By giving educators the tools to teach children to communicate and socialize, a University of South Carolina researcher hopes to help reduce bullying in the state. (File photo by Getty Images)
COLUMBIA — Students who lack fully-developed social skills are a common target for bullies. By giving educators the tools to better teach communication and socialization, a University of South Carolina researcher hopes to help reduce bullying — and the violence that comes with it — across South Carolina’s K-12 school system.
Professor Chad Rose heads the newly formed Bullying Prevention Center within USC’s College of Education. He brings with him 20 years of experience training teachers and parents, and putting research-backed, antibullying programs to work within school districts. By better preparing teachers to stop bullying behaviors early in a child’s school years, he hopes to protect children while also reducing teacher burnout in the Palmetto State.
“The main reason why teachers leave the profession is because of challenging behaviors in the schools and either a lack of training or lack of support in addressing challenging behaviors,” Rose said.
Bullying, he added, is often in the center of these struggles.
While this fall marked the second consecutive school year of declining teacher shortages in the state’s public schools, there were still 706 reported vacancies at the start of the semester.
“So I’m hoping that this center can not only support schools but also help with teacher retention,” Rose said.
Rose started his career as a high school special education teacher in Indiana. He said most students he worked with had a behavior disorder, making them more vulnerable to bullies as well as more prone to respond with violence and aggression. He’s spent two decades since then studying the causes of bullying and the best ways to prevent it.
“I was interested in hopefully making our school safer, especially for youth with disabilities,” he said. “At the heart of everything that I do is really school violence prevention.”
What Rose’s studies found is that social and communication skill deficits are the biggest predictors of bullying.
“The first thing that we have to do is we have to recognize that our schools are not just a place for learning academics. Our schools are a place where kids learn how to socialize,” he said. “So, our interventions are grounded in teaching kids these critical social skills that not only help prevent bullying but also help improve lifelong outcomes.”
In his 12 years working at the University of Missouri, Rose founded a center that grew to a team of 20 people. K-12 schools across the country could contract with the center’s team. The group went into a school, assessed instances of student-on-student violence and made a plan for the school to follow.
The center has worked with districts including Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, the third largest school district in the country, and Milwaukee Public Schools in Wisconsin, one of the nation’s most racially and economically diverse.
On the Missouri-based team were college students studying to become teachers. After training under Rose, they worked in classrooms as teams of two, teaching lessons designed to practice social skills, such as decision making, cooperation, conflict resolution, emotional regulation or setting boundaries.
This could include asking students to work in small groups on a math problem.
Not only were students asked to solve the equation, but they had to do so as a team. The teacher gave examples of what that cooperation should include. Then, as students worked, the teaching team walked around offering praise whenever a student showed signs of teamwork. Beyond just saying “good job,” the teachers gave compliments highlighting the specific action or behavior that fell within the social skill they were trying to teach.
Now, he’s bringing that same model to South Carolina.
Rose said teachers aren’t always trained to recognize and reinforce these social skills during classroom lessons. That’s what the center offers, both to working teachers and teachers in training who will study under Rose at USC.
Teachers can choose to participate in training, in person or virtually, through the center as part of the professional development and continuing education they need to maintain their teaching license.
School districts can also choose to partner with the center, either paying the center as a consultant or taking part in research studies run by the center.
A pair of federal grants, totaling $8 million, will support the center’s work over the next four years. The center also earns revenue when it books contracts with districts.
Rose hopes to have half a dozen people on staff at the end of the spring semester and grow from there, eventually bringing undergraduates onto his team the way he did in Missouri.
In addition to offering training through the center, Rose also has been in talks to bring the Say NO Bullying Festival to South Carolina. The annual event, which for the past 10 years has taken place in Los Angeles, brings in celebrity speakers and performers to raise awareness.
Rose said he also wants the center to celebrate great things schools are already doing.
“That’s a twist on how people approach bullying prevention,” he said. “We don’t talk about those things that are working. We talk about those things that are broken.
“But there are some schools out there, some administrators, some teachers, some parents that are doing amazing things to prevent bullying,” he said.
