Note: This is one in a series of blog posts to be used by Auburn’s Social Media Design Team to conduct a study group before making recommendations for social media policy. If unfamiliar with this series, you might find reading this post helpful.
Core Issues Study Questions (Bullying & Boredom)
- What are Auburn schools current doing related to bullying and school climate?
- What are Auburn schools current doing related to fostering student engagement in academics?
- What is considered best practice around bullying?
- What is considered best practice around engaging students?
Although intended as a tool for Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, everyone is invited to use these posts as a resource. And if you are not a member of Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, you are welcome to post comments, too. But please limit/be thoughtful of the sharing of opinion and stay focused on the focus questions – we a trying to use these posts for fact-finding, identifying resources, identifying best practice, etc. Thanks!
Multiple Pathways 
Check out this infographic about Bullying…
It seems to me that finding something interesting to do is a normal human reaction to being less than engaged at the task at hand. So maybe it isn’t a big surprise when students choose to do something like social media, instead of what they are supposed to be doing in class.
That doesn’t mean that I think it’s ok, just that its understandable.
And in all fairness to my fellow teachers, I don’t think it has been as important for teachers to find ways to engage students as it is now. And we didn’t necessarily have a bunch of engaging teachers, nor were we taught how to engage students. That means this is something that we have to train and support teachers in as they work to get better at it.
I’ve used the Meaningful Engaged Learning framework with other teachers I’ve worked with, and they seem to have found it helpful. http://www.mcmel.org/motivation/
The MEL framework suggests that educators focus on 5 areas: Inviting Schools, Learning by Doing, Higher Order Thinking, Real World Connections, and Student Voice and Choice.
Here is a page of Bullying resources from the Association for Middle Level Education:
http://www.amle.org/Publications/OnTarget/Bullying/tabid/2599/Default.aspx
Where else can we find quality resources on preventing bullying?
Check out the National Bullying Prevention Center
http://www.pacer.org/bullying/ that is referred to in the above link from Mike. Great, up to date resource of things being done to raise awareness and of ways to prevent it…
A quote from their website:
PACER Center and Paula Goldberg, one of PACER’s founders and its executive director, were honored by FBI Director Robert Mueller III in Washington, D.C., on March 16. Mueller presented Goldberg with the prestigious Director’s Community Leadership Award in recognition of PACER’s national bullying prevention efforts. The award is presented to individuals and organizations whose achievements in crime prevention and educational programs have made a positive difference in their communities.
There was an interesting piece on bullying education on NPR last week. You can listen to it here: http://www.npr.org/2012/03/30/149606925/in-bullying-programs-a-call-for-bystanders-to-act . I think the call to get kids involved in the effort against bullying is a key point:
“”Kids themselves need to create new social norms where bullying is not cool, and create an environment where the cool way of dealing with bullying … is for one kid to say to the kid who’s aggressive, ‘Hey, why are you hating on so-and-so all the time?'”
The piece also ends with the conclusion that high-profile one-off guest speakers, often not research-based, do not get the job done. Rather it is:
“the slow and tedious task of changing kids’ hearts and minds about what’s cool — and what’s not, and convincing them to speak out against aggressive behavior.”
I’ll extend that into the technical realm (overlapping topics a bit) and suggest that the same applies to the attempt to ban or block. We’ve already heard from teachers about instances of bullying-type posts moving to other venues besides facebook, including one case where it occurred on Quizlet, a site the teacher was using for instruction. That’s because simply blocking Facebook or any other site doesn’t address the core issue.
Anti-bullying education needs to be part of the bedrock of what we do day to day, with a zero tolerance approach from all adults. Students need to be part of the solution, feeling empowered to remind their peers when the need arises. There needs to be a digital citizenship curriculum spanning multiple levels so that there is consistency as students move through the system.
How do we bring the cyber bullying issue into the OLWEUS and Stepping Up bullying prevention initiatives being taught in the elementary schools? This is a key piece to tie in – it doesn’t just happen on the playground.
Engagement is currently a problem for some students. We need to find ways, (MCL, RISC, etc.) that heighten students’ ownership of their learning so that this will be less of a problem.
There is a panel discussion panel on cyberbullying slated for Wednesday, may 16th, at 7:00 Pm at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in Augusta, ME.
This blogpost: http://www.joebower.org/2012/04/should-web-be-allowed-in-class.html is focussed on the problem of distraction at the college level. However I think the points made apply equally well to the question in K-12.