How Should School Staff Respond to Bullying Behavior?

This is both a frequent and an important question. It can be answered directly through a list of actions: staff members should

• stop the behavior if individual intervention is safe- or otherwise call for help ,
• protect the target,
• remind bystanders to take action next time,
• and apply consequences when appropriate.

The question, though, also raises more significant issues:

• How do we recognize bullying actions?
• How do we reach consistency between staff members?
• How do we choose and administer effective consequences?
• How do we help youth who bully find other ways to act?

I am writing to summarize what I have learned about this subject in the past eight years of implementing bullying prevention programs at my own school and with staff at other schools. I will focus in this essay on the key question: How can we structure our in-the moment interventions so learning and change are most likely?

Students may interpret adults’ reactions to their negative behavior in many ways:

• They may react angrily, believing that they are being punished because we don’t like them. Some young people may even believe that they have not done the behavior we witnessed.
• They may see our interventions as fair and as an expression of our caring about them.

These different interpretations of adult disciplinary interventions will lead to quite different responses by students. Students who see discipline as unjust or based on adults’ feelings toward them are likely to become more angry and rebellious. Students who see discipline as fair and based on caring connections are more likely to consider changing their own behavior. In addition, students may resolve to stop a negative behavior, or they may choose other ways to meet the needs or solve the problem that that behavior was directed toward. They may have wanted to be left alone; they may have wanted to impress their friends; they may have wanted to have fun; or they may have been angry about something unrelated to the situation. In any case, when they find a more positive way to solve that problem or meet that need, students are more likely to make ongoing change.

Stopping a behavior just to stay out of trouble is likely to be temporary. Our actions have the potential to influence students’ thinking. If disciplinary interventions for peerto- peer aggression vary widely depending on which adult is present and on which student shows the behavior, students learn that what you do counts less than who sees it or what your reputation is. If disciplinary interventions are based on adult expressions of anger or frustration, students are more likely to believe that they got in trouble because of the feelings of an adult rather than because of their own behavior. On the other hand, if school staff have made consistent efforts to build positive relationships with every student through greeting, initiating positive interactions, frequent use of honest, action-based praise, and other mentoring initiatives that attempt to build staff-student connections for each student, students are more likely to understand that disciplinary interventions are based on our caring for them. We also help students to learn this lesson when we maintain positive emotional tone during the discipline intervention. When discipline interventions are consistent no matter which staff member is involved, and when they are consistent no matter which student displays a certain behavior, students are more likely to view them as fair, and thus to learn from them. When we focus our later discussions with students who have broken rules on helping them discover what was wrong with their behavior, what goals their actions were directed toward, and how else they could have reached that goal, students are more likely to find other paths to get their needs met without hurting others.

Olweus, Limber, and Mihalic summarize this approach to intervention well when they state: “The [bullying prevention] program strives to develop a school (and ideally a home) environment characterized by:

• warmth, positive interest, and involvement by adults;
• firm limits to unacceptable behavior;
• non-hostile, nonphysical negative consequences consistently applied in cases of ...unacceptable behaviors; and
• where adults act as authorities and positive role models.” (Olweus,Limber, Mihalic 1999)

When I discussed this focus with Dr. Olweus, he told me he had been influenced by the work of Diane Baumrind, the American psychologist who identified two dimensions of effective parenting: consistent discipline and supervision, and warmth and connectedness. Baumrind’s research identified four parenting styles, as shown in the chart below:

[Figure 1]

Diana Baumrind's Research: Parenting Style

L                    Warmth and Connectedness                 H

In long-term follow-up research with children who had been raised in these four types of families, Baumrind (and others who have replicated her work), found these predictable outcomes:

[Figure 2]

Diana Baumrind's Research: Outcomes

L                        Warmth and Connectedness              H

Olweus’s research, in which working to boost warmth, connectedness, and disciplinary consistency schools has led to marked declines in rates of bullying, makes clear the importance of these two principles: connectedness and consistency. Based on my experience implementing bullying prevention over the past ten years, I am convinced that these two principles hold the key to our work. Our goal, then, should be to implement disciplinary approaches that build student perceptions that staff are using discipline to help them learn and grow, and that students see our disciplinary interventions as fair. Both these goals connect with the original meaning of the word “discipline” which derives from the same linguistic roots as the word “disciple.” Effective discipline teaches. As the principal of the school where work, Nancy Reynolds, often states: “Our rules and consequences here are all about learning. We care less about what you have done than about what you will do in the future.”