We want to encourage kids to make a positive impact using social media. We teach our students to screenshot and block mean comments. We also encourage them to anonymously report bullying and cyberbullying. When I was bullied in elementary school, I wished someone would have told a teacher or a principal what was happening to me, but it was too risky! Who would physically go and do this? But as it turns out, it is risky to tell on someone when it is online as well.
I was contacted by a teacher who had this exact situation happen. The student had discovered that someone had created fake accounts and was being really horrible to another child. And when he told, lots of kids in the class turned on him. This prompted me to turn to my own children and students for advice. The reality is that adults do not always know how to effectively “fix” the situation. What I learned by talking to them was that turning against a “snitch” is common. Even the sweetest, most empathetic kids said that. And many of them admitted to me that there wasn’t much we (aka adults) could do in this instance. A few told me that the kid should, “just wait it out” or “make other friends”.
WHAT??
Other kids told me that they had been an upstander and despite the fall out, they would do it again because it was the right thing to do. To me, this is about culture–establishing a positive culture in your school where doing the right thing is celebrated. My friend Matt Soeth from #ICANHELP agreed. My first thought was, “this child needs to feel listened to, and loved, and valued by other students in the class”.
Here are a few ideas for how to deal with this after the fact:
Listen intently
The child who told likely knows it was the right thing to do and may have suspected that there might be backlash. What they need is an adult to listen and empathize. Ask them what they would like to see happen.
Kindness Intervention:
What a bullied child needs more than anything is kindness, but it’s also important to show kids that they can create kindness opportunities in person and online. Use a Bucket filler activity from this resource or have kids create kindness quotes and then intentionally set out to send messages to classes through your own or class Twitter account just to make their day brighter. It’s important for kids to see instances of positive behaviour online.
Community Circle:
A regular community circle is one that allows for several entry points for kids and allows for its namesake–community building. Students gather in a circle and use a feather or talking stick to go around the circle to share. Kids can have the right to pass. You can use a cares/concerns/celebration prompt. Then, when kids have engaged in a couple of community circles, a good provocation might be, “Share a time you had to do something that was really hard to do, but you knew was the right thing to do”.
Restorative Justice:
In Social LEADia, I refer to the good work done by Victor Small Jr and a group of educators who have seen dramatic improvements in behaviour because they use a restorative justice pedagogical approach. The idea behind this approach (which originated in the Justice System) is that the offender and the victim repair the damage caused by an incident and try to restore the relationship. Jennifer Gonzalez interviews Victor in this post, Restorative Justice: An Overview.
Fearless Kids Around the World:
There is a really cool project that highlights kids who are “fearless” featuring Carmen Sandiego shared by my friend Michael Drezek. The fearless kids stand up for the environment, talk about medical care, stand up for learning differences, and stand up to bullying. The lens of fearless kids will help reinforce that standing up to bullying is heroic, but because it is in a series with other topics, will not feel like it is in response to the situation. Check it out here.
The best approach is to do all of these things as pro-active measures, including a few of the following:
- Use the idea of Humans of New York, (like students at Vaughan Secondary School and my own school, People of Carter) for kids to get to know each other on a personal level.
- Use the lead of Jeremiah Anthony and Konnor Suave (featured in Social LEADia), two students who used social media to compliment students at their school community and changed the culture in their schools.
- Have a student team at your school who makes kindness cool or whose mandate it is to tackle micro aggressions like these kids from Burlington VT.
- Check out the #GlobalEdSschat topic for December which is all about promoting a positive school culture here.
What advice do you have?