Before getting started with responding to the student who has engaged in bullying behavior, the authors recommend keeping a few things in mind:
- Positive Relationships are key to intervening - Keep in mind students who engage in bullying behavior often feel singled out
- Let the student know he/she is important and deserves to learn new skills
- Seek to understand the function of the behavior
- Allow the student who engages in bullying behavior to share their perspective
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Assess your own feelings regarding the behavior
- Stay calm
- Balance support and firmness
The Big Questions help staff become efficient problem solvers. They help us look at what we are doing and assess its effectiveness and whether we should consider alternative solutions.
- What is my goal?
- What am I doing?
- Is what I’m doing helping me achieve my goal?
- If not, what can I do differently?
The Four R’s of Bully Control correspond to The Big Questions, and are recommended action steps for responding to a student who is initiating bullying behavior.
- Recognize that a problem exists and stay calm
- Remove yourself from the situation and ask for help if you feel you will respond with anger
- Review the situation
- Respond to the situation
As you have likely experienced, tier 1 / foundational classroom management practices, including planned responses to appropriate and inappropriate behavior (as outlined in our Comprehensive Classroom Management Plan template) facilitate more sustainable behavior change, and will enhance your ability to implement the following five components of a best practice response recommended for students who initiate bullying behavior.
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Anger & Impulse Control Training
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Students who engage in bullying behavior tend to be aggressive and impulsive. Interventions should aim to teach alternatives to physical force. Clinicians can teach students to identify their triggers, and learn the physical signs that they are angry so they can use newly acquired techniques to reduce their anger.
- Aggression Replacement Training: A comprehensive intervention for aggressive youth (Rev. ed.) was developed by Goldstein, Glick and Gibbs (1998) and has been used to teach students these skills.
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Students who engage in bullying behavior tend to be aggressive and impulsive. Interventions should aim to teach alternatives to physical force. Clinicians can teach students to identify their triggers, and learn the physical signs that they are angry so they can use newly acquired techniques to reduce their anger.
The Anger Busters Activity (for K-2) can be used to help students understand that anger is a normal part of life, to identify constructive ways of expressing and dealing with anger and identify safe ways for responding to the feeling.
The Turtle Club Activity (for K-5) teaches students strategies for controlling their impulses, especially anger and provides opportunities to practice the strategies.
The Anger is Normal Activity, the Cage Your Lion Activity and the Feel the Heat Activity (for 6-8) all help students identify triggers, physiological changes that occur in the body as a result of anger and healthy vs unhealthy ways of coping.
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Empathy Building
- As we increase empathy skills we decrease the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Teachers can model empathy skills with targets and initiators of bullying. Incorporating empathy into educational activities like ELA is a critical Tier 1 intervention for helping students respond to bullying behavior out of care and concern, rather than anger. As you read stories you can ask students to consider the thoughts and feelings of each character. Role plays and role reversals can also help the initiator of bullying learn what it feels like to be the target. Likewise, clinicians can explore this on a deeper level with small groups of students who have exhibited bullying behavior or on a Tier 3 level during 1:1 counseling sessions in response to founded DASA cases.
One activity that can be used to teach empathy is the Caught the Feeling Activity (for K-2). This activity helps students recognize and understand different types of feelings, expand their feelings-words vocabulary and encourage the development of empathy for others.
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Cognitive Retraining
- Research by Dodge and Coie (1987) state that nonaggressive children attribute a bump or nudge or tactless comment as accidental. Conversely, students who exhibit bullying behavior see these activities as spiteful and believe they have the right, and sometimes even a responsibility to retaliate.
- Cognitive retraining teaches students who engage in bullying behaviors to see others’ motivations in a more neutral way. Teachers facilitate this by encouraging students to think about both sides of a situation and engaging in activities that encourage students to take the viewpoint of someone else.
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Social Skills Training
- Identify the lagging skill
- Evaluate the current level of the skill
- Break the skill down into small steps
- Provide learning models, for example, peers, books, movies that demonstrate the skill
- Provide time to practice the skill
- Provide support and encouragement for use of the new skill
- Monitor use of the new skill
For example, if a teacher notices that several students are struggling with a certain skill, for example group entry skills, the teacher can discuss the steps for entering a group and post them on poster paper and refer back to the steps and use them as opportunities to encourage and monitor use of the skill:
- When approaching a group of students, watch and wait before joining the conversation.
- Listen and follow the conversation rather than changing the topic.
- Ask questions that go along with the topic and make comments.
- Imitate the behavior of the group.
Clinicians can also facilitate Tier 2 social skills groups to help groups of children practice skills such as managing their frustration in age appropriate ways of reading social cues in order to respond effectively. For students who need additional support, social skills training can be accomplished via 1:1 counseling.
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Problem-Solving Training
- Stop and Think
- Define the Problem
- Consider Alternative Solutions
- Evaluate Consequences of Solutions
- Select a Solution
- Implement the Solution
- Evaluate the Solution
Teachers and support staff can foster problem solving skills by posting and reviewing these steps regularly with the whole class. To engage students with an activity to practice, students could be asked to present the teacher with a typical problem and the teacher could role play working through the 7 steps to respond to the situation.
Teachers can encourage students to use the Big Questions as a whole-class exercise or on a 1:1 basis to promote metacognition skills, or thoughtfully planning substeps to achieving a goal. Improved metacognitive skills can help reduce bullying behavior by shifting students’ attention from the frustration situation to what they really want out of it and the best way of getting there.
Stick and Stone, by Beth Ferry https://amzn.to/2JZRCOH
Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon, by Patty Lovell https://amzn.to/2WUWydb
Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes http://amzn.to/2gRaR15
A Big Guy Took My Ball, by Mo Williams https://amzn.to/36LdJ5f
The Recess Queen, by Alexis O’Neil and Laura Huliska-Beith http://amzn.to/2ujzzKB
The Juice Box Bully, by Bob Sornson and Maria Dismondy http://amzn.to/2tnSjqN
You, Me and Empathy, by Jayneen Sanders http://amzn.to/2uYCeJH
Grades 1-5
My Secret Bully, by Trudy Lugwig https://amzn.to/2NQU8Ik
Anger Tree, by John Cary http://amzn.to/2f8LKX8
Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson http://amzn.to/2ujVMrC
Newman-Carlson, D., Horne, A., & Bartolomucci, C. (2003). Bully Busters: A Teacher’s Manual for Helping Bullies, Victims and Bystanders (2003). Research Press.