[MUSIC, Title: "A Deeper Look at Efforts to Eradicate Bullying and Other Harmful Behavior"] [Beth] What's the best way to stop bullying? We teachers would often like to march in brute force and reassure a bullied student that "No one deserves to be bullied, and we will do everything we can to make it stop!" We then tell the bully, "Your behavior is inappropriate and you need to stop." This makes us teachers feel good, in the moment, but it often simply makes the problem worse. This judgmental approach to conflict resolution comes from a legal perspective to handling problems. But judges' verdicts don't make the two sides like each other or get along better. It simply makes both sides more angry with each other, and the loser of the verdict often becomes angry with the judge as well. Sometimes, schools DO need to treat bullying as a crime, and that's when the acts are indeed crimes—like theft, assault, and vandalism. These are acts that cause OBJECTIVE harm, meaning the perpetrator caused the harm to the victim. Perpetrators of crimes need to be punished or properly rehabilitated. But most bullying is not criminal. It is insults, social exclusion, and non-injurious physical acts that hurt kids' feelings. They cause SUBJECTIVE harm, meaning it is up to the victim whether they get hurt. When we treat acts that cause subjective harm like crimes that require investigation, judgment, and punishment, it can simply worsen the situation. We get not only more subjective harm as each side becomes more upset towards the other, but it often leads to objective harm when the vindictiveness turns to physically injurious attacks. That is why the majority of bullying situations that lead to serious violence against the self or other, happens AFTER the school gets involved with a legalistic approach. As school psychologist Izzy Kalman, who we met in the last video, points out— subjective harm is a physiological phenomenon that is best served by a psychological solution. [Barb] You might ask, what about teaching bystanders to intervene? The challenge is, this approach has not been credibly shown to be effective. Students will often have good reasons for not intervening, and this approach also encourages a feeling of helplessness on the part of the bullied student— that they shouldn't feel empowered to handle the situation themselves. Bystanders can, however, be taught to de-escalate situations in a fashion that helps the victim without directly antagonizing the aggressor. Incidentally, what's a typical tactic Kalman teaches kids to use in response to challenges to a fight? Defusing the situation with humor. For example, "I'm warning you, if I hit you, one of us is going to go to the hospital, and it's not going to be you." The intent is to make the bully laugh, so the bully can be more easily changed in his perspectives towards liking the victim. Furthermore, the victim acknowledges to the bully that he can beat him up, so it doesn't have to be proven. Kalman also points to the story of a boy who had suffered from years from bullying, including severe exclusion by other students. One day, the boy decided to start holding the door open for kids in school. In a short time, he became popular and the bullying ended. In fact, Kalman's approach teaches bullied students how to handle bullying themselves in a calm, non-threatening way. He doesn't try to convince kids to stop being bullies. After all, as we've seen, that can be difficult or impossible to do. Instead, he focuses on teaching kids, including those that we think of as bullies, how not to be victims. These are skills everyone can use throughout life. There's no challenge in dealing with people when they're nice to us. That's easy. The challenge is in dealing with people when they're mean to us. We've all experienced that throughout life, and it's important to learn how to deal with it. Approaches such as these don't sound as dramatic or enticing as programs that tout themselves as "reducing bullying by 20 to 70 %". That's a strange and questionable statistic. How did they come up with that? Or that they are the "most widely studied program". Huh? Like being widely studied means that it's proven to be effective? But UNCOMMON sense teaching approaches can be more effective in the long run— both for students and the school. [MUSIC, Title: "Taking Care with Good Intentions"] [Barb] Joan McCord's brilliant work in performing long-term follow-up on social programs is important. What was perhaps most eye-opening for her— and for the researchers themselves— is that many social engineering programs have results that actually make the situation worse. Yet the creators and promoters of such interventions can be so deeply convinced that their approach is right that they refuse to analyze their programs' outcomes in any rigorous way. Or they spin the results to make them seem better than they really are. Or they point to results on measures that have statistically significant results, but in reality, may be irrelevant, such as "changing attitudes towards bullying", while ignoring important results that can be negative indicators about the program. [Terry] In our last video, we promised you that we'd take a look at what to do when faced with difficult students and situations. As an uncommon rather than a common-sense teacher, we hope that you will look at attempts to socially engineer your students' attitudes with a skeptical eye. If the end results seem too good to be true without you or your students expending much effort, then they probably ARE too good to be true. Note that we're not saying that it's better to do nothing in the face of social problems. We are saying to be careful in what you do, so that your good intentions don't make the situation worse. As we mentioned before, there will always be some percentage of students— sometimes the ones who need it most— who will internalize little or nothing of what is being taught. Social engineering programs can become an endless treadmill of trainers exhorting that still deeper training is needed. When in actuality, it can be their own underlying systemic approach and its unintended consequences that is a part of the problem. Perhaps most importantly, it's wise to remember that teacher, instructor, and workplace professional development programs are a multi-billion dollar industry. Like Big Pharma, professional development programs are often the ones funding, either directly or indirectly, the studies showing that their program is a success. And their narrow definition of success can cover a multitude of worse side effects— like the lady who swallowed a fly. Next week we're going to move on to an area where YOU as a teacher can have the biggest impact. [Beth] I'm Beth Rogowsky. [Barb] I'm Barb Oakley. [Terry] I'm Terry Sejnowski. [All] Learn it, link it, let's do it!
