Q: How can assemblies help with bullying strategies?
Q: I have a quite effective assembly which people can use and adapt to address various types of bullying. I take a sheet of flip chart paper and draw the outline of a pupil, a little overweight, a bit spotty, glasses, greasy hair. I am no artist and I think the more basic the drawing the better. As a secondary teacher I always put the drawing in uniform. I then show the assembled group the picture and tell them a story about how this is a picture of a pupil who joined the school recently. Sadly other students haven't accepted him/her and begin to call him/her names. I tend to use the names and phrases that the students use and I shout them out. I tell them that at first the comments have little effect. But after a while when other students join in the abuse the new pupil becomes very sad and eventually stops coming to school. They are encouraged to return but the abuse carries on. I then take the drawing and begin repeating the abuse and as I do so I begin to tear the picture into pieces, dropping each one to the floor. Eventually I am left with nothing. I ask the assembled students to tell me what has happened to our new pupil. I explain that this is what name calling does it tears people apart. It has quite a dramatic effect. Colleagues tell me that students often remind others about it when they might have been verbally abusive. Needless to say it can be adapted for other forms of abuse.
Jenny: At the risk of appearing to have an answer for everything (truly, I haven’t… I’ve just lived for a long time!!!). I’d like to say how brilliant your idea is. I’d never thought of using something like this in a secondary school and the visual image is very strong. A long time ago when some of these types of ideas were coming through in books like Canfield and Wells ‘101 Ways to Build Self Concept’, they put forward a similar idea whereby each pupil hung around their neck a sheet which said something like “I am likeable and deserve respect”. It was a primary initiative and whenever a child felt put down they would tear a bit of the label off (possibly this idea maybe a bit too “American” for us). However, the reason why I remember it is because one teacher I was working with was clashing with her head teacher and she put a similar label round her neck and every time she considered he spoke rudely to her she tore a bit off and then announced later to him that he had “demolished her!!!” Desperate times call for desperate measures!!! Your idea is simpler and far more effective. You might want to look at idea in ‘Turn Your School Round’ which is called Boost Ups and Put Downs (pg124). You read out a story that describes a normal kid’s day and you have two buckets on stage. Whenever any pupil considers something in a story to be hurtful they drop a pebble into the bucket. If they consider the event or the words to be positive they drop in a large brightly coloured star. Again, though, this maybe too primary oriented…anyway thank you for sending me down this memory trail.
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