Case Study 14B
Team LEAD—Leadership, Empathy, Accountability, and Discussion: Addressing Social Aggression through Bystander Leadership Groups
Denise Koebcke
“Please, Mrs. K., there must be something you can do about this!” Thus began my journey into the realm of relational aggression nearly ten years ago, though at the time I didn’t yet know or understand the terminology. It was a journey that began with throwing my lesson plans out the window for a day and focusing instead on simply listening to my seventh graders and letting them take the lead in solving their social issues.
My middle school in Valparaiso, a socioeconomically stable town in Northwest Indiana, just an hour outside Chicago, Illinois, houses approximately seven hundred sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. After teaching sixth-grade language arts there for approximately twelve years, I decided to move to seventh grade. My first year teaching seventh-grade language arts became a turning point for my students and me, perhaps because of the personal relationships I had already formed with so many of the kids who had been in my sixth-grade class the year before. The level of trust they had already established with me, I believe, prompted the stream of weeping girls and sullen boys who, by mid-October, seemed to continually traipse down to my new seventh-grade classroom to seek advice.
On the day in question, a student came up to my desk toward the end of homeroom and asked if I had a moment. As my homeroom kids worked on homework from other classes, she sat on the floor behind my desk and started to cry. Amid the tears tumbled out a story of hurt feelings, exclusion, poor self-esteem, and loneliness from a girl who seemingly had everything under control and everything going for her. I listened much more than I spoke, and when the bell rang for my honors language arts block to begin, she quietly rose to return to her seat, still in tears and completely miserable. I sat at the front of the room, looking out at a group of kids I knew quite well and cared about a great deal, and knew that whether I taught English that period or not, they weren’t going to learn a thing until we dealt with the social issues that had apparently gotten way out of hand. I threw aside my lesson plans and simply said, “Over the past couple of months, so many of you have come to me unhappy or angry over issues with your friends this year. So today I’m not teaching English. I want to talk about what’s going on that is making you all so miserable.”
In that moment, my first bystander leadership team was born. Hands lifted immediately, if somewhat tentatively. Both girls and boys shared their frustrations and concerns, and it became abundantly clear to me that they had all hurt each other and been hurt in return. Most importantly, it was obvious that none of us, myself included, had all the answers. The more they spoke, though, the lighter the air in the room became, the taller they sat, and the closer they grew. As they left the room a full ninety minutes later, I recognized we had just had the most productive and enlightening lesson of the year, not in language arts, but in humanity, and it wasn’t I who had done the teaching. They had also left me with a challenge I knew I had to accept: “Please, Mrs. K., there must be something you can do about this!”
Though I had always been quite confident in my ability to work with kids and understand them, our discussion that day had opened my eyes to the fact that most of the assumptions I had made about kids and a good portion of the advice I had given them concerning peer issues were not helpful and were perhaps even harmful. They left my room that day much kinder and more considerate of each other, but I knew the change would be short-lived unless I found a way to continue their growth and found it quickly. As I researched peer aggression online, I made several important decisions. First, I believed strongly that this wasn’t just a girl or boy issue, but one that involved all kids equally. I needed to share the information I had gathered with the kids and give them the knowledge base from which to discuss their own experiences. Most importantly, I had to find a way to continue meeting during the school day, and it couldn’t be during my language arts classes.
As the student council sponsor, I decided we would continue our discussions for the rest of the year under the student council heading, and I would allow more kids to join student council as “members at large.” We met during the school day during study halls and raised money to bring in speakers on the topic of “bullying.” By the end of the year, we had created enough interest in the issue to secure an Indiana safe schools grant; we used the grant to contract with the Ophelia Project out of Erie, Pennsylvania, for staff training and a high school mentor training workshop on bullying. The Ophelia Project used their Creating a Safe School (CASS) curriculum to train teachers and high school mentors in the language of peer aggression. We gained approval from both the high school and middle school administrators to institute the CASS Mentor Program, in which the high school mentors would visit the middle schools once a month, working with sixth and seventh graders on peer aggression issues.
Prompted by that one discussion with a group of seventh graders, our school district had set in motion a fledgling antibullying campaign. While bringing in professionals in this new field was exciting, I was eager to continue exploring the student energy that had created the entire movement. Therefore, as the new school year began, I moved my eighth-grade student group out of Student Council and named it Team LEAD in order to focus specifically on bystander leadership and promoting prosocial behaviors among kids. Core values of the group were teaching Leadership, Empathy, Accountability, and Discussion in order to help kids manage their own social interactions more positively, resiliently, and productively. One goal for the group was to harness student energy and discussion as a key component in establishing a prosocial climate in our school; in addition, we wished to create a more natural progression for a broader peer mentoring and role-modeling program. How could we move our kids forward in a way that was less contrived and less dictated by adults? How could we take their concerns and give them more ownership so that they could move forward in a way that made sense to them, allowing them to initiate peer mentoring ideas and timelines? The Team LEAD concept grew from a desire to empower kids and create a more authentic leadership experience.
Based on my experience having sponsored many different leadership groups over the years, from student government to honor societies to drug-free clubs to journalism groups, Team LEAD was designed to be unique in several important ways:
Lessons Learned from My Own Group and Those in Other Communities
Given a window of opportunity, student teams will readily form themselves, just as my first student team did. The question for educators becomes, what next? Student-initiated spirit weeks, dances, fund-raisers, and other concrete, finite activities or projects are things teachers understand and feel comfortable facilitating. Peer aggression and prosocial climate development, however, are not short-term, finite issues; the task is never accomplished but continually evolving. Through our continuous efforts to promote positive climate change in our schools, the kids, teachers, and I have discovered the following truths:
“Bullying” is not the problem; it is just one symptom of a much larger societal problem. American children are at risk in our society today, not just some of them, but all of them. Society has changed drastically in a comparatively short amount of time; when the “baby boomers” were born, most would agree that parents were the number-one influence on kids, and church and school were high on the list; peers were the major variable in the list. “Boomers,” however, have created a new world for today’s kids, one in which the media and the cyberworld have a larger impact than we ever imagined; in fact, some would argue that the number-one influence on our kids today is the media, followed by their peers. Not surprisingly, bullying has become this decade’s buzzword in education. Why then, with such a public push toward creating safer climates, haven’t we yet found a way to “end” bullying, a curriculum or a program that “works”?
The answer is twofold. Implying that we can “end” bullying or find what “works” sets up a dangerous mind-set for all involved. As adults, we know better than anyone that there is no perfect world in which everyone is kind and loving 100 percent of the time. In addition, there is rarely one right answer or solution in dealing with human relationships; so much depends on individual perspective and context. Implying to our kids that we can put an end to conflicts, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and all forms of aggression does them a disservice because, in doing so, we set them and ourselves up for failure right from the start. If that’s the standard, we will see proof of our failure every time something unpleasant happens, and the truth is, wherever human beings interact, there will be conflict. This is the very reason kids and adults throw up their hands and believe that efforts to change the social climate will never work.
In working with our Team LEAD kids, we have discovered that to effectively empower students to create positive change in this area, it helps a great deal to shift the terminology we use from “what works,” a very finite, succeed-or-fail mind-set, to “what helps,” the more growth-oriented mind-set. This small shift may seem insignificant, yet it empowers kids to recognize small successes and how each individual improvement can have a ripple effect, making a much larger difference down the line. In addition, we have discovered that perhaps it is time to shift the emphasis away from labels such as “bully,” “target,” and so on, especially in working with teenagers, who cringe at that terminology. Creating a prosocial climate for kids is not about labels such as “bully” or “target.” Instead, a more real-world focus on helping kids find their strengths, explore altruism, and grow as human beings will create opportunities to practice prosocial behaviors in a more palatable, less threatening way.
Character is not developed in a vacuum; it is natural and right for kids to face challenges and conflicts and learn how to deal with them positively. If we ask a group of parents today what they most want for their child, a large percentage will say they just want their child to be “happy.” Too often, however, the pursuit of happiness translates into self-gratification and self-centeredness, the child’s desire to always get his own way. Does making sure our children are happy mean that we must protect them from all unpleasantness? If that kind of happiness is the goal, it is no wonder we are dealing with an alarming lack of empathy and compassion for others. How do children develop empathy, character, strength, and integrity if we shelter them from experiences in which they must meet a difficult challenge and overcome obstacles?
My eighth-grade students drove this point home for me my first year of Team LEAD. Toward the end of the school year, two of my girls came to me in tears one morning before school. They told me they had only come to school that day because they knew we would be able to deal with their problem in Team LEAD; otherwise they would have stayed home from school, unable to face their peers. It was a Monday, and over the weekend, they had gone to a party. The gist of the drama was that both of the girls had kissed one of the guys, also a Team LEAD member, and other kids were now spreading a rumor that they’d had sex. Indignantly they reported that some of the kids spreading the rumor were in Team LEAD as well. They were angry. I was angry. How could these kids be spreading rumors when we had discussed this very thing so many times? The girls asked if I could call “an emergency Team LEAD meeting” so that we could get to the bottom of this nastiness. I agreed but asked if they minded if I first spoke to the young man involved. I wanted to make sure he hadn’t somehow started the rumor himself. When I spoke to him privately, though, he was just as furious as the girls. He supported holding the emergency meeting and offered to stand up with the girls. This was my first surprise; this young man was one who seemed to always be looking for approval from the other guys, and I feared he would be unable to stand up to them. I was wrong.
With the permission of the eighth-grade teachers, I called the emergency Team LEAD meeting during advisory. As all eighty of our members crammed into the Team LEAD room, I asked the injured parties if they wanted me to handle this. They looked me dead in the eye, all three of them, and said no; they wanted to do it themselves. In amazement, I watched as they took the floor, stared down their dead-silent peers, and took them to task for spreading a rumor, one that was, by all accounts, untrue. As the girls spoke, with the boy standing solidly beside them, their voices became stronger and their stature taller. The other members listened quietly, some appalled on their behalf, some tearful, some sheepish. When the young man involved stepped forward and shared his feelings of hurt and anger and then challenged anyone who was spreading the rumor to get up and leave the room because they did not deserve to be in Team LEAD, the other guys stared at him with a brand new respect. One of his friends stood up, took responsibility, and begged forgiveness. Several others also admitted to playing a part, and en masse, they stood, went to each of the three injured parties, and apologized and hugged them. All eighty students in the room vowed to shut down the rumor immediately and apologized to me for letting it happen in the first place.
After the group left, I asked my courageous three how they were doing. They said they felt great that they had been able to address the problem themselves through Team LEAD and thanked me for making it possible. They left the room with heads held high, and when I touched base with various kids later in the day and in the days following, the group had been true to its word. The rumor was stopped dead in its tracks that very day, an amazing feat in a middle school setting. Most importantly, I saw a major change in the confidence and leadership skills of the three kids who had started out as victims. Following this traumatic experience, they were much more confident leaders among their peers. They all commented to me later that while it had been awful to have a rumor spread about them, it had ended up a positive turning point for them and for the group as a whole. It was also a turning point for me and the Team LEAD philosophy. An event that I had initially considered a dismal failure had actually been one of Team LEAD’s finest moments. The kids themselves had modeled exactly what Team LEAD was all about—leadership, empathy, accountability, and discussion—in that single emergency meeting. Had I stepped in and dealt with the issue as an adult, all of that growth would have been lost.
Through this experience and many others with Team LEAD kids over the years, I have come to believe we do our children a grave disservice by not allowing them the opportunities to face obstacles and challenges and overcome them, to fail until they learn how to succeed on their own, to face disappointments before they find real happiness. It is through being allowed the opportunity to overcome problems and face their fears, as we did in that emergency meeting and many other regular meetings throughout the years, that kids develop self-respect and, ultimately, empathy for others. All kids, even student leaders, will make mistakes. If we allow them to be accountable and to learn and grow from those mistakes, we empower them to become stronger, more compassionate human beings.
Children enjoy and respect being given a higher purpose; we can and must teach altruism and service. Experts in the fields of school safety and mental health encourage schools to focus on protective factors like school connectedness, empathy, and resilience. Some recent studies add a surprising new component to the list of recognized protective factors, however, one that hinges on altruism. Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities is a recent report by the Commission on Children at Risk (a panel of thirty-three leading professionals) and sponsored by Dartmouth Medical School, the YMCA, and the Institute for American Values. The commission set out to examine why American teenagers are suffering in epidemic proportions from drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, violence, suicide, promiscuity, emotional problems, and so on (Commission on Children at Risk, 2003). Their findings point to three protective factors that could lessen the risk for our kids: authoritative schools and families, a feeling of belonging, and a higher purpose. While the first two factors are commonly addressed in climate programs in our schools, the third factor, higher purpose, oftentimes is not. How do public schools help kids develop a sense of a higher purpose? Through Team LEAD, we were able to naturally promote a higher purpose for our kids through weekly discussion of relevant issues and by creating regular opportunities for them to address those issues using prosocial behaviors and positive actions such as mentoring and hosting pertinent schoolwide events. As one of our eighth graders so eloquently stated, “I want others to know that you can find security and comfort from being a positive difference for others in a group like Team LEAD. It changes lives.”
Teaching prosocial behaviors within a character/leadership backdrop instead of an “anti-bullying” backdrop is more effective, especially for teenagers. Shifting our focus from “bullying”—a schoolyard-focused term that prompts most teens to disengage immediately—to a larger real-world perspective of character, altruism, and leadership has created a more positive and productive environment for Team LEAD kids. Inherently, a focus on “bullying” invites the labeling and judging of “bullies” and “victims” or “targets” and can therefore alienate students. What’s the value of explicitly or implicitly offering them even more labels with negative connotations? We have found that if we wish to move our kids toward a climate in which they live and let live and avoid making harsh social judgments, we can model that mind-set from the start by focusing more on leadership skills and prosocial behaviors than the labels. Through Team LEAD, we helped the students themselves examine negative social behaviors and issues from their own perspectives and empowered them to support each other in creating positive change. When students have ownership of the program and issues, it means more to them; they take it more seriously, and it empowers them to be more positive leaders.
With this focus on making a difference one person at a time, we’ve seen some interesting progress, not just in the founding school, but throughout the five school districts, who have thus far fully implemented this system of working with kids. Given that normative beliefs determine behavior, Team LEAD focuses heavily on helping kids understand the impact they can have on others. It is important to us that kids believe they can make a difference. In data collected from 2008 in Valparaiso, we noted a 17.4 percent increase in the number of sixth and seventh graders (sample of 345) who responded “Yes” to the statement “I believe I can make a difference at school” after just five and a half months of Team LEAD programming and mentoring. From three years (2008–2010) of data on the same group of middle school kids (sample of 187), in response to the statement “I stand up more for myself and others now than I did before the program,” we saw an increase in “Yes” answers each year, from 58 percent as they entered sixth grade, to 66 percent as beginning seventh graders, to 74 percent at the end of seventh grade. The School City of Hobart, Indiana, instituted Team LEAD in their schools K–12 four years ago. Superintendent Dr. Peggy Buffington writes,
Team LEAD empowers students to become leaders in their school and community. Sometimes the evidence is so obvious as in the service they provide, for example, nursing home visits, Christmas caroling, food pantry assistance, and program support in the schools and community. Then there are those profound moments when a parent tells you that if it were not for a Team LEAD member helping her child cope with the loss of a loved one, she/he would have never made it. These same Team LEAD students tackle peer aggression by identifying where it is occurring (actual maps of building) and offering solutions to stop it. There is also the taking on of social issues in the school community, including drugs and teenage pregnancy in their I RED campaign where they marketed to students to Re-evaluate Every Decision. The students in Team LEAD are leaders in every aspect because they are making a difference in young people’s lives.
Team LEAD, I soon realized, was much more than an antibullying program; it was really a system of working with kids, one that empowers them to grow and become leaders. My favorite example of the power of the student leadership team philosophy involves a young girl who was one of the most disconnected middle school students I had ever seen and a middle school boy who was at the opposite end of the social spectrum.
Maria had a severe speech impediment, so severe that she rarely spoke at all because when she did, few could understand her. She didn’t participate in class. She didn’t speak to teachers or peers if she could help it. In fact, in the lunchroom, if other students tried to sit near her, she’d yell at them to “Go away!” If they didn’t leave, she would get up and move herself. If you touched her—a pat on the back, a friendly hand on the shoulder—she would pull away and scowl. She had built a fortress of isolation around herself as a protective shield. John, on the other hand, had what some would call a privileged life, with a large support system of friends and family. He was friendly and outgoing, someone all the kids liked. In eighth grade, John had decided to join Team LEAD in order to learn how to be a more positive, active leader.
At the initial full-day Team LEAD training at the beginning of the school year, one of the discussions revolved around a U.S. Secret Service study (Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002) that involved teachers “silently mentoring” those students who seemed disconnected. After hearing of the major impact the teachers had on those students, the eighth graders discussed the potential power of peers silently mentoring each other, simply noticing each other and caring enough to say hello. John decided, unbeknownst to anyone else, that he would reach out to Maria, someone he perceived as having little support in the school. Two months after he initially began his plan, he stopped to see me after school. He explained, “You know, Mrs. K., when you told us about that Secret Service study back in August? Well, I decided to try to silently mentor Maria. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell anyone, but I just have to tell you what happened today!”
John went on to describe how he had started saying hello to Maria in the hallway, and how, on his first attempt, she looked at him and yelled, “Shut up, Stupid!” When I asked how he’d felt when that happened, he said, “Well, you know, it kind of hurt, but I figured that if no one had ever been nice to her, why would she trust me? So I decided to keep trying.” That day, after two months of “hellos” with no response, Maria had finally looked at him and said, “Hi, John.” Those two simple words were the reason John was flying high and eager to share his story with me.
Later in the week, John walked into our weekly Team LEAD meeting with Maria following silently behind. To their credit, the other kids acted like she had been there all year, and we just added her to our roster. John clearly had elicited their respect and inspired them to increase their own efforts to make a difference for others as well. Within a week or two, Maria was volunteering to make Team LEAD announcements over the intercom for the entire school in the mornings; a young lady who rarely spoke had gained the strength and courage to not only speak, but speak publicly for all the school to hear. The girl who had refused to sit with anyone at lunch now signed up to be on “Peace Patrol,” the kids’ name for their plan to have Team LEAD members go to lunch in pairs at least one day a week and mix it up, sitting by kids who seemed like they needed a friend. Maria signed up to do this not just one day a week, but two.
In the space of just a couple of months, one of the most disconnected kids I had ever seen had jumped right in and started connecting, all thanks to the actions of one middle school boy. As the year ended and Maria left us to go to the high school, I frankly feared that she would be eaten alive. I need not have worried. Maria joined multiple extracurricular activities and even ran for a student council office; she continues to lead and serve at the high school level.
Empowering kids to lead schools’ efforts to create healthy social relationships and positive school climate is not only logical and effective but necessary in today’s new world. Only the students themselves have direct access to and a true understanding of the constantly changing new cyberenvironment in which they live and socialize. The frightening reality is that we adults cannot control or monitor all of their social interactions today, and that will no doubt become even more difficult with each new technological advance. How do we best help them become civilized, productive adults in this new society? The answer may lie, surprisingly, in encouraging our kids to give, not get—to notice what they can do for others rather than what others are doing for or to them. Helping kids develop more realistic expectations for their relationships—expectations that take into account human nature and normal human conflict—can help us develop stronger leaders who will persevere rather than throw up their hands in frustration when faced with a social challenge or setback. Perhaps this is the most direct route to creating safer climates and nurturing not only good citizenship and social conscience, but individual social-emotional health and happiness as well.
References
Commission on Children at Risk. (2003). Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities. Poulsbo, WA: Broadway Publications.
Vossekuil, B., Fein, R. A., Reddy, M., Borum, R., & Modzeleski, W. (2002). The final report and findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attacks in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education.