By empowering our students to lead and serve lead for change is changing lives, transforming communities and improving our world. Learn more, check out the research and access free leadership curriculum now at leadforchange.org. Under heavily American Federation of teachers, I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar on Preventing and Addressing Bullying, racism, and intolerance. My name is India credible with share my lesson and I will be your moderator. Before we begin, I'd like to thank this virtual conference sponsor, at least for change, which is celebrating its 10th year. Interchanges are free leadership curriculum for grades six through 12, with a community service framework that is easily integrated into any class, club, or setting. Lead for changes in nation's fastest growing, privately funded student leadership program with more than 15,000 educators and nearly two million students. If your class, club or school a chance to win up to $10,000 in the leaf between challenge, you can learn more about leap for change by clicking on their logo on the right side of the screen. We truly appreciate your support. Now, before we begin, let's watch a short video on how our webinars work. Hello everyone, welcome to our 2022 share my lesson virtual conference. My name is Kelly Booze, director of the American Federation of Teachers. Share my lesson before we begin. We'll go over a few housekeeping items. For those of you who have joined us many times before, you know that we make our webinars as engaging as we possibly can. So to get us started, please open up that group chat box and tell us where you are from and why you are joining us today and what interests you about this particular topic. In addition to the group chat, if you're joining us live, you will be able to provide some different reactions throughout the webinar today, so let us know what you're thinking and throughout the webinar, whatever reaction you want to give, share it with us and share it with your fellow participants. At the end of this webinar. We will be facilitating a question and answer session use that Q&A Widget to submit any questions that you want us to ask the presenter. If you have any technical issues, please also use a Q&A widget and one of our share. My lesson team members is there and ready to respond to you. If you would like a copy of the slide deck or any of the related materials, you can find those in the resource widget. For those of you who want professional development credit, you will be able to download a PDF certificate at the conclusion of this webinar verifying your participation today, you do need to answer the poll questions that you will see throughout the webinar. To access that certificate now, let's turn it back over to your moderator who will put up a sample poll question for you to try. The poll question is located directly in the slides. You can answer your question. And then hit submit. From all of us at share my lesson. Thank you for joining us today. Enjoy your webinar. Alright everyone, before we really get to the main show, I have a quick poll question to ask you all so you have the option to live in a city for a year. Which do you choose? Our options. Tonight we got Paris. London, Tokyo Buenos Aires. Cincinnati or you just like to stay home? I feel like there's great things in all of those I'm gonna give you about 30 seconds to answer. You can find that pole in your slide deck. Me personally, I really like Tokyo, but like I just mentioned that I think there's good things in all of those. So let us know what you think. You can also pop that in the chat if you'd like to let everyone know and then we'll get moved on. Alright, we got a little bit more than half of you. All you monitor 10 more seconds to get your pole in. There we go. So the number one question, number one is I'm staying home even after all those people want to stay home. I totally get that too. I love cooking myself or cooking for myself. Alright so. Now it is my pleasure to introduce our presenters tonight. Becky, Cohn Vargas and Patrice O'Neal, leader of not in our town. You can read their BIOS on the right hand side of your screen. Thank you for joining us today and welcome. Thank you so much, Andy and Laura. We're so grateful to the FT and share my lesson. For for presenting this this powerful set of of seminars over the past few days and we're glad to be with you for an introduction to not in our school, anti Bullying Workshop and to present some ideas for launching not in our school activities for the past 25 years. Not in our town has been working with communities across the country to stop hate racism and bullying and build safe, inclusive communities. For all teachers and educators, have always been a vital part of this. On the ground movement and so in a time of we have, I think all of us have faced so much stress, particularly in these recent days, that with the war and all of the divisions that were facing in our country, we need some inspiration. So I'm just going to tell you very quickly the origin story of not in our town, so that you understand where we're coming from. Not in our town was a film that we made. Quite a number of years ago it told the story of people in Billings, Mt standing up to hate. So white supremacist started organizing in this town. They overturned graves and the Jewish cemetery. People in the town got together and said we have to do something. So when skinheads started showing up at an African American church, members of other denominations showed up to support them. The skinheads went away when a Native American woman's home was plastered with racist graffiti, 30 members of the painters union came over to paint it over. 100 neighbors were there to watch, so the town was started, started to learn what what they could do together to address the problem. The culminating event took place when a 6 year old Jewish boy placed a Manor in his window for Hanukkah. Brick was thrown through the window. It landed on his bed and people knew that the stakes were getting higher, so they said, what if we're all Jewish and they started putting these paper menorahs in their windows and they handed them out at the quick way in the dry cleaner and that. Year after the newspaper printed it and in a full paid 10,000 people put into words in their window and the white power movement, white supremacist movement organizing stopped. And that's not to say that hate went away, but this story is about we aired it on PBS and people from all across the United States and around the world found inspiration from it because it's about what each of us can do in our own communities and our own schools to stand up to hate. Very quickly, teachers adopted it and charted started showing this film in their classrooms and not in our school was born because teachers took it on and then young people started teaching the story to each other. So that's really the the origin of not in our school. I wanted I particularly wanted to say a few words about what we're facing now in this country. We we know from from all of you that many of you are really facing a lot of pressure as. There is censorship. Questions about learning history, about what our young people can learn about racism in schools, and this is a really scary moment. We we paired up with an organization called Learn from History. I hope you know about them and. And started to work in a coalition. the FT is part of that coalition, so please know their resources. I want to tell you a little bit more about some of the resources that we offer, so there are not. In our school films and videos offered for free, you can get them on our site. Classroom guides there are stop hate action kits. You can find all of these things for free on not in our school, not in our town. So why are we here? We're here too. To learn from you to back you up and to give you just a little bit from Becki, Cohn Vargas. Becky was for many years the leader of not in our school. She's now an independent consultant and she offered to do this workshop and one other that will talk to you about later. But you are vital members of your communities, our educators, our parents, moms and dads, grandparents, community members. We need you now. For young people need you now they need your strength. They need your courage and to help them stand up and face so many of the divisions that we see in our country they're facing in. Peer to peer interactions. So we're hoping that some of what we can present tonight is useful to you and your classroom and community. Please stay in touch with us. We'll talk more about the new learning community we're doing with not in our school later on. And now I'm going to introduce Becky, who will go through the agenda here. Welcome, she'll talk about understanding bullying bias, what some prevention models are responding, what it's like. You know, some things you can do to lead us not in our school campaign. And then we'll we'll get into some other resources in Q&A. So thank you so much for inviting us into your classrooms and homes this evening. I'm going to now introduce my colleague, friend, and leader Becky Com Vargas. Well, good evening, good afternoon everyone across the country. It's wonderful to see how many people are here from so many different States and we always like to start by finding out who's in the room. So take a minute to we have two poll questions. The first one is about the age group you work with and then the second one will be about your actual role. So I'll give you a second to complete this poll. It helps to always know grade levels and the roles different people have, so we can really target what we have to all of you. Because we have so many different people from so many places. In a minute we'll have the results. While we're doing that, I'll say that. The. Sorry I didn't realize do the full. I thought it was going to pop up so we have a lot of people in the elementary grades and some middle and some high school and a few in higher education. So the idea of bullying actually is relevant from birth to adulthood. It's a really important topic and. Pulling off admissions based on differences, and that's why we're focusing also on anti racism. As part of this workshop. Here's our second question. And it's always good idea also to see who is in the room and what they do. And once again, everybody has an opportunity to deal with bullying, whether your parent, whether your teacher with your school administrator, whether your district administrator, bullying touches. Everyone as well as bias, and it's important to think about bias from the point of view, both of a implicit and explicit bias, and we'll talk about that in a minute. So here's some definition of bullying. I think the key part about it, it's important to know the definition of bullying that that it is repeated. It has to do with an imbalance of power. Every once in a while it's not repeated. It's a very dramatic action, but we want to be careful because kids these days and parents often come in telling us my child was bullied. My child was bullied and we want really don't want to call every conflict bullying. Bias and hate. As I said before, it can be covert and overt and it comes in a lot of forms here just a few. Could be based on race, religion. Gender. And. People have different ways, different physical. Conditions. And disabilities. I want to talk about overt and Co implicit bias. This really deserves a whole workshop and we have a resource guide that has some very good resources on learning more about implicit bias, but basically over bias is what you think of. That's obvious that somebody saying racial slur or a comment. That it's hurtful implicit bias can be unconscious actions. It could mean that too many black boys are being sent to the office friend of mine who was a principal said she'd come in at lunch and she'd see her office filled with African American boys. And it turns out that when they do research, there are differences in the way people are treated, even when the people the teachers aren't aware of it. They've done research where they've given a piece of writing. And they've said the name of the student would either be a name that's obviously associated with African American students or Latinx students, or with white students and the same piece of writing gets. Graded differently so we do have to be aware, and that's something we're awarenesses educators is very very important. Implicit bias happens in the flash of an eye. It confirms stereotypes that we may have deep inside, and it may even conflict with what we think our conscious and aware thoughts are in our belief system. But it's very, very harmful, so it's important for us to become aware of it. Pulling click happens in a variety of ways and I'm not going to spend much time on this because, you know about him, but I just wanna say something about relational bullying. There's a lot of relational bullying it's leading kids out. It's when the kids are sitting at a lunch table and then another kid comes up and they quickly move the chair so that kid kids have a place to settle in. Relational bullying can happen when kids are not chosen on teams. And then of course, cyber bullying is rampant and it's sometimes anonymous and it's very dangerous. Why do kids bully well? There are a lot of reasons and I think it's important to recognize that it could be the same child who bullies who is bullied. Sometimes they're just angry and frustrated and they take it out on someone else. Sometimes they feel mistreated and rejected, and so they mistreat and reject someone else. Sometimes it's because the school has a culture where bullying just happens and people just do it all the time. And bullying with bigotry can happen in a culture of bigotry you probably heard during after the elections of football teams were kids would scream. Out in groups at the members of the other team, build a wall. Go back to Mexico so it's really important to be aware of all these different ones, but a very basic one is just popularity. Sometimes kids always show up. Hate crimes hit a 12 year high in 2020 and it's really, really heartbreaking to see. That I don't know during the pandemic, maybe some of the things that are going on in this country. Certainly when you turn on the news media, you hear a lot of. Anger and a lot of slurs and social media, but we need to be a pay attention to that and those hate crimes. Start in our schools in small and large acts of hate, whether it's kids who paint swastikas on the wall or kids who in my town over here in Albany, CA kids put up on social media pictures of African American students and they superimpose nooses. It's. All around us and we need to take it very seriously. Empires and bullying cause trouble. And it lasts and as. Any of us know we remember those things? I remember 6th grade in South Bend IN when the boy called me a dirty Jew. It it hits deep and it affects us and that's why we need to take action on it. Bullying can happen in the form of microaggressions. Micro Christians are repeated. Behaviors in there called micro 'cause they might be seeing this tiny little actions, but they're hurtful. Maybe it has to do with mispronouncing names. About comedy's name. Maybe it's mixing up someone at two people at the same ethnicity and it can happen, but. It's how we handle them, and it's not the intent of the person, it's the impact. If you're one of two Asian students in a class. And you keep hearing people mix up your names and think it's a big joke. It's hurtful. Misgendering one of my children identity I've adult children and one of them identifies as trans as non binary and. We need to respect that the pronouns at those. People choose for themselves and a simple thing I put in your name and your pronouns in a. On your zoom is or on, your email is a really good way to do it, but when you misgender, it's being aware that that can hurt someone's feelings cuz they've made a conscious effort to have a certain pronoun and for my. Kid. My kids changed their name and that's hard for a parent. When your kid changes their name from David to Luna, but I know that that is very, very important to them to be both gendered correctly and have their name correct. And then this microaggressions can happen in the forming exclusion like I described at that table lunch table. So here's some of the differences and some of the people that get the worst targeting. And that's where you can be aware person. Later, as a person leading in a situation, pay attention to what's going on. It may happen behind your back. It may happen out in the schoolyard, and nobody says anything. But here are a couple of student voices and I'm going to actually read them. I got these from a website where in San Diego and the school district that asked students to anonymously share some of their experiences. Here's what a black middle school student said. Once it's cool, they look person of color. Friend of mine was accused of selling drugs, which he was not doing. Our Group of friends was all racist, but I was the only black one in the group. The administration brought me into the office and had the police there to question me. Or having ties to an alleged gang. None of this is true. Here's an Asian middle school student. When I would not let a classmate copy my homework, he blurred it out. Maybe it's better because you probably have the Rona and will give me the China virus the other kids started laughing at me. I reported it to the teacher who just said they were just kidding. It did not feel funny to me so often teachers say to students just let it roll off your back. Just don't pay any attention rather than stop. So here's a moment where I'm gonna give you a few minutes just a minute or so to write in the chat. Where and how do bullying and stereotypes? And bias show up in your school. So here are some of the examples. Recess lunch. Collusion during recess. Hallways. One school had bullying in the hallways, so they. Created a. High five hallway in they had kids in the hallway on the sides of the walls. Put up pictures up put up handprints. So instead of that being a place to be awful and scared of it, became a place to be friends. Here's jokes, graffiti. You see them in unstructured activities. That's why. As adults, we need to be paying attention because it may not happen in class. You may have a school and you think everything is fine. But it's not their locker room. I remember an experience I had in the locker room. A girl started spraying deodorant in the air and saying mean things to me and she called me out to fight. And when I think about it, I was just the last kid who got into fights. But Becky. Street yes could I could I remind you? I'm not sure if you're going to raise it, but the. The mapping mapping bullying in your school video rnayak.org is a great tool for young people to find out where bullying is happening and how it's happening in a school. And that's a a video on nyaa.org. Great, yeah, there's so many resources videos on net.org on all of these topics. Thanks Patrice for mentioning it. I'm going to keep moving 'cause probably could go all day with us on the way home from school. All kinds of places. A lot of times schools say well, it doesn't have anything to do with us 'cause it happened on the way home, but it carries over and the fight continues. That's why we have to be aware of all the subtleties. So before we talk about how to respond to bullying, I want to talk about prevention, because really, what makes a difference is that if you put. Time and energy into prevention, which later we're going to talk about. A campaign that supports prevention. The not in our school campaign, but you're trying to create. A culture of kindness. You're trying to teach positive social skills. You're trying to. Spread compassion. You're trying to promote inclusion. All this stuff. All these things can be taught. They can be done in schoolwide activities. They can be done in classrooms. They could be done whether you're in math class, you're trying to create that culture where people feel like they belong. And the work that I do now is in the area of identity safety. I've written three books on the topic and you can find them. They're called. The books are identity safe classrooms, places to go along and learn, and we have one for elementary and one for secondary. And then we have one for leaders and the idea of identity safety is we're creating spaces where everybody feels they can belong where they develop resilience and empathy where they learn skills of conflict resolution. The way they feel valued for who they are. I know that the term identity safety may be thought. You may think when you first hear it of identity theft, but it actually makes a lot of sense. If identity theft is when you. Have your you can't operate your computer. Your credit cards don't work. Your bank accounts frozen bank account is frozen, but what about identity safety with your psychological state, when your identity is stolen by people who are bullying you by people who treat you poorly by being ignored, or by being invisible, so a climate of identity safety is part of that culture of prevention. In terms of identity, and particularly getting students to feel positive about themselves and about each other, we need to validate their background. We need to talk to them about race and gender, starting with when they're very young. They're already aware of it, and we want to teach them about acceptance and fairness, and so we don't want a colorblind environment where we're ignoring differences. We want to celebrate the differences and ask students to be. To be themselves, and whether it's gender or race or religion that they don't feel like they have to hide who they are. In terms of positive gender identity, we're trying to kids teach students to be strong and independent. We're trying to teach them to be caring and sensitive, and we also need to teach students that there's this spectrum of gender. There's a wonderful website called gender Spectrum, and they need to learn to accept themselves. Kids are not boxes that fit the stereotypes of wet as a boy, or what is a girl. There's a whole spectrum of gender identity, and we can teach our children about that. And then of course we want them to value similarities and differences, and the way we do that is we make build connections. We teach them to listen to each other. We talk about the differences in positive ways and we don't have to stereotype in. You know, talk what we can do is we can get them to share from their own lives because their mixtures of all different identities we we don't have one social identity. My husband is Nicaraguan and he's born Catholic. I'm Jewish and a white. Person, daughter of immigrants who experienced the Holocaust. That's a lot of layers of complexity to who I am, and each person has those layers, whatever their religion or race or gender identity. Patrice talked about the idea that organization that's called that's at teaching the truth about history. We need to make space for everyone in our history, rooted stereotypes with counter narratives. Counter narratives are. Alternatives to what they call the dominant discourse. Counter narratives are stories from the voices of people themselves and teaching current events in a way that people can learn that there are many different ways of being in ways of thinking that using primary sources, and critical multiculturalism is the idea that we're not only looking at the happy things that have happened in history, we're recognizing that there have been some difficult things. And there are things we need to overcome. Here is another quick poll because as Patrice said, we're in a difficult time and you're in many different parts of the country. I wanted to know if you've had trouble from people in your community, maybe some parents or others, and I know we have at least one school board member here who had have there been people expressing opposition to teaching about racism. Unless it's about diversity and I'm going to talk a little later about how to respond. So if you could answer this poll. So we do see that in this group we've had people who've experienced it, and. District and school meetings. We've certainly seen a lot on YouTube of angry school board meetings, and there have also been people with who've experienced personal communications and both. There's still 40% who haven't had that experience, but 60% who have. It's unfortunate that as we're trying to teach as we're trying to reach out and make space for our students to feel connected, we need to defend ourselves. So I have a few misconceptions and clarifications. One of them is that discussing differences, highlights what we don't have in common, and drives us apart, and I've been a bilingual teacher. I've been a school principal and a very diverse school, and I know from experience that when we learn about each other when we celebrate our differences, we come to understand each other and we develop compassion and that actually brings us close together. So when people are saying that you shouldn't talk about the differences. We notice differences. Babies notice differences from the minute that they're born, so this is just one method of clarification. Another question Vicki. I'm sorry to interrupt the the group would like the poll questions back up again at some point. So because I think there are a lot of people who weren't able to finish it and it was an important one for them. So if I put them back up, thank you touching that. Well, hold it for a minute. I know our time is limited. I know it's. I think it's an important thing for us to assess and learn from this group. Needed a little more time. OK, here we go. Great. So there are a few more in. Since we added now they're 43% who haven't, but it hasn't changed. The numbers haven't changed that much. And I know different parts of the country and the different. If you're in a larger city, it may be different. Sometimes more rural areas have it. Oh wait, this is the next one, so there's another misconception that opening Pandora's box past history exacerbates our divisions. And that is actually. Another thing that I think is a misconception. We're not pointing fingers. We're not trying to say certain people are bad, and the his and they're responsible for the history and so therefore they're bad. We're just trying to say that as part of democracy, we need to look at what's happened in the past and all through history they're having people writing who've been fighting for social justice. The picture on this slide was the little girl walking with the federal. Agents who had to walk her to school when they desegregated after Brown versus. So again, the goal of history is to change all of learning. History is to learn about our mistakes so we can't repeat. And it's not about trying to point fingers and say one group of people is bad and the other isn't. But a famous quote, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem and we certainly have a lot of work to do to make our. Country fair and just for everybody. I'm going to go now to some bullying protocols to how to respond to bullying, so we talk about creating clear rules and reporting procedures that everybody knows about. That's really important. Everyone in the school, from the yard supervisors to the security guards to the people in the office, to the counselors on, need to know what is the process. So if anyone gets bullied they know how to do it and parents need to be informed of the bullying protocols as well. When you're dealing with something that happens and you witness it, it's important whether it's teasing, name calling, or microaggressions. Stop the behavior on the spot and name it what was what do we not want to hear? We do not want to hear you say the term that's so gay in this class because that hurts people and makes people who feel judged. And it also makes you feel that something is wrong with being gay, which whether you are gay or not or have a gay friend, it is a very hurtful thing. Just something at the age level of your students. So what is it? Why isn't it acceptable at the same time you want to be careful not to stigmatize anyone you don't wanna make the child feel all the worse because that comment was made. And when it happens, you need to inform the parents and the consequences. For kids who do it need to be ones that teach them so they stop. Excuse me a minute. Ruby, I'm one more thing Becky. The little girl who was had to be escorted to class her name was Ruby Bridges and people are remembering her in the chat and I think that's so important to be able to name her and and and think about what she had to go through in her courage, which is why we need to learn from history right so? Thank you, thank you for naming her item for a minute. Went out of my brain so I didn't say it, but I I totally agree and there's there wonderful books about Ruby Bridges, I think. I think Teresa put something in the chat. Physical bullying immediately get the targeted student to safety and don't bring everyone together at the moment because it's very intimidating for the child who is bullied. Get the facts. Listen to both students part stories and what happened. Informed parents. Take your time to do that investigation before you jump to action. For the targeted student, you wanna share them. You're there for support. You want to teach them how to refusal skills, how to stand up for themselves. Sometimes if a child is repeatedly bullying, you need repeatedly getting bullied. You need some counseling support and you always want to monitor ensure the bullying stops so it's not just over at the time you want to make sure that child isn't bullied in the future and the problem stops. Through the student who did the bullying, we don't like to label children, bullies or young people bullies we don't like to say call them bullies. So I it's a little cumbersome but I always say the student who did the bullying and you do your consequence according to policies. But as I said before, you want them to learn and. We want them to understand that it was a mistake and it can change and you can work with them. I know there was one boy who said every day he went home and he would pray that he didn't bully again and then sometimes he did and. I worked with him, he was a boy that had a lot of challenges in his family and he wanted to change. So we want to help them learn to change. Of course, counseling can be used and again, we're watching and monitoring them so that the behavior is not repeated. Don't forget the bystanders. They both stand and and just about everyone. And if you think about it yourself, you've probably been a bystander. Oh, there's a great comment that says Ruby wrote a book herself and was a keynote speaker at NAEYC. So I'm I didn't know that that's great, so the bystanders. You want to be sure that rumors aren't spread and you want to follow up and and you want them to realize that we don't help anyone by being a bystander and standing and watching. And rather we want them to be upstanders and upstanders or people who speak up and stand up and the research says that 50% of the time bullying it's in stock within 10 seconds. If we've taught our bystanders to be upstanders, so that's a really great great piece of research that I love. It's very promising and. And we that means that the work we do to teach them to be upstanders is well worth it. These two girls in the picture actually work to get the word upstander in the bullet in the mirror, in the dictionary and the the cool thing is that you're going to meet to educators a little later in the session. Who are their teachers? And so they were part of a not in our school campaign, and when they got to college they wanted to work to stop, stop bullying and they decided to take on this campaign to get up standard in the dictionary and it's now there. It's a great word. So in the chat. And a lot of you are very active in the chat. How would you introduce being an upstander at your grade level? Give me a minute. To think about it. Lisa is talking about the role of restorative circles with. With young people who are bullying Becky and I know you're a big proponent of that. Yeah, if you wanna see restorative circles in action. If you go to the Oakland Unified School District website. The Oakland, CA has some excellent work on restorative practices and how to do restorative circus restorative circles. So there were a lot of comments in the in the chat, although I don't. See any others about introducing. Students of the concept of being an up sooner. OK, here we go. So. Having conversations using skits, that's a really great idea to do skits and we have some actually assembly plans on the not know town website that show you how to help kids do skits on bullying prevention and how to be an upstander. I csel support and restorative circles are great. A great tool for teaching students. And getting students to speak out and tell staff when I do a longer workshop on Upstanders, I talk about that being an upstander is. Sometimes it's getting help. You don't have to. If it's an unsafe situation, maybe you need to tell an adult. Morning meetings in other place. Lots of great examples chat, let me just mention another one, Becky that I thought was so important in and that is I know you're about to get into this with the not in our school campaign. It's two things that someone in the chat mentioned. One is. Creating space to discuss it right, just even creating the space in the classroom to discuss what it means to move from being a bystander to upstander that is a big you know part of it is creating that space for young people to have this discussion. The second is to involve parents and community members in this effort, which I know is is part of what you want to talk about in the next and I'm just saying 2 to 3 minutes. Exactly. So. I'll keep going. So what I want to share about is our model of an art school campaign and this is very abbreviated. You can find out more on the website, but basically the idea of not in our school students taking the lead and they can create. Everything from assemblies to lunchtime activities, art exhibits, contests. You can see the pictures on the side in the slide are from, uh, a contest that took place in a high school in San Diego and. Kids are so creative. There's so many ways to do it, so in not our school campaign is student LED. That's the main important thing about it and it can happen at any grade level. Sometimes part of it is older kids helping younger kids learn like and we have films. We have many, many films that show examples of how to do this and basically what you do is you create a group of kids. It can be your student council. It can be a committee or a club. Get the kids to sign a pledge here. They're signing the pledge. I'm actually on a big giant piece of paper or I don't know if it's paper or cloth. Get some activities going and plan a yearly not in our school week. There's so much more that can be done and I'm going to pass it to Patrice who can tell Beth? Some exciting workshops will go more into detail on how to do this before I. The last thing I want to say is just remember that. You want to find out what's going on at your school. That needs work. Sometimes it has to do with kids being left out, sometimes has to do with social media, which someone mentioned in the chat and and there were kids. For example, in a school in Los Angeles, they did a campaign. That said nobody is illegal. They were trying to get rid of the terminology illegal for kids in their school. Build awareness. So I'm going to pass it to you, Patrice. Thank you so much back and thanks to everyone who spoke up in the chat and your excellent ideas for how to engage. I hope that you learn from each other through this process as well. So Becky is going to offer an upcoming workshop on addressing bullying by some be along a little longer than this and more in depth on some of these issues about how to support young people who are bullied and how to support you know. Also, the the the children who are bullied, how to respond in that way and and if you know anyone or if you would like more time to interact with her on this, this we're doing this workshop on April 13th. So spread the word. Teresa is putting the the sign up for this. In in the chat as well, you'll see it there now at workshop so. I'm going to introduce now and I hope you're on two teachers. You saw the two young women who got the word upstander in the dictionary. Their teachers were from Watchung Hills High School, Mary Sock and Jamie, Lot Jones, and they're with us. Today. They are going to work with Nyah nyah and not in our school to start. Professional learning community for not in our school to do. Tackle some of these these issues that we spoke about in this 45 minute session for a little bit longer. So I'd like to bring them on. Jamie and Mary and and have you tell us a little bit more about the workshop and what you're these series of workshops that will happen starting this spring and and really monthly starting in the fall. So welcome Jamie and Mary. Hi there, I'm Jamie lactones. There you are. Hi, I'm Mary sock. We're both teachers at Watchung Hills Regional High School in Warren, NJ, and Jamie is going to speak a little bit 1st to tell us tell everybody about the work that we've done with not in our schools. So about 10 years ago we did our first not in our schools campaign and it was considered a white out against bullying. It was ten years ago and everybody still used the white out correction fluid at that point and it was the idea of making and affecting change in our school district and moving forward from it. So the two young women that you saw in it, I believe, were freshmen at the time that that was done, they have. Both gone on. Graduated from Watchung Hills, gone to college, gotten one has finished her law degree and passed the New York bar and is working in human rights law and the other is graduating from law school this April or May end of April. So they are incredible. Go getters. They decided to to work on getting the word upstander in the dictionary, the year that the word work was added to the dictionary and they thought if that word could. Get added, we definitely have some work to do to get up stand are added to the dictionary and they launched a campaign and there's some articles on the not in our school website as part of nyhat about the work they did and also if you saw Becky's previous slide of the young men that all had not in there in our school written on their backs their T shirts. Those are the boys that were involved in our club at the time. Also who are now out of college. So it's been a great decade. Long relationship and what Mary and I are hoping to do is to create a professional learning community with teachers educators who are interested in doing this kind of work in their school where we create actually a sense of community amongst our group and we function as an ongoing group for the year to support one another. So I'll let Mary tell you a little bit about our proposal and what we'd like to begin doing in April with any of you. More interested in signing up and joining the team. So thanks, Jamie. Mary speaks Teresa. We put the sign up for the for these workshops. It's limited group of people, but if you would like to sign up, we would so welcome your participation. So Teresa is going to put it in the chat. Go ahead, take it away, Mary, thanks Patrice. What we're looking to do is essentially form a professional learning community, right? So we can build a space together as a network of educators and what we want to do is have interactive, engaging workshops with ideas, strategies, tools that you can turn key into your lesson plans. We also just have a community of support, but part of it is it. What can I put into my lesson plans and then another part would be empowering students, right? Creating a culture of. Upstanders in your school. What can you do to improve your own school climate in your classroom and in your school community? And a lot of what Becky was talking about. This lays the groundwork for building a positive school culture and affirming the identities of all of the students that we teach. And our first session is going to be April 26th, 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Looking forward to it. Thank you so much. I have learned so much from these two amazing teachers and Andy. I think we have a little bit of time for Q&A and E and Laura are we correct? Q&A or interaction? We do have time. We can go a couple minutes over here if you need to. Alright, we we'd really love to hear from this powerhouse group with us on the workshop today. Any questions for Becky? Any things that you want to raise or talk about in the discussion? OK. Seeing anything? So while we're waiting for, I guess we don't have any Q&A. Right, so we do Patrice. I have a question here. How would you respond to a parent who says that social emotional learning is a form of indoctrination? And unfortunately in some states, I believe it was Oklahoma. They're actually working on a law to make the teaching of social emotional learning illegal. And the problem with with that idea that it's indoctrination is social. Emotional learning is actually the. Opposite, it's teaching kids how to communicate and share ideas and express themselves, and it's but it's from the inside out. It's not telling them what to think, it's asking them how they're feeling and it's and so that's a really important thing that I think we need to clarify, and I'm not sure why there is that concern. There's another question here about how do you respond when a student says that's OK to another student in the middle of class? Time and we actually have a film about that and we have a couple films on the website. What do you say to that? So gay and it's the basically that's so gay is a very hurtful comment and so it's again, I think Patrice was talking about the idea of that. Giving space to talk about it so kids can understand why that's not why that's hurtful and the in the little film one of the students. The students teach them each other and one says, well, I don't mean anything bad. I just mean that's so stupid. I don't mean that anything against gay people and the other student says, well, if if you mean that's a stupid idea, why don't you say that instead of. Trying to say something that blames all gay makes gay people feel uncomfortable so. Not sure if there are any other. Petrus, do you want to take this one? How can you explain to parents why students need to learn the truth about history? Right? You know, I, I think there's there are I? I will defer to. This incredible coalition called Learn from history there are vital resources from. National Association of School Board members from a FT from. The Council for the Social studies really amazing work and materials and resources on their side about this and they have webinars quite regularly. We really have appreciated their guidance on our site. There is a webinar that we held with learn from history with Pen America with some leaders from the not in our school movement who are facing this around the country and they had some suggestions about how they have dealt with it. I just had a session where I interviewed some students in Bloomington, normal, IL, where they've had a knot in our school campaign for a long time. And if you want answers. You go to your students and these young people had to get up in a school board session and answer that question. And I was so inspired by their answers about them wanting to learn and really understand history because they wanted to be prepared for the world and. You know, I think their answer was more complex than that, but letting giving young people the tools to lead and answer this question and be part of the conversation in our communities, I think is so vital. So you find that webinar and more tools from learn from history. So Teresa maybe you could put in the chat how people can see the webinars about an hour long webinar where you can get, you know, sort of advice from some really amazing people who are steeped in this work. There was another question about. Let's see. What do you do when faculty bullies are student and that is a faculty member? That is a problem and I would say. It's important to find out a little more from the student about what's been going on, and sometimes you need to get the help of the administrator to handle this. Sometimes you can go to the person, but it's a very delicate kind of situation. Depends on who that person is and if it's something that you think the person didn't realize they were doing, then maybe you could go directly to the person, but sometimes you need help from somebody else. That would be my thinking. And then Teresa wrote about standing up to racism and bias in our schools and communities. Patrice, did you want to share about that? 'cause that's a webinar, people. That's the webinar. That's the webinar right? She gave the link to. I'm sorry, I just. Uhm? There's another question about. How? How do you more strategies for teaching students to be upstanders? Well, we already heard the idea of of the role playing the idea of. Actually using the restorative justice process to help students do that, and we do have a film where older students teach younger students about that and. That is a. Another technique that's been used, I think Mary and Jamie didn't you use a technique like that where they actually went to other schools to teach that? Teach you how to be in that standard. Mary, I think you're on muted sorry yeah pre COVID we would send a cohort of high school students down to the middle schools as part of our White House days. Part of not in our schools campaign. And the like. The high school kids. Part of our Diversity Club would run a workshop for the middle school kids. Sometimes we would have our state senator who would come be the keynote speaker and then also the kids would break out into groups and the high school kids would facilitate conversations with the middle school students. We've also done it differently, where we've had a cohort of cheerleaders come from the middle school up to the high school. And we've trained the middle school. Students, they've gone back to the middle school, and they've run conversations and facilitated conversations on race, ethnicity with middle school students, and then the middle school students have actually gone down to the elementary school and facilitated those conversations with 4th and 5th graders in the elementary schools. It's really exciting. I think the team is telling us it's it's time to sign off. This has been such a really wonderful gathering with all of you this evening. We hope that you stay in touch with us. Sign up to get updates on Nye at dot Org where it says get updates. You'll get the not in our school newsletter please. I I we urge you to sign up and and spread the news about Becky's next workshop. In this new cohort, not in our school professional learning community that we're building with not in our school, we learn so much from you that's what not in our town and not in our school is all about about what we can learn from each other. What we can learn from our young people, and how we can share that knowledge. Moving forward. We're really grateful to share my lesson for giving us the opportunity to share some of these tools and to Becky for her. Her really, really important presentation today. You can learn more about her book. Identity safe classrooms and in her work. Thanks again so much. Thank you to our excellent partners. Thank you so much, Patrice and Becky and everyone else to join us tonight. And thank you for our awesome audience for joining us. This is the last letter of the day that we hope you'll be joining us tomorrow as well. We have one more short reminder video before we close out. Be sure to download your certificates. You should be able to do that now and also make sure to rate review this session and access all the fantastic resources from this session on the resources widget in your console. And again, thank you for joining us tonight. Goodbye. Hi everyone. Hi everyone, Kelly Boos rejoining you re joining you again join you. Enjoyed today's webinar as much as I did. I want to go over. _1736928502224
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