Bullying: New Findings and Old Advice

President Obama is hosting a conference on bullying prevention this week, a subject, coincidentally, I had already planned to write about.  Several recent articles on the subject prompted my attention to this important topic.  One, from researchers at the University of California at Davis, posits that most bullying happens among relatively close peers.  While the stereotypical bullying of the outcast definitely happens, the researchers found that the dominant pattern is quite different. 

Sociologists Robert Faris and Diane Felme studied 3,722 6^th through 12^th graders from three North Carolina counties over three and a half years.  Using self-reported information about their friendships and any aggressive behavior they reported experiencing or perpetrating themselves, the researchers mapped and analyzed the data to determine the relationship between friendship and aggressive behavior.  They define aggression as “behavior directed toward harming or causing pain to another,” including hitting, shoving and kicking; name-calling and threats; and meanness that takes place “outside of a victim’s immediate purview such as spreading rumors and ostracism.”[i]  They conclude that approximately a third of the students were involved with aggressive behavior.[ii]

Working from the assumption that adolescents value social status, Professors Faris and Felme discovered that young people engage in aggressive behavior as they jockey for social position.  Most teenage aggression is directed at social rivals — “maybe one rung ahead of you or right beneath you,” as Faris put it, “rather than the kid who is completely unprotected and isolated.”  Faris goes on to say, “the overall rate of aggression seems to increase as status goes up. What it suggests is that a student thinks they get more benefit to going after somebody who is a rival”; in other words, the higher the stakes, the more intense the aggression.  Indeed, only those at the very bottom or the peak of the social ladder – the top 98% -- and those who genuinely don’t care about social status, don’t participate in aggressive behavior, either as agents or victims.  “Most victimization is occurring in the middle to upper ranges of status,” explains Faris.[iii]

Faris and Felme’s sophisticated mapping of the relationships among the individuals engaged in aggressive behavior focuses on groups rather than individuals and illuminates patterns that psychologists, preoccupied with individual experiences and traits, might not observe.  In addition, the sociologists have identified less obvious phenomena than the sensational cases that psychologists study.   What Faris and Felme have uncovered may well be “invisible” as Faris says.  That does not, however, make it any less significant for those enmeshed in fierce social competition on a daily basis.  In that context, “It’s entirely possible that one act, one rumor spread on the Internet could be devastating.”  We certainly know that!

I would say that this study, while interesting, just proves what we already know.  With girls, we usually refer to this kind of behavior as “mean girls” and we call the perpetrators are Queen Bees and their associates.  The point for us is, what do we do about it?  How do we help our girls to extricate themselves from this cycle of aggression – which, by the way, demonstrates very little difference between boys and girls? Plus, we need to address the behavior of both the aggressors and the victims, while recognizing that it’s very likely that girls will play both roles at different times. 

First, we need to remember that much of this behavior is invisible.  Rosalind Wiseman, the author of Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, & Other Realities of Adolescence, the basis for the movie Mean Girls, argues that girls skillfully operate under the adult radar.  In fact, some of the worst offenders are girls who present themselves positively to adults, a fact that provides a very effective cover for their cruel treatment of their peers.  So we must be careful not to be duped.

We also need to consider the messages we send our daughters, consciously or unconsciously.  What does she absorb about our values regarding friendship about how people should treat one another?  What do we communicate about our own feelings regarding social status? What is our role in our daughter’s social life?   Julie Rodriguez-Franson, our Lower School Counselor, warns that a mother often labels a girl a bully when she herself does not get along with the other mother.  “In fifth and sixth grades,” Rodriguez-Franson explains, “the girls become very aware of adult interactions as well.  They often talk about parents who can bully each other or intimidate another student when the mothers don’t get along.”

While Rosalind Wiseman’s work is now nine years old, her understanding of “girl world” and her advice for handling the social challenges inherent in that world knows no peer.  She aims to help parents raise self-confident young women, a goal that can be achieved in part through effective negotiation of the perils of “girl world.”  To this end, she offers a wealth of advice, for the parents of both the aggressors and the victims.

First, we should spend some time with our daughters helping them to articulate what they want and should expect in a friendship.  It’s helpful to draw up a list that answers questions such as

·         What does she want and need in a friendship? (trust, reliability, loyalty, telling you when they’re angry with you in a respectful way)

·         What are her rights in a friendship? (To be treated respectfully, with kindness and honesty)

·         What are her responsibilities in a friendship (To treat her friends ethically)

·         What would a friend hav to do or be like for her to ende the friendship? (Not listen to her, not honor her values and ethics)

·         Under what circumstances would she go to an adult for help with a problem with a friend? (When the problem feels too big to handle alone)

·         What are her friends’ rights and responsibilities in the friendship? (To listen even when it’s not easy to hear)[iv]

In both our Lower and Middle Schools guidance curricula, our girls to consider these very questions, so they have a basis for this kind of conversation with you.  The process of working through these questions provides an excellent forum for reinforcing the values that you have presumably been teaching your daughter since she snatched a shovel from someone else in the sandbox.  It’s also important, if possible to have this conversation early, during a period of social calm (preferably well before Middle School) and then to revisit it periodically (say before school starts each year.  A set of expectations to refer to when she encounters difficult social situations (which virtually every girl will) will provide a foundation from which to work.  

Next week, we’ll talk about how to handle the actual meanness, whether your daughter is the perpetrator, the victim or the bystander.

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[i] Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee, “Status Struggles: Network Centrality and Gender Segregation in Same- and Cross-Gender Aggression,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 76, No. 1, February 2011, 49.

[ii] Tara Parker-Pope, “Web of Popularity, Achieved by Bullying,” The New York Times, February 14, 2011.

[iii] Parker-Pope, “Web of Popularity, Achieved by Bullying”

[iv] Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence (New York, 2002), 173.

Blended Learning II

At the end of my last column, I suggested that blended learning had potential that extended well beyond simply using some interesting tools and websites in class.  Indeed, I would argue that technology may (and should) revolutionize education to a degree not seen since the invention of the printing press, ever.  The printing press arguably contributed to the Reformation and the scientific revolution, two events that permanently transformed Western Civilization and ultimately affected the rest of the world as well.  The Reformation spurred a major expansion in the number of people educated, and beginning with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the range of subjects taught has also expanded.  However, the actual delivery of education has changed hardly at all. 

Socrates taught a group of students sitting in a room.  He asked them questions and they responded.  Is that much different from today?  No.  In fact, institutions as august as Harvard Law School pride themselves on employing the Socratic method.  Today, students much of the time still sit in a classroom with a teacher at the head of the class.  They read books, listen to lectures, answer questions in class, take tests and exams, and write papers, as they have done for centuries. 

The agricultural revolution, the Reformation, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment failed to change the delivery of education – why should the information revolution do so?  And if it does, how will it?  The possibility certainly exists that it won’t.  Academia is remarkably conservative – it is after all the process of transferring the wisdom and knowledge of the past from one generation to another.  However, the forces for change are gathering daily and the potential for a transformation that will benefit students and thus society is at hand. 

First the answer to why change might actually happen.  The explanation comes from a work referred to in my last column, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.  They argue that technology is proving to be a “disruptive innovation” in education.  Disruptive innovation occurs when an innovation emerges that completely transforms an industry.  Examples of disruptive innovations include: the Kodak camera (and then the digital camera), the Bell telephone, the Sony transistor radio, the Ford Model T, the Xerox copier, and the microcomputer.[i]  A disruptive innovation starts out as something inferior to whatever already exists.  “But by making the product affordable and simple to use, the disruptive innovation benefits people who had been unable to consume the back-plane product.”[ii] Those people start to buy the new product, it gradually improves, and over time transforms the market.  Take the microcomputer, for example.  When it first came out, only big, powerful mainframe computers existed.  No one could really imagine why anyone would want a device that couldn’t really do much.  But microprocessors grew more powerful; software became simpler, and over time more and more people began using microcomputers.  Eventually, microcomputers came to dominate the computer market, in the process, completely altering the way we do business, communicate, manage our personal affairs, and even entertain ourselves. 

According Christensen’s research, the growth of online education -- from 45,000 to 1 million participants in eight years[iii]  --  is following the pattern of a disruptive innovation.  People are turning to technology to provide various services that their schools do not.  For example, students in schools with limited programs take AP courses on line; or students who have credits to make up, take classes on line, as do home-schoolers.  In addition, as programs develop that allow students to learn at their own pace in ways that fit with their learning styles, technology will either replace tutors or make that kind of individualized instruction available to students who previously couldn’t afford it.  Remarkably, many of Christensen, Horn and Johnson’s  predictions published in 2008 have already come to pass.  

Where will this disruption take us?  To “student-centric instruction,” say Christensen, Horn, and Johnson. In this process, the role of the teacher is going to change.  In some ways, the teacher will need to be more skillful, know her students even better, and understand and be able to teach to different learning styles more effectively.  In an environment where students can access virtually all knowledge with the click of a mouse, the teacher becomes the facilitator rather than the purveyor of knowledge.  This will certainly take some adjustment, but ultimately the reward will be greater student engagement and learning. 

Blended learning accomplishes the shift to more student-centric teaching and learning in several ways.  The most significant way comes through an approach called “reverse learning” where, the teacher records lesson that students watch for homework (often along with other assignments such as problems, reading or writing), freeing up classtime for hands-on activities or individualized instruction.  With recorded lessons, students can go back and repeat parts they didn’t understand – as many times as they want.  They can refer to the lesson while they are applying the lesson – for example, while they are doing a math problem that demonstrates the concept being taught.  Because the lesson was taught on line the night before, during class, the teacher will have more time to spend with individual students to ensure mastery.  Or they might have more time for labs in science.  Or they might have more time for student led discussions, role plays, or debate I history. 

A teacher at Hockaday, a girls school in Dallas, is using reverse learning in his AP Biology class.  He has created ten-minute lectures to present content previously taught in class.  The students watch the lectures for homework, leaving more time for labs and class discussion.  He reports having completed more labs by midyear than he had done all year last year.  His students love being able to watch his lectures on their own time, as well as review them as often as they want.

On the opposite end of the spectrum age wise, our own Linda Caleb and Kathy Chaney dramatically changed the way they teach fifth grade Design Tech.  The students now do most of their content learning online.  The class only meets every few weeks, but does so for larger blocks -- even a full day (in essence, collecting and merging all the short blocks they didn’t use on a regular basis).  During that time they tackle big projects, like building small solar cars, where they apply what they learned independently.  This approach has proved enormously successful.  The girls have responded extremely well to the online learning environment, eagerly doing their assignments and even expanding beyond the required work when a topic peaks their interest. Moreover, the hands-on projects are much more effective when they have longer periods of time in which to work.   

Discussion boards, wikis, and voicethread offer effective opportunities for reflection outside of class. Students can do a reading or watch a video and then respond on line.  They have time to think before joining an in class discussion, and perhaps, more importantly, they interact with their peers and their teacher prior to the class discussion making for a richer in class experience. In addition, in a traditional setting, most assignments are handed into the teacher who grades them and returns them to the individual students, interaction occurring only bilaterally between the student and teacher.  In these kinds of collaborative, multi-lateral environments, students have more opportunity to learn from each other.  Teachers have also found that because everyone must participate in these types of online activities, there is more accountability.  Moreover, they have discovered that students who are reluctant to speak up in class, often readily participate online. 

Finally, quick online assessments allow teachers to have a more accurate gauge of their students’ understanding.  Quiz programs like Quia (www.quia.com), used by the Hockaday biology teacher, allow teachers to create quizzes that measure efficiently measure students’ grasp of material, while providing students with immediate feedback.  It also produces reports for the teacher which enables him or her to have a more nuanced picture of students’ understanding.  Another online resource, Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) makes students complete ten problems on a given concept before being allowed to move on.  In addition, it can provide teachers with specific information about how long it took a student to do each problem and which problems she answered correctly and incorrectly.  As Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy said at the NAIS conference last week, “the expectation should be mastery not a grade.”

Another benefit of online education are the enhanced opportunities for students to collaborate.  For a number of years, we have understood the benefits of collaborative activities.  However, there are always logistical challenges related to time and space – it’s not always easy for students with busy schedules who may live miles from each other to get together to work on group projects.  However, online, space and time are irrelevant.  Whether it’s through voice thread, discussion boards, wikis, or any number of online collaborative tools, including Google docs and apps, students can work together in all kinds of ways.  Moreover, they can work with students from other schools and from other parts of the world.  The possibilities are truly endless, allowing for multiple dimensions of learning. 

Employing technology in education does not mean substituting a computer for the teacher.  Nor, does it mean simply taking what we already do and putting it online.  In some ways, the preparation for blended teaching takes longer and is more differentiated, intense, and nuanced.  As students learn from each other as well as from the teacher and the vast wealth of the web, they assume more ownership of their own learning, while at the same time their teachers have a greater capacity to ensure that each individual achieves mastery.  In a blended learning environment, students are more engaged, held more accountable, and have more opportunities to express their thoughts, to reflect, to collaborate, and to learn through hands-on, experiential activities.  They will learn more better.

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[i] Christensen, Horn, and Johnson, Disrupting Class, 50.

[ii] Christensen, Horn, and Johnson, 47.

[iii] Christensen, Horn, and Johnson, 91-92.

Blended Learning I

For the past four weeks, in addition to hosting a Chinese teacher, making decisions about snow days, and determining whether we have anything to learn from the Tiger Mother, I’ve been taking a course entitled “Introduction to Blended Learning” offered by the Online School for Girls.  Our own Director of Academic Technology, Craig Luntz and Melissa Wert, the Technology Integration Specialist at Harpeth Hall, a girls school in Nashville, TN which, with Holton, is one of the founding members of OSG, taught the course. 

First, a little background on the Online School for Girls: In 2009, Holton-Arms joined three other girls schools, Harpeth Hall in Nashville, Laurel in Cleveland, and Westover in Washington, CT, in founding the Online School for Girls.  Our intent was to create a program that took what we knew about how girls learn best and apply it to virtual learning.  We started by offering three classes in the fall of 2009; and next year the roster includes 12 semester and full year courses  including AP Computer Science, AP Music Theory, Japanese, Genetics, Intro to Human Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease and Intro to Animation.  For the first time, OSG is teaching summer courses including Review of Algebra I, a writing course, intro to computer programming, and courses to help students transition from the second to third year levels in French and Spanish.  Eight other schools have joined the original four as consortium members while twenty-seven schools have taken advantage of affiliate status.

The percentage of students taking online courses nationwide is expanding at an exponential rate.  Last year, 1.5 million K-12 students were enrolled in at least one online course;[i] this represents more than a 50% increase in five years.   Some kind of online learning is available to students in 48 states plus the District of Columbia and 27 states and DC have established statewide virtual high schools.  The largest of those, the Florida Virtual School, enrolled 220,000 students in 2009-10.  Michigan and Alabama both require students to take on online course to receive a high school diploma.  Business writers, Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, in their influential Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns predict that by 2019, approximately half of all US high school classes will be taken online[ii]; according to their calculations, the percentage will grow to 80% by 2024.[iii]   We noticed this trend in education, and decided not to ignore it, but rather to embrace it. 

All OSG courses are taught by teachers from member schools, and experience quickly taught that teaching online is quite different from face-to-face teaching.  This insight prompted OSG to launch professional development courses for teachers.  This is the third time OSG has offered the four week course I took and there were enough sign-ups to run two sections of 22 students each.  In addition to Dena Greene and Ann Vaughn from Holton, my classmates included teachers and administrators from across the country and two from the American School in Bombay. 

But it’s very possible that you’re thinking, all that’s fine, but what is blended learning?  Actually, that’s a good question and one to which there is no set answer.  For the purposes of this course, blended learning was defined as “courses that combine face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning and reduced classroom contact hours (reduced seat time)"[iv].  So what makes it blended is that teaching and learning take place both online and in a traditional classroom setting, as opposed to a purely online class or solely in face-to-face setting.   iNACOL (the international Association of k-12 online Learning) predicts that blended learning "is likely to emerge as the predominant teaching model of the future"[v] .

The emergence of online learning as a major factor in education prompted my taking the blended learning class.  I also knew that I would learn about key technological resources so that I would better understand what is available to teachers.  I wanted not just to learn about the resources, but actually try them out; to find out how easy or hard it might be to master them; and to explore firsthand the opportunities and challenges to employing these resources in our teaching.

I would divide what I learned into two categories: 1) mastering various specific technical vehicles; 2) developing an understanding of the applications for these vehicles in an educational setting as well as the theoretical aspects of blended learning.  There is layering here: when using technology, you need to understand the vehicle’s potential to understand how to apply it; you will understand that potential better if you have actually tried to use it yourself. 

Quite honestly, once you start playing around with the tools, ideas for their utilization naturally emerge.  In addition, when you are taking a class where others are also experimenting with the same technology, you benefit from the sharing of ideas among classmates.  In addition, because the blended learning class takes place on line, you are both learning the technology and learning online simultaneously, another layering aspect of the experience. 

The course used Voicethread and discussion boards extensively.  I had used discussion boards a little before – they basically consist of posting a comment to which others can respond and vice versa.  In essence, you have a written online conversation amongst a group of people. Like discussion boards, all of our teachers have access to Voicethread, and a number of them have already integrated into their teaching.  Voicethread allows you to write, record, or film your comments, so it offers a more personal format.   For my first Voicethread, in which I was supposed to introduce myself, I prepared notes and redid my submission three or four times.  I also had to get accustomed to simple things such as where to position myself for the computer camera.  By the end of the four-week course, though, I was producing Voicethreads with the ease of writing an email or making a phone call.  This is very user friendly-  technology.

For one assignment, we had to use a brainstorming tool called bubbl (bubbl.us).  Here I encountered some frustration because we were supposed to accompany our bubbl diagram with a recorded explanation.  I tried three times to add my explanation without success; finally, I switched from video to a voice recording and it worked.  This was the one time that the teacher’s explanation of how to use the tool did not prove detailed enough and it highlighted the importance of thorough instructions, a fact stressed in one of the articles we read.

We also had to learn how to make a screencast.  In a screencast, you film what is happening on the computer screen with accompanying commentary.  When you’ve seen a video that demonstrates how to go through a series of steps on a computer – for example, how to use a new software program, you’ve watched a screencast.  You look at something like that and think, how would I ever be able to do that?  However, with tools like screencast-o-matic (www.screencast-o-matic.com), it’s actually remarkably simple. 

More specifically, in that assignment, we were supposed to use the screencast to describe a tool or resource to our classmates.  Once again there were layers.  In my case, I chose to demonstrate something called Prezi.  Prezi is a free presentation tool somewhat similar to powerpoint, but much more dynamic.  I had seen it used and was intrigued to learn it for myself.  So I had to learn two programss: screencasting and Prezi.  This was my favorite assignment and from a time and technological perspective, it was the hardest.  But successfully mastering the rudiments of Prezi (which is very cool) and creating a screencast that explained it proved tremendously gratifying.

As an added benefit, we also learned about the resources and tools that other people presented.  I discovered wolfram-alpha (www.wolframalpha.com), a site that describes itself as a “computational knowledge engine.”  You can enter a mathematical expression and it will give you multiple different ways to understand the equation: graph, geometric form, alternate forms of the equation, roots, derivatives, indefinite integral, global minimum, etc, etc – from algebra 1 to calculus.  And the site doesn’t just do math – you can find demographic information about a country and then compare to other countries; or statistics associated with a professional sports team; or the normal lung capacity and body mass index of a human of any given height and weight.  Amazing!

Someone else shared the Google Art Project (www.googleartproject.com).  On this site you can explore the collections at museums all over the world.  The Metropolitan in New York or Versailles or the Uffizi all wait for the click of your mouse and you can move from room to room, zooming in on individual works of arts to a point where you can even see brushwork.  And again, it’s all free! 

I accomplished all that I hoped and more.  I learned a lot about the resources that are available for teachers, some of which have uses for administrators.  I learned that there are a huge array of resources out there, some of which may be more useful than others.  And I learned that they are all quite accessible and easy to use – not more than an hour or a 3-4 tries achieves mastery of the rudiments and allows one to use the tools with some facility.  Technology can be intimidating both because we think it will be complicated and because we don’t think we have the time to master it.  I would say these characteristics no longer pose obstacles– quite the opposite.  The challenge is that there are so many useful tools available that knowing where to start and how to find them can be overwhelming.  The web comes to the rescue here, too, with sites like ISTE (International Society for Technology in Learning) Learning (www.istelearning.org) that provide direction. 

However, the implications of this technology go way beyond simply being able to record a voicethread, create a nifty Prezi presentation, or be presented with all the aspects of a calculus problem.  As we think about technology as a “disruptive innovation” in education, to use Christensen, Horn and Johnson’s phrase, it is these implications that stand out as truly important, something I now understand much better than I did five weeks ago.  We’ll talk about that next week.

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[i] John Watson, Amy Murin, Lauren Vashaw, Butch Gemin, and Chris Rapp, Keeping Pace With K-12 Online Learning: An Annual Review of Policy and Practice, 2010,( iNACOL)

[ii] Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (2008), 98

[iii] Christensen, Horn, and Johnson, 102

[iv] Dziuban, Charles D., Joel L. Hartman, and Patsy D. Moskal. Blended Learning.
      Boulder, CO: Educause, 2004. Research Bulletin 2004.5: Educause. Web. 15 June 2010, 2.
     <http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERB0407.pdf>

[v] Watson, John. Blending Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face
     Education. Vienna, VA: North American Council for Online Learning, 2008.
     Promising Practices in Online Learning. North American Council for Online
     Learning. Web. 10 June 2010. <http://www.inacol.org/research/
     promisingpractices/NACOL_PP-BlendedLearning-lr.pdf>, 4.