Part of the Solution

| By: Committee for Children

Today's blog was written by senior program developer Bridgid Normand.

Before I came to Committee for Children to work as a program developer, I was a prevention specialist for the Youth and Family Services Agency on the island where I live. Part of my job was to run classroom meetings focused on social-emotional development along with the classroom teacher. One day a fourth-grade teacher pulled me aside and told me that she was very concerned about a boy—we’ll call him Johnny—in her classroom. His mother had told her that he was being picked on by many of the students in all four fouth-grade classrooms. As is typical for bullying behaviors, this had mostly gone on behind her back or out on the playground away from adults. His mother was considering pulling him out of the school. The teacher wanted me to help her address the situation with her class. “It is complicated,” she said, “because Johnny has some behaviors that are quite off-putting to the other kids. Like his habit of picking his nose.”

I puzzled about what to do, as I did not want to further distress Johnny. The teacher and I decided that it had to be addressed directly with the whole class, because clearly many of them were involved in the bullying. So at our next classroom meeting, with Johnny out of the room, we opened up the topic. We described the seriousness of the situation and listed some of the bullying behaviors Johnny had experienced. We asked the students to imagine what it was like to be him. Students began to name his feelings: mad, sad, scared, lonely, unhappy. Then there was a long silence. The students knew that we knew what they had been doing. You could feel their discomfort. Finally one student spoke up. He admitted to deliberately tripping Johnny. More silence, then another child spoke up, “I let the air out of his bicycle tires.” And soon, one by one, every child in the room spoke of smaller or larger actions they perpetrated against Johnny: name-calling, pushing, excluding, making rude faces, damaging his bicycle. They talked about how all the students in the fourth grade felt completely free to bully him. He had become the scapegoat for the whole grade level of students. It was shocking.

As the class meeting continued, the students began to talk about how guilty they felt about what they had been doing. They talked about the ways they excused it to themselves with “Everyone's doing it.” Or “Well he picks his nose. It’s disgusting.” We talked about how, no matter what behaviors Johnny has, he deserves to be treated with respect. Discomfort turned to relief that they could finally admit as a class to how they have been treating Johnny. They also decided they wanted to apologize to him as a group, which they did at the next class meeting. We then turned to what they would now do about the situation. Spontaneously as a group they decided to become his defenders and stand up to the rest of their grade level, and intervene when others started bullying him. They choose to become bystanders that were part of the solution. Johnny agreed not to pick his nose. They all held to their agreements and Johnny became an integrated part of the class.