When exactly do we win the war? If indeed we have an enemy in these bullies and if we therefore need to be anti-bully, then how would we know that the bullies have been vanquished? It sounds silly when put like this doesn’t it? Which is why we need to take back the national conversation on bullying and make it a far more productive one.
We can all be misled by the media and even by the general vibe of industry conversation. This is what’s happened to us when it comes to bullying.
While we’ve been arguing over which anti-bullying ‘program’ is best – all encompassing, LGBTI, racism, sexism, physical, bystander or cyberbullying – we’ve failed to see the common point of failure within all of them. That they are programs! So obsessed with program have we become that we’ve now hit around 9000 global attempts to program our way out of bullying. One of them should have worked!
Programs are useful for compartmentalising. You can, for instance, teach robotics on a Wednesday afternoon to decent effect. But bullying is not a compartment of our students’ educative experience. It’s everywhere – it’s cultural!
So it stands to reason that no compartmentalised program will ever achieve more than a ‘sugar hit’ when it comes to feeling better and safer at school. So what do we do?
In this webinar, we’ll unpack for you:
- the imperative for whole-school approach over program when it comes to bullying.
- the whole-school approaches that have worked globally.
- the behaviours and artefacts evident in schools where bullying is low.
- the immediate changes that Teachers and Leaders can make for drastically improved “return on investment”.
- the proven benefits of shifting model, language and practice to something more effective and less stressful.
This Real Schools Webinar is aimed at Teachers, School Leaders, Administrators and Teachers of all phases of learning – you’d be crazy to miss it!