from being passed on to the students in our classroom
     3. Take action:
        • Our training includes strategies for starting open, respectful conversations about power, peer dynamics, and identity-based bullying with students

2. PREVNet Resources for Educators on Youth Interpersonal Violence
   • Short animated videos and tipsheets that describe:
     • What identity-based bullying is, and tips to address it in schools
     • How to tell the difference between positive teasing and harmful bullying
     • How to encourage students to be upstanders when they witness bullying

3. PREVNet Resource Library
   • You can filter over 250 resources in our online library by audience
     1. Select educators under audience to see all of the webinars, research summaries, presentations, and guides designed specifically to support educators and school staff to intervene on youth interpersonal violence
     2. Most resources are available in English and French!

4. Does Your School Make the Grade? Checklist
   • Use this tool to understand what your school is doing well to promote health youth relationships, and what more can be done

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How can Educators and School Staff Help Students who Bully?

Repeatedly engaging in bullying behaviours can have negative long-term effects on development and the ability to build and maintain healthy relationships. The good news is that children who engage in bullying can change their behaviour for the better, with some support from caring adults.

Change they way they use their power

Kids who bully may need help developing problem-solving skills that dont involve aggression. Provide them with opportunities to use their natural leadership skills in a positive way, for example, get them to teach younger students a new sport or skill. Help kids who bully resist peer pressure by letting them know you believe they can change their behaviour.

Acknowledge positive behaviours

Encourage positive connections among children by praising respectful and cooperative behaviour whenever it happens. Try and focus on the positive behaviours of all students, even when they need correcting. Children are works in progress they cant always get it right they learn through trial and error.

Consequences that teach, not punish

Children who bully may need help in understanding the impact of their actions. Formative consequences are designed to send the message that bullying is unacceptable while also providing support for children who bully to learn the social skills and empathy they may lack.

Formative Consequences for Students Who Bully

• Have students create a poster, collage, or drawing of what it must feel like to be bullied. Talk about the feelings that children who are bullied might experience (e.g., shame, embarrassment, anger, fear or sadness)
• Assign students a research project where they have to learn about the prevalence, nature, and consequences of bullying and write a paper or create a class presentation based on their findings.
• Have the students who bully interview an adult or older student about their bullying experiences and the impact it had on him/her.
• Assign a project requiring the students who bully to research a historical figure or celebrity who has been bullied.
• Have the students read a novel about bullying and write a character study (e.g., Blubber by Judy Blume)
• Have the students watch a movie about bullying and describe the characters and the consequences of their actions (e.g., Mean Girls, Back to the Future). Encourage them to focus on the feelings of the victimized character. Help them to identify these feelings by looking out for facial expressions, body posture, and tone of voice.
• Have your students identify instances of bullying in the media (e.g., television, newspapers, radio, magazines, websites) and talk with them about their reactions to these instances.
• Talk with your students about their own strengths and weaknesses and how they can use power to help, not hurt, others.