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First off, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no 100% foolproof way to stop LGBTQIA+ based bullying in your classroom. There are, however, some tools that can help you greatly reduce it. One of the most effective tools to stop LGBTQIA+ based bullying is prevention. Here is how I set up an anti-bullying classroom.
How Does Your Anti-Bullying Classroom Look
Do you have visuals in your classroom that indicate that you support LGBTQIA+ students? If you are able to, post a LGBTQ Pride Flag and/or a Trans Pride flag. This is a simple and effective way to show your support for your LGBTQIA+ students. A simple flag can be a deterrent to LGBTQIA+ based bullying in your classroom. You, however, must be comfortable answering questions about the flags you display. This might require you practicing your answers. If you are uncomfortable, students will know and it will undermine your support.
Additionally, look at the visuals you post on your walls, in your presentations, and on your hand outs. Do these images show a variety of family structures including LGBTQIA+ families? Are there LGBTQIA+ people represented? I cannot stress to you how refreshing it is as an LGBTQIA+ youth to see yourself represented this way in a classroom. This also signals that you see LGBTQIA+ youth and families as a valuable part of the classroom and society. Your clear support is a bullying deterent.
Planning for your Anti-Bullying Classroom
Before the semester, put the building blocks in place for creating an anti-bullying classroom. Look at your curriculum for the first weeks of school. Are LGBTQ+ families represented? What books do you read? Do you include books that have LGBTQ+ based bullying in them? A big (and often well meaning) mistake I often see elementary educators make is reading books about this type of bullying, saying it is bad, and leaving it at that. These books can be great teaching tools, but only if you know how to use them.
Anti-bullying Classroom Example Activities
In lesson planning for the first few weeks of school, plan to address real or perceived* LGBTQIA+ based bullying. Here is a simple activity for pre-kindergarten to third grade to model the anti-bullying behaviors you want to see in your classroom. Read a book like that contains real or perceived* LGBTQIA+ based bullying (Sparkle Boy by Lesléa Newman is a book I have used for this activity in the past) to model scripts for confronting bullying. It is not enough to just tell students that bullying is bad or that they should stand up to bullying.
You need to teach students what to say to interrupt bullying. By giving students a script and the opportunity to practice it, you empower them to speak up if they encounter bullying in the future. This is a great activity to work into the classroom expectations section of your lesson plans for the first weeks of school.
Older elementary, middle school, and high school students also need scripts and practice for confronting anti-LGBTQ bullying. For older students, I will type out bullying scenarios and have the students in pairs or small groups pick one. These older students use the prompt scenario to come up with their own scripts and practice them in their group as a setting classroom expectations activity.
*when speaking about young children I will often used the term real or perceive LGBTQIA+ status because young children have often do not have a full grasp on what it means to be LGBTQIA+ and much of the bullying at this age is focused based on gender, gender presentation, and defying gender role expectations. While creative gender presentation and defying gender roles can be part of being LGBTQIA+, those two things alone do not by definition make anyone part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Celebrate Student’s Identities
Schedule some activities during the first weeks of school that allow students to share the identities they hold that are important to them. These can include including family structure, gender, sexual orientation, and many more. In the recent past, there has been a lot of focus on trying to take gender out of the classroom and have classrooms be gender neutral spaces. Gender is in your classroom already, and it is not neutral. Please do not try to have a gender neutral classroom. Have a gender celebratory classroom!
Let students share their gender if they want to. There are lots of ways to do this. Two recently released books that include identity activities that would be great for this time period are, Being the Change: Lessons and Strategies to Teach Social Comprehension by Sara K Ahmed and Start Here, Start Now: A Guide to Anti-bias and Antiracist Work in Your School Community by Liz Kleinrock.
The First Day: Setting Up an Anti-Bullying Classroom
At the beginning of the semester is the best time to set the tone for your anti-bullying classroom. First, look at how you set the tone on day one. How do you take attendance? Do you ask students’ pronouns? How do you collect information about their family structures? An often overlooked source of inclusivity is data collection. This is by design! It is much easier to not seek out the data and then use that as justification for not supporting LGBTQIA+ students and families. Don’t be part of this problem. Learn how to collect this data from your students in a supportive and culturally appropriate way.
Do not call attendance from your roll sheet. There is a very good chance that some students do not go by the name listed for them. In the case of transgender students, calling them the name on the roll sheet could cause them harm by outting them. Instead of calling attendance from your roll sheet, hand out a questionnaire as students enter the room. Have students fill out a form that includes what name you can find them listed as on your roll sheet. Then, have the students introduce themselves to the class. Additionally, taking roll this way will help with name pronunciation. Win win!
What Should Happen if LGBTQ+ Based Bullying Occurs
You need a plan in place for if LGBTQ+ based bullying does occur. All students should know what it is and ideally have a say in creating it. I do not personally like sending students to the office so I always made other plans. I have lots of tips on what to do if LGBTQ+ based bullying occurs in my recent blog post Five Easy Ways to Support LGBTQ Students.
Follow Through and Reevaluate
Finally, students should have a way to provide feedback on things you are working on in the classroom and your anti-bullying plan should be part of that. It is imperative that while you are creating your anti-bullying plan you are coming up with ways to let your students evaluate it. You cannot know everything all the time and there are things that you will miss.
One way to seek feedback is by doing a short survey. In this survey, ask students how supported they feel in their identities in the classroom. Ask students if they or someone they know has experienced LGBTQIA+ status based bullying in class. Also seek student input on ways to make your anti-bullying plan more robust.
In Conclusion
Students thrive in an environment where they have clear and consistent boundaries and feel supported. No student should be subjected to LGBTQIA+ based bullying in the classroom. Taking these clear and decisive steps to set up your classroom in a way that allows all students the support they need to learn, will lead to better outcomes for all students. Thank you for taking the time to learn how to support your LGBTQIA+ students better. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback. For more ideas, please sign up for my once a month newsletter below.