First of two parts

By CHRIS OVERTREE

AMHERST — Teachers and administrators in a small elementary school in New Hampshire were puzzled by a young student’s suggestion that the answer to their bullying problem was, in his words, “for teachers to get better shoes.”

Having just gone through a schoolwide climate assessment, school personnel had access to a wide range of data from both students and teachers, all collected anonymously and encompassing a wide range of topics related to the school’s social and academic environment.

This response was certainly intriguing, but was it actually a joke?

In my experience, children almost always know more about what is really going on in a school because, like many difficult behaviors, bullying is something that goes on when the teacher’s back is turned.

And like good researchers, school community members realized this comment warranted further investigation. (Photo of Chris Overtree by Gordon Daniels.)

Their school district had courageously decided to take an extremely transparent approach to evaluating their school climate. In doing so, they invested students with an unprecedented amount of power and control over the process. Student leaders from many backgrounds joined to survey themselves and to seek to understand the data this produced.

Teachers participated too and the information was put out on tables, sorted and analyzed in the school lunchroom.

The reasoning behind that enigmatic student comment turned out to be simple.

During winter, the plowing of the parking lot left a large area of the playground obscured from the eyes of teachers, who preferred to watch recess from the less snowy areas. Without better shoes — rugged winter boots, in fact — teachers missed the school’s biggest haven for bullying and teasing.

This school didn’t need a million dollar anti-bullying campaign; it needed a new map for the snowplow and more adult eyes on the playground.

As one of the co-founders of the Center for School Climate and Learning, an educational consulting group that works with school districts on comprehensive school climate reform, I never cease to be amazed at the profound impact that children can have in shaping the direction of our communities.

They have information we adults do not, energy we have no longer and ideas that would never have occurred to us in the first place.

It has been my privilege to be part of a team of clinicians and scholars who have developed a process that schools can use to promote positive changes in their school climate.

As much of this work relies on student leadership and community engagement, it is a process that can be replicated across many domains.

My work as a psychologist and school consultant has taken me all over the country, working with schools to address the elusive notion we think of as climate, the social and emotional environments where our children learn.

Not surprisingly, bullying is on many minds, and I am often asked, “How do you stop bullying?”

My answer is always “by starting something else.”

Just like academic problems, we need to understand the problem and from where it comes, and then develop new skills and strategies to address it.

We don’t teach children to stop reading badly; we work to improve their reading skills.

This academic notion can be applied behaviorally too.

Solutions do not lie in our ability to squash negative behaviors, but to promote more positive ones.

Whether it is parenting, teaching, or legislating, we often rely on prohibitions as a method of establishing and promoting community standards.

As a democratic society, we use laws to set forth common standards of behavior, the rules that citizens agree to follow.

Massachusetts’ recent anti-bullying legislation serves this purpose well by giving schools more guidance about which behaviors to target. But the anti-bullying law should be our back-up plan, used to address the outliers in an otherwise more proactive, positively oriented strategy.

The anti-bullying law, like any law, tells us what not to do, but fails to teach new behaviors and promote different values and norms. Legal prohibitions are different from social solutions, and this is the key to understanding the strategies needed to combat bullying.

The law is a good place to start, but to support our children as they adapt to an extremely fast-paced and changing world, we need to bring new, more socially responsible behaviors into our schools and communities.

Let’s discuss some things that might, in their small way, behave like antibodies in inoculating our children against bullying.

Some words that come to mind, concepts that have born out repeatedly in our work, are things like student engagement, student leadership, respect, tolerance, empathy, social justice, equality of opportunity and being heard.

Each of these notions represents a powerful tool for addressing problems with bullying. A school that is successful in increasing its students’ sense of empathy, for example, will almost certainly see a reduction in bullying and harassment among its students.

And when typical students begin to change their behavior, social norms shift, groups change, individuals feel stronger and more supported. No school-wide intervention will eradicate all problems, and outliers will continue to exist. But social trends in schools, and those that become part of the culture of bullying, do grow and change with our social and school climate.

Thus our climate and culture is the true target. The answer is not an anti-bullying program, but climate improvement.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to bullying in schools, and anyone who claims otherwise might be selling one. Human behaviors are as variable as we are, and individual schools, districts or communities must rely on specialized approaches that fit their own strengths and weaknesses.

Thankfully, our work over the past decade has taught us that there are common elements in an effective school climate change process that place schools and communities on a productive pathway.

Next week: Specific recommendations.

Christopher Overtree is a clinical psychologist, school consultant and professor of psychology at UMass. He directs the Psychological Services Center there and specializes in treating children, adolescents and their families. He is co-founder of the Center for School Climate and Learning (www.TheCSCL.org). He is the father of two boys and lives in Florence.