Bullying Prevention Activities (That Aren’t Talking About Bullying)

Bullying prevention is all the rage. There are special weeks and months devoted to it, and I’m often asked what my favorite “bullying prevention activities” are. Here’s the thing: bullying prevention isn’t simply “A lesson”. Bullying prevention is a lot more than that, and most of it 1. You are already doing and, 2. Doesn’t even involve bullying.

I’ve always felt this way, but I felt really vindicated when I stumbled across a journal article called “Rethinking School-Based Bullying Prevention Through the Lens of Social and Emotional Learning: a Bioecological Perspective” (Divecha and Brackett, 2019). It talked about how major bullying prevention programs in the US have mixed and/or limited results, and how the real answer to bullying prevention is developing SEL skills. Now, full disclosure, one of the article’s authors created a fairly large and well known SEL program (RULER). That said, I wholeheartedly agree.

Bullying intervention is going to involve talking about bullying. It’s going to involve explicit procedures around reporting, teaching upstander skills, and having a district wide definition about bullying. This may or may not also prevent some future bullying incidents. But bullying prevention isn’t really about bullying as much as it’s about social emotional learning.

What is Bullying?

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive (physical, verbal, or social) behavior that involves a power imbalance (real or perceived) that is repeated over time. Both the bully and the bullied are at significant risk for long-term impact.

Because bullying is a complicated problem, it requires prevention and intervention to occur at multiple levels. This quote will help us contextualize this:

“Bullying is best conceptualized as an interaction that occurs not only because of individual characteristics of the bully, but also because of the actions of peers, actions of teachers and other adult caretakers at school, physical characteristics of the school grounds, family factors, cultural characteristics, and even community factors.”

(Swearer, S., & Doll, B. (2001). Bullying in schools: An ecological framework. Journal of Emotional Abuse – paraphrased by Dr. Christopher Willis at NASP in 2005)

Bullying Prevention Activities = SEL Activities

Where does SEL fit into this process? Well, SEL can intentionally (and effectively!) target at-risk characteristics through the teaching of skills, attitudes, and behaviors that support those who are at-risk for being bullied or for bullying others, as well as the adults involved with them.

Teaching and Practicing Empathy

One of the most fundamental components of real bullying prevention is empathy. If our students care about how other’s feel, and show that they care through action, then they aren’t bullying. Empathy for someone and bullying them don’t go together!

There are TONS of books that you can read to help students understand empathy. Some titles we recommend are: Adrian Simcox Does NOT Have A Horse, It Will Be Okay, Be Kind, and The Invisible Boy.

For your younger elementary students, empathy might need to be taught in a more explicit manner. In our Empathy Adventure lesson, students are guided through the steps to treating others with empathy:

• Think About What Has Happened
• Look at the Person’s Face and Body for Clues
• Imagine What it Would be Like to be in Their Position
• Care About How They Are Feeling and Find a Way to Help

When children have a firm foundation of understanding, the next step is to practice! When faced with a situation, it’s helpful for children to have some level of comfort with their options; to know what they can do and to have done it before. You can do this by brainstorming empathetic language together, or another really great way to do this is through role-playing. You can use prompts like:

• “If you see a friend crying after they fall on the playground, what can you say or do?”
• “Your friend is feeling excited about their birthday this weekend, what can you say or do?”
• “Your teammate missed the goal and is sitting on the bench with their head down, what can you say or do?”

Another piece of empathy is being able to see things from another perspective. In our perspective taking lesson, students are given a scenario and asked to think about how different people might experience different feelings. This practice helps to understand that even in the same situation, people can have different thoughts and feelings.

Regulating Emotions

Emotional regulation is an important set of skills that help children manage their big feelings. These skills include: understanding feelings, identifying feeling, accepting emotions, expressing feelings, and using coping tools. You can read more about these skills here!

When children lack emotional regulation skills, they are at greater risk for making decisions that isolate them from peers and/or reacting with aggression, both of which are key when we are thinking about bullying prevention.

As school counselors, we can help children build their emotional regulation toolbox. We can:

• Read books like The Color Monster, The Way I Feel, In My Heart, Double Dip Feelings, Listening To My Body, and so many others!
• Model accepting our own emotions. Explain to children how you feel and remind them that all feelings are okay, even for adults! This might sound like, “I’m feeling really frustrated because my computer isn’t working and that’s okay!”
• Explain the locus of control. Children need to understand what is inside and what is outside their control. This knowledge can help alleviate some pressure and regulate their feelings for those things that they cannot change or control. This activity can be a great introduction!
• Teach the use of I-Messages. Start by teaching the formula, “I feel…”, “When you…”, “Could you please…” and then have them practice. You can provide scenarios when an I-statement could be helpful, or try out our I-Message puzzles!
• Coping skills, coping skills, coping skills. Start by explaining what coping skills are – a set of tools that can help us calm or brains and bodies. Next, practice different coping skills and help children discover what works best for them. Finally, role play scenarios when a coping skill can be helpful. Check out our coping skills unit here, where this is already created for you!

Navigating Social Situations

Bullying is a relational problem, and part of the prevention should include focusing on building relational skills. We talk more about these specific skills in a previous post, but generally speaking we want children to know what they want in a friend, how to make friends, how to interact with others, and how to manage conflict with friends. Social situations are tricky (and seem to get more tricky as they get older) so kids need some explicit education and time to practice so they can navigate them in ways that are both productive and effective.

To do that, you might consider trying:

• Helping them identify what is important to them in a friend by creating their unique friendship “recipe”, like in our Friendship Recipe lesson. You can do this through a game of Would You Rather, or you can prompt them with questions like: “How do you want a friend to treat you?” or “What do you want to do with friends?”
• Practicing identifying body language cues through a game of charades. This helps children learn to look for certain clues like facial expressions and small body movements that can help them figure out how their actions may have may someone else feel.
• Reading a book like, I Can’t Believe You Said That and offer scenarios for children to decide if they should “think it” or “say it”. You can find examples here.
• Role playing sticky friendship situations like competitiveness, navigating change, and setting rules. You can come up with your own, or use our Sticky Friendship Problems lesson!

Setting Boundaries

Everyone (children and adults, alike) have boundaries. Teaching about them helps children understand what boundaries are, why we have them, and how to set and maintain them in hopes that they will not behave in a way that makes others uncomfortable or accept behavior from others that is uncomfortable.

Each person has a unique set of beliefs about what is okay and what is not. In our friendship boundaries lesson, we discuss specific types of boundaries and help children recognize what they look like in everyday life. Something tricky for some kiddos is that because our boundaries are unique to us, children may assume what is okay with them is okay with everybody and that, we know, is not the case. This is where learning how to communicate boundaries comes into play.

A great strategy to teach is using I-Messages. An I-Message follows this structure:

• I feel __________,
• When you _____________________.
• Could you please (or I need you to) __________________?

It’s important to practice this communication strategy so when they come up against a situation that doesn’t feel right, like experiencing or witnessing bullying, they know what to do! You can do this by giving them a scenario (or having them come up with their own) and having them come up with I-Messages they could use to communicate their boundaries.

Resolving Conflict

Our children are experiencing conflict at school. It happens in the classroom, on the playground, in the gym or cafeteria, etc. We can’t take that away, but we can provide them with skills to resolve these problems so they don’t elevate to a more pervasive problem, like bullying.

The first step is to help children distinguish between different types of conflict. The term “bullying” gets thrown around quite a bit, but there is a big difference between disagreements, rude moments, mean moments, and bullying.

Another element of this is understanding the conflict escalator – how some choices we make can either make a conflict better or worse. To help children understand this, you might choose to discuss some scenarios like these:

• “What would happen if you and your friend disagreed about what to play at recess and you chose to push them down?”
• “What would happen if you said something unkind to a friend and then apologized?”
• “You and your friend don’t agree on which soccer team to cheer for and you decide to call them a mean name because of their choice. Is that making your problem bigger or smaller?”

Learning how to give and accept apologies is another important step in resolving conflict. Sometimes, we are quick to say “Say you’re sorry” when children hurt someone else’s feelings or do something they shouldn’t and we expect that children know how to apologize, but that’s not always true! This is a skill we can teach and practice.

Start by teaching the components of an apology. Explain what you are sorry for and what you will do next time. Then, practice building apologies. Provide your students with situations and have them come up with their own apologies! This could be fun as a game of charades, as a Scoot activity, as exit tickets, or in Quiz, Quiz, Trade!

Respecting Differences

Some children are uncomfortable with different, they assume different is bad. This can lead to social challenges because differences are all around us! To combat this, we can explicitly teach our kiddos about the importance of differences and how to talk about those differences.

To do this, you can:

• Read books like I’m Like You, You’re Like Me, What I Am, Same, Same, But Different, Just Ask, It’s Okay to be Different, Except When They Don’t, and SO many more.
• Introduce identity. Help children understand what our identities consist of and explore their own! What makes them who they are? Activities and conversations about identity will help to grow children’s awareness, but also their confidence.
• Define diversity. While it’s great to have things in common with people around us, differences make our world wonderful and they deserve to be celebrated! Expose them to different celebrations, traditions, languages, names, abilities, body types, foods, families, etc.
• Teach them to be curious. It’s okay to talk about our differences! Help them learn respectful ways to ask questions about other people by providing sentence stems like, “I’m wondering about __________” or “Can you teach me more about _____________?”

This is not something we can accomplish in one (or even a few) lesson(s), but our diversity and identity lessons are a good place to start!

Building Confidence

We know that children who do not feel good about themselves do not function well socially, academically, or otherwise. On the other hand, children who have a strong sense of self are more likely to engage socially, take appropriate risks, and succeed academically. Confidence is a key protective factor when it comes to bullying. A confident child is more likely to avoid or address bullying.

To help build a healthy confidence in students, you can target:

Strengths: Sometimes our kiddos need help figuring out what positive attributes they already have. Luckily, there are a bunch of ways to bring attention to them!

Self-Talk: How we talk to ourselves can either be helpful or hurtful. In this lesson, we explicitly teach about how self-talk can either help or hurt how we feel about ourselves. Students have the opportunity to see that illustrated through different examples. Then, children get to practice by writing a fun story about themselves, mad-lib style!

Bullying prevention is a hot topic in the education and school counseling world. It is hugely important AND it is more likely to be effective if it is done proactively throughout your program. While you might not be using specific bullying prevention activities, by focusing attention on building empathy, self-regulation, social skills, conflict resolution skills, and confidence you are arming your students with tools that will help them avoid becoming a bully or being bullied themselves!