Building Respect: A Bullying Prevention Simulation to Promote Safer Schools
More Than Bullying Prevention
Many of us know that bullying is bigger than a shove on the playground. Bullying is verbal, social, and physical, extending into cyberbulling and online harassment. What role do schools play and how can all teachers and staff be prepared not just to recognize bullying incidents, but also how to respond to them effectively?
Somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 students say they have been bullied at school. Over 70% of students say they have seen bullying in their schools, and the same percentage of school staff have seen bullying. According to stopbullying.gov, adults often don’t know how to respond when they do recognize bullying.
Preventing bullying is an essential component of improving school climate and school safety. It determines whether kids feel safe at school, which contributes to attendance, academic success, and likelihood to graduate.
Bullying affects every school. And it’s not just about bullying prevention. It’s also important to equip all school staff with the knowledge and skills to recognize an incident and address it when it happens. It’s about noticing that something is wrong and bringing up a situation with a victim of bullying in a way that makes them feel safe and supported. And it’s about knowing what to do when you hear about an issue that has not been addressed by other teachers and staff.
An Evidence-Based Bullying Prevention Simulation
Our new bullying prevention simulation, Building Respect, is a role-play simulation that addresses bullying from many angles, for all adults in a school community. Its main purpose is to teach conversation techniques in a variety of situations.
In the conversation simulator, users take on the role of a teacher and experience how a student or another teacher might respond in certain scenarios where bullying or use of biased language takes place.
The goal is for school staff to take action when appropriate, and to feel more confident and more prepared to have real-life conversations about bullying with students and colleagues.
This bullying prevention simulation covers three role play scenarios:
In the first scenario, the user assumes the role of a teacher who addresses a situation in class where a student makes derogatory comments about another classmate’s ethnicity, reading skills, and immigrant status.
In the second scenario, a teacher speaks with a student, Stephanie, who has regularly been absent from class. The goal of the user is to determine if she needs a connection to school support services.
In the third scenario, a teacher talks with a fellow colleague, Mr. Walker, who failed to report an incident in which a transgender student confided that she was being bullied in the bathroom.
These mental health scenarios for teachers were designed to give a variety of situations to address bullying, and are based on real-life incident reports. With the help of a virtual coach, they can try different approaches and see what works best during their conversation. The experience can be completed within 40 minutes.
How to Access
Learn more and access a demo of Building Respect here. And don’t miss other simulations for PK-12 educators on topics like mental health, trauma-informed practices, social-emotional learning, and curtailing LGBTQ harassment.