Teacher Workshop Summary Document

Teachers’ Workshop Summary document

The following document outlines the sessions held at the Teacher Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, 19th-20th October 2002, and the feedback received from the teachers and VICTEC team members.

1) Aims of the Teacher Workshop:

The overall goal of the teachers’ workshop was to provide an overview of the VICTEC project to teachers, and most importantly work with the teachers to get their views and experiences about bullying and victimisation behaviour cross-culturally in the schools where they work.

A breakdown of the Teacher workshop programme was to:

- Provide an overview of the VICTEC project including the goals and aims.

- Present recent research findings about bullying behaviour in schools in the U.K, Germany, and Portugal.

- Allow teachers to share their experiences about bullying behaviour, differences in bullying behaviour cross-culturally, and discuss intervention strategies that are successful or unsuccessful.

- Explore how we might use ICT and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) to allow children to explore bullying issues.

- Examine how ICT is currently being used in schools throughout Europe dealing with Personal and Social Education (PSE).

- Set the goals for VICTEC in terms of teacher involvement. Schedule a preliminary timetable of work and deadlines to be reached.

2) Feedback from the bullying presentation

The University of Hertfordshire presented a detailed account of the profiles of children involved in bullying behaviour, the extent of bullying problems in schools cross-culturally, the precursors of bullying behaviour and some of the consequences of bullying behaviour.

Overall, the feedback from teachers regarding this session was positive. The research findings presented generated a lot of interest and discussion between the teachers regarding the relationship between bullying behaviour, behaviour problems, health problems etc, and the character profiles of the children involved in bullying behaviour.

Some teachers asked for further information and a copy of the presentation for future reference.

Contact Details:

• Sarah Woods, Psychology Dept., University of Hertfordshire

Tel: +44 (0)1707 285 066

e-mail:

· Professor Dieter Wolke, ALSPAC, Bristol University

Tel: +44 (0)117 928 8134

e-mail:

• Website: http://www.autor.pt/victec/

Further Reading:

• Wolke, D., Woods, S., Bloomfield, L.. & Karstadt, L (2000). The association between physical and relational bullying and behaviour problems among primary school children. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 41(8), 989-1002.

• Wolke, D., Woods, S., & Karstadt, L. (2001). Bullying involvement in primary school and common health problems. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 85, 197-201.

• Wolke, D., Woods, S., Schulz, H., & Stanford, K. (2001). Bullying and victimisation of primary school children in South England and South Germany: Prevalence and school factors. British Journal of Psychology, (92), 673-696.

3) What is happening in our schools session:

Teachers were divided up into 4 groups for this session. Each group had a teacher representing each country and a member of the VICTEC team.

This session provided useful insights into the different bullying problems across cultures in schools in the U.K., Germany and Portugal. Each school also provided some concrete examples to highlight these differences.

The groups then discussed the different policies and interventions that have been tried out, and differences in approaches cross-culturally.

Summary Table of discussion groups about bullying behaviour and intervention strategies

U.K. / Portugal / Germany
School Size / Rural School: 106 pupils
Urban School: 215-230 / 350 - 2000 pupils / 215 – 240 pupils
Age of children / 4-12 / 10-19 / 6-10
Examples of Bullying / · Urban &Rural school has problems with relational bullying problems.
· Not wearing the latest kind of footwear.
· Not having the latest video.
· Problems with parental aggression in rural school.
· Mobile phone bullying. / · Problems with ethnic bullying.
· Older pupils bullying the younger children in the school. / · Bullying is more of a problem with the boys.
· Boys not being allowed to play football with the other children.
Interventions & policies to tackle bullying problems / · Team efforts and ethos of ‘equality’.
· Try and create empathy among pupils.
· School newsletter.
· Team building & sport.
· ‘Circle Time’.
· ‘Bench of Sadness’.
· Schools counsels.
· School assemblies. / · Talking to the victim to improve self-esteem.
· ‘code of practice’.
· Banning mobile phones.
· ‘CIVIC’ education. / · Role play.
· No government regulations for tackling bullying problems.
· Individual schools have their own guidelines.

4) How we might use ICT and VLE as part of PSE in schools

- Demonstrations of ICT packages integrating educational aspects of bullying behaviour were shown to the teachers. Feedback was collected regarding the appropriateness of the packages and whether teachers would actually implement them alongside classroom sessions regarding PSE.

- Teachers were asked how the demonstrations could be improved and whether elements of these improvements could be incorporated into the VICTEC VLE.

- Teachers were shown the 3-D character that INESC had been working on as an example for the VICTEC project. The feedback was that the character looked quite frightening, the eyes needed to be improved, the ears were not right and the head was too large. Teachers overall preferred cartoon looking characters such as the one below.

- Teachers believed that using ICT to deal with bullying issues would be particularly beneficial for boys as they would be able to depersonalise themselves when interacting with the VLE. Boys are generally much more reluctant to talk about personal experiences whereas girls are happy to. The distancing and anonymous nature of the VLE would be advantageous for boys in this sense.

5) Scenario Development:

- One of the major work packages for the project is to generate bullying scenarios. To ensure that up to date types of bullying behaviour are enacted in these scenarios, teachers worked together in groups to generate scenarios that are realistic, and may have happened at their school. This also allowed the team to take cultural differences into account when designing the scenarios to be depicted in the VLE.

Country / Scenario Examples
U.K. / · Child starts to notice that things are missing from his packed lunch. Tells the teachers but it still keeps happening every day.
· Cloakroom scenarios where child is excused to go to the toilet during class, later the coat is stamped on and ripped or the bag could be hidden.
· 3 girls in classroom. Two girls start smirking at the girl who attempts to answer the question the teacher is asking. The two girls then start to ‘tut’ and ‘sigh’ every time the girl tries to speak.
Portugal / · New child at school and an older child who is repeating a school year but is good at football. Younger child asks to play football, the older one insults him and tells him he’s useless etc. Other children pressure him and then start to steal his belongings.
Germany / · Bus scene where a dominant child has his/her own specific seat and is aggressive towards anyone else who tries to sit there. New pupil arrives at the school and tries to sit in this seat and starts getting bullied.

6) VICTEC timetable for teachers.

October 19th-20th 2002 / Teacher Workshop.
End Oct 2002 / Feedback from Teacher workshop to be circulated to all schools.
Nov – Jan 2002 / Teachers will have the opportunity to send in scenarios for the VLE that have been discussed with the children. These could be posted onto the VICTEC website.
End Nov 2002 / VICTEC work package to be prepared for all schools involved in the project.
End Nov/Beg Dec 2002 / Visit schools with bullying scenario storyboards and ask the children if these are relevant to them. Show children some of the characters which we propose to use in the VLE to see which they prefer. Have a series of different school environments to show the teachers to determine preferences.
Jan 2003- Feb 2003 / Pilot the bullying interview in UK schools. Validation of empathy and bullying instruments in UK, Germany and Portugal.
Date to be confirmed for User Evaluation. / This will be carried out in schools in UK, Portugal and Germany to assess how believable the children found the VLE, whether they enjoyed the VLE experience etc.
November 2003 / pre-test of empathy assessment.
January 2004 / Demonstration to schools of finalised version of the VLE.
February 2004 / Post test of the Empathy evaluation in Germany, U.K and Portugal.
June 2004 / Bullying evaluation with the VLE to be held at UH involving 400 children from schools around Hertfordshire.

Contact Details for Further information about the project

· The University of Salford, U.K.

Ruth Aylett, Project Manager

Tel: +44 (0)161-295-2912

e-mail:

Malcolm Padmore: Educationist

e-mail:

· The University of Hertfordshire, U.K.

Sarah Woods, Psychologist working on the development of bullying scenarios

Tel: +44 (0)1707 285 066

e-mail:

· The University of Bamberg, Germany

Carsten Zoll, Psychologist working on the evaluation of empathy

Tel: +049 (0)951 /863-1965

e-mail:

· INESC, Lisbon, Portugal

Isabel Alexandre, Working on character development and the technical toolkit

e-mail:

or visit the website at: