Focusing on the Solution: Building a Bully-free classroom

Here I sit at my desk, feeling relieved to have finished a task that had been looming over me for days.  With this task complete, my mind is free to wander.  It glides into the future, where soon there will be classrooms abuzz with children and teachers meeting and reuniting after a long summer break.  In these buzzing classrooms I see happy teaching staff engaging with children. And in this moment of wandering, I flashback, to a classroom with staff that embraced Solutions Focused work this past year.  (Ironically, SF work is about breaking away from rehashing the past, but looking into the future for answers.  But that’s for another post.)

In the 2010-11 school year I had a brand new teacher, Ellie*, in a classroom of 15 3-to-5 year-old children.  Alas, we all know that first year teachers never have it easy.  Unfortunately, Ellie had it particularly tough – in her classroom was a child, Jessie*, who encountered a significant trauma early in the school year and as a result of this he would take to great fits of rage – throwing things, running and screaming in the classroom, trying to run away, biting, hitting, on and on and on.  In our program, we work closely with local mental health agencies and therapists to support children like Jessie.  Throughout the year we had endless meetings looking to identify the precursors to the behavior, to locate the reasons for the distress, and minimize the occurrence.  Yet, despite all our hard work things continued to get increasingly worse throughout the school year.  The school year ended with our hearts heavy as we knew we had failed Jessie, but certainly not of a lack of trying.

In the 2011-12 school year, Ellie was ecstatic to return, happy to have had the dreaded first year of teaching behind her and confident that her own learning would make for a better second year.  And for the most part this was true.  Until, sadly a few months into the school year, Ellie discovered that a once sweet and shy boy had become the class bully. Upon learning this, Ellie sprung into quick action, informing me of what she was witnessing and being told by children and parents.  Ellie knew she needed to start by supporting this boy, Aron, and made sure to communicate with his family.

We began by handling this situation in our typical fashion: meetings with Aron’s parents and our mental health staff and partners to discuss the “problem” of bullying. We learned that he was being bullied by older kids in his neighborhood; so clearly feeling powerless on his home turf, he is looking for power at school where he is one of the oldest. As we talk with the family we hear the family talk in negative terms and tones about their son: he doesn’t like to read, he’s too active, hes rebellious and makes faces at them when they ask things of him.  His mom rarely makes eye contact with the teachers and appears shameful, as if she might be feeling that her parenting skills are in question. Together we make a typical plan to look for the problem behavior and stop it. We also decide to set up situations in which we think Aron can take on leadership roles have power. We decide we will attempt foster friendships with other children by setting up play scenarios for him with children who are more passive and likely to follow his lead.  

On the surface Aron’s behavior seems to get better over the next few weeks.  The teaching staff no longer hear him teasing other children. But we also notice that the set up peer play quickly dissolves.  And then the worst happens: Aron’s parents come to pick him up at the end of a school day and they hear another child call Aron stupid and fat.  In response to this, Aron’s father tells Ellie, “You call me in for meetings and tell me my child is a bully, and then let my child get bullied?  The next time you call to tell me my son is being bad, I’m going to tell you ‘he’s just doing what he needs to do to get by.’” Of course, Ellie is devastated and concerned about how she is going to make this work for Aron and his family.  She knows she has some considerable rehabilitation work to do on the relationship with this family.

In a follow up meeting with Ellie about a week after the name calling incident, I ask how this is going.  Ellie describes it to me as “managing day-to-day, in the moment, but no permanent solutions.” And this is when I know that something different needs to be done.  We need to move away from trying to manage the problem behavior and begin to focus on what we want for Aron and all children in this classroom.  I ask Ellie and her teacher’s assistant to envision a classroom that doesn’t have bullying;  What does this classroom look like?   As they talk about a bully-free classroom, they talk about children who don’t just say they’re friends, but children who demonstrate friendship.  Children seek to help one another, demonstrate genuine care for one another. Children tell each other how they feel truthfully instead of avoiding one another or squabbling.

From here we identify three areas the teaching staff believed would be successful for Aron and the whole class - their vision for success.
1.       Community building and responsibility to one another - When children say “you’re not my friend” (or the like) teachers ask children to explain what the other child can do to be a friend
2.       Family connection/relationship rebuilding
o   Call Aron’s family to share with them what the teaching staff will be doing to help him be successful in the classroom
o   Connect with the family at least twice a week to share Aron’s successes at school
3.       Aron’s responsibilities and needs
o   Telling Aron that he is a friend
o    Teachers looking for moment’s when Aron acts out of kindness and telling him what they saw
o   Pointing out to Aron what other people do to be a friend to him

Two weeks later, Ellie called me (as my office is located off-site) with an excitement in her voice that is palpable.  She told me that from the very next day that they tried this new approach, Aron was a different child: he began playing with other children and the play lasted for substantial amounts of time without issue; he began offering to help the teaching staff with classroom maintenance duties; he was carrying himself differently, with this shoulders back,  head held high and making eye contact (in the past they staff had commented on how he slouched and refused eye contact with teaching staff); Aron had even hugged the teaching staff when he left school the very day Ellie decided to call me with the updates.  This was truly a monumental change for this boy.

But the change didn’t stop with Aron, his parents began interacting differently with the staff too.   Mom also started making eye contact and smiling with the teaching staff.  She too carried herself with confidence.  The teaching staff told Mom that they had noticed that Aron had high-level early math skills that they hadn’t seen before, and credited her for it.  She confessed that she likes to work with him on math because she knows he’s good at it and it’s one of the few things he’ll sit down to do with her.

And Ellie had some amazing things to say about her own process.  “We get these images in our head as how kids are and now I’m realizing that they change.  It requires a lot of patience and remember everything’s not going to change overnight. Thanks for helping me see things in this way.  It’s the little things that make such a difference.”

And this small change just kept on reaping benefits.  Soon the entire classroom culture had changed.  Before Ellie and her TA spent most of their time dealing with small conflicts between children, but soon children were playing together more peacefully and could be overheard telling each other how they could be a “friend.”  Children were less likely to lash out at one another and the teaching staff attributed this to children interpreting other’s behavior as someone’s attempt to be a friend, not to be malicious.  It was as if someone had replaced the entire roster of children enrolled in the class with different ones.  And all because the staff had the courage to envision what could be in their classroom, instead of what wasn’t working.


*All names changed to protect confidentiality.

After a bit of a hiatus (closing down one school year, enjoying the quiet of the summer and preparing for the next one), I am back at my SFEC work.  My last post posed the following challenge:

Look for one, just one, "problem area" in your work (and honestly, it doesn't matter what your work is).  Challenge yourself to remove the problem from your thinking and ask "when I (or this) is successful, it looks like this ____________".

I post this here again for you to think on as I finalize crafting the next post that chronicles the amazing success of one teacher, one child, one family and one classroom when the staff dared themselves to move beyond the problem and consider what success looks like.  Stay tuned for a post within the week!