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 helps teachers:

1. Develop foundational classroom management skills that integrate social-behavioral expectations
2. Identify aggressive and bullying behaviors in the classroom
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 not only provide foundational knowledge, but also 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 provides support to teachers in classroom management. The CCU embeds a communication technique called motivational interviewing in which a coach empowers teachers to engage in self-guided classroom management and instructional practice changes. The CCU utilizes a five-stage problem-solving process that was adapted for the BCCU to include the bullying content throughout each step, combined with the use of mixed-reality simulation.
• The TeachLivE© Simulator is an immersive, mixed-reality (i.e., part real, part synthetic) simulator in which the teacher sees and communicates with student avatars through video conferencing technology. The student avatars represent a diverse range of ages, races, personality types, and behaviors. For the simulator to mimic real classroom experience, teachers are provided a lesson plan to deliver and the student avatars respond to teachers in real time with true-to-life student behaviors and responses enacted by trained live voice-actors. Teachers participate in paired sessions where they can practice using a bullying prevention strategy and receive immediate data-based feedback from the coach. Given the unpredictable, yet harmful nature of bullying behaviors, TeachLivE© provides teachers with invaluable 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.

The Community We Serve

BCCU is designed to provide research-based bullying prevention support for elementary teachers’ preventing, detecting, and intervening with bullying behaviors in the classroom. The current study, funded through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development/National Institutes of Health, will rigorously efficacy test the teacher-focused BCCU intervention in 32 elementary schools in two sites – the School District of Philadelphia and Anne Arundel Country Public Schools in Maryland. Researchers and staff from CHOP and Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health will run the program and lead data collection.

An Evidence-based Approach

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. Moreover, the BCCU was found to be feasible and acceptable, requiring very limited time from teachers and nearly all teachers reported that the coaching helped to build their capacity to implement evidence-based strategies.

The current line of work will build on this foundation to address outcomes beyond teacher-reported constructs, determine the effectiveness in elementary schools where students often spend their day with one very influential teacher, and also assess BCCU’s potential to have a systemic impact on bullying behaviors.

Recommended Resources

Relevant Publications

• Waasdorp TE, Mehari KR, Bradshaw CP. Anti-Bullying Programs in the U.S.A. and Canada. In P. K. Smith & J. O’Higgins (Eds.), Bullying Handbook. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2019.
• Pas ET, Waasdorp TE, Bradshaw CP. Coaching Teachers to Detect, Prevent, and Respond to Bullying Using Mixed-reality Simulation: An Efficacy Study in Middle Schools. International Journal of Bullying Prevention, 2019. 1;58-69. 
• Bradshaw CP, Waasdorp TE. Preventing Bullying in Schools: A Social and Emotional Learning Approach to Prevention and Early Intervention. New York: Norton Publishing. 2019.

Relevant Reading

• “Coaching Teachers in Detection and Intervention Related to Bullying” 
• “Empowering Schools to Change Behavior and Attitudes”