I want to start just by showing you some results of a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is really a summary of a body of literature that tells us what works under what conditions. What you see here is the grades plotted below, first through 12th grade. What we're plotting here is the effect size in the reduction of bullying perpetration. The line will give you the average effect size. So, what you noticed is that we do pretty well in first grades. The effect size is point two which is wonderful, excited by that, and you see that it drops dramatically so much so that once you're in month seventh and eighth grade, it's pretty low, it's not sustainable, so we're not reducing bullying perpetration. What you then noticed in high school that it's actually getting worse. So, there's increases in bullying perpetration. I show this because we have to recognize that I understand the state legislators and there's requirements in many countries to have Programming Bullying Prevention K through 12. What we've done is we've taken a program that was developed for the little kids K through five, elementary school kids and we dumped it in the middle school, and because we're so desperate for high school programming that we've done the same thing in high school. So, the message is that we need to start requiring K through 12 programming until we know it works and recognize that what we're doing right now is actually making things worse. The messaging to elementary school kids has to be different than middle school kids where the kids that engage in high rates of bullying are often popular and over represented in athletic groups, and in high school, high school kids do not want to be talked to like elementary school kids. The high school level, we believe that it has to be youth involvement. So, if you're working at the high school level, work with your kids. They have good ideas about school safety. We're also looking at restorative justice and circles so that when there is a conflict that you've restored versus just being punitive. So, we have to think about the messaging. Most high school students don't want to be talked to like an elementary school. We know that we have reduced bullying perpetration and victimization only by 20 percent. So, what is happening? What do we need to think? So, there's a movement to re-evaluate what we're doing. A lot of the programs would just say, "Stop bullying, don't do that, be a bystander." The reality is that we have a lot of social science, a lot of do not know psychology literature that points to what we call the risk and protective factors model around bullying, which bullying is associated with other forms of violence in middle school and high school. They share some overlapping risk and protective factors. So, what we've tried to do is one, breakdown the academic silos where some will say, "I study bullying, I study sexual violence, I study this." In fact, those are different forms of violence whether it's bullying or pure aggression, sexual harassment actually share the same risk and protective factors. Can we create prevention programs or evaluate prevention programs that may target multiple outcomes through the risk and protective factors model that has been so well articulated by Hawkins and Cataliano and others? So, a lot of folks have focused on social-emotional learning as an avenue to prevent bullying. So, social-emotional learning is this umbrella term that sometimes it's turned around, but I'll try to define it for you. So, social-emotional learning came about this terminology, this framework umbrella term in 1994 when a lot of scholars that were either in the area of restorative practices, character education, positive behavior supports, school climate came together and wanted to understand how to create safer spaces for kids and how to create kids that have social-emotional learning skills. So, within social-emotional learning, this includes things like empathy, perspective taking, conflict management, getting kids to regulate their emotions, getting them to understand their own ways of interacting, learning how to communicate. So, when you think about what are the skills you need to communicate, well, one, you need to listen attentively, to understand what the person is saying, but at the same time you have to have coping strategies and problem solving for when you encounter conflicts so all of those things. So, social-emotional learning is all of the skills that we all make us all successful in the work that we do whether that's managing our emotions, whether that's communicating with others, the problem solving when you have conflicts and coping strategies. At the same time, though, we bring in the character piece in social-emotional learning. So, what we do know is that when kids take ownership of their classroom or their schools, and they talk about creating a safe space where they together problem solve, that's a component of social-emotional learning as well. So, sometimes it's easy for you to think like, if I asked you right now, pull out a piece of paper and write down the three characteristics or the three skills that you have, that you use on a daily basis to make you successful in your job. You guys are going to do this, and some of your math teachers, and you're not going to put down quantitative skills. You're going to say things like, patience, the ability to manage and organize. All of those things that make you successful in a day is really makes you a skilled social-emotional learning agent, if you will. So, in the programs, largely reviewed, if you want to know about the various social-emotional learning programs, Roger Weisberg has this consortium of academic social-emotional learning, www dot casel dot org. In this website they've reviewed all of the social-emotional learning programs at the elementary school level and the middle school level. Because you have to pick a program that fits the time that you have for this, some of you will have 50 minutes a week, some of you may only have once a month that you can do this type of work. So, you can figure out like, where does SEL fit into my culture and context? What is your population you're working with? For the most part, if it's reviewed and seen as positive by CASEL, it's a program that's evidence based, it's a program when implemented, fidelity would work. So, social-emotional learning really is really giving kids skills to succeed both academically and socially. So, at the same time that we were rethinking what are we doing and thinking about the risk and protective factors, at the same time, another meta-analysis came from this guy by Durlak and colleagues at American Institute's of Research and showed very clearly that if you're kid in a school with social-emotional learning programming where you're being taught empathy, perspective taking, communication, listening skills, all of those types of things that make us really effective human beings, if you will, academically and socially, then you have less disruptive behavior, and you have higher test scores than kids who are in schools where there's no social-emotional learning program. So, here we have some of the first evidence through a meta-analysis that showed that if you're in a school that has some type of vescio programming, so it could be a full out curriculum or it could be a drama group, it could be an art club. But somewhere where you're learning about the perspectives of others, learning to regulate your emotions, and what happens is that we have an improvement in social skills, but we also have a higher test scores. Who doesn't want higher test scores? So, we then said, well, okay, will SEL work to reduce bullying and other forms of violence that we see in middle school? So, I'm going to walk you through a randomized clinical trial that we conducted. It was funded by the Centers for Disease Control in 36 middle schools where we took a social-emotional learning program that's based on the risk and protective factors model to see if we can reduce bullying and other forms of violence. So, this program developed by Committee for Children, it's called Second Step. Certainly, when my lab had to decide on a program, we wanted to make sure that, one, it was based on risk and protective factors model, that it could be scripted, such that teachers that don't necessarily have the strongest facilitation skills, especially around sensitive topics, so you can have good facilitation skills to teach Math but when you start talking about sexual harassment or bullying, it gets a little bit more complicated. So we wanted that to be scripted for the teachers that really needed that guidance. At the same time, we needed something that teachers could prep in three minutes. So, Second Step won out in that criteria. Let's see. So it's based on the risk and protective factors model. We evaluated the middle school program. So it's going to be sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. There is some bullying in it but it's not just about bullying. In fact, three out of the 15 lessons at the sixth grade is about bullying. We're really trying to foster those risk and protective factors, reduce the risk factors and promote a more protective factors through the social, emotional learning training. It's also based on brain research. So, when the kids would learn about anger, they would understand what would happen in their brain when they get angry. So, we have a neuroscience slant to it. It's a positive approach to the problem behaviors. So, as you recall, there was a meta-analysis rumbling prevention, and it showed that if you got kids to work together cooperatively, you had less kind of bullying over time, and certainly that's what we want to play here so that the kids can have ownership. Then also, it's developmentally tailored for middle school students, which we all know are very different than elementary school students. So for the practicalities here, we had Grade 6 with 15 lessons. Grades 7th and 8th, we had 13 lessons, and it's 50 minutes each but can be divided into two 25-minute sessions. So you should know that just because many of you may have the advisory period and that is a great place that you can do this work if you're looking for something. So this was a rigorously evaluated program. It's a nested cohort design. So, we started with over three, almost 4,000 sixth graders in two states in the United States, and we followed them over time, and we randomly assigned either to the Second Step schools or the control schools. We wanted to see whether or not we impacted bullying perpetration, peer victimization, physical fighting, sexual harassment, and homophobic name-calling victimization, and perpetration. Just here's your kind of design. Again, what we did is we went out, and we recruited 36 schools from two states in the United States. We did some baseline assessment, randomly assign them to interventions or controls. Then, here you see the O's are the observations. We have baseline O1, and then they had the first, if you're in Second Step school that had the 15 lessons, and then we surveyed them right after that sixth grade curriculum. They went off for the summer, they came back, and then we surveyed them two more times across this three-year study. I'm going to summarize this three-year study within just a couple of slides so you can know. Remembering that we had those seven outcomes. What we found right out of the gate after 15 weeks of talking to kids about empathy, and perspective taking, and other things, if in fact, you were a kid in a Second Step school compared to the control schools, you're 42 percent less likely to engage in physical fighting on school property. Now, some people might say, "Well, is that substantial?" It is. If you think about healthy people 2020 in the United States, we have a goal by 2020 to reduce physical fighting on school property by three percent. Not real lofty goal, right? So here with a sample of 4,000 kids and 36 middle schools, we found a reduction simply by giving the kids those skills of empathy, emotion regulation, and talking to them about bullying, they are less likely to throw punches. What happened after Year 2? Year 2, we had what we call a state effect. So if you were in the state of Illinois, you had reductions in sexual violence perpetration and homophobic naming victimization to the tune of 40 to 50 percent. If you're in the state of Kansas, we did not see that effect. However, when we did a meta-analysis, when we analyzed actually implementation data, so you should know that when teachers did a lesson, they then filled out a three-minute survey to tell us how they engage with the lesson, how they prepared for the lesson, whether the kids were engaged. That's what we call implementation fidelity. Do they do what they were supposed to and how did they perceive actually the lesson? When we meta-analyze that, we actually found a reduction in all forms of aggression, perpetration, and victimization. So the message here is, when implemented with fidelity, the programs work, and they reduce all forms of aggression in middle school. This is important because if you're a social worker or a practitioner that's going to use some of these programs which are going to just pick some of the lessons, don't do that. It will not work. You will not get these reductions. You have to implement as intended. These developers have worked years to develop this. It's grounded in developmental research. The lessons are sequenced in such a way that they build off of one another. You can't pick and choose. If you do not have the support from your administrators to do this type of program which is 15 weeks, then find another program that fits for the time that you're given. We do not want to set you up for failure and that's what will happen. Now, when we want to talk about the last year, we had also reduced all forms of aggression in Year 3. We sustain that and we did it through decrease in delinquency. So, that's really promising that we're not only addressing victimization and perpetration of aggression, but we're actually reducing delinquency through social-emotional learning. Very, very powerful stuff. Then, finally, not many of you will know this but there is not a single randomized clinical trial of a social-emotional learning program with students with disabilities. So we were able to get some disability data, and what you see here is that if you're a kid with a disability in a Second Step school, your bullying perpetration flatlines, right? If you're a kid in a control school, your bullying perpetration goes up. This is what we call a prevention effect because we know that bullying goes up during middle school. What we want to do is kind of hold it constant. It appears that if you're a student with disability in a Second Step school, it did flatline, which is very, very nice. What I'm not showing here is we also if you are a student with disability in a Second Step school, your grades went up 0.75, so almost entire letter grade from report cards. Pretty substantial and significant in a field where not a lot is happening with students with disabilities around social-emotional learning. So when we think about prevention programs, we know that we're reducing victimization, especially among elementary school and middle school students. We also know that some of these effects diminish as they go to high school, but by standard intervention program seems to be particularly robust at the high school level. We also know that staff matters. So we have to think about the adult climate that might be contributing to what we're seeing among the kids. The reality is, is that we have to continue to chase after and do rigorous and relevant research, such that the practice is on the ground that you are implementing are evidence-based and will lead to the reductions of victimization over time.
