What is bullying? This has been the focus of all my classroom lessons for the month of September. We discuss, at length, that bullying is when one student is mean to another, it happens more than once, and they haven’t been able to get it to stop. We talked about how bullying is different from just being mean, and that while both are problems, if someone is being unkind, a student can usually use problem-solving steps they’ve learned through Second Step to solve the problem. Bullying is when the problem keeps happening, they’ve tried to solve it and can’t, and is one-sided. Being one-sided means that a problem is considered bullying when one person is being unkind to another, but that person is not being unkind back. Having an argument with another, then, while is might be a problem isn’t bullying.
We will continue to talk about what bullying is as well as what to do when you recognize bullying in the coming months.