In order to efficiently curb bullying it is essential to use the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. This program is a multi-echelon, multi-constituent program intended to thwart or decrease bullying in schools.
Goals and objectives
The program endeavours to streamline the existing school milieu to lessen prospect and incentives for bullying. The School staffs are principally accountable for initiating and executing the program. Their endeavours are fixed toward enhancing peer relations and putting the school at a secure and constructive position for students to study and develop. Whilst intervention in opposition to bullying is predominantly significant to decrease the victim’s suffering, it is as well extremely enviable to frustrate these propensities for the sake of the violent student, as bullies are more probable than other scholars to enlarge their unfriendly conducts are. Study demonstrates that reducing violent, unfriendly conduct may also decrease material exploit and mistreatment, other reductions subsisting bullying/victim predicaments. The program is also meant to prevent development of novel cases of bullying and develop peer relations at a school
Intended population
In this case, The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program will be intended for students in high schools and college. All the students partake in most features of the program, while those recognized as bullying others or as marks of bullying will obtain extra personal interventions.
Design
The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program operates with interventions at three levels:
The first one is School wide Interventions
1. This involves the administration of the Olweus Bully/Victim questionnaire concerning bullying and should be filled out incognito by the students (Appendix D)
2. There is also the configuration of a Bullying Prevention coordinating committee
3. There is staff training
4. There is development of school wide rules aligned with bullying
5. There is progression of a synchronized system of administration throughout break episodes
The second includes Classroom-level Interventions
1. This involves the regular classroom assemblies concerning bullying and peer relations
2. Class parent meetings: where the parents within the class congregate to discuss the issue
The third is Individual-level Interventions
1. personal meetings with children who bully
2. Personal meetings with children who are targets of bullying
3. Meetings with parents of children involved
Implementation
Implementation of the Program necessitates momentous and continuous obligation from school managers, educators, and other relevant personnel. An initial measure is to establish a bullying prevention coordinating committee compiled of administrators, educators, scholars, parents, and the program’s onsite planner.
Training, Program Management and Timing
All school staffs should partake in a half- to 1-day training conference. Additionally, educators are anticipated to scrupulously comprehend the Teacher Handbook: Olweus’ Core Program against Bullying and Antisocial Behaviour and the book Bullying at School: What We Know and What We Can Do (Olweus, 1993). They should also hold weekly 20- to 40-minute classroom conferences, besides, partaking in habitual Teacher Discussion Groups throughout the initial year of the program. Additionally, school employees on the Bullying Prevention Coordinating Committee should partake in 1.5-day training with an authorized trainer and go to 1- to 2-hour monthly assemblies. Dependent on the school’s dimension, a program will necessitate a part- or full-time onsite manager. The best approach to program implementation entails choosing the onsite controller and administering the questionnaire review in the spring; training staff in August, prior to school opening; and holding a school wide start at the start of the fall semester.
Evaluation Design
Two dissimilar kinds of evaluation plans have been employed to gauge the program. In numerous assessments, what is frequently described an age-cohort design with interval disparities linking neighbouring but age-correspondent cohorts was employed. One of the potencies of this quasi-investigational plan is that numerous of the cohorts dish up both as intervention and control/baseline groups in different contrasts. As well, in one assessment project, a conventional control group plan was employed.
Discussion of empirical (scientific research) support of the effectiveness of the theory
According to CSPV (2002), The Bullying Prevention Program (BPP) is a prototypical program prevention of school-based bullying. The BPP’s objective is to alter social norms that encourage passive recognition of bullying behaviour (Olweus, 1993). The model is malleable and can be personalized to diverse cultures.
The model employs a school organization committee to create individual, classroom, and school level interventions (Olweus & Limber, 2000). Consistent with DHHS, The ultimate benefits of BPP are that interventions are theory-based and pro-social and may be custom-made for target addressees’ growth level and culture (2001). Initial BPP evaluations in Bergen, Norway, exhibited declines in student conveyed bullying equal to 50 percent (Olweus, 1997). Subsequent evaluation studies demonstrated reductions of merely 21-38 percent (Olweus, 2003). Reduced effectiveness in these studies was believed to be owing to restraining variables, for instance key curricular changes. Implementation within the United States has similarly not revealed the same gradation of effectiveness (Olweus, 2003). Conceivable reasons for dropped efficacy may be less rigorous implementation, absence of resources and the bullying role within American culture. A lot of the program's growth transpired in Norway. Social obligation, a significant fundamental worth of the program, may not interpret as effortlessly into the American culture of forte and liberation. The equilibrium between cultural efficacy and reliability to the program project is tough to attain in reality (MacDonald & Green, 2001). Consequently, it is imperative to critically and thoroughly appraise programs in the public to struggle for incessant quality upgrading.
The determination of this project was to establish if the BPP was suitable and efficient for school students in an urban school district. The initial project scheme was to instigate the BPP in 12 central city schools via two cohorts in a span of four-year execution periods. Seven schools were to commence in 2001/02 Academic Year with an extra five schools beginning the subsequent year, 2002/03. The mission was a conglomerate between the Office of School Climate and Safety, the indigenous chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Office of Research and Evaluation, and an autonomous program assessor and the schools.
Diverse data sources were designated to offer the best conceivable depiction of procedure and results. Data employed to appraise the program were bullying incident density, reliability of implementation, student reviews, and stern incident reports. The assessment reproduces the limits of functioning in the actual world. Per se, final result data could merely be designed on nine schools within the comprehensive four years of data.
Evaluation results proposed that the BPP could be instigated in urban schools notwithstanding numerous social limitations, for example poor resources, elevated staff and student takings, and communal violence norms. The essential philosophies of the program, constructing a scheme of social backing do decipher into central city culture and can decrease bullying. When applied with reliability, the BPP abridged BID by 22 percent, student-reported bullying by 5 percent, and violence-related grave incident reports by 7 percent.
A key valued finding of the study was a reliable dose response association where schools who applied the program with reliability had enhanced results than schools that did not. The dose response association proposes that results are because of the program and not exterior features. The dose response relationship was recognized via a simple dichotomous specification of program machineries. This procedure can effortlessly be practical to other programs.
The program decreased bullying when instigated with fidelity. The program’s Benefits were that the program was malleable enough for fitting to the requirements of students. The rudimentary grounds of founding a pro-social setting are convertible to American culture. Bullying can be abridged via obvious and reliable rules, enhanced student monitoring, optimistic incentives programs, and socialized retreat or lunch.
Complications to full execution were high staff and student turnover instigating a poor substructure to back conjoint positive standards. We should encourage the privileged exploit of evidence-based practices in schools whereas we linger to advance and improve best practices via continuing evaluation.
References
Berk, R. A. and Rossi, P. H. (1999). Thinking About Program Evaluation (2nd Edition). Sage Publications
Borg, M.J. (1998). The emotional reactions of school bullies and their victims. Educational Psychology, 18, 433-444.
Ericson, W.M., & Pepler, D.J. (2001). Observations of bullying and victimization in the school yard. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 13, 41-60.
MacDonald, M.A., & Green, L.W. (2001). Reconciling concept and context: The dilemma of implementation in school-based health promotion. Health Education & Behavior, 28(6): 749-768.
Oliver, R., Hoover, J.H., & Hazler, R. (1994). The perceived roles of bullying in small town Midwestern schools. Journal of Counselling and Development, 72, 416-420.
Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2002). Finding the balance: Program fidelity and adaptation in substance abuse prevention. Washington DC: Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration.
Smith, G. (1997). The Safer Schools-Safer Cities Bullying Project. In D.Tattum & G. Herbert (Eds.), Bullying: Home, School, and Community (p. 99-113). London: David Fulton Publishers
