What is Bullying Prevention

Bullying has many formal definitions, but typically it is when someone repeatedly uses threats, intimidation or aggression to obtain objects, activities, or social gain from others. Bullying prevention focuses on the strategies for reducing bullying behavior by blending PBIS with explicit instruction and redefining the bullying construct. Teaching students to identify and respond effectively to the bullying and harmful behavior of others needs to match the students’ developmental level. The goal is the same – to reduce bullying behavior – but the process may look different across communities and across elementary, middle, and high schools.

Foundational Elements

There are four foundational elements of bullying prevention.

School-Wide Expectations  

Everyone in school should know what it means to be respectful. They should know what it looks like and how it feels to be respected. On the other side, they also should be able to identify if, when, and how someone else’s behavior is inappropriate. School-wide definitions help everyone stay consistent.

Signals and Routines for Unwanted Behavior

Building on the school-wide foundation of expected behavior, all students should know the signal and routine to let someone know their behavior is unacceptable and needs to stop. The signal is something anyone can use anywhere, anytime. It’s short, easy to remember, and easy to do.

Responses to the Stop Signal

When a student signals a behavior is unwanted and needs to stop, other students need to know how to respond. Students should be taught appropriate responses that are calm and responsible.

Recruiting Help

The last routine to teach is how students can recruit help from an adult when they experience bullying, harassment, or intimidation.

Why Address Bullying Prevention?

Bullying most often involves student-to-student interactions, and is noted by the National School Safety Center as the “most enduring and underrated problem in U.S. schools.”[1] Over and over, the effects of bullying have been documented:

• In multiple surveys, 25% to 30% of students report experiencing bullying behavior in schools[2]  
• Both students who engage in bullying and students who experience bullying are more likely to experience school failure.
• Bullying is not done by a small number of students who are socially and emotionally isolated but is common across socio-economic status, gender, grade, and class.

This means every school would benefit from strategies to prevent bullying in their building as a way to increase student safety, prevent problem behavior, and improve student outcomes.

Bullying Prevention in a Tiered Framework

Not all students respond equally to bullying prevention strategies, for lots of reasons. Schools implementing PBIS will find it to be an effective framework for preventing and reducing bullying behavior in schools. The strategies listed here come from the resource Reducing the Effectiveness of Bullying Behavior in Schools.

Tier 1

All students and school personnel are taught directly and formally how to behave in safe, respectful, and responsible ways in every school setting. The emphasis is on teaching and encouraging positive social skills and character traits. At this tier, all students may also learn how to respond to the problem behavior of others.

Tier 2

Students whose behaviors don’t respond to Tier 1 support receive additional preventative strategies involving:

• Targeted social skills instruction
• Increased adult supervision and positive attention
• Specific, daily feedback on their behavioral progress
• Additional academic support, if necessary

Tier 3

Students who don’t respond to Tier 1 and 2 support receive intensive preventative strategies. This might include:

• Highly individualized academic and/or behavior intervention planning
• More comprehensive, person-centered, function-based wraparound processes
• School-family-community mental health support.

Getting Started with Bullying Prevention  

The first step to starting bullying prevention in your school is to identify whether bullying behavior is a major concern in your building. How often does bullying happen at your school? How many students are involved either as someone demonstrating bullying behavior or as a target of the behavior? Decide as a leadership team whether it is important to you to invest in prevention at your school.

Teaching students formal skills and routines for responding to the problem behavior of others is more than bullying prevention. Even if bullying is not a targeted priority for a school, your school’s Tier 1 PBIS systems should include:

1. A school-wide approach for identifying if, when, and how the behavior of others is inappropriate.  
2. Specific routines for indicating someone’s inappropriate behavior should stop.
3. Formalized strategies students can use to get help from adults when aggression, intimidation or harassment continues.

These procedures should be relevant in all school settings – formal and informal – and address expectations for online interactions, as well as rumors, and face-to-face interactions.

Bullying Prevention Self-Assessment  

This 12-item self-assessment may be used by school teams (typically with their coach) to determine if the core features of an effective bullying prevention system are in place.  Self-assessment may be used.

• Proactively identify what a school is already doing well
• To select components that need to be adopted/added
• As a way to assess/evaluate if implementation efforts result in the core features of bullying prevention being adopted and used successfully.