ABOUT

CirclePoint was initiated in February 2013 by active and retired veteran educators of the Boston Public School District in Massachusetts, USA, who were looking for a solution to bullying problems that were not being met by the traditional school processes and bullying programs available at that time. These educators, whose combined experience included roles as a superintendent of middle school academics, principals, and teachers at multiple grade levels, saw the following problems:

1. The traditional discipline process—the application of a punitive consequence for bullying—was ineffective in stopping bullying and in many cases counterproductive.
2. The traditional discipline process would, without fail, result in an antagonistic engagement between administrators and parents.
3. Rules against bullying and excluding others were generally ignored by students.
4. Bullying problem identification was a challenge given that aggression is pervasive among students as a normal form of social interaction and that students rarely told adults about bullying problems.
5. Adults and students alike do not have a clear understanding of what bullying is and why people do it.
6. Adult intervention as the sole means of addressing a bullying problem does little in terms of preventing future bullying of the target.
7. Not only is the traditional discipline process largely ineffective in addressing individual bullying problems, but the process does nothing in terms of influencing peer group norms to make bullying in general less accepted among peer groups.
8. No specific support is given to students harmed by bullying to help reverse the harm and prevent future bullying.
9. Parents are generally provided with a “signs your child is being bullied” pamphlet; the “wait and watch” approach does nothing to prevent bullying or provide parents with an opportunity to play a larger, more effective role.

Perhaps more importantly, these educators saw a tremendous opportunity in educating students on bullying and providing them with ways to render bullying behaviors ineffective, whether as a target or as a bystander. Creating an empowered, resilient, and socially astute student body was a goal that these educators wanted to meet.

The educators also wanted to engage parents more strongly not just to align goals and work with them in partnership but to provide them with ways that they can work with their children to help reduce the chances that bullying would start and what they can do should their children become involved in a bullying problem.

These educators engaged Ari Magnusson, a proponent of whole-community empowerment for addressing bullying problems, to develop the program and define effective mechanisms. The team set the following goals for the program:

1. Involve all members of a school community.
2. Educate all members of the school community on bullying.
3. Provide educational materials that do not carry a social stigma to students.
4. Empower all members of the community with specific and role-appropriate ways that they can solve the problem, individually and collectively.
5. Address bullying by both boys and girls (physical, verbal, and social-relational aggression).
6. Enable parents, teachers, and administrators to work together in partnership when bullying problems arise, not to be in conflict.
7. Provide targets with a robust support system so that they can get whatever help they need, including reversing harm and learning how to deal with aggression in the future.
8. Create a discipline process that is constructive, results in behavioral change, and is a positive experience for all participants, including the aggressor and his or her parents.
9. Use consequences for bullying that do not feel like an injustice to aggressors but that are clearly linked to the behavior of the aggressor and that do not penalize the target.
10. Create a discipline process that eliminates the risk of retaliation by the aggressor against the target or peer who informed an adult.
11. Create conditions that make students comfortable telling an adult about a bullying problem.
12. Remove barriers to bystander intervention: empower bystanders to take action by providing them with specific techniques that they can use that do not carry a risk of a decrease in social status or of becoming a target.
13. Ensure that a bullying target who comes to the attention of adults is protected from further bullying throughout the entire school day.

The program development effort relied on independent research from peer-reviewed journals and other scholarship to answer the following questions:

1. What does modern research say about why students bully?
2. What are the similarities and differences in bullying by gender?
3. What are the needs of the target in terms of support, reversing the harm caused by bullying, and getting bullying to stop?
4. What is the perspective of the aggressor? Why do aggressors see punishment as such an injustice? And could that be related to why the engagement with parents is so antagonistic?
5. Why don’t bullying targets seek adult help more frequently?
6. Why don’t students who are against bullying stop it when they see it?
7. In a school community, who is aware of who is being bullied?
8. What are the roles that individuals play in an instance of bullying?
9. What are the problems with the current processes and components related to bullying typically found in schools—discipline process, rules, target support, bullying education, teacher and support staff actions, student engagement, parent engagement, problem resolution?
10. What do current bullying prevention programs offer, and what does the research say about the effectiveness of these programs?
11. How does the media present bullying, and what misinformation and erroneous perspectives based on media and traditional ideas about bullying need to be changed and overcome?

From this research and the goals defined by the team came the mechanisms defined as part of the original CirclePoint Bullying Prevention Program and, later, the CirclePoint Method. These mechanisms are described on THE METHOD page.

The CirclePoint approach is based on the beliefs that:

• preventing and stopping bullying starts with an education on bullying, for all community members: students, parents, teachers, administrators, and non-teaching staff.
• the pervasive aggressive interplay that characterizes student social interactions is normal, natural, and healthy, and that students need to be exposed to these types of interactions to develop into socially-skilled, well-balanced, resilient, and confident individuals.
• all students should be taught ways of rendering aggressive behavior ineffective, whether faced with it in the course of normal social interaction, as a bullying target, or as a bystander.
• some students will need adult help in getting bullying to stop and that adults who understand bullying will be best able to provide that help.
• an environment with strong support for targets and constructive approaches for dealing with aggressors will make students comfortable coming forward and asking for help or notifying adults of a bullying problem.
• most students bully not with the goal of harming others but in order to improve or maintain their own social status.
• the drive to acquire status by students can be stronger than their desire to follow rules or “do the right thing.”
• students, in their drive to attain status, may not realize that they are bullying and causing harm and should be given an opportunity to change their behavior.
• the consequence for bullying should be constructive—one that is directly linked to the bullying behavior and is beneficial to the target.
• a punitive consequence (i.e., punishment) will be perceived by the aggressor (and his or her parents) as an injustice and will be ineffective at best and usually counterproductive.
• the problem of bullying should be addressed at the individual, peer group, organization, and community levels.
• adult education on bullying creates conditions that allow parents and administrators to work in partnership to solve a bullying problem.
• classroom teachers play a unique role in that they perhaps can best understand the social relationships and hierarchies of their students and can use this information to identify and help bullied students and to influence peer groups to make bullying less accepted.
• parents can do more than just look for “signs that their children are being bullied”; parents can play a key role by taking proactive action to reduce the chances their children will be bullied and can create an environment of understanding with their children that will increase the chances their child will come to them for help if a bullying problem arises.
• when a bullying problem arises, all adults who monitor the students involved—from the start of the day through to the end of the day—should be made aware of the problem to ensure that the aggression stops.
• stopping bullying behavior should not be the end of the process for bullied students; these students should have additional help to reverse the harm caused by the bullying and to heal.
• every bullying problem can be a learning and growth experience for the students involved and that parents, teachers, and administrators can work together to resolve the problems.
• “feel-good” events such as school assemblies against bullying, “say no to bullying day,” posters, stickers, and slogans promoting empathy are ineffective at delivering lasting change and not a good use of school resources for the purpose of addressing bullying.
• terms and definitions should be objective, concrete, and appropriate, ones that every member of the community—adults and students like—can understand.
• the language used to discuss the problem should reflect the tone and the approach of the solution; it should be objective, rational, and constructive and should avoid stereotyping, labels, and sensationalism.

The philosophy is not based on personal notions of what might be effective; the philosophy is based on independent, peer-reviewed research. This research shows that:

• bullying is a group behavior generally done to attain higher social status (making the harm caused by bullying a by-product and not the intent).
• peers reward aggressors with greater respect (making appeals not to bully by non-peers, such as adults, ineffective).
• starting in early grade school years, social status becomes the highest priority for students, above following rules (which renders rules against bullying ineffective) and, for some, friendships (which renders rules mandating inclusion ineffective).
• student social life is awash in aggression; however, the vast majority of it isn’t harmful (making policing of the student population to identify harmful aggression inefficient and ineffective).
• punishment for bullying is largely ineffective (aggressors who don’t intend harm, don’t realize the harm they are causing, or use aggression in an environment where bullying is not always recognized or addressed by adults see punishment as an injustice) and even counterproductive (punishment can actually enhance an aggressor’s status, reinforcing the bullying behavior, or be perceived by the aggressor as an injustice, resulting in retaliation against targets or other students).
• students don’t always recognize that they are bullying and, where peer group norms strongly support bullying, may see the target as deserving of the bullying (also making punishment seem like an injustice).
• students who have been chronically bullied may not recognize that they are being bullied and may believe their treatment is due to personal flaws (making identification of these students by classroom teachers and others critical to getting these students help).
• the risk of tragedy for a target and/or his or her peers increases when a support system for targets is lacking (making schools without a robust student support system at a higher risk for tragedy).
• many bystanders want to do something about the bullying they witness, but they face barriers to action in terms of risk to social status and of becoming a target (making rules that bystanders act without providing them with proper strategies to overcome these barriers ineffective).

Please see Sources on the ABOUT page for a select list of research references.

Imagine a school where:

• some targets of bullying are able to stop bullying on their own, gaining peer acceptance and a boost in social status and self-esteem in the process.
• bystanders are able to effectively intervene in bullying situations and change peer social norms without risk to their own social status or of becoming a target themselves, the main barriers to intervention.
• students who need adult help with a bullying problem can reach out to any adult they trust, in confidence, and get not only effective support in stopping the bullying, but also help in healing and becoming empowered so future aggression doesn’t result in bullying.
• students feel comfortable telling adults about a bullying problem as the risk of retaliation is eliminated.
• teachers have a set of concrete strategies to not just identify and stop bullying but also to influence the peer group to make bullying less accepted.
• administrators who are resolving a bullying problem are able to have an open and honest conversation with the aggressor that results in an immediate change in behavior, eliminating the need for any form of consequence or punishment.
• a student who continues to bully after administrator engagement is provided with a constructive consequence that influences the aggressor to change behavior and doesn’t penalize the target.
• all the adults who monitor a bullied student through the entire day—homeroom teachers, specialists, substitutes, and cafeteria and playground monitors—are aware of the bullying problem and will intervene to stop any further aggression.
• parents are proactive in helping to prevent their child from being bullied and know in advance what actions to take should their child become involved in a bullying problem, whether as a target or an aggressor.
• administrators, teachers, and parents work in partnership to resolve a bullying problem.

In other words, imagine a whole school community empowered.

This is CirclePoint.

Ari Magnusson worked for seven years as the bullying prevention educator for the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Life Skills program offered in Boston, Massachusetts-area schools in the United States. At the request of Boston Public Schools, he created the CirclePoint Bullying Prevention Program, which was piloted in 2016 to great success. For the past decade, he has been teaching about bullying at the elementary, middle, and high school levels in person and virtually. He has worked with educators on implementing whole-school solutions and has helped educators, parents, and students resolve individual bullying problems. He has also provided guidance to healthcare practitioners on how to support their patients and their caregivers when they identify a bullying issue.

The following is a list of select sources that were referenced while the CirclePoint Program and Method were being created. Please note that inclusion of a source on this list is not an endorsement of the accuracy of the information contained in the source. 

Andrews, Naomi C. Z., et al. “Bullying and the Abuse of Power.” International Journal of Bullying Prevention (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-023-00170-0

Anthony, Michelle, and Reyna Lindert. Little Girls Can Be Mean: Four Steps to Bully-Proof Girls in the Early Grades. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.

Atlas, Rona S., and Debra J. Pepler. “Observations of bullying in the classroom.” Journal of Educational Research 92 (1998): 86–99.

Bakken, Linda, Neilia Solberg, and Chris Gentess. “Middle School Cyberbullying Curriculum.” Seattle Public Schools, fall 2008. http://district.seattleschools.org/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=216981

Bauer, Nerissa S., Paula Lozano, and Frederick P. Rivara. “The Effectiveness of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program in Public Middle Schools: A Controlled Trial,” Journal of Adolescent Health, March 2007, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 266–274.

Bauman, Sheri. Cyberbullying: What Counselors Need to Know. Alexandria: American Counseling Association, 2011.

Black, Sally D. “Evaluation of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program: How the Program Can Work for Inner City Youth” (a report from the Proceedings of Persistently Safe Schools: The 2007 National Conference on Safe Schools), 2007.

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Boehm, Christopher. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

Bonanno, Rina A., and Shelley Hymel. “Beyond Hurt Feelings: Investigating Why Some Victims of Bullying Are at Greater Risk for Suicidal Ideation.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 56, Number 3 (July 2010): 420–440.

Coleman, Peter T. “Dismantling Systems of Bullying.” International Center for Cooperation & Conflict Resolution, November 18, 2011. http://blogs.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/2011/11/18/dismantling-systems-of-bullying/

Coloroso, Barbara. The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander. New York: Harper, 2008.

Colvin, Geoff, et. al. “The School Bully: Assessing the Problem, Developing Interventions, and Future Research Directions.” Journal of Behavioral Education 8:3 (1998): 293–319.

Cox, Deborah L., Sally D. Stabb, and Joseph F. Hulgus. “Anger and Depression in Girls and Boys: A Study of Gender Differences,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, March 2000, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 110–112.

Davis, Stan. Schools Where Everyone Belongs: Practical Strategies for Reducing Bullying. Illinois: Research Press, 2007.

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Davis, Stan, and Charisse Nixon. “Youth Voice Project First Results Workshop” (a presentation to the 2010 International Bullying Prevention Association conference in Seattle, WA), 2010. http://www.youthvoiceproject.com

Dijkstra, Jan Kornelis, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Rene Veenstra. “Beyond the class norm: Bullying behavior of popular adolescents and its relation to peer acceptance and rejection.” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 36 (2008): 1289–1299.

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Dowdy, June P., ed. “Bullying Prevention: A Statewide Collaborative That Works” (a report to stakeholders from PA CARES, HALT!, and the Highmark Healthy High 5 Bullying Prevention Institute), 2009.

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Hawkins, D. Lynn, Debra J. Pepler, and Wendy M. Craig. “Naturalistic observations of peer interventions in bullying.” Social Development 10 (2001): 512–527.

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James, Alana. “Research Briefing: School Bullying.” National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, February 2010. http://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/research/Briefings/school_bullying_pdf_wdf73502.pdf

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