Bullying Classroom Check-Up

Bullying Classroom Check-Up (BCCU) is a teacher-consultation program that coaches elementary school teachers to leverage evidence-based classroom management strategies, trauma-informed instructional practice, social-emotional learning skills, and positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) approaches to detect, prevent, and respond to bullying and aggression.

BCCU was initially developed in partnership with teachers and students drawn from diverse, under-resourced schools in Maryland in collaboration with researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the University of Virginia School of Education.

BCCU helps teachers to (1) Develop foundational classroom management skills that integrate social-behavioral expectations, (2) Identify aggressive and bullying behaviors in the classroom, and (3) Select and implement strategies to intervene with aggressive and bullying behaviors briefly and in real-time to create a positive social environment conducive for learning.

How BCCU Creates Bullying Prevention Support for Teachers

Program Details

How BCCU Works

There are three evidence-based components to BCCU:

  • Professional development (PD) modules focus on raising awareness and building concrete knowledge about bullying prevention constructs and bullying detection, prevention, and intervention skills for all school staff, specifically targeting bullying hotspots (e.g., hallways, cafeteria). PD modules provide foundational knowledge and promote consistency and a common language in addressing bullying in all school settings.
  • Coaching through the Classroom Check-Up (CCU) is a classroom coaching model that supports teachers in classroom management (Reinke et al., 2008). The CCU was adapted to include the bullying content throughout the program and in the mixed-reality training experience.
  • The TeachLivE© Simulator is an immersive, mixed-reality (i.e., part real, part synthetic) training experience in which the teacher sees and communicates with student avatars through video conferencing technology. Given the unpredictable yet harmful nature of bullying behaviors, it provides teachers with guided practice of new skills before they try to implement those skills with students in their classroom.

These three BCCU components help prepare teachers to better address problematic peer interactions and reduce the occurrence of bullying in schools.

Evidence-base for BCCU

With support from the National Institute of Justice, the BCCU was developed and preliminarily tested. Findings from a 78-teacher-randomized controlled pilot trial in five middle schools demonstrated that the BCCU’s bullying prevention support for teachers yielded benefits across a range of teacher-reported outcomes, including increased referrals to school counselors, intervening with bullying perpetrators and victims and perceptions that school staff need to better address bullying. 

Current Research

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) / National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding an efficacy trial of the BCCU to determine its effectiveness in elementary schools, where students often spend their day with one influential teacher and assess BCCU’s potential to have a systemic impact on bullying and prosocial behaviors. Researchers and staff from CHOP and Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health will run the program and lead data collection.

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