Speakers
Description
Symposium Title: Peers, Teachers, and School Responses to Bullying
Symposium Chair: Karla Dhungana-Sainju
Symposium Integrative Statement: Bullying most frequently happens at school. Thus, teachers and schools play a critical role in addressing bullying (Colpin et al., 2021). Teachers respond to bullying within a school context, therefore characteristics of the school and classroom will likely also be related to how they respond. Using diverse methods and analyses, this series of papers from five countries examine the school, peer, and teacher perceptions that are associated with responding to bullying. Taken together the results highlight the importance of contextual effects on teachers’ response to bullying including (active engagement in prevention) school support, anti-bullying classroom norms) as well as teacher characteristics such as years of experience, teachers’ reactions, and teachers’ sensitivity to bullying. Results also indicate that there are different perceptions regarding teachers’ responses to bullying, depending on the informant. Lastly, there are different profiles in teachers’ responses. Results support a whole school approach to addressing bullying – it is just not enough to train educators in how to respond, but school climates and classroom norms are also important. The implications for prevention and intervention are discussed, as well as the critical importance of teacher training.
Keywords
responses to bullying, teachers, school context
Additional field for symposia
Individual Presentation Title: Teachers’ Responses to Bullying and Their Effects on Students’ Bullying Behaviors: A Person-Centered Approach
Authors: Hilde Colpin, Fleur van Gils, Karine Verschuerena, Isabel ten Bokkel, and Karlien Demol
Abstract: When teachers are confronted with bullying among students, they may respond in different ways, such as supporting victims or disciplining bullies. Teachers’ responses may vary depending on the bullying incidents and they may use multiple responses to address one incident. In order to provide a more comprehensive picture of how teachers respond to bullying, this longitudinal study examined different profiles of teacher responses and how these profiles predicted bullying across the school year. Students (N = 1026; Mage = 10.57; 52.5% girls) reported their teacher’s responses to bullying (Non-Intervention, Disciplinary Methods, Victim Support, Mediation, and Group Discussion) at the beginning of the school year; bullying was assessed at the beginning, middle and end of the school year with self- and peer-reports. Latent profile analysis revealed three profiles: Highly Active (low levels of Non-Intervention, high levels of active responses), Moderately Active (somewhat higher level of Non-Intervention, somewhat lower levels of active responses), and Passive (higher levels of Non-Intervention, low levels of active responses). Regarding self-reported bullying, the Passive profile was related to higher initial levels and a decrease was found in the Highly Active and Passive profiles. The profiles did not differ regarding peer-reported bullying. These findings suggest that teachers can help to reduce bullying by using a variety of active responses in bullying situations.
Individual Presentation Title: Assessing the impact of school characteristics and teacher perceptions on teacher intention to intervene in identity-based bullying scenarios
Authors: Karla Dhungana-Sainju, Natalie Spadafora, and Wendy Craig
Abstract: Teachers are an important component of bullying prevention and intervention. Research on traditional bullying finds that the school environment and teacher perceptions influence teachers’ likelihood of intervening. However, less is known about the impact of these influences when teachers’ witness identity-based bullying (IBB), which are forms of bullying rooted in discrimination targeting someone due to an actual or perceived identity. Using a sample of 1005 Canadian teachers, this study aims to investigate effects of the school environment and teachers’ perceptions on teachers’ likelihood of intervening in IBB scenarios. A secondary aim was to examine indirect effects from the school characteristics through teacher perceptions to intention to intervene. Using structural equation modelling, several significant direct effects were found. Higher levels of teacher responsibility and self-efficacy were associated with greater intention to intervene, and higher school support was associated with higher teacher responsibility, higher self-efficacy and greater intention to intervene. Lower school diversity was associated with higher teacher self-efficacy, working at a public school was associated with higher self-efficacy and teacher responsibility, and more years of experience was associated with greater teacher responsibility and self-efficacy. Testing indirect effects also found significant indirect effects from working at a public school through teacher responsibility, school support to intention to intervene through both teacher responsibility and teacher self-efficacy, and from years of teaching experience through teacher responsibility to intention to intervene. The implications of these findings on teacher training and school-based strategies and approaches to increase teacher intervention in IBB scenarios will be discussed.
Individual Presentation Title: Teachers’ primary and secondary responses to bullying incidents: Combinations and success from the teachers’ and the students’ perspectives
Authors: Saskia M. Fischer and Ludwig Bilz
Abstract: The success of teacher responses to bullying incidents is an important question for research and practice that has not yet been sufficiently answered. In 2019, Wachs and colleagues published that cooperative teacher responses were most successful from the students’ perspectives, especially compared to punitive strategies. The effectiveness of purely disciplinary and punitive measures has also been questioned in other publications (Johander et al., 2020; Smith, 2016). At the same time, research stresses that setting clear boundaries against bullying is important (Demol et al., 2020; Garandeau et al., 2016). As a result, a combination of teacher responses that clearly show that bullying is not acceptable and teacher responses that support socio-emotional competencies and increase cooperation seems to be recommendable (Demol et al., 2020; Van Verseveld et al., 2021). However, the combination of different teacher strategies and their success has hardly been investigated so far.
Based on quantitative data from 556 teachers and 2,071 students from 24 schools in Germany, we analyzed the combination of teachers’ primary and secondary responses to retrospectively reported bullying incidents at school. Both the teachers and the students were asked to choose the most important teacher response and at maximum one additional teacher response from a list and rate the effectiveness of the teacher reaction short and long term. In the presentation, combinations of teacher responses and the success from the teachers’ and the students’ perspectives will be analyzed. Possible context-level factors that may affect the teacher's responses will be discussed, along with practical implications.
Individual Presentation Title: Classmates and Teachers Matter: Effects of Class Norms and Teachers’ Reactions on Bullying Behaviors
Authors: Charlie Devleeschouwer, Chloé Tolmatcheff, and Benoît Galand
Abstract: School bullying is a complex social phenomenon embedded in the classroom. At the class level, classmates and teachers are the two main sources of normative influence on students' bullying behavior. Many anti-bullying prevention programs have primarily focused on increasing classmates’ anti-bullying attitudes and defending behaviors, which, when averaged, respectively represent the injunctive anti-bullying class norm and the descriptive defending class norm. In addition, anti-bullying programs have also aimed at increasing teachers’ reactions to bullying incidents. However, most available studies have been cross-sectional, focused either on class norms or teachers’ reactions, and provided inconsistent findings overall. The present study aimed to examine the influence of the injunctive anti-bullying class norm, the descriptive defending class norm, and both teacher- and student-reported teachers’ reactions to students' bullying behaviors over time among 1,626 primary students and their 79 teachers. Multilevel analyses showed that the injunctive anti-bullying class norm, students-reported teachers’ reactions, and some of the self-reported teachers’ reactions (i.e., working with the bullies and working with the victim) predicted change in bullying over five months. This suggests that classmates and teachers independently influence bullying behaviors. The descriptive defending class norm did not predict bullying, which is in line with recent literature questioning the effectiveness of promoting defending behaviors among classmates. Our results suggest that anti-bullying programs should target both classmates' attitudes and teachers' reactions to maximize their effectiveness.
Individual Presentation Title: The effects of school involvement in combating bullying: a study on teacher training using ELISA platform data
Authors: Stefanelli, F., Moretti, M., Nocentini, A., & Menesini, E.
Abstract: Research shows that teachers often struggle to identify and address bullying (Farrell, 2010). To overcome this problem, the Italian Ministry of Education and the University of Florence launched the ELISA platform, which offers two key actions: 1) training courses for teachers, anti-bullying team members and school principals; 2) monitoring of bullying through annual surveys for teachers and students. The project promotes a multitiered school approach that integrates universal prevention strategies and indicated actions. This approach is most effective when the whole school is involved (Espelage et al., 2014; Cross et al., 2021) and uses a multi-level prevention model.
This study aims to compare teachers’ and students perceptions’ of the problem and verify whether the school institutions that participated in both project actions (training and monitoring) have lower levels of bullying and cyberbullying, since they have more sensible and prepared teachers and are more active in preventing and combating bullying. A total of 232,011 high school students and 14,625 teachers from 689 state schools participated in the study. The results show a strong discrepancy between teachers' and students' perceptions of the presence of bullying at school. Furthermore, schools that were more active in prevention and participated in both project actions (47.4%) had lower levels of bullying (B=- 0.296; p=0.007), victimisation (B=-0.206; p=0.035), cyberbullying (B=-0.116; p=0.028) and cyber-victimisation (B=- 0.095; p=0.050). This finding is consistent with the literature showing that schools where teachers are more sensitive and committed to tackling bullying have lower levels of this problem (Espelage, et al., 2014).
| Please indicate what type of scientific contribution it is | Quantitative method study |
|---|---|
| Please also indicate what kind of contribution it is: | Scientific |
