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Advertisement ADHD Parenting Friendships & Activities Friends at School Bullying Is the Norm. So Is an Inadequate Response. Bullying plagues a majority of neurodivergent students at school, on social media, and/or on the bus. When asked about the school’s response to incidents of bullying, 72% of ADDitude readers surveyed said they were dissatisfied and only 12% said the bullies faced any punishment. By ADDitude Editors Verified Updated on October 28, 2022 Email Save Save

Bullying Prevention Strategies

For Educators and School Staff

Many parents are afraid that “labeling” a child as having a learning disability will make him feel broken, left out, or less willing to try. In fact, the opposite is true: giving your child an understanding of the nature of his learning disabilities will comfort him — and motivate him to push through his challenges.

The knowledge that he has an identifiable, common, measurable, and treatable condition often comes as great comfort to the youngster. Without this information, the child is likely to believe the taunts of his classmates and feel that he indeed is a dummy.

If a child does not have a basic understanding of the nature of his learning challenges, it is unlikely that he will be able to sustain his motivation in the classroom.

In school, getting people to share can be difficult. Learners may be diffident, or they may not have good strategies for sharing. Children often do not know how to offer constructive criticism or build on an idea. It can be helpful to give templates for sharing, such as two likes and a wish, where the “wish” is a constructive criticism or a building idea.

listening and sharing as cooperative techniques can alleviate frustration and, more importantly, allow group learning to surpass what would be possible by a single student (Slavin, 1995).

when students collaborate on class assignments, they learn the material better (we provide examples below). Ideally, small group work can yield both better abilities to cooperate and better learning of the content.

“While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing, when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade.”

Behaviors like these undermine leaders’ effectiveness by depressing the performance of those around them, and are ultimately self-defeating.

power puts us in something like a manic state, making us feel expansive, energized, omnipotent, hungry for rewards, and immune to risk – which opens us up to rash, rude, and unethical actions.” But it turns out that simply being aware of those feelings – “Hey, I’m feeling as if I should rule the world right now” – and monitoring impulses to behave inappropriately helps keep those behaviors in check.

Every superintendent, or state commissioner, must be able to say, with confidence, ‘Everyone who teaches here is good. Here’s how we know. We have a system.

school-based administrators “don’t always have the skill to differentiate great teaching from that which is merely good, or perhaps even mediocre.” Another problem is the lack of consensus on how we should define “good teaching.”

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

In psychology, there are currently two common approaches to empathy: shared emotional response and perspective taking.

Shared emotional response, or affective empathy, occurs when an individual shares another person’s emotions.

When I was in high school I hated biology. Funny that I became the Principal of a science high school. But I hated biology for one simple reason: I am a horrendous artist. Every lab report that I did looked like I had dissected an amoeba.

But my best friend, who sat next to me, was an amazing artist. And I’m a pretty good writer. You know, I look back and I think, you know, if you had you only let us collaborate, we could have done some really amazing work, even without some of the tools that we have at our disposal today, we could have done great stuff.

we are beginning to realize that power of collaboration. People really do talk about the idea of collaboration being the 21st century ‘silver bullet.’ I think people have been collaborating for a really long time. I think we’re only now getting good at it in schools—at least in some schools.

a Professional Learning Community is "a group of educators that meets regularly, shares expertise, and works collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students."

A PLC is made up of "a school's professional staff members who continuously seek to find answers through inquiry and act on their learning to improve student learning.

Teachers who work in more supportive environments become more effective at raising student achievement on standardized tests over time than do teachers who work in less supportive environments.

1. Value Parent Voice During the Conference: Start conferences by having parents share their impressions of how school is going for their child. Ask them to share what is working well for their child, what they see their child struggling with, and whether they have any specific questions they’d like answered during the conference. To save time, you can have parents answer these questions in writing before the conference. Showing parents that you value their expertise sets the stage for true collaboration. Hearing parents talk about their observations and concerns allows you an opportunity to assess the most productive direction for the conference. Beyond: Draw upon parents’ expertise throughout the year. If you’re struggling with a student, talk to his parents and don’t be afraid to ask for advice by asking questions such as, “Does this ever happen at home? What helps the situation?” True collaboration means learning from each other; building relationships with parents can help students receive better support at home and school. 2. Set Goals During the Conference: After having parents share their impressions of how school is going for their student, I shared my observations, student work, and assessment data. After looking at the information gathered from both home and school, I found success using this sheet to assess students’ progress and set goals. Sometimes I didn’t have enough time to fill in the sheet as I talked with families, so I jotted down quick notes during the conference and added more details later. Sharing the written record of the conference with parents helped to summarize our discussion and held us accountable for following through with action steps. Beyond: Revisit the action steps that were mutually agreed upon at the conference. Before winter break, consider sending home a copy of the action steps and having students work with their families to self-assess their progress towards their goals.

ProfHacker has written quite a bit about the app and their post “GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom” is chock-full of links to various tips and useful ideas. Getting Smart’s “6 Powerful Google Docs Features to Support the Collaborative Writing Process” provides an excellent step-by-step guide to using Google Docs especially for collaborative writing. And for a basic overview of Google Docs’ features and potential uses, you can browse through this slideshow:

I have asked my Basic English Skills students to keep a daily journal (which can be on anything they wish to write about and functions to help them build their writing muscles) in Google Docs, which they’ve only shared with me. Besides alleviating any anxiety students might have felt about making their journals public, Google Docs allows me to easily monitor new entries (whenever a Doc is edited, the title turns bold) and to verify when students are completing their entries (by using the revision history feature).

I decided to have the students write in teams of three, with one team member serving as lead editor each week. The lead editor is in charge of each week’s blog post, which includes coming up with a focus question and locating 2-3 sources to help them answer their question, which they share with their team before the week’s first class meeting (I have had the teams indicate each week’s lead editor in a spreadsheet in Google Docs so that I am aware of which students are in charge each week). But it gets really interesting when the teams come together in the week’s first class meeting. The lead editor creates a Google Doc, which they share with their team and me, and type in their focus question and a brief summary of how they plan to answer it. What follows is a 30-40 minute session in which the team discusses the question, the lead editor’s sources, and their plan for answering the question completely in writing in the Google Doc, observing a strict rule of silence (I adapted this activity from Lawrence Weinstein’s “Silent Dialogue” activity in Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely).

the most important factor in determining whether a school is a setting in which children grow and learn is whether the school is a setting in which adults grow and learn.

school buildings were designed to enable the supervision and orderly movement of students. The egg-carton model of school architecture and organization prevails even today. Individual classrooms are adjacent to one another with parallel doors facing a hall (not unlike prison cellblocks).

The major hurdle is the history and ethos of the teaching profession. "Teaching is a very autonomous experience," says Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, author of The Good High School. "But the flip side of autonomy is that teachers experience loneliness and isolation." In too many schools, teachers close their classroom door and spend the majority of their working hours with children, only talking hurriedly with other adults over a break, during lunch, or while standing at the copying machine. This is not terribly surprising since many educators chose to enter the profession to work with students, not with other adults

Existing inequities play out when adults engage with kids around tinkering or making. And, while makerspaces are a unique kind of learning space, many of the techniques thoughtful educators are using to improve their interactions with students could be used in other venues.

Sewing has been one of the most successful projects in the program Escudé helps run at the Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley neighborhood. Kids shared their family histories of sewing and even invited grandparents to participate and share. The activity was framed as intellectual thought and valued as equal to any other tinkering task. The success of this activity came from giving students the space to share themselves and build relationships with one another and the facilitators, not because they were using the most recent technology or because they were building robots.

it’s a cultural assumption that kids would think taking apart toys would be fun.

In 2009, TNTP reported that teacher evaluation systems didn’t accurately distinguish among teachers with varying levels of proficiency, failed to identify most of the teachers with serious performance problems, and were unhelpful in guiding professional development.

The Widget Effect study concluded that “school districts must begin to distinguish great from good, good from fair, and fair from poor.”

On average, only 2.7 percent of teachers were rated below Proficient/Exemplary on a 4- or 5-point scale.

Polls, chat tools, and interactive quizzes provide good ways to hear from all of the students in a classroom. These kind of tools allow shy students to ask questions and share comments. For your more outspoken students who want to comment on everything, a feedback mechanism provides a good outlet for them too. Here's a run-down of some of the best tools for gathering feedback from students in real-time.

Fifty-one percent of 16 year olds share their age/birth date with others Seventeen percent of teens keep their social network sites public and 19 percent only have some privacy settings enabled Twenty-nine percent of kids between five and 11 years old believe they are anonymous online Only a little over 50 percent of children age nine to 12 know how to block unwanted messages Nine percent of nine year olds share their email passwords and 24 percent of 18 year olds do the same Seventeen percent of male and 23 percent of female users would share inappropriate pictures online