Janet had few fears about transferring to Whitman High School in the fall of her sophomore year. Bright, energetic, and socially agile, she had always been popular. She was excited about making new friends and imagined she would quickly find her footing in this new place.
So it rattled her when she found herself repeatedly trying to pry her way into conversations with a group of girls in the cafeteria and, even more so, when several popular girls began snubbing her in the hall. She summoned the courage to ask a classmate why she was being ignored and was told that several girls had decided that she was "too enthusiastic."
Over time, she made several good friends in the school. The following fall, she decided to ensure that no incoming student would suffer as she had. She invited all students new to her grade to sleep over at her house. She created a place in the cafeteria where new kids were always welcome.
Another group of students, organized into a social action committee by a teacher, also took action. They posted on the walls of the cafeteria—without names or identifying details—all the derogatory comments on Facebook that students had leveled at one another at the school. They called their display "the walls of shame."
Battling Bullying
Over the last 20 years, high-profile episodes of bullying have stirred up broad public alarm. This attention may appear to be merely trendy, but it's important. Bullying—commonly defined as systematic exclusion, aggression, or harassment that one child or a group of children inflicts on less powerful children—is pervasive in our schools. About 30 percent of students are bullied on school grounds alone (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). Janet suffered a mild form of bullying; bullying is often more intense, physical, and vicious. Rather than generating empathy, a child's vulnerability can fuel another's spite, contempt, and even fury.
Consider the toll on students. Bullied children are more prone to anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, depression, social withdrawal, physical health complaints, aggression, alcohol and drug use, school difficulties, and suicide (Espelage & Swearer, 2003). Some children remain haunted by the humiliation long into adulthood. Bullies suffer many of the same problems, although they seem more likely than their victims to manage such challenges by lashing out. Some children are bullied one day and turn around to bully the next, and many children bully and are bullied at different points in their childhood.
Many schools across the United States are now focused on reducing bullying. These efforts have tended to take two forms: Traditionally, schools have focused on punishing perpetrators; more recently, attention has shifted toward emboldening students who are bystanders to become "upstanders"—that is, to stand up for those being bullied. But these approaches only go so far.
The Problem with the Solutions
Although children should be punished for transgressions, research indicates that simply punishing perpetrators without either explaining or attempting to repair the harm has few positive effects and, in some cases, does more harm than good (Kasen, Johnson, Chen, Crawford, & Cohen, 2011). Those who bully have frequently been victimized and humiliated themselves, and many forms of punishment simply reinforce the feelings of isolation and shame that cause children to torment others in the first place. Perhaps more important, bullying and other types of cruelty thrive when they're supported by underlying social norms—and punishing bullies does nothing to change those norms.
Similarly, although we should certainly encourage children to stand up to cruelty, relying on isolated bystanders to become upstanders does little to change the social norms that fuel that cruelty. Upstanders are, by definition, exceptional. They go against the tide; they buck social norms. No widespread system of prevention can depend on the capacity of individual children for heroism and self-sacrifice. Further, bystanders who misread a bullying situation or wrongly assess their power to prevent it can put themselves in the line of fire, becoming targets themselves.
It Starts with School Norms
Rather than asking students to fight against the tide, we need to find ways to shift the tide itself, to create more caring schools. Research shows that bullying is far less likely to take root in school cultures where caring and responsibility for others are the norm, where students see the entire school community as within their circle of concern and influence, and where large numbers of students model positive behavior for other students (Farrington & Ttofi, 2009; Kasen et al., 2011). Such school cultures also provide students with ways of feeling powerful and valued, so students are less likely to seek power by dominating, demeaning, or —alizing their peers.
Students like Janet are crucial in changing school norms. Students primarily take signals from other students about what's ethically in and out of bounds. They often know what needs to be changed and how to change it. They have inside knowledge—they know what cliques are forming, who's in danger of being excluded, when teasing has crossed the line, who's in a destructive romantic relationship, and when and where a fight between students might break out. Students are also best positioned to provide meaningful support to other students who are vulnerable or in anguish.
However, empowering students to change social norms does not get adults off the hook. In fact, it makes adults' roles more challenging. Rather than only punishing or providing information, adults need to engage in the complex choreography of leading and following. They need, for example, to know how to best capitalize on the key roles of students who are perceived as leaders while making sure that multiple voices in the student community are heard. They need to know how to convey high ethical expectations and ensure that students use their power maturely. Finally, school adults need to know when to assert or relinquish their authority.
More Than Just One Thing
Reducing bullying and cruelty is not about changing one social norm. It's about changing many kinds of relationships that exist in the complex context of a school. Schools consist of numerous microenvironments—for example, classrooms, lunchrooms, hallways, and athletic fields. They also comprise a variety of student interactions—with teachers, peers, hall monitors, lunch supervisors, after-school activity providers, and sports coaches (Bouffard & Jones, 2011). Each environment has its own norms for behavior and discipline, actual and perceived safety, students' sense of belonging, and levels of adult supervision (Jones & Molano, 2010).
Research increasingly shows that bullying and other forms of cruelty are more likely to take place in spaces in school buildings that are unsupervised or thinly supervised (Astor, Meyer, & Pitner, 2001; LaRusso, Brown, Jones, & Aber, 2009). That's why it's especially important to build the capacity of students to act responsibly in the absence of adults, generate constructive norms in these unsupervised spaces, and assist one another in maintaining these norms.
Yet few schools regularly involve students in key decisions affecting school life. Bullying is most prevalent in middle school, yet middle school students typically have fewer opportunities than high schoolers for proactively participating in classroom and school-level choices; working cooperatively and collaboratively in small academic groups; and engaging in positive, close relationships with teachers (Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000; Shultz, Barr, & Selman, 2001).
Promoting the Positive: It's Not That Easy
Making matters more challenging, positive peer behaviors, unhappily, appear to be far less contagious than negative behaviors. Research indicates that aggression and other negative behaviors can spread rapidly among peers (Cairns, Leung, Buchanan, & Cairns, 1995; Dishion & Piehler, 2009). Research also indicates that students in classrooms where aggression is higher than average show a several-fold increase in aggression over time.
Contrary to popular conceptions, peer networks can have many positive effects, encouraging improved school performance and more positive social behaviors (Wentzel, Barry, & Caldwell, 2004). Yet positive behaviors do not spread easily. That's one reason why one-shot events, such as antibullying rallies or isolated student efforts, commonly fail. They aren't deep, comprehensive, or sustained enough to reverse negative social norms, and they often don't address the stubborn forces that keep those social norms in place.
Three Promising Approaches
The good news is that three strategies—especially when enacted in combination—stand a real chance of transforming social norms.
Whole School Community Approaches
Some schools have sought to promote moral development and a moral community by directly engaging the entire school. One such approach, the just community, was launched almost 40 years ago by the moral development theorist Lawrence Kohlberg. This approach convenes groups of students and teachers for regular community meetings. Students tackle moral questions; decisions concerning discipline, ethical standards, and other aspects of the moral life of the community are made democratically by all.
Ethical violations, such as stealing and cheating, are taken up at these meetings. Further, teachers and administrators guide students in identifying the ethical dimension of issues like drugs, alcohol, or skipping class that may not appear as ethical matters on the surface but that corrode the community. Staff members push students to adhere to high ethical standards and community obligations. Students are called on, for example, to identify solutions when groups of students are —alized (Powers & Higgins-D'Alessandro, 2008).
These types of approaches can be substantially enhanced by data that inform the entire school community about the school's moral and behavioral strengths and weaknesses. Any school serious about creating a caring and just community will collect data periodically from students. How else can schools know about students who may be quietly imperiled or about risks in unsupervised areas in the school? How else can adults know whether their own hopes and biases are skewing their conceptions of students' experiences?
A variety of school climate surveys exist that elicit students' knowledge about who's being bullied, threatened, or left out and about levels of safety throughout the school.<FOOTNOTE><NO>1</NO>See the Bullying Prevention and School Climate Assessment created by the Bullying Prevention Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For more information, contact Trisha Ross at trisha_ross@gse.harvard.edu.</FOOTNOTE> These surveys can also assess students' confidence in both the trustworthiness of school staff and the staff's capacity to intervene effectively when students violate positive norms. They're especially important for uncovering the views of students who are unlikely to speak out at a community meeting, and they can help a school assess whether ethical violations in the school are getting better or worse.
In addition, students tend to overestimate the degree to which their peers engage in destructive behaviors (Henry, 2008). In trying to conform to their peers' perceived negative behavior, they may be more prone to engage in cruelty themselves. Surveys can correct these damaging misconceptions.
Approaches such as these have many benefits. Longitudinal research suggests that these communities can, over time, deepen students' moral identity—their commitment to values such as caring, honesty, responsibility for others, and justice (Lapsey, 2008). But promising as this approach is, preparing for weekly meetings demands a great deal of time from teachers, administrators, and students. Therefore, it's important to consider more modest approaches that are likely to gain traction in a far wider range of schools.
Student Leadership and Governance
Rather than having all students share in community decisions, student councils and other student leadership groups can play a larger role in framing and enforcing community norms. Students can serve on formal governance committees in middle and high school, where they are responsible for working with adults to develop school norms around respect and safety and for determining punishments for violations of those norms.
To ensure that these student leaders have leverage with other students, students themselves, not adults, should nominate them. But adults should make sure that these leaders roughly represent the broad diversity of the school community. Student councils should, for example, have a minimum number of seats for both genders and for each large racial or ethnic group in the school. These students might also play a lead role in mediating conflicts among students.
Fostering Activism
Students in schools around the United States have also organized social action groups to take on bullying and meanness, such as the group that created "the walls of shame." On Pink Shirt Day in Canada, students and adults take a stand against bullying by wearing pink, a mobilization sparked by two high school students who elected to wear pink to support bullied students in their school. Groups of students in West Virginia have developed a school "friend zone," a place where any isolated or threatened student is assured of friendly company (Collier, Swearer, Doces, & Jones, 2012). In 2009, in response to ongoing violence, dozens of Asian immigrant students in Philadelphia boycotted their high school and developed a civil rights campaign that pressed the district to take responsibility for creating a safe education climate. A group of Boston students created a video that powerfully conveys how cyberbullying becomes increasingly vicious.
Students might take up a variety of other activities, and adults in a school can play a key role in getting these types of actions off the ground. These activities might include interviewing fellow students and staff members—teachers, bus drivers, school secretaries, cafeteria staff, librarians and other school adults—about how to make the school a more safe and caring place. Students might consider adopting projects to improve school culture developed by students in other schools, both in and outside the United States. They could organize peers to sign a list of commitments that uphold norms of respect and care, such as, "If you see bullying, don't just ignore it. Talk to the victim and offer support. Don't encourage or reinforce the bully" (Collier et al., 2012). They could take up more systematic efforts to change the culture of younger students by engaging them in joint social action projects. And they should ask crucial questions and advocate for schools in which they feel safe, respected, and able to learn (see "," p. 29).
Such active student engagement is likely to draw a far greater number of participants if the school offers incentives. Schools might provide seed money to students who want to create a video or offer prizes to groups of students who take up projects that improve the school culture. School staff members and students should conduct periodic assessments to determine the efficacy of these interventions and change course, if necessary. If schools are committed to routinely mobilizing students, these initiatives, especially together, can reach a kind of tipping point.
We're not suggesting that schools can entirely eradicate cruelty. But it is possible to shift social norms so that students who bully—not just students who are bullied—are seen as vulnerable and troubled; so that students value other students for caring acts; and so that students take pride in their ability to make connections and friendships across the various divides.
What Adults Should Do
These student-led changes are only possible if adults play a different role. In the most effective school communities, adults are good listeners and facilitators who insist on fundamental values, such as honesty, caring, respect for differences, and justice. The work of school adults is not to create these values with students but to envision with students how these values can live and breathe in every aspect of a community and then join students in delivering on this vision.
School adults also need support and guidance in intervening effectively when students are cruel. Although many thoughtful school staff members do intervene effectively, we've seen videotapes created by researchers (Craig & Pepler, 1997) showing students getting teased, taunted, and even physically victimized on school playgrounds when adults were standing only a few feet away. We've also been in schools where adults tout respect for others yet fail to act when they hear students using harmful language like "That's so gay!" or see boys making lewd comments to girls.
This inaction has significant consequences. Students can reproduce the worst aspects of adult cultures; passive adults can inadvertently reinforce passivity in students. Adults have to be upstanders, too, and they have to take responsibility for the community as a whole.
A colleague of ours recently spoke with a teacher who explained that, by union agreement, teachers in her school had no responsibilities outside their individual classrooms. That policy can leave hallways, bathrooms, and outdoor spaces dangerously unsupervised, with adults inadvertently modeling indifference. Further, when students bully or in other ways transgress, school staff members often respond by tightening rules or stepping up punishments. They often don't think about how the school functions as a community or about how they might respond in ways that could strengthen that community.
The Bottom Line
We're advocating for a markedly different role for students and a fundamentally different adult–student relationship in schools. Too many efforts to reduce bullying have treated students as passive recipients of information. In too many schools, students are taught values didactically or through a system of punishments and rewards.
If we want to change student cultures, we need to prize in students what they prize most in themselves—their capacity to think—and give them something vital: the tools they need to be better people and to create a more just world.
10 Questions Students Should Ask
Students should ask these questions of their principal, assistant principal, guidance counselor, or other school staff members or share them with student representatives who meet with these leaders regularly. The adults may not know the answers to these questions, but by asking them, students show school adults what they care about. Students and adults might choose a few questions that are most important to their schools and meet regularly to explore them.
Does the school regularly survey students about whether they feel safe, respected, and cared about? Do they share the answers with students and parents?
Is there a confidential way for students to report when they feel unsafe or mistreated, and how do students know about this?
Is there an adult in school whose job it is to make sure everyone feels safe and respected and that people treat one another well? If so, who is this person?
Does the school use a program that teaches social and emotional skills, such as conflict resolution, showing understanding and empathy, and understanding one's emotions? If so, what evidence shows that the program works?
Are teachers and staff members trained in how to stop bullying or hurtful behavior? Are they trained in keeping it from happening in the first place?
How does the school work with students who act in aggressive or hurtful ways? Besides punishment, how do adults help those students stop acting that way?
Are any adults in charge of bathrooms, hallways, and other areas outside classrooms? If so, who are they?
How can students have a say about things that happen in the school, such as deciding on school values, community events, and nonacademic programming?
Does the school have a peer mediation or peer counseling program?
Does the school have a policy that clearly states that discrimination and harassment are not tolerated for any reason? Does it cover race, class, gender, and sexual orientation? How and where is this policy presented to students and staff?
<ATTRIB> Source: Bullying Prevention Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Available at www.thebullyproject.com. Adapted with permission. </ATTRIB>
