School Climate.
School climate refers to the quality and character of school life. School climate is based on patterns of students', parents' and school personnel's experience of school life and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures (National School Climate Center, 2012) and includes: respect, norms, morals and values that help students feel safe in a nurturing environment, everyone works together to carry on the school vision, and each person contributes to the operations of the school and the care of the physical environment (National School Climate Center, 2012).
Themes of the Literature.
Forms of Bullying.
Dake, Price & Telljohann (2003) explain that conflicting research exists regarding physical characteristics of students involved in bullying behaviors and that in elementary schools, the prevalence of bullying ranges from 11.3% in Finland to 49.8% in Ireland and the only United States study of elementary students found that 19% were bullied. The researchers also found that as students get older and go through the different grades that bullying behavior tends to decrease (Dake et al. 2003). A whole school approach which is assessing the problem, planning school conference days, providing better supervision at recess, forming a bullying prevention coordinating group, encouraging parent-teacher meetings, establishing classroom rules against bullying, holding classroom meetings about bullying, requiring talks with the bullies and victims, and scheduling talks with the parents of involved students (Dake et al. 2003). The researchers recognize that more research within the United States Schools needed to be conducted on this subject.
Bullying is not relegated to just physical abuse or even mental abuse anymore, computers and other electronic devices have taken bullying to the next level which is cyber bullying.
