Working against bullying

Bullying was something that was brought up briefly in one of my other classes this week and it got me thinking about it in terms of ICT. How do we as teachers deal with problems in our classrooms that are being dealt with by our students?

Students often do not have the skills to deal with their confrontations in the best way and this often leads to bullying (in all mediums that are available to them).So through my personal contemplation, I came to a conclusion that really emphasized to me that we need to encourage our students to act responsibly. Bullying is a huge issue that has affected most people who have gone through the school system, yet it is a cycle that is still happening, even with anti-bullying classes.

So I think it’s time to take a different approach on top of our regular anti-bullying techniques. First off we need to work with our students to take accountability for their actions and think about how their actions affect others, and why not use the internet to do so?

My thoughts are to have a weekly poll on the class website where each student answers questions about how they feel about respect within the school that week .The results of the poll could only be seen by the teacher/ administration .We could ask students questions like:

Have you had a confrontation with a peer this week?

(If yes) Was it solved in a positive or negative way?

Do you feel that our class is working together in a positive way?

Is everyone in our class treating each other with respect?

Is everyone in our school treating each other with respect?

(These are just a few of question ideas that I came up with, please share if you have others or modifications that you would like to make to mine)

On top of asking the questions each week, I would also like an easily accessible way for students to notify their teacher about bullying or unrespectful situations that are going on, either experiencing personally or observed. This may just go to the teacher’s email, but it would provide the different forum that students may need in approaching the teacher with problems.

This I think would give us a really quick and easy way to assess situations going on in our schools and work with our students to stop bullying one another.

Do you think this would work? I am curious to hear what others have to think about this as a prevention method!