Program Overview

There is no denying that school violence and youth suicide rates have soared in the past few years. Many of these incidents have resulted from bullying. School districts across the nation have implemented and embraced bullying prevention programs although the effects have remained weak (Guerra, Williams, & Sadek, 2011). Policies like the JICDE focus in bullying prevention and education but its content causes reactive actions. It emphasizes acceptable versus unacceptable behavior, right or wrong from a normalized, adult perspective. What really needs to happen is for the content to foster self-reflection and decision-making from each student, bullies and victims alike. In addition, prevention program information is currently sporadic and dispersed so the learning is not effective. The prevention program needs to be formalized so that it becomes top of mind awareness for the students. In tackling this issue from the root cause, I am proposing the adoption of a formal education for diversity & inclusion in middle school, during the homeroom period. This will be a 45-60 minute interaction with students to help them learn about everyone’s unique identities and to help them accept all peers from that perspective. Middle school is a strategic learning opportunity for the students because studies have shown that bullying peaks in early adolescence (Nansel et al., 2001). In enabling this education, the instructional need is for a one-day “train the teacher” in-person class to help teachers develop their curriculum.

Purpose

The purpose of the diversity and inclusion course will be to teach students about recognizing their own cultural identities. As they acknowledge everyone’s unique background, including their own, they will gain cognitive bias skills. In the process, they will become sensitive to their peers’ differences and become motivated to respect everyone’s unique identities instead of rejecting them with acts of bullying.

Plan of Action

& Stakeholders

The end goal will be to implement the diversity and inclusion education in middle schools nation-wide. As a first step, which will serve as a pilot program, I am approaching the Colorado Board of Education with the idea to pilot the program within a local school district I am familiar with: the Poudre School District. Members of the board of education are the main stakeholders. With their approval, the next step will be to collaborate with the Poudre school district’s leadership and every middle school administrative staff within the district in order to train the teachers as part of the program pilot. Upon successful implementation, the program will be expanded nation-wide..

Benefits

The benefits of diversity and inclusion education in middle school are going to build a great foundation for life-long skills for the students. In increasing tolerance for all students by teaching love and acceptance for all, we will increase their self-esteem. When students feel like they belong, their motivation to be engaged in school will inherently result in academic success.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

There will be monthly workshops for teachers to share with the facilitator and other teachers successful teaching methods as well as criteria for continuous curriculum improvements. The facilitator will cooperate with the school districts to obtain reporting on key performance indicators (KPI) and share it with the audience. Key performance indicators are statistics on school attendance, school transfers, etc. After a year of collecting the KPIs, if KPIs are met, these statistics will be leveraged to roll out the program in other school districts nation-wide.

Goals & Objectives

The goal of this program is to enable teachers to effectively teach diversity and inclusion to their middle school students in order to foster and environment of acceptance among them. The learning objectives will be:

To learn about the depths of individual identities, how they are tied to our cultural background and personal affinities
To obtain cognitive bias skills
To expand on the psychology of peer pressure in the middle school setting
To distinguish between bullying versus teasing
To gain ideas and peer insights on best practices to approach the topic with their middle school students

Training Format

This one day in-class instructor-led training session will be supplemented with one monthly one-hour workshop.