Kids CAN Be Taught How to Stop Bullying
By Ari Magnusson
The results are in: 100% of the students in Boston-area schools who were taught about bullying prevention during this past spring term of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Life Skills program said they now know how to resolve a bullying problem on their own.
In addition to supporting the CirclePoint program, I am also the bullying prevention educator for the Life Skills program. The Life Skills program consists of educators from a variety of fields (nutrition, general health and wellness, substance abuse, stress reduction, etc.) who teach elementary and middle school students how to lead healthier lives. The program uses CirclePoint materials for the bullying education component.
The Life Skills program is taught in the fall and spring, and at the end of each term, the students fill out a survey about what they have learned. This past spring was the first time in the history of the program that a topic received a perfect score. While my fellow educators congratulated me, the result is not about my teaching. What the perfect score reveals is that it is possible to teach students ways that they can resolve bullying problems themselves.
Many bullying prevention programs and policies take an adult-intervention approach. They tell students that if they are being bullied, they should ask for adult help. However, there are many problems with this approach. First, students are not given the opportunity to learn and practice valuable social skills (life skills!) in dealing with aggression. Second, it makes students dependent upon adults to solve their problems. Third, adults may not know the most effective methods for resolving bullying problems; the biggest reason students do not ask adults for help is that they fear (with good reason!) that adults will make the problem worse.
Not every student is able to resolve a bullying problem on his or her own. Even those who are taught the mechanics of bullying so they understand how it works and are taught ways to thoughtfully respond to aggression to render it ineffective are not always able to resolve the problem. But in addition to learning what bullying is, why their peers do it, and how to respond to it, kids can also learn how to help an adult to resolve the problem effectively. That’s right: The student can learn how to help an adult address a bullying problem and not make it worse.
To paraphrase an old adage: Stop a bullying problem for a student and he or she won’t be bullied that day; teach a student how to stop bullying and he or she won’t be bullied for a lifetime.
More information on the MGH Life Skills (Stay in Shape) program can be found here.