Program Weaves Bullying Prevention into Literature

Educators are weaving bullying prevention messages into literature lessons as part of a program created by EDC’s HHD and Center for Family, School, and Community (FSC) divisions and funded by MetLife Foundation. The curriculum reinforces students’ reading and writing skills and teaches them how to address bullying situations.

The MetLife Foundation Read for Health Program incorporates a middle-grades curriculum and materials for parents on the powerful theme of bullying. The program materials draw on the motivating power of literature to build students’ reading, interpretation, and writing skills, coupled with an introduction to positive skills for healthy living. By reading compelling fiction and buildi ng positive life skills, students explore how they, their families, schools, and communities can take action against bullying. Read for Health is the newest component of HHD's Teenage Health Teaching Modules, a comprehensive health curriculum for grades 6 to 8.

Read for Health brings together the work of experts from HHD's Center for School and Community Health as well as FSC's Pathways to Adolescent Literacy -- to create a new set of resources that draw on the best of both programs. More specifically, the program is based on three strands of research: violence and bullying prevention, adolescent literacy, and life skills.

“Bullying is particularly prevalent among young people, especially students in the middle grades,” said Christine Blaber, project director. “Teachers in a variety of disciplines are looking for ways to enable students to understand and prevent bullying. The middle grades English language arts curriculum provides an ideal forum for exploring the complex issue of bullying,” she said.

“The goals of the MetLife Foundation are to strengthen communities, promote good health, and improve education,” Blaber said. “The Read for He alth program fits squarely with the Foundation's commitment to provide support to improve the education system, involve parents, and provide children with resources and opportunities they need to succeed.”

The Read for Health curriculum was field-tested by nine middle-grades teachers in six schools and two community organizations in three Massachusetts cities. These teachers worked with approximately 200 urban seventh- and eighth-grade students from African American, Latino, white, Haitian, and Brazilian backgrounds. The sites included a middle school, three K-8 schools, a two-way bilingual school, a school for students expelled from other schools, a Boys and Girls Club, and a youth-serving agency. Field-test teachers and students, as well as a project r esearcher who conducted classroom observations, provided feedback in writing, interviews, and focus groups.

HHD and FSC held a workshop recently to familiarize educators with the curriculum , allowing them to practice activities and prepare to use the prog ram with students . “ Because the Read for Health materials were just published in April, this was the first workshop on the program that EDC has offered,” Blaber said. “We wanted to give classroom teachers and teacher trainers an opportunity to discuss wit h the developers the special characteristics and nuances of the program and to consider options for how to use it in the schools they serve.”

The MetLife Foundation Read for Health Program includes the following products:

• Taking Action to Stop Bullying: A Literacy-Based Curriculum Module includes 12 lessons for middle-grades English language arts and/or health education classes and after-school programs. These lessons use award-winning literature to enhance students’ literacy and life skills.
• A game, Communicating About Bullying (and Other Tough Issues), serves as a lively and fun prompt for discussions between pre-teens and parents or other trusted adults. The game, available in English and Spanish, can also be played by students in the classroom.
• A five-minute video for parents, Talking with Your Young Adolescent About Bullying, portrays a boy and his mother discussing a novel he is reading and a related bullying situation he faces in real life. The video ends with tips for parents on communicating with children between the ages of 10 and 13 about these issues . Both the video and related handouts are available in English and Spanish.
• An Implementation Guide provides guidance to individuals coordinating th e entire program and to educators implementing just the curriculum.

Some educators who took part in the Read for Health workshop will use the program as a way to tackle a bullying problem in their schools while others are adding it to other anti-bullying initiatives already in place.

"There's been a lot of bullying this year in my school," said Michelle Carafiello, a seventh-grade English teacher in Fitchburg , Mass. "We're always looking for ways to address those issues, and we're hoping that literature can be used as a vehicle for that."

Lynne Bleier, a middle school principal in Winchester, N.H., said that budget cuts have eliminated her school's health curriculum for the upcoming school year, so bullying prevention will have to be integrated into the school's regular curriculum. "The Read for Health curriculum will be a perfect match," she said.

"We can use this as a resource to support and strengthen what we're doing already," said Pablo Garza Estrada, a specialist in the Dallas Independent School D istrict . "I really liked the idea of the video because it had a parent component to it."

Other educators said that the Read for Health program is easy to adapt -- and easy to get teacher buy-in -- because the modules are flexible and they can be integra ted into existing curricula without too much trouble.

"It's always a problem when you give something to teachers that they see as an add-on," said Susie A. Bell, program specialist in the Dallas Independent School District . "But if we can show them how t o use it in a way that's going to be beneficial to their academics, then I think that they will find it acceptable," she said.

"Many teachers like something that they can control as opposed to something that is imposed school-wide," said Kathy Rigsby, ass istant director of the Interwest Equity Assistance Center at Colorado State University . "The portability of this to schools makes it easy to implement."