At our school, about 24 teachers including me are being trained in a character education program called Tribes. We have completed three of the eight units, and I like what I see so far. Tribes trained teachers who practice the approach have had great results in other schools. Kids respect one another and much of the nastiness disappears.

The training is continuing in the Fall and I hope to apply what I have learned to help the kids in my class be more respectful of one another and develop respect, empathy and compassion for one another.

I don’t think we as teachers can do it all. The school, parents and the community need to work together to change things.

I am going to visit some schools in our board this Fall who have had good results with their character education program and get the details. They had parents and the community involved.

I plan to share what I have discovered in my blog/podcast this Fall.

There is no easy answer. That’s for sure.

Regina,
I agree with you when you say that we need to “hear” the bully. I am working on a post about listening to the bully’s cry for help. Thanks for adding me to your blogroll.

As a mediator, I am extremely interested in issues of power imbalance and in helping people be heard. I have mediated more than a few cases that boiled down to the bullying behavior of one person and often found that the aggression stopped cold once the victim of the bullying was made to be *heard*. It’s not necessarily the victim that has to hear it, and it’s not the same as therapy: it is a process by which active listening is used to solve a real problem.

One theme that I find constantly is that parents put their kids in martial arts training to deal with the issue, but the problem is not the so much the kid who is being bullied, but the person who feels the need to bully. In my experience, the victim has something the bully needs…the problem is that the bully is either “asking the wrong question” or going after it in entirely the wrong way. It might be highly productive to deal with bullies, we need to focus on “hearing” bullies and removing the cause of their obsessive need to make inappropriate contact. It makes no sense to tell a child to ignore a bully,–any schoolkids knows that it is absolutely impossible for a child to ignore someone who is causing them misery. Adults have the obligation to deal with it, not sweep it under the carpet as insignificant.