Separating Boys and Girls for Middle-School Anti-Bullying Lessons

In this ASCA School Counselor article, Pennsylvania counselor Lisa Fulton says she used to present lessons about bullying to girls and boys together. Over time, she noticed that many students were tuning her out. “I blamed the students for their lack of attentiveness,” says Fulton, “but I should have been blaming my approach.” Finally she realized that there are big differences in the type of bullying experienced by boys and girls:

• Boys – Shoving, punching, elbowing, wrestling, and other physical bullying, and also name-calling and teasing (“Just joking!”);
• Girls – Gossiping, talking behind someone’s back, spreading rumors, excluding, and other social bullying.

Fulton realized that one-size-fits-all lessons weren’t the best approach, and convinced her principal to let her try single-gender groups with a new four-lesson curriculum:

• Lesson #1: The teacher draws attention to the fact that the group is all-girl or all-boy, and students quickly identify the differences in bullying between gender. The teacher then shows clips from several movies…

• For girls, Mean Girls, The Clique, and Odd Girl Out;
• For boys, Back to the Future, The Any Bully, and Cheaper by the Dozen…

and they discuss who was the bully, who was the target, and the type of bullying involved.

• Lesson #2: The teacher introduces some key terms; sidekick, supporter, disengaged onlooker, possible defender, champion, and target. Students think about situations when they’ve been in one of these roles and realize that all of them are part of the bullying dynamic. 

• Lesson #3: The goal is helping bullies see the impact of their actions from the target’s point of view. In the girls’ group, students play the telephone game and see how a rumor, as it is passed from one girl to another, can cause hurt feelings. The girls also learn assertiveness and are encouraged to use these new skills to deal with problems rather than spreading rumors to others. In the other group, boys focus on the difference between bullying and teasing, starting with the classic “young lady or old woman” drawing, as well as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. The goal is to teach the importance of perspective and how looking at something from a different point of view can produce a completely different understanding of the same event. 

• Lesson #4: Students consider the actions of supporters, disengaged onlookers, possible defenders, and champions. Each group is presented with a gender-specific scenario and asked to decide on possible actions to help the target and combat bullying behavior. The girls’ group has a special segment on exclusion, where all girls get different cards, form groups by affinity, and the girl with a particular card is left out. The big take-away: exclusion hurts. 

“Once the lessons are over, the hard work begins,” says Fulton, “both for us and for the students.” Kids try to figure out how to implement what they’ve learned, and adults monitor to see if they’re succeeding. Teachers also give pre- and post-tests (with gender-neutral and gender-specific questions) to measure learning and behaviors. Fulton reports significant gains in student awareness and a marked decline in bullying behavior as a result of the single-sex curriculum.

“Mean Girls and Rough Boys” by Lisa Fulton in ASCA School Counselor, May/June 2015 (Vol. 52, #5, p. 18-21), www.schoolcounselor.org; Fulton is at lfulton@elcosd.org. 

From the Marshall Memo #589