(These tips were adapted from articles by James Dillon from Principal magazine, Sept/Oct 2010 and Ted Feinberg from Principal Leadership, Sept. Conduct Bullying Prevention Activities such as all-school assemblies, communications campaigns or creative arts contests highlighting school values to bring the community together and reinforce the message that bullying is wrong.
#School bully code
Develop a School-wide Code of Conduct that reinforces school values and clearly defines unacceptable behavior and consequences.Assess the Extent of the Problem Survey students, staff and parents to find out how much and what type of bullying is going, as well as where and when, to target prevention efforts.Practice What You Preach Don't use your status as the school leader as the lever for change instead, "listen before talking and reflect before acting" to ensure your staff feel valued (this is backed up by the NEA survey, which found an important predictor of adult willingness to intervene in bullying was their "connectedness" to the school, defined as their belief they are valued as individuals and professionals in the learning process).A true culture change takes time, but a few key steps to help principals get started: Five Tips to Help Principals Prevent BullyingĪccording to Dillon, effectively addressing a bullying problem requires a culture change. So whom should we blame for the state of bullying?Īs Dillon puts it, "The reality is that no one is to blame, yet everyone is responsible." We all can work to prevent bullying, be it on a school- or classroom-wide basis, or even at home. Without such training, some of Dillon's other suggestions as to why bullying is so prevalent - that adults don't recognize some behaviors as bullying and that bullying is often ineffectually addressed using the traditional discipline system of applying punishment to a perpetrator - make sense. But just 54 percent received training on their district's bullying prevention policy. He suggests perhaps bullying problems are not addressed because "people think bullying prevention is someone else's responsibility."Ī large-scale study by the NEA and Johns Hopkins University that examined school staff's perspectives on bullying and bullying prevention somewhat refutes that hypothesis, finding 98 percent of participants (all teachers and education support professionals) thought it was "their job" to intervene when they witnessed bullying. Inevitably, he gets a wide variety of responses. In Principal magazine, elementary principal, now retired, James Dillon writes that in bullying prevention trainings, he asks participants to choose the one group they believe is most responsible for addressing school violence and bullying: parents, students, school, or community. But especially given that commitment to student safety, why do so many children experience bullying?