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By John Hoffman
Illustration: Gavin Reece/New Division
Shona Anderson, OCT, was offended when she first heard the suggestion that teachers seldom intervene in bullying. “In 2005, I took part in an Ontario Principals’ Council workshop where the facilitator mentioned Canadian data that showed that teachers intervene in less than 20 per cent of bullying that takes place in schools,” says the vice-principal at Spruce Ridge Community School in Durham. “I thought, ‘This can’t be right.’ So I started looking into the data. I was going to prove it was wrong.”
But it wasn’t wrong. The data was solid, not just from that study, but others as well. Anderson’s debunking mission morphed into a paper on how to move teachers from the role of witness to the role of intervener. Eventually she wrote a book called: No More Bystanders = No More Bullies: Activating Action in Educational Professionals. Anderson now does workshops on how teachers can become effective interveners, something she came to see as a key addition to bullying prevention in schools.
Bystanders have been a topic in bullying discussions for at least 20 years. But the focus has been on students, not teachers. That’s because of two famous findings from some 1990s research led by Wendy Craig of Queen’s University and Debra Pepler of York University. Their team set up video cameras in classrooms and schoolyards and wired students up with microphones and transmitters to get real-time data on bullying. Two of their findings revolutionized thinking about school bullying. Peers were present during more than 80 per cent of bullying episodes and when they intervened, bullying stopped within 10 seconds 57 per cent of the time. Those findings captured considerable attention. Bystander intervention programs were developed to teach students how to be effective interveners. But another finding from that study was largely overlooked, a finding that Anderson could not believe at first: Adults seldom intervene in school bullying.
“Focusing on children, including their role as bystander, is important, but we’ve been doing that for years and bullying has not improved,” Anderson says. Her assertion is backed up by data that shows that the impact of anti-bullying programs, many of which address peer intervention, are rather modest. “If we want to become more effective at preventing bullying we need to focus more on adult bystanders,” she explains. Mindful of how she felt when first confronted by the data on teacher witnesses, Anderson frames the discussion very carefully. “I usually start by saying that I’ve learned to look at bullying through a different lens, and it is an uncomfortable lens at times.”
Part of that discussion centres on how teachers can see (and hear about) bullying more often. In her research conducted with the Bluewater District School Board, Anderson discovered the problem is not that teachers choose not to intervene, it’s that they can’t see bullying a lot of the time.
“When I asked teachers for the reasons they would not intervene in a bullying situation the most common answer, cited by 82 per cent, was that they were not aware of the situation,” says Anderson. “And when asked to what extent different types of bullying were a problem at their school, up to 30 per cent of teachers’ responses were ‘I don’t know.’” That dovetails with other research that illustrates the gap between the extent of bullying observed by children and teachers. A 2007 Canadian study involving students who self-identified as victims of bullying, showed that in more than half of the cases, teachers were unaware that the child in question was being bullied.
Blind spots
Bullying is hard to see for myriad reasons. For one thing, the behaviours are often subtle and indirect — rumours and gossip, smirks, muttered comments or silent exclusion.
Bullying tends to take place out of sight and earshot. Research repeatedly shows that face-to-face bullying (see sidebar “Cyberbullying”) often takes place in school “blind spots.” For example, a survey of Canadian high school students by Egale Canada, an organization that advocates on the behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, found that washrooms and change rooms, places that are often teacher-free zones, were the most common sites for bullying behaviour.
The Egale Canada study also reported that 21 per cent of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) students report being physically harassed or assaulted due to their sexual orientation, and that washrooms and change rooms are where LGBTQ students feel the least safe.
Data from Anderson’s school’s Safe Schools Survey also showed that stairwells were a key blind spot. This suggests that, along with everything else schools do to address bullying — awareness raising, building a respectful school climate, teaching kids about empathy — revamping supervision, to put teachers in positions where they see bullying more often, should be part of the picture.
Better supervision
Tracy Vaillancourt, professor of education and psychology at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Children’s Mental Health and Violence Prevention, says, “If I could change one thing it would be to have increased supervision at times when students are not in class. For example, more teachers monitoring playgrounds during breaks and more secondary teachers standing in the hallways during transition time.” Greg Anderson, a retired superintendent with the Grand Erie District School Board, agrees. “In my time as a superintendent, the schools that had better supervision tended to have less bullying,” he says.
There is an inherent challenge here. Teachers’ supervision time is subject to collective bargaining agreements, and requirements have decreased in recent years. Greg Anderson says improving the levels of voluntary supervision depends on the principal’s leadership skills and relationships with staff. “Bullying prevention starts with the principal,” he says. “The principal needs to be at the school, and principals and vice-principals should be out in the halls and on the playground when students are not in class. If principals are not taking a visible, active role, it’s going to be hard to persuade teachers to do extra supervision,” he says. “But small changes like having secondary teachers take turns standing out in the hall during class changeovers can reduce everyone’s workload by preventing problems, including some bullying.”
Shona Anderson says there are ways to improve supervision without increasing teachers’ official supervision time. For example, her school did an audit of routes teachers habitually take when moving around the school. “We asked teachers what hallways and stairwells they walk through on their way to the staff room and which entrances they were using,” she says. “Then we looked at all the routes and identified “staff-free” zones and compared them to the bullying hotspots identified in our Safe Schools data. Once staff became aware of this information some teachers changed their routes so that blind spots had adults walking through them during transition times.”
Denise Canning, OCT, principal of St. Maria Goretti Catholic School in Scarborough, increased the number of schoolyard supervisors during recess. They added three more lunchtime supervisors and adjusted the supervising schedules of teachers and EAs to increase the total number of adults in the yard to supervise the school’s 1,000-plus students. “Our goal was to help students feel safe and to facilitate the school’s focus on nurturing-position relationships between students, and between students and staff as well,” she says. “It wasn’t hard to get staff on board with this. We include yard safety and bullying prevention and intervention in most staff meetings, so staff is well aware of the importance of a safe and welcoming atmosphere in the schoolyard.”
One result of this change, Canning says, is an increase in children reporting inappropriate behaviour to adults. This is very significant because, even with enhanced supervision, some bullying will fly under teachers’ radar. Therefore, another key bullying prevention strategy would be to get more students to report the bullying they see (but staff don’t see) more often. And there’s work to be done because students do not report bullying nearly as often as teachers need them to.
Reluctance to report
Children shy away from reporting bullying for many reasons: what they think of the victim; not wanting to risk becoming a target themselves; or simply not feeling like it is their business. But two other reasons stand out for Vaillancourt. One is that most bullies wield considerable social power. “About ninety per cent of bullying is done by kids with high social status; popular leaders with good social skills,” she says. “And a lot of it takes place between friends.” If it’s hard to report bullying to begin with, it stands to reason that it would be even harder to inform on a friend or a peer with whom you want to ingratiate yourself.
Dealing with the problem
The second factor that drives children’s reluctance to report bullying is that they lack confidence in adults’ ability to deal with the problem, Vaillancourt says. “In our studies, students have told us repeatedly that they’re afraid that adults won’t handle it right. They worry, for example, that the adults are going to call in the bully for a conference with the victim, and that the bully will manipulate the adults, only making the situation worse.”
Some provisions of the Accepting Schools Act, 2012 may help to improve students’ confidence that the bullying they report will be dealt with, including a more precise definition of bullying (see sidebar “Defining Bullying”), the legislated requirement for teachers to report suspected bullying and the principal’s obligation to investigate. Specifically, the Act legislates: mandatory reporting by teachers and administrators of all aspects of bullying, including homophobic bullying; mandatory training of all staff in bullying prevention and intervention; mandatory allowance of Gay-Straight Alliances in all secondary public and Catholic schools; and mandatory surveys every two years to be conducted in each school board by students and teachers to catch any discrepancies.
“There is no grey area,” Vaillancourt says. “If a child reports bullying, or a teacher suspects bullying, the teacher has to report it and the principal has to investigate. It’s much like the requirement report suspected child abuse. The logical consequence of having to report and follow up on bullying in a more systematic way is that administrators will get better at handling it.”
Improving relationships
Improving school climate and staff-student relationships and trust are also key to creating an atmosphere where peer bystanders feel safer about reporting bullying to adults. “We have done staff training to help staff improve their ability to spot and keep an eye on children who might need extra support,” says Canning. “When you have good relationships, the staff understand students and their needs better, and children are more likely to come for help with problems, including bullying.”
Amine Aïdouni, OCT, principal of École élémentaire et secondaire publique Maurice Lapointe in Kanata, believes that the work he and his colleagues have done to improve student/staff relationships helped him detect and deal with a recent case of bullying that might otherwise have gone undetected. “The instigator was a charismatic, popular individual, highly involved in school activities, someone that peers looked up to,” he explains. “And the bullying behaviour was subtle, the kind of thing that teachers hadn’t noticed. Some friends of the student who was the target of the bullying told a teacher, the teacher told me, and I was able to deal with the situation. The atmosphere at our school enabled that to happen.”
Effective intervention
Once the investigation of a reported bullying incident has established that bullying has indeed taken place, one of the keys to successful intervention is working with the parents of both the bully and the victim. Given the media coverage of catastrophic impacts experienced by some victims of bullying, it is very difficult for some parents to accept that their child is a perpetrator. Aïdouni says he broaches the subject very carefully. “I try to relate to the parent as a human being,” he says. “I let them know that I’m not saying that they are bad parents or that their child is a bad person, but we have a serious problem to solve and I need their support to get to the root of it.”
Aïdouni says the Act’s clear definition of bullying helps him explain the difference between bullying and conflict to parents of victims (and also to staff and other students). “Sometimes parents believe their child is the victim of bullying, but really it’s a case of conflict. I can show the results of our investigation and then compare that to the definition to help parents and students understand [the difference].”
Another interesting approach to intervening in bullying, currently used in Shona Anderson’s school, is to have teachers model effective intervention in bullying. In the past, teachers who observed bullying would pull the instigator aside for a private talk. “Now we do it publicly, so that other students hear what we are saying and can learn from it.” Anderson acknowledges that staff found this hard to do at first. “We had to train teachers in how to have these public conversations,” she says. “It’s not a natural thing for most people, so we gave people a script to start off with.”
Anderson says it is too early to know to what extent Spruce Ridge’s new approaches to bullying prevention are reducing bullying at the school. “We don’t have data on bullying yet,” says Anderson. “But we know that our suspension rates and absenteeism are lower, and at our Safe School Committee meeting last fall, everybody was talking about what a better feeling there was in our building.”
That’s a good place to start.
Cyberbullying has emerged as a significant challenge for schools (particularly secondary schools) in recent years. “I’d say we’re now seeing more cyberbullying than face-to-face bullying,” says Dina Salinitri, OCT, principal of Kingsville District High School. Media coverage of cyberbullying — bullying that involves social media, texting or other electronic communication — tends to focus on extreme cases with tragic results. In extreme cases, some victims, such as B.C. teen Amanda Todd and Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons, have even taken their own lives. However, these cases are rare. Salinitri says most cases she deals with have been more troubling than tragic. “The incidents we see often consist of indirect statements or threats,” she says. “Usually it begins with social conflicts — jealousy, competition over boyfriends or girlfriends, conflict between two individuals.” Sometimes friends become involved so it becomes a group ganging up on one person.
For the most part, Salinitri deals with cyberbullying in the same way as face-to-face bullying. However, there are two important differences. One is that while investigating face-to-face bullying relies on eyewitness reports, cyberbullying usually generates hard evidence — a screenshot or printout of a text or Facebook post. In most cases it’s easy to identify the perpetrator. However, many of the apparent cyberbullying cases she investigates turn out to be more about conflict than the use of power to oppress a weaker victim. “Sometimes a student shows us texts sent by the student they are accusing of bullying. Then the bully shows us texts sent by the victim and it starts to look like conflict. Either way, it carries a risk of significant harm, so we need to deal with it.”
The other difference between cyberbullying and face-to-face bullying is that engaging the support of parents becomes even more crucial with cyberbullying. Salinitri says, “We rely on parents to monitor or restrict technology use when students are involved in cyberbullying or conflict.”
The Accepting Schools Act defines bullying as aggressive and typically repeated behaviour, which involves a power imbalance and is intended to cause fear, distress or harm to an individual or his or her reputation or property, and which creates a negative environment at school for the victim.
Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor of education and psychology at the University of Ottawa, who is now on the expert panel for the Act, says it was important to get that definition enshrined in legislation.
“Teachers observe and interpret a huge continuum of behaviour, from minor incivilities to conflict between peers to clear physical bullying,” she says. Moreover, the students involved often present conflicting views as to what happened. The legal definition was designed to help education professionals assess behaviours that are sometimes difficult to interpret, not only by teachers, but also by students and parents.