Beyond Attitudes and Teaching Methods: The Role of Teacher Professional Ethos in Tackling Bullying

Bullying negatively affects the social and learning climate in classrooms, impedes classroom management, has grave psychosocial, health, and academic consequences for bullies, victims, and witnesses, and impairs students’ academic achievement. In the school and classroom context, recent research has identified the critical role of adults, especially teachers. Their perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours contribute to the establishment and chronification of bullying. When not participating in any anti-bullying program, teachers show different reactions when facing bullying. Some intervene, and in different ways, while others do not intervene at all. Given teachers’ educational role and the moral and ethical basis of their professional teaching practice, it is most likely that the reactions they show in cases of bullying will directly impact students’ behaviour, as they send direct and indirect messages on the acceptability of bullying through their own behaviour. Teachers’ professional ethos in the area of school bullying is reconstructed based on (a) the specifics of the phenomenon; (b) findings from prevention and intervention research identifying factors effective in reducing bullying; and (c) the author’s practical experience in teacher (further) education and bullying prevention work in schools. These points are linked back to a multidimensional model of teacher professional ethos which moves beyond moral and ethical considerations and addresses the role of the professional context in nourishing and sustaining such ethos.