In
this helpful article in Principal
Magazine, Jim Dillon (Measurement Incorporated) says that trying to tighten
control of student behavior is not an effective way to stop bullying. “The
people who have the most influence in determining the amount and degree of
bullying in a school are not the adults, but the students,” he says. The trick
is to shift from a controlling to an influencing mindset – changing students’
reactions to bullying through modeling, listening, and winning trust.
From
the student’s point of view, bullying has a clear social purpose – impressing an
audience of bystanders and raising one’s social status. “Stopping bullying
requires changing the audience response to it,” says Dillon. “Educators… need
to focus less on the rule-breakers, and more on the majority of students who
don’t break the rules: the bystanders or the audience for acts of bullying.”
A key step is for adults to
avoid the fundamental attribution error
– the tendency to attribute students’ behavior to the way they are rather than the situation they’re
in. Bystanders who don’t intervene aren’t heartless and apathetic; they are
subject to a common set of social pressures and haven’t learned how to deal
with them. “Just telling bystanders to ‘stand up’ to bullying makes little
sense,” says Dillon, “no more sense than just telling a student to be a good
reader or become a safe driver without first providing instruction, guidance,
coaching, and support.” Based on his research, he offers this summary of the nots – rationalizations that bystanders use
for holding back:
