The Unteachables Podcast

#134: Bullying in the classroom?! 😖 How to talk to your students about it in a way that gets them listening, empathising, and creating change!

• Claire English • Season 6 • Episode 134

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Ever had a student yell "I'M BEING BULLIED!" when their friend won’t let them borrow a pencil? Meanwhile, real, insidious bullying is flying under the radar?

HEAD TO THE BLOG HERE FOR ACTIVITIES + MORE 😁

In this episode, I’m giving you a front seat to the three-part framework I use to help students identify what actually counts as bullying, how to respond safely, and how to foster real empathy in your classroom. These are simple but powerful tools that work beautifully during Bullying. No Way! Week—but honestly, they’re useful any day of the school year.

We’re talking real strategies, not posters and platitudes.

You’ll also hear the story of the time I got my hair done by the girl who used to bully me in high school (yes, really), and what it taught me about what we really need to be doing to address bullying.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How to define bullying using the 3 P’s: Power imbalance, Purpose to harm, and Pattern over time
  • The difference between conflict, meanness, and bullying (and why kids mix them up constantly)
  • The "High Five" strategy to help students respond safely when bullying happens
  • A powerful visual metaphor that makes the emotional impact of bullying stick
  • Three discussion starters that build empathy and help students step into others' shoes

Resources Mentioned:

Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

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Speaker 1:

Oh, hi there, teachers. Welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm your host, claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama and a big old behavior nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behavior and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to, because we're not dancers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game, changing strategies and I mean the things that we can actually do and action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and, dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Welcome back, lovely teachers, to the Unpitchables podcast. Thank you for joining me here again. I know that somewhere in the world right now there are some of you on summer holidays, which is fantastic, but in Australia we are definitely still in the thick of the school year and next month we actually have bullying no way week, which is something that is very close to my heart. So I wanted to do an episode giving you a few ideas on how to talk to students about bullying and how you can highlight bullying. No way week and if you're not in Australia, that is also fine. You can use these ideas and resources just in general to highlight, you know, an anti-bullying focus, because it is so important.

Speaker 1:

The prevalence of bullying is so high. It is incredibly damaging. It is something that is really hard for us to address as teachers. I feel like it's like, really, it's one of those really insidious things, like sometimes we don't even know what's happening. I had a beautiful behavior club actually come to me the other day and say, claire, I just I need a bit of a pep talk before going back into the classroom because I had a meeting with a parent. I didn't realize this one student had been chronically bullying so many in my class and I missed it. Like how can I like she was so devastated and just what a beautiful empathetic human to be so affected by this, because you have got so many things going on. It is so insidious. It often happens without us realizing it and if you don't catch something like this, it's not because you aren't looking close enough. It truly is something that can be so ingrained in the culture in our schools. But being able to have a couple of things to address this in our toolbox is wonderful.

Speaker 1:

I did say that it's very close to my heart and I'm sure that I am not. I'm not the only one that can say this, and I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this, but I was severely bullied as a kid. I remember I just remember getting into the car after some days in primary school and just sobbing and just never wanting to go back. I was, and then I got to high school, like early high school, and I just remember feeling like physically scared and and unsafe every single day. There was one girl right, that was kind of the main instigator of this that I was quite afraid of the way that she spoke to me, the physicality, and I saw this girl years later, right, like. So she like bullied the hell out of me in high school. And then I saw her years later because when I was about 21, I went to get my hair done for a wedding and I walked into the hairdresser and I sat down and I got my I was going to say bib, would you call it shawl I got my thing on and there she was looking straight back at me through the mirror.

Speaker 1:

She was the one doing my hair and my whole body was hot, like the anxiety. I felt like I was going to vomit and I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to do. I let her do my hair, we made small talk, I left and I spewed in the bathroom.

Speaker 1:

It brought back everything for me that the last episode on the podcast I spoke about the flipping your lid and the fight, flight or freeze response, and the whole time I was sitting in that chair I felt like you know, so unsafe and I knew logically that you know, nothing was going to happen to me. I was physically safe, but the way it impacted me throughout my childhood, it had just carried through. But what was really curious about that encounter is that she acted totally normal, like, totally fine. What felt like was something that scarred me for life, wasn't even on her radar. There was not one ounce of recognition. There was not like. It was just hey, claire, how are you going Like, oh like. Have you spoken to anyone from school recently? And it not like. It was just hey, claire, how are you going Like, oh like. Have you spoken to anyone from school recently? And it's just. It's just wild, right, but it made me realize that when people bully others or, like you know, when those kinds of things happen, yes, I think that in the moment, they have an understanding around how it's impacting on the person to varying degrees, right, I know that there's a lot of you know things that you know can get people to bully other people, but I don't think she realized the lasting impact of her actions when she saw me, when she saw me that day, I don't think she saw someone that she had bullied. Neither do a lot of our students. Again, we can talk all day about the reasons for bullying, but I just want to talk you through three or a few actionable things that you can do in your classroom to help students become more aware of the words they're using and the choices they make, maybe more aware of the fact that they have a responsibility in their community to be an upstander rather than a bystander, and how being a bystander to bullying can be just as damaging. So I just want to talk you through a couple of things that I'm doing, for you know, I've kind of had planned for Bullying no Way Week and I wanted to pass that on to you for you to take away.

Speaker 1:

So, first up, I think that it is important for students to be able to define what bullying is. One of the most common issues I see is students just calling everything bullying. Like everything is this bullying? They're bullying me, but it's actually just conflict or it's actually just a moment of meanness. Or sometimes students aren't able to recognize it as bullying, even though it is very severe bullying. So I start by trying to support students to understand the difference between things like bullying and conflict and mean, you know, just meanness or mean moments or just being nasty in that moment, which could be between friends or you know people who don't know each other very well. So I use real examples and I take out, like you know, scenarios and I say, okay, like let's think like what's bullying here? What's conflict, what's just having a mean moment? And then I kind of use the three P's framework for them to better understand whether or not it is bullying.

Speaker 1:

So the things that I like to talk about with students, that kind of define bullying, are things like is there a power imbalance? Is there a purpose to harm the other person? Is there a repeated pattern of that bullying occurring? So we want students to be able to say, hey, like that was a one-time thing and we're both involved in that, so that's probably conflict. I'm not going to run to the teacher and say, hey, I've been bullied, because that's conflict between us, as you know. I'm not saying they shouldn't come to you, but I'm just saying, you know, when students come and they say I've been bullied, but actually it's just them having conflict, you know you want students to be able to say, hey, like this happened once and that was rude, so it was probably just a mean moment, like someone pushing past me at the canteen or again, doesn't mean it doesn't have to be addressed. But we're talking about how do we define bullying? And then I want students to be able to say, okay, this is happening constantly, they're doing it on purpose and I feel powerless. So this is something that is bullying behaviors.

Speaker 1:

And the reason this is so important is because students need to be able to name it and identify it, to be able to do something about it, because a lot of our students are being bystanders to bullying or just not being able to say anything or not feeling empowered to be able to do anything about being bullied. There's also this high five strategy I've seen around and that's really good because it gives them like something concrete they can remember. So it's just like a visual. It's like ignore it, talk friendly, talk firmly, walk away and report it, and you can put those on a hand, you can make posters, you can let them personalize it. They just need to know what their options are when it comes to bullying. And that reporting it is okay, it is okay to talk firmly with somebody and advocate for yourself. It's okay to walk away and it's okay to seek support for that, and it's also okay to do that when you're not the one being bullied but you're a bystander of it. You know, talk to somebody, walk away, report it, and just having students feel more empowered in that. So I like those high five strategies for that reason. So that is us understanding what bullying is and empowering students with that knowledge.

Speaker 1:

So is it bullying? Is it conflict? Is it nastiness? Is it? You know, bullying because there's a power imbalance, purpose to harm or a pattern over time. The second thing that I'd like to do with students when it comes to bullying is building empathy around it and, you know, having students understand the lasting impact of it, just like you know, the girl that bullied me in high school clearly had no idea about the lasting impact of the bullying that she, you know, exhibited, had on me. So I, you know there's that metaphor of the scrunched up paper, which I also love. You know, you scrunch up the paper and then you get students to unscrunch it and then try to smooth it out and they have to see, like visually, that that paper is. You know, once you scrunch it up, like once you do something to it, then it's always like the mark is always there.

Speaker 1:

I have my own version of this where students write nasty things that they might've heard or said or you know, anything like that, on a piece of paper with a pencil. I try to maybe keep boundaries around that, on what they can and can't say. Just, you know, don't say anything that is going to, you know, be not safe for school, but just nasty things that they've heard, that they've experienced, on a piece of paper. And yeah, obviously, depending on your cohort, I teach older students and then they try to erase them. So they write it, so I don't tell them to, I don't tell them. That's going to be the challenge when I set the challenge.

Speaker 1:

But I just say, I just want you to get a piece of paper and a pencil and just write the things that people have said to you that have been really hurtful, or that you think you've said to someone that's been really hurtful it can be a brother or a sister or a friend, whatever it might be. So cover that page. You usenames or real situations, but then, when they're finished, I give them the challenge to then erase every single word on the page until they can't see them anymore. Then I get them to reflect on that, because obviously you're trying to erase them and there's always going to be something left behind. There's always going to be some kind of mark. It's going to be, there's going to be resonant of that. Then they reflect on it.

Speaker 1:

Like, what do you notice when you try to erase the words completely? How is that similar to what happens when somebody says hurtful things to somebody in real life over time, consistently, and then I get them to write kind things over the top. What can you say instead? How can you flip that and then really think about the power of kindness? So if you see someone being bullied, someone is writing those nasty things on their piece of paper, what can you do to help them kind of, you know, wipe them out. What can you do to build a different narrative for that person? So you know that's not what they're hearing, that's not what they're seeing. Only you've got other things happening and you know it just really emphasizes the power of kindness and community and just being nice to each other. So so that's one thing you can do in your anti-bullying approach.

Speaker 1:

You can do that activity, you can take it, that's fine. So you can do the scrunched up one or you can do the pencil and the rubbing out one and then putting the kind words over the top. So I love that activity. It's a really great visual metaphor for the impact of bullying and just in terms of like other ways to embed it into your week, like don't think you need to overthink it very much. You don't need a huge lesson. I don't want you to necessarily take out like chunks of time from teaching the curriculum if you're not able to do that, if you're already feeling under pressure. But you can just put things in like a starter activity or just an opportunity for you to discuss the concept of bullying and what's going on and, you know, just building some empathy around that. So I like to use throughout anti-bullying week.

Speaker 1:

I like to use some starters I've actually done it through the whole month before Things like the invisible backpack. So these are a couple of starters that I use the invisible backpack so I say to students everyone carries things that we can't see, worries and stress and struggles. What might be in the backpack of somebody who bullies other people and what might be in the backpack of someone who's being bullied. And I have two backpacks there that they can fill in. And I say fill in the backpacks with your answer. And then I get them to discuss it. And this is really great because not only does it help us to discuss the impact of bullying, but it also gets us to think about, like, what might motivate someone to bully, like what's going on for that person that makes them want to put other people down.

Speaker 1:

Another starter that I love using is if it were me so imagine for a moment that you were the one being left out, laughed at or targeted. How would you want others to respond? Again, it's just an empathy task getting you know your students to put themselves into other people's shoes and then saying, okay, if that's what I would need when someone's bullying me, what might I be able to do for other people? If I see something happening, if I'm a bystander to bullying, what can I do to help? You know, change the narrative for that person, or to stand up for them or to, you know, get that bully to stop. Like, what can I actually do safely to be able to do that?

Speaker 1:

The third starter that I absolutely love doing is the bystander. So I ask students is seeing bullying happening and not doing anything to help just as bad as doing the bullying? Why or why not? It really gets students thinking and kind of debating this point around being a bystander and what the impact of that is, and it just really gets students to start thinking outside of themselves and you know, it's like understanding why being an upstander is so important and what our role is in our school community when it comes to bullying. So those are the three things that I tend to do during anti-bullying week.

Speaker 1:

I was about to say celebrate anti-bullying week, which probably isn't the right terminology, but those are just a few of the things that I do. I have a few. You know I've got a big bundle of stuff that I um, I run with students but like, just if you want to do something really, really basic. If you just want it to be, you really want to set aside time for it. If you don't have that much time, think about what bullying is. Define it for them, you know, get them to define bullying, conflict and meanness. Then get them to think about, you know, the impact of it, the lasting impact. So you can do one of those, those demonstrations whether it's the screwing up the paper or writing on it and then rubbing it out, and then maybe a couple of starters like those things, those three things won't take a lesson. It might be five minutes one lesson, 10 minutes another lesson, then five minutes, another lesson. It really isn't that long.

Speaker 1:

But the impact that we can make by just highlighting anti-bullying in a way that's not performative, you know, I think students kind of roll their eyes a little bit when we're trying to talk about anti-bullying stuff, because it's not, it doesn't have a lot of buy-in. I think that a lot of students like, oh, whatever, they really want to address bullying in a way that's going to get students connecting with it, which is why the starters are great, because it's putting the students in the shoes of someone being bullied. You know, the visual metaphor itself is getting students doing something, is getting students actively thinking about that metaphor of the lasting impact of bullying, and then, finally, you're giving them a little bit of education around what bullying actually is. So if you've only got a little bit of time, I think that those three things are a great way to yeah, just to spend a bit of time during anti-bullying week, bullying no way week. To yeah, to help spread those that awareness around the impact of bullying. My gosh, like I spoke a few episodes ago about the mental health stats of our students and it is so alarming and so scary. So anything that we can do to try to foster that community and that kindness and that respect between our students is going to go a very, very long way.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm going to leave it there. If you are in the Behaviour Club, by the way, I have got a bunch of resources there for you for bullying no way week that you can use. So just head into the resource area and you'll see it there, or in this current month, you'll see it there. And for the rest of you, I've got a blog that you can head to to see any of the all the ideas that I've discussed in this episode. You can go to the blog and it's there for you, so you don't have to remember it, you can just pull it out. I've got the three starters there that you can just copy and put on a PowerPoint or something and use those. So make sure you head over to the blog, which is a great place to, yeah, describe everything from this episode, and I'll pop that link in the show notes for you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, lovely teacher, whether you are in the middle of the school year or on your summer holiday, I am just sending so much love and I shall see you next week. Actually, oh my gosh, next week I am starting my challenge, my five. It's a five day challenge, right, but I am going to be spreading it over the five weeks on the podcast, just to give you a bit of an idea around. It is the five day kickstart challenge. So each of the days next month I am going to be focusing on one of the days of the challenge. I've just said days a lot, haven't I? So it's going to be absolutely awesome.

Speaker 1:

It is good for anybody, no matter where you are in the school year, but I have designed it to launch at the start of the school year, just because when we're thinking about back to school stuff, yes, you can talk about like the classic and I did.

Speaker 1:

I did a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 1:

I spoke about the classic like you know how to set expectations, and so if you need to learn a bit of that kind of stuff, you want to hear about how I approach my first week back then definitely go and listen to that episode.

Speaker 1:

But this challenge here that I'm going to be running is more about like, what can we do every single day of the school year to sprinkle classroom management magic in everything we do, in our presence, in our routines, in everything? So make sure, if you have not yet, make sure you are following this show, make sure you have subscribed and you can also join the kickstart like live, so you can come into the behavior club for $1 and you can do the kickstart with me. You'll have the resources, you'll have the videos and all of that kind of stuff, so you can head to the dash on teachablescom forward slash kickstart and I'll leave it there. I'll also pop that link in the show notes for you. But I cannot wait to get started. I'm so excited for next week and, yeah, I shall see you there, lovely teacher. Bye for now.

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Claire English

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