Education Week - February 2, 2022 - 5

" There's been some amazing success
stories throughout the pandemic, so
it's also an opportunity to document
some of the great things they've done
during this time. Let's capture that. "
WHAT THE
RESEARCH SAYS
Build strong relationships
If principals build strong and trusting
relationships with their staff members,
students, and communities, it
will be a lot easier to discuss thorny,
unpleasant, and difficult issues.
Some of that trust can be forged
through listening to staff, following
up when they have concerns, and ensuring
that they have the resources to
do their jobs.
" It's definitely not just the situation,
it's something that's built on a lot
more, " said Redmond, the principal
from Homer, Alaska.
Redmond spent her first few
months at Homer Middle School last
year getting to know teachers and students,
finding out what was important
to them, and learning how the staff
operates.
" That has really helped me to anticipate
how they are going to react
to something I am about to share, so
I don't get quite knocked off my feet
as I did in the beginning of the year, "
Redmond said.
Like most of the country, Homer
Middle School is dealing with a substitute
teacher shortage, but Redmond is
able to cover classes with teachers and
staff in the building.
She credits the school climate built
on the idea that everyone in the building
is a part of every student's education
for making this possible, she said.
" That's how we operate, so being
able to cover for each other is a part of
building that climate, " she said. " If you
don't have a good relationship, having
to share those negative things is going
to make it even harder for you. "
Let people feel heard
Principals have to be willing to listen
now more than ever, Dixon said.
Principals are master multitaskers,
but this is one of those times when
they should train 100 percent of their
energy on the recipient. No emailing
or texting while having conversations,
Dixon said.
" People will give you tons of feedback
right now, and a lot of it maybe
isn't positive, but I think you just have
to be prepared to know that that's
coming, " she said.
And whenever possible, opt for inperson
communication with staff over
email, even if it's a short staff meeting,
advised Redmond.
Doing so gives the staff opportunities
to ask questions and brainstorm
solutions to possible problems that
may come up along the way.
" Usually, the staff thinks about so
many more things than I ever think
of and helps me figure out what problems
can arise, " Redmond said.
Coverage of principals and school
leadership is supported in part by a
grant from the Joyce Foundation, at
www.joycefdn.org/programs/educationeconomic.
Education Week retains sole
editorial control over the content of this
coverage.
Bullying Dropped as Students Spent Less Time in In-Person Classes
During Pandemic
By Sarah D. Sparks
The long periods of remote learning
during the pandemic may have one silver
lining: The physical distance appears to
have prevented student harassment.
New national research from Boston
University using internet search data
suggests bullying declined during the
pandemic-not just in schools, but online
as well-and harassment hasn't entirely
returned even after students started to
come back to campus.
In a typical year, the internet sees a
spike in people looking for information
on bullying at the beginning of a school
year, which then drops over time, with lulls
particularly over the winter and summer
breaks. By comparing the month by month
search patterns of millions of Google
users from March 2020 to February 2021,
researchers got a glimpse of how school and
online harassment may have changed when
students were at home, beyond school
reports and surveys.
Over the course of the pandemic,
searches related to school bullying were
33 percent lower than would be expected
based on historical trends, and those
related to cyberbullying were 27 percent
lower.
The drops were driven by changes in
in-person learning during the school year.
Lead author Andrew Bacher-Hicks and
his colleagues found that searches related
to bullying stayed about the same during
the summer months before and during the
pandemic.
Bacher-Hicks, an assistant professor
of education at Boston University's
Wheelock College of Education and Human
Development, said he was surprised that
there was a significant drop in online as well as
in-person harassment during the pandemic-
considering students were spending more
time socializing online. But the findings bear
out the results of other studies that suggest
" cyberbullying rarely occurs independently
of in-person bullying, " he said. " It's a form of
in-person bullying that's just enacted through a
different medium. "
" There might be some event or
interaction that's going to create a cycle
of both in-person [bullying] and then spill
over into cyberbullying, " Bacher-Hicks
said. " And so when that initial event doesn't
happen, not only is in-person bullying less
likely to happen, but so is cyberbullying. "
He suggested that when students
attended school remotely-as well as when
they returned to strict social distancing-
there was less time moving between classes
and other unstructured periods in which
students could have an initial falling out in
person that could lead to later bullying on
campus and online.
Search-term analysis has previously been
used to identify other behavioral trends such
as voting, spending habits, and even the
spread of disease, but the Boston University
study is among the first to apply the largescale
analysis for school bullying. The
approach allows researchers to track people's
private interest in real time, getting around
the problem of school-reported bullying data
that may undercount harassment that flies
under educators' radar.
However, using search data does not give a
clear picture of whether students or parents,
bullies or victims are the ones seeking more
information. Also, the study looked at the
prevalence of specific search terms rather
than traffic to individual web sites, so it does
not show whether there were any differences
in the kind of information people looked for.
To compensate, the researchers compared
their historical results in Google data against
federal data on bullying from 2013 to 2019
from the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior
Surveillance System, the most recent data.
That analysis showed the search patterns
correlated with actual bullying data.
'Clear link' between live and cyberbullying
Sameer
Hinduja, a co-director of the
Cyberbullying Research Center and
professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic
University, said the center's own studies
of reported bullying were more mixed. In
national surveys of middle and high school
students, Hinduja and his colleagues found
the share of students who said they had
experienced cyberbullying rose 6 percentage
points from 2019 to 2021, to 23.2 percent. But,
in a separate survey, the researchers found
more than 42 percent of the previous victims
said they had faced less cyberbullying during
the pandemic, and nearly 22 percent said
the harassment stayed about the same.
Moreover, more than 62 percent of students
who said they had bullied classmates online
in the past said they have done so less since
the pandemic started.
" Do I think that cyberbullying continues
to happen among students? Yes. Do I think it
should be a major priority point for educators?
Absolutely, especially with mental health
and well-being of students being such a
core concern these days, " Hinduja said.
" Everyone--including our youth-seems like
they are hanging on by a very thin thread, " he
added, noting the " very clear link over many
years between cyberbullying and problematic
emotional, psychological, academic, and even
physiological outcomes. "
The Boston University study also found
that as schools began to return to in-person
schooling in the 2021 school year, search
activity related to online harassment came
back faster than searches related to in-person
bullying. Areas where schools remained fully
virtual saw a 42 percent drop in bullyingrelated
searches, while those that allowed at
least some students back on campus had only
a 19 percent reduction from 2019.
This may point to ways that school leaders
can tamp down bullying once students return
to school, Bacher-Hicks said, by looking at
how social distancing, cohorting, and other
procedures used during the pandemic may
prevent initial bullying episodes.
" A lot of the evidence that we see coming
out of COVID focuses on the negative
consequences-you know, learning loss,
mental health, things like that-and those
are very real negative consequences of the
pandemic, " Bacher-Hicks said. " But I think
this is useful to show that there's some
evidence that at least some aspects of the
educational experience may have improved
for certain students, especially those who
were targeted for bullying. "
From remote learning for young children to playground infection risks, schooling under the pandemic is raising a lot of questions for teachers and education
leaders. This new research column aims to help readers understand what the research says-and doesn't say-about our new context for learning. If you have a
question, please send it to ssparks@educationweek.org.
EDUCATION WEEK | February 2, 2022 | www.edweek.org | 5
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Education Week - February 2, 2022

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