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I felt this article was necessary to read because bullying unfortunately is still prevalent in schools today. This article highlights some low-risk strategies students can use to support peers who are bullied. These strategies include supporting the target in means of reporting the incident, not participating in the bullying, telling a trusted adult, getting to know people instead of judging them, and being an ally online.

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Standing up to bullying can be frightening, but students can use these low-risk strategies to support peers who are bullied.

©Shutterstock.com/mmstudiodesign

Bullying among school-age children is on the decline. This is a promising trend; however, 28 percent of all young people in the U.S. experience online bullying, and almost one in four experience bullying in person.

Bullying often takes place where there are no adults around, in transitional spaces like hallways and stairwells. It also occurs during recess, in the cafeteria, on the way home from school, or online when a child is alone in their room. Despite these conditions, less than 40 percent of young targets of bullying notify an adult-a percentage that decreases as kids get older.

Obviously, schools and school staff need to do their part to prevent and address bullying, including establishing policies that reflect district/state guidelines, assessing bullying at their school, monitoring hot spots, encouraging reporting, and educating the school community.

But another approach is to empower students to prevent and interrupt bullying by teaching them how to act as allies.

What It Means to Be an Ally

When we think of the word ally, we often picture someone who directly challenges the person doing the bullying. But most young people find confrontation difficult because it takes a lot of self-confidence and assertiveness. Many kids-like many adults-are not going to speak out against aggressors.

Support the target. This can be as simple as encouraging the targeted person to report the incident, and/or accompanying them to tell an adult. It can also include reaching out to the targeted person face-to-face or via text and saying something like, "Hey, I'm sorry that's happening," or "What they did wasn't cool." Research demonstrates that support strategies like these are more likely to lead to positive outcomes for the targeted student.

Don't participate. This may sound like passive bystanding, but is actually an effective form of active nonparticipation. For example, if a group of kids in the cafeteria are laughing at someone, a nearby student can make a point not to laugh, or say something like "Let's not go there," and change the subject. In doing this, the nonparticipating student sends a powerful message to counter the bullying behavior while sending a message of support to the targeted student. Further, if one child takes the initiative to voice support, it can give others the courage to follow suit. This creates a groundswell of nonparticipation, which can stop bullying in its tracks.

Tell a trusted adult. Many students don't notify adults because they don't think it will do any good or they think it could even make things worse. A key to creating an environment where students feel safe to report bullying is to make adults more approachable by taking the issue seriously, letting students know you are available to talk, really listening when they come to you, and remaining discreet. Confidentiality can go a long way toward preventing retaliation. Encourage students to tell a trusted adult in their lives about bullying or harassing behavior they experience or witness. Make sure your school has safe and confidential procedures in place for reporting bullying incidents, and communicate these to all students.

Get to know people instead of judging them. This is an important one. Especially during the tween and teen years, many bullying episodes are identity-based, which means students are targeted based on aspects of their identity (e.g., appearance or body size, race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, etc.). To create a safe classroom climate, it is critical to explicitly teach about identity, diversity, and bias.

Be an ally online. When young people see bullying happen to someone online, they can explicitly not contribute and leave the group-it will be noticed. Students can support the target by reaching out with a message of support. Students can also take a screenshot of a bullying conversation and report it to an adult. Finally, young people can spread their own inclusive, nonbiased, and respectful messages, either by responding to bullying comments or by creating original ones.

Young people need to learn specific actions they feel they can realistically take when faced with bullying. These are effective and less risky than confrontation, and can be used by those students who want to do something but feel unsure in the moment.

Teaching Strategies

1. Turn a bullying or name-calling incident into a teachable moment by discussing what happened and how one can act as an ally.

2. Use children's and young adult literature that provides examples of ally behaviors and how they made a difference.

3. Teach explicit lessons that explore identity-based bullying, prevention strategies, empathy-building, and activities that help students practice the skills of being an ally with role-plays and scenarios.

Educators can teach these strategies in a few ways:

The Anti-Defamation League has some helpful real-life examples in a 20-minute online course for educators.

In 100 years, we may not be remembered by the subject matter we taught, but those generations of young people will remember whether they felt like they belonged, whether they felt safe and included, and whether all aspects of their identity could be shown in school and elsewhere. We can stop bullying once and for all by creating a compassionate cadre of allies among our students.

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Standing up to bullying can be frightening, but students can use these low-risk strategies to support peers who are bullied.

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This article explains the many ways you can create a positive and impactful learning experience for students with community building and assessment. It begins with having a clear standards-based mindset, making your assessment goals clear, and developing a community, not a classroom, of learners. It continues with being able to provide opportunities to all learners and infuse a growth mindset into your instruction. When you give students the agency over their learning, you make room for them to be heard, and feel important.

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7 Ways to Build a Learner-Centered Classroom

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Teachers can create positive learning experiences for students that combine assessment with agency, opportunity, and community building.

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This article focuses on the benefits of giving students efficient sensory breaks. Students with behavior disorders may not be able to cope with overstimulation, and may need periodic breaks to regroup. These breaks are significant for these students because they improve students' learning outcomes.

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Creating Effective and Efficient Breaks for Students During the School Day

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Short breaks allow students who struggle with regulation time to regroup, which improves their learning outcomes.

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After viewing the title, I already felt strongly of my biased opinion of leaving Tiktok out of the classroom. However, this article incorporates the many ways Tiktok can enhance science class. Especially at the younger grade levels, science concepts and ideas can be challenging to understand when they aren't available to be conducted in person. However, many educators have turned to TikTok to demonstrate many science experiments for students. Since many middle school-high school students already have TikTok, why not encourage them use this application to expand their knowledge in a positive way.

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When Greg Wolf's middle school science students recommended that he film his class experiments and post them on TikTok, he initially thought it was a silly idea. TikTok, Wolf believed, was a space for teen dance videos. "I didn't even remotely realize there was educational content to be found on the platform," Wolf says.

But after finding a trove of excellent videos made by educators, Wolf changed his tune. Now, the recently retired science teacher from Vermont is a content creator himself and uploads TikTok explainers and experiments to an audience of over 300,000 followers. Wolf's recent videos include a 40-second breakdown of just how fast the speed of light is and a demonstration of potential and kinetic energy using Popsicle sticks.

Many K-12 science teachers are following suit, visiting TikTok to showcase their own experiments, explain scientific concepts to their followers, and recommend lesson ideas to fellow teachers. Other teachers are turning to the app as a source of inspiration for lessons, such as potential experiments to re-create-or debunk-in class.

According to educators, when used correctly, TikTok can serve as a means for science teachers to distill complex concepts, bolster lessons, and engage students in the process of scientific thinking and inquiry through a medium that many of them are already using on a daily basis.

Here are some of the ways that science teachers told Edutopia they are using TikTok in the classroom.

A Library of Science Experiments

Teachers looking to find compelling experiments on TikTok can type relevant keywords into the platform's search bar, scroll through the app's new dedicated STEM feed, or follow the accounts of other science teachers to get notified about new posts from trusted sources.

After finding an interesting experiment, teachers have options. If it's simple enough, some will go ahead and re-create the experiment with their students. Savannah Brown, an eighth-grade science teacher in North Carolina, told Edutopia that she recently illustrated the concepts of force and motion to her students by using spring-loaded pull-back cars-an idea she found in a popular TikTok video.

For experiments that are too difficult, too dangerous, or too expensive to pull off in class, teachers also find value in showing TikTok videos of them during lessons to expose students to scientific concepts and phenomena.

"Often teachers don't have the lab equipment to perform certain experiments in the class for students," says Josh Kenney, a high school chemistry teacher in Michigan. "So I do a lot of demos, but I'll use others' videos to demonstrate a lot of the things that I can't." Kenney follows these video demos with elaboration activities, like having students sketch or write out possible explanations, before wrapping up with a full-class discussion.

Showing someone else's TikTok experiment "is almost like free prep work," Wolf explains. "Somebody went into my back lab, mixed up my chemicals for me, and now they're presenting this quick little experiment," saving both time and resources. Given the vast amount of content available on TikTok, Wolf says, it's possible to show students a short video of the exact chemical reaction they need to understand. "Then I can tell you how it worked, why it worked, and what they didn't talk about," Wolf says.

Getting Kids to Fill In the Gaps

Most TikToks are under 60 seconds. That doesn't sound like much, but Kenney likes this conciseness.

In fact, he actively seeks out videos of experiments that don't give a complete explanation of what just happened. "I can use those videos to introduce a phenomenon or to introduce a topic, and then we can have a discussion," Kenney says. "Why do you think this happened? And what can we do in our class to test that?" To Kenney, TikTok videos serve as useful discussion starters; he often pushes his high school students to use higher-order critical thinking to fill in the information that the video left out.

For example, Kenney uses a one-minute TikTok at the start of a class in his "gas laws" unit, in which a bottle rocket filled with water and liquid nitrogen rapidly takes off. Kenney starts by playing it without sound; "I don't want students to hear how it works; I want them to think of ideas for how it works."

Then, Kenney has students break into small groups to discuss why they think the phenomenon in the video occurred the way it did and create molecular diagrams to support their explanation. Once each group has presented their ideas, Kenney plays the video a second time-now with sound-and asks the groups to revise their explanations, before holding a broader class discussion to dispel any lingering misconceptions.

Elementary teachers can follow a similar approach, says Nancy Bullard, a K-5 science lab teacher in North Carolina and popular TikTok content creator with over 3 million followers.

Bullard uploads fun and easy-to-replicate science experiments-like a recent 40-second video on how to make a "DIY fire extinguisher" with baking soda, vinegar, a plastic bottle, and a balloon. Bullard suggests that instead of simply playing full TikToks in class, teachers tease out learning by showing students the first five to 10 seconds of a video and pausing it before anything substantial is revealed. "Pique their interest. Engage them in this lesson, and then have them go make their predictions," she says.

Bullard argues that students will be compelled to think critically and use their prior knowledge of concepts, chemical properties, or reactions to try to predict what's likely to happen next, rather than having all the information handed to them at the outset. Wait until the end of class to play the rest of the video or re-create the experiment yourself, Bullard advises.

Think Like a Scientist

Some teachers might be hesitant to use TikTok out of fear of stumbling across the misleading information lurking on the platform. But teachers like Kenney make it instructive: "That's why I like TikTok," he says. "Because it has misinformation. That's super-valuable in an educational setting."

Kenney suggests actively searching for phony TikTok experiments to show in class, then asking students to break into groups to analyze whether the videos seem legitimate. Kenney notes that this aligns with the instructional framework of "CER": getting students to identify and evaluate claims, evidence, and reasoning.

Ariel Lane, an educational consultant and former middle school science teacher in Georgia, says her former students would notice small things that seemed fishy about TikTok experiments-like an ice cube tray being one color when it entered a freezer and a different color when it came out, which might suggest that some of the materials were manipulated. To further test the authenticity of experiments, Lane's students re-created them. This, Lane says, allowed students to engage in complex work and introduced them to the important scientific concept of replicability -used by the larger scientific community to confirm the validity of findings.

After watching a video on the Mpemba effect, the phenomenon whereby hot water actually freezes faster than cold water, Lane's students conducted their own version of the experiment with ice cubes at home. The next day, they discussed the process: what variables they held constant, what variables they changed, and whether their outcomes lined up with that of the video.

TikTok as Professional Development

Educators say TikTok has gradually become a space for teachers to learn from each other and build relationships. In high school chemistry, Kenney says, "we kind of all do the same demos and labs, but every once in a while someone's got a better take on it, and they'll put that out there on TikTok."

Many teachers reach out to content creators directly to solicit advice on how to pull off an experiment in the classroom, says Phil Cook, a high school chemistry teacher in Indiana whose TikTok account has close to 4 million followers. "They've said, 'I really want to try this experiment. Can you give me a little bit more detail?'"

The app can also help teachers better connect with students. "It does increase your street cred to be able to say to your kids, 'I'm on TikTok' or 'I use TikTok' or 'Here, let's watch a TikTok,'" Wolf says. "I mean, that's where their lives are."

To take advantage of that intrinsic engagement, Lane suggests allowing students to find relevant videos to share in class. To ensure that a video is worthwhile, ask students to make the case for how it is connected to a skill or a concept you're working on. If the video is relevant, Lane suggests attempting to incorporate it into a lesson.

"A lot of times, we just kind of disregard videos they show us," Lane says. "But try to look deeper and consider, 'Wow, wait a minute-this could be something we talk about as a class.'"

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Harnessing the Educational Potential of TikTok in Science Classes

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For many science teachers, TikTok serves as a useful library of inspiration for in-class discussions, experiments, and student inquiry.

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This article is about a famous pineapple named Patricia. This article portrays the many creative ways to help students learn self-regulation. After many years of trying and failing, a 4th grade teacher was finally successful in growing her own pineapple. The students named her Patricia after being welcomed to the class, and she soon became their friend. She cheered them up, calmed them down, and became a great conversation starter for those who were shy.

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The Power of the Pineapple: Helping Kids Learn Self-Regulation

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Observing nature can be an effective method for young students to discuss and understand their emotions in a calm learning environment.