How to provoke deeper conversations about bullying?

The cartoon story video above looks through the perspective of a boy on the cusp of being a bully after one moment of violence. He is in danger of being labelled a Bully, ostracised and enculturated within unwanted patterns of behaviours. 

This story aims to provide the viewpoint that the Principal of the Primary School wants parents to consider - What would you want to happen if your child was the bully? 

It is partly inspired by a conversation I had with a Grade 5 boy some years ago who talked about having red evil eyes glare at him whenever he shut his eyes (after he attacked a group of boys who were calling his sister names), and partly by a video I saw of a boy who talked about his transformation from a Bully to a normal person again.  He explained how his heart had been numb - he couldn't feel. He felt friendless and alone. He was turned around by being included and making friends.  

I sent different versions of the little video out to my networks over the weekend and got very useful suggestions back. (These included trauma and abuse counsellors, youth worker, victim of domestic violence, educators, lawyer, parent, teenagers.) 

It is interesting how people who are in the professional space and know the different paradigms and approaches like having a range of scenarios. However, my single parent audience thought it had too many scenarios that were alike - did not understand the nuance.

The professionals were also very particular about the words that are being used. For example, a key aspect of restorative approaches is that it gives control back to the person who might be designated as "the bully" - addressing a key reason of why they are doing it in the first place. So there is a difference between saying - "Billy, I know you are hurting, so is Joel. You need to make it right." and "Billy, it seems to me you are hurting. What do you feel you need to do to make things OK?"

There were a few women who had been victims of abusive partners and felt they had fallen into the trap of thinking they could help their partner - so stayed far longer than they should. So they were concerned about the fairy tale notion of the beautiful princess turning the beast into a prince. For kids being trained by family relationships during their formative years into the abusive partner role, what could a school community do to help break these cycles?

My teenage audience were very engaged, and said it made them think about the story behind why people might do things and to think again before labelling people too quickly. 

What was interesting is how many conversations have been generated by it. 

The process has reminded me (Tips for students creating videos):

• How important it is to get continuous feedback from a variety of professional and interested voices - Is the info right? What does it provoke in audience? 
• It is only when you start doing it, that all the nuances start to show themselves - lifting to higher understanding. 
• The process is going to take several iterations. 
• Keep the format/style simple so the message is clear. 
• Don't give one answer - scenarios help people to open to other possibilities

What do we need to consider when engaging parents in a difficult issue such as bullying?

Often when pressured with deadlines and outcomes it is easy to get right down into strategy - What we will do? Sometimes that is OK, but when there is complexity and conflict of views I have found the 'Seven ways of inquiry' process by Henderson and Kesson to be very helpful. These seven unique lenses represent different ways of thinking/feeling/relating with issues. They also work holistically together. Please do not be put off by the Greek names, rather use the questions as prompts for reflection.

Below is my map of  trying to capture the thinking and dilemmas of Sam, the Primary School Principal as well as my own. As Sam and I discussed it together we also added thoughts. The question behind the map is:

What do we need to consider when engaging parents in a difficult issue such as bullying?

Techne? 

How do we do it?

• What is the process we will use to engage parents?
• What is the form of the outcome of this? (Policy, protocol, awareness, champions?)
• How do we communicate it in a way that engages and empowers other parents? 

Phronesis 

Drawing on everyone's practical wisdom. Asking why. Going into deeper understandings of what is happening.

• How can we tap into parent's wisdom about positive parenting and social and emotional development? (e.g. building relationship with their child, skill building, praise.) What processes do parents already use when their children face dilemmas? 
• How do we enable time for parents to explore/discuss the reason behind bullying dynamics in order to understand why? (eg. power issues, identity, fear, role, home issues, peer culture.)
• How do we encourage different parents to build an expertise and bring information to the group?
• How do we help parents to build a bigger picture of where bullying sits in their own words and narratives? (For example, our narrative might be: Bullying is just one of several unhealthy relationship dynamics, that students can become trapped in, feeling powerless to change.)

Praxis

Critical Inquiry.  Challenge assumptions. Question how this process itself might set up power inequities between participants.

• How does this process help participants feel empowered?
• What assumptions or worldviews are we bringing through focussing on the issue this way - eg. stop bullying approach versus positive behaviour approach.
• What processes can we use to surface everyone's assumptions in a caring and respectful way?
• What assumptions do we think parents might bring? (My child is not a bully. Bullies need to be punished. It doesn't happen here. Tackle the issue when it happens. The school is responsible to fix it. The school isn't taking this incident seriously enough. Bullying is bad. I have taught my child to stand up for herself.)

Dialogos

Enabling different perspectives to converse. 

• How can we collect diverse positions and value them, and put them in conversation?
• Whose voices? (students, teachers, parents/carers)
• Whose roles? (Bully, victim, bystander, carer, teacher, counsellor, siblings, friends, principal)
• How can we help participants walk in another's shoes? (bringing mind, heart and soul)

Poesis

Soulful attunement, integrity, wholeness, creativity

• How in this process can we be mindful of participant's feelings and work with integrity?
• In whatever policy/approach that is created, how do we ensure that all players can come out whole, feel a senses of growth and integrity, and not feel diminished/blamed/shamed.
• How can we keep in mind the larger wholes here? This is not just about fixing a problem for individuals, it is something that contributes positively to the fabric of society. 

Theoria

Contemplative Wisdom. Linking to purpose and vision of what education is about.

• How can an issue like this link into a purposeful curriculum of life? (For example, each incident is an opportunity for social/emotional learning. It is welcomed as being part of our core business of learning and child development. It is not seen as a distraction.)
• How might thinking about what we need to do in terms of PREVENT, PREPARE, RESPOND, RECOVER enable us to see how this fits more strategically within our curriculum? For example, thinking about PREVENT might encourage us to develop pedagogies for more collaborative learning, with greater student agency.

Polis

Public Moral Inquiry. Making visible underpinning and possibly conflicting values. Moral responsibility.

• What responsibility does each stakeholder have? Eg. Each parent has a responsibility for every child.
• What values do we want to underpin the school's policy? Eg. Restorative (no child should leave the school) vs punishment. What happens if Restorative doesn't work?
• How can we tease out the various merits of different positions? What do we agree on?

Sam and I spent 30 minutes exploring and discussing the elements of the map, testing whether we had captured his concerns and thinking, and also what it opened up in terms of possibility. A key "break through" was the framing of bullying as part of a spectrum of relationship dynamics, enabling it to be linked to the school's core business in a positive way.

Sam said once he got over the Greek names he found the 7 lenses very logical and useful - and it was helpful to see the whole picture and how they interacted. He found one section - phronesis, considering the wisdom of the parents  - an important perspective that he had missed. He said if we were to take into account all of it, there is no way we could do this with a parent group in 1.5 hours. So we framed this as a touch-stone - something to help our thinking - and inform the design of the parent workshop.

We both had homework  for our next meeting - Sam to design the parent workshop, and me to consider how to engage the Grade 4/5 students in a transforming leadership role.

Is it about getting the right strategy?

Plan A - Have goal in sight

I met Sam, the Primary School Principal, during the last week of the school year in 2014 to discuss how the school might engage parents in developing a whole community approach to bullying.

We came up with a strategy that involved running a 1.5hr workshop for a group of about 20 people consisting of parents (with the core being Parents and Friends members), teachers and students.  The workshop would be designed to enable the group to:

• consider what they would want to happen if their child was bullied (to help orient into a non-punitive ethos);
• look at definitions of bullying;
• explore different approaches to dealing with bullying (through a world café),  including ones that we might not want;
• suggest approaches/ethos for the school;
• suggest ways to engage the whole community in a conversation.  

A key to this was to work with the Grade 4/5 class prior to the workshop to create some inputs to the workshop to provoke thinking (eg. Examples of bullying/not bullying. The conversation I would like to have with my parents. What I would like my parents to do.)  

Sam thought we would have no problem getting parents and that the School Newsletter would be the way to advertise. The timeline was to run the workshop within the third week of term 1 (Feb 20). Following the workshop the Grade 4/5 class would work on a way of stimulating conversation with the whole school community, creating a video that we could launch on the National Day of Action against bullying on March 20. It was a tight time-frame and we were wary that the focus point of the national day might be making us too goal oriented.

Listening to the dissonance

I could tell Sam was still concerned over the emphasis on bullying and whether this would drive approaches that wouldn’t necessarily fit into the whole school philosophy.  He was still juggling how bullying fit in terms of a respectful framework. Why the emphasis on bullying when it was just one of a number of disrespectful behaviours?

Our intention was to meet the week before school started and fill in the details.  After a months’ break I looked at my notes and experienced what can only be described as cognitive dissonance over this same issue. Intuitively something felt wrong, and I know to trust my unease about issues. I knew we had to think bigger than this. I then did lots of thinking, pacing, stewing and had little sleep. The only way to resolve it was to capture and map out the dilemmas.

What helped me was Sam’s statement that the benefit to him of being involved in this project was coming up with a generic process that could help him with any controversial issue. Too often controversy is solved by one person or a small group in power – the diverse perspectives are collapsed into an easy time saving message. Without seeing the alternatives people find it difficult to understand the ethos or principles behind what they do – so they follow rules or procedures, rather than empowered to make their own processes.  

So what is a generic tool kit that enables mapping of controversial issues? In mine are Integral Theory, 7 ways of Inquiry (Henderson and Kesson) and the use of hypotheticals – these can help to bring a rigor and clarity to the complex soundtrack in your brain.  In the next few posts I use each of these to tease out some of the competing perspectives and the different angles that might need to be considered when engaging others on controversial issues.

What excites me is that when I shared these with Sam something flowered in his thinking that took us to a whole new level.

How do schools engage parents in conversations about bullying? Is this what we really want to talk about?

At the end of last year I was asked if I would like to manage a project funded from the Safe School Framework to promote not just awareness around bullying but also to develop approaches that link into the Tasmanian Respectful Schools Framework. 

A key awareness event is the 20th March National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence. Schools are encouraged to register and consider some of the activities.  The website has tips for teachers, parents and students, "bully blocking" apps for students, videos and lesson plans. Last year a number of Tasmanian schools created "Bystander" videos to get across the message of how bystanders can radically change bullying situations.

But this funding is slightly different. It is about creating a process that might engage parents in conversations and be part of processes to help develop school policy. There are three schools - A primary school (K-6), a High School (7-10) and a Senior Secondary School  (11-12). Each is doing something different and has a slightly different challenge. 

The primary school is a no rules school - rather students act from a strong values base to work out what is respectful behaviour in different situations. The High School is one year into developing a School-Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) model, and the Senior Secondary School uses restorative approaches, method of shared concern and ACT mindfully.  All of them were interested in finding ways to engage parents more.

Sam (pseudonym) is the principal of the primary school and was keen to be part of the project:

The issue we have here is that parents will come in all upset saying their child has been bullied. They want to see action - some sort of punishment for "The Bully". "Bullying" is such an evocative term - we have all sorts of associations in our head about how bad it is and how people can be affected. That is true, but often what has happened is not actually bullying - it may be a one-off or it may not involve power.  And punishment is not the answer - it can make it worse. It doesn't address the underlying causes and it discourages reporting of bullying behaviours. Students may not even tell their parents that they are bullied, afraid of their parents taking action. 

I would like any process that we develop for our school to be restorative and an opportunity for social learning. I would not want to see any kid leaving the school or being expelled. That's the problem if you use a ladder of consequences with increasing repercussions for behaviour - they can end up getting expelled - and that doesn't help the long term future of the student. They don't have to be friends, or to like each other, but I would like to see them find a respectful way of relating.

I would like to say to parents that it takes a village to raise a child and how can all parents be responsible for all children. I would like to ask them what sort of processes they would like in place if their child was "The Bully." 

Then Sam reflected:

My first thought is we need to help parents develop a definition of bullying - to know when it is and isn't bullying, and then we can work out what to do. But now I wonder about the whole approach of saying NO to something. Wouldn't we be a lot better off saying YES to something? What are we valuing here?

I asked Sam in that case does the focus of the project on bullying actually fit his ethos for the school. He thought about it.

Yes, I think so. It is a difficult issue. The word "bullying" is still out there, parents use it.  We need to address it  - but we need to frame it more in the context of the respectful schools framework. If we can develop a process for working with parents through such a difficult issue then we can use it for other issues. 

We decided we needed to sleep on it and I knew that I needed to capture his competing dilemmas, because these no doubt will be the drivers that shape the way the process unfolds. 

When I visited the team at the High School responsible for the Positive Behaviour Support program at the school they were initially interested in the project. After further discussion they were unsure how it would sit within an SWPBS framework. They were particularly concerned that the emphasis on negative behaviour - Bullying. NO WAY! - did not fit their positive behaviour model. Their decision in the end was to engage a parent committee to review their old Bullying Policy and look at what it would now mean under their new framework. Their key concern in engaging parents was that most were busy working people who had little time to consider more than their particular child's issues. Their offerings of visiting speakers to talk about adolescent issues had poor attendance.

What is interesting is that although the campaign brand is Bullying. No Way! and parts of the website  focusses on tips for parents, students and teachers on how to respond if there is a bullying situation, the National Day of Action lesson plans actually do focus on positive behaviour. The 2014 lesson plans ask what is needed for a safe school and invites students to come up with their own ideas that can support this and prevent bullying. The 2015 lesson plans focus on what makes good friendship to help students develop a code of ethics for online practice, helping to prevent cyberbullying. 


How do we engage parents in conversations reflecting a positive behaviour approach? 

• What are their concerns? 
• What dilemmas are they facing? 
• What are their values, and what do they hope for? 
• What parental wisdom can they bring?
• How can they feel part of a bigger whole?