While Bullying Awareness month may be over, the need certainly is still with us. In today’s podcast we continue our conversation on the resource, Bullying Hurts. In part 2 of our conversation, co-author Lester Laminack says that the term bullying is in danger of being overused which could cause it to loose it’s effectiveness. He says there’s a difference between a student who is being rude and bullying. We started our conversation on the need to work towards kindness not only in our classrooms, but in the world.





See below for the full transcript of the conversation:

Lester: Let's think about working towards kindness in general. If we try a certain type of thing to do in the classroom versus a certain type of thing to do outside the home, if you make those differentiated, I think we're missing the point. Kindness is kindness, and I think we've reached a point in the country where we need to just be conscious of our actions and our words, the things we post on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. It appears to me that we've reached a place where lot of people, adults and children, respond in a knee jerk fashion to an issue or an idea in a very one sided kind of way.

I think that the place we need to start is just being mindful, being conscious of ourselves and how our actions and reactions either make the life of another person more stressful or less stressful. I mean this for everything, not just in our teaching lives, but also in our daily lives. Our moment by moment existence, just being conscious and mindful of our own behaviors. I don't think it's that difficult to be conscious, to be present and aware of your own thoughts and your own feelings, your emotions, and when an issue comes up.

Mr Rogers told us you're entitled to feel any of the human emotions, that's part of being human. What we have to guard against is how we react to those emotions. It's fine to feel angry or indignant, but to behave, speak without reflection is dangerous. I think the idea of being kind, and how we worked towards being kind, is to help children be conscious of what they're feeling in the moment, to be conscious of the notion that what they say and how they act has an impact on the other people around them. It helps build the notion of who they are in the minds of the people they interact with. It's building your identity, and I think just being conscious, and then helping everyone work toward that. That makes seem trite, but I think it's true, that if we just simply pause and ask ourselves, "Will this help another? Will it harm or hinder another? Is it necessary? Is it something I would want everyone else to do?" then I think that's like the first, and probably most important step.

Brett: Throughout Bullying Hurts, you write about the importance of Read Aloud. Can you talk a little bit why they're such an important part of the process?

Lester: Years ago, Rudine Sims Bishop wrote about literature as having the power to do windows, mirrors or doors. Read Aloud is an opportunity for us to hold up examples of kindness and unkindness, conscious choice and unconscious actions so that we can see ourselves in situations that perhaps we don't see ourselves in in the moment. We may not actually be conscious that our actions are harming another person, we're simply reacting on the gut level in a visceral way, just out of impulse, without being thoughtful about it.

Using Read Aloud allows us to take a situation and look at the situation,